The last couple of weeks, we have been looking at information about the day that we are living in—the time of Great Tribulation, the end of the world, and Judgment Day—and how near we are to these things. It is not something that is far off. It is not the span of another century. It is not something that is a long way off, but it is very near.
As we learn from the Bible, there is a good possibility and a good probability that the world will end in just a few years. The likelihood is that the world could end in 2011.
In thinking about these things, I was just wondering what I should teach today, and I was praying for wisdom. The direction that we are going to go in is to look at our own personal relationship with God, our own standing with God, and whether or not we are a child of God.
This really takes on more and more significance as the days are passing and time is flowing. As we are getting closer to the day when all of the unsaved will have to stand before God and give account for the things that they have done in their body, this really becomes more and more important that each individual knows where they stand with God—whether or not they are truly saved, whether or not they are really born again, whether or not they have a new heart and a new spirit, whether or not they know that they have assurance of salvation.
In talking with many people, it seems to be a problem. Many people are hearing the Gospel and listening to the Gospel and they do not have assurance. They lack assurance. They do not know at this point whether they are really saved.
Actually, to look at this in a positive way, this is not the worst place to be. The worst place to be is to have absolute certainty and to be convinced that you are a Christian, to where you do not even question it or look at yourself at all, and then to find that you were not truly saved.
There are many who profess, “I know that I am a Christian. I can even give you the date that I became born again. I can tell you exactly when I became a Christian.” There are many people in this situation, many who think that they are saved and that they are going to Heaven, but are actually not saved.
This is the worst place to be. This is the worst, because these people are not going to be concerned or to try to really look at themselves too carefully.
It is much better to be under the hearing of the Gospel and to not be certain and to not be sure. You know this and are aware of it. You do doubt and are honest with God about your questions.
Some people are afraid to even bring up the idea or to even ask the question and honestly look at themselves in this light. “Am I truly saved? Has God given me a new heart? Is there a difference in my life? Am I really changed from the person that I used to be?” They do not want to bring this up.
This is just like the person who does not want to know that they have cancer. They do not want to know that they are seriously ill, so they avoid doctors to avoid finding these things out.
Okay, but this is not going to help them if they do have cancer and if they are seriously ill. They are not going to have any benefit in ignoring this or in avoiding medicine and doctors. The best thing would be to go and have yourself checked out.
Some of us might have physical problems, but this is not our real problem. Our real problem is our soul; it is our heart. Has God changed us or not?
The only place that we can go to check this out is to the Bible. We have to go to the Bible to discover whether or not we are a child of God. There is a verse in 2 Corinthians 13:5 that says:
Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove (test) your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?
God is not suggesting it. He is not saying that this is something that we can do if we want to. He is commanding it. Examine yourself! Look at yourself! This goes for everyone—look at yourself!
So where do we look? We do not look in a physical mirror. We look in the mirror of the Word of God and we look at what God has said in His Word to see how we are doing as a result. How are we living our lives?
Actually, we do have to be careful with this commandment here because it says:
Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith…
And that “faith” would be Christ. Examine yourselves, whether you are in Christ and He in you, whether or not you have the Spirit of Christ within you. Examine yourself and:
…prove (test) your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?
There is a question here. What is your answer?
Do we know ourselves? To some degree, we do, because 1 Corinthians 2:11 tells us:
For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.
God is giving us this verse to help us to realize that we need to go to Him in order to understand the Bible, because it is His Spirit, His Mind, that is behind the Word of God. We can look at another person, but we have no idea what is going on in that person’s mind. Neither can we come to the Bible and think that we can know what the Mind of God is. We have to go to God and pray for wisdom and also compare Scripture with Scripture. This will reveal the Mind of God because God will then teach us.
Again, 1 Corinthians 2:11 says:
For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him?...
Does your brother or sister, who knows you very well, know what is going on in your mind? Does your husband or wife, who knows you very well, know what is going on in your mind?
They can know some things. They can know some of the patterns and habits that you have and what you tend to do in certain situations, but they can not know really what is going on in the deep recesses of someone else’s mind.
Only the person himself knows what he is thinking about. Therefore, to some degree, we know ourselves. But we do not know ourselves completely. We do not know ourselves exactly. We have a subconscious mind that we are fairly ignorant of, deep-down within the thoughts of man’s heart. We do not really know what is going on, deep-down within. Sometimes, we can not even fully or completely know what is going on within us.
Turn to Jeremiah 17:9. It says:
The heart is deceitful above all, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
You see, there is the question. “Know ye not your own selves?” Try yourself. Examine yourself. God is commanding us to do this, yes, but beware and be careful because the heart of man is “desperately wicked: who can know it?”
This is why we have all kinds of people—Presbyterians and Baptists and Episcopalians and Catholics and Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Muslims—who think that they have a right relationship with God. We have multitudes of people who think that they have a right relationship with God, and they are deceiving themselves. They are fooling themselves. Their heart has deceived them into thinking that they have a saving relationship with God and that they are going to be in Heaven with God forever, yet it is not true.
It is not true, so we have to be very careful when we are examining ourselves and looking at ourselves to realize that we can not know ourselves completely. We just can not know what is going on deep-down within.
This is why some people can think that they are saved. They can be absolutely convinced in their minds that they are saved, yet they are not really saved. They are not really saved.
So why does God give us this command in 2 Corinthians 13:5:
Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove (test) your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?
God wants us to come to the point of realization, “I can not completely or thoroughly fulfill this verse. I can not obey this verse to the degree that it is necessary to know whether or not I am in Christ. On my own, I can not do this.” Anyone whom God is really dealing with will come to understand this.
If we turn back to Psalm 139, we will find out how it can be done. This is where God would lead us. As we are looking at ourselves, we want to look into the mirror of the Word of God. We read in Psalm 139:1-4:
O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether.
We are not going to look at the entire Psalm here, but it would be good for us to sit down and read it at some point. Now look at Psalm 139:23:
Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts:
Here is the proving and the testing of ourselves again. We go to God, “You search me. You test me. You prove me, because You know all about me. You know everything that is going on within me, even things that I can not know.”
Then we read in Psalm 139:24:
And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
This is what God would have us to do. When He is commanding us to “Examine yourselves,” He is doing so in order for us to realize that we are going to fall short. We are going to fall short, so go to God and beseech Him and cry out to Him for His searching and for His revealing of any iniquity and any wickedness within us that we might be holding onto and cherishing and not wanting to give up. We want Him to test us and to examine us so that we might know whether or not we are a child of God.
Turn to 1 John 2. This is one of the better passages in the Bible to turn to when we are wondering about assurance of salvation and when we are questioning whether or not we are really born again and whether or not God has really saved us. It says in 1 John 2:1-6:
My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in him. He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also so to walk, even as he walked.
We will go through this passage, verse-by-verse, as far as we can in this study, but we really want to get down to 1 John 2:3-4 and following, where it talks about knowing Him. We can know that we “know Him.” We can know. This is assurance. This is what assurance of salvation means. We know that we are saved. We know.
By the way, as far as assurance or knowing whether or not you are saved, you really have to be one of God’s elect. You have to be one of God’s elect. You have to be someone whom Christ died for. You have to be someone whose sins Christ paid for in order to have proper assurance of salvation. You have to be one of those whose sins Jesus took upon Himself and paid for.
So there is a warning here. People can struggle with assurance of salvation and it might be rightly so because they are not saved and because they are not a child of God. Yet others can struggle with the whole matter of salvation and they might continue to struggle right up until the very Last Day, because it might be God’s will and His design and His “good pleasure” not to save an individual until the very end, even if that individual is one of His elect.
Do you remember what we read in John 7, where Jesus speaks about “the last day, that great day of the feast”? He is still sending forth the Gospel because God intends to save people on the very Last Day of this earth’s existence. We do not know who these people are going to be, so anyone who is unsure should really not become discouraged and just give up. They must continue to go to God and continue to cry out for mercy and continue to read the Bible. God might wait a year or two or three years or until the very Last Day before He actually saves someone—this is all in His control.
However, for those who are doubting, it could also be God’s will that they come to an assurance sooner than this. So here in 1 John 2:1, it says:
My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not.
This is one of the purposes of the Bible. “These things” God has written unto us, that we “sin not.” Remember, we read in Psalm 119, “Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against Thee.” All Scripture can be used by God. God can use His Word in the life of any sinner who is in their sin, in order to pull them away from their sin.
We memorize Scripture. We read passages of Scripture and it can help us in our weak areas of the flesh or in areas where we are falling into sin. It can strengthen us to turn. It can strengthen us to turn from these things, as God’s Spirit can strengthen and He uses His Word to strengthen the one whom He is dealing with.
So the Apostle John is saying in 1 John 2:1:
…these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous:
“If any man sin.” Who is going to sin? Everyone, everyone has sinned. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” So if any man has sinned, John writing under the inspiration of God is saying that there is “an advocate with the Father.” There is the Lord Jesus who is called here “an advocate.”
What is an “advocate?” We still use this term today. An advocate could be a lawyer who is representing a client, someone who has been charged with committing a crime. But in Christ’s case, this means that He would be pleading and interceding with the Father, with God Himself, on behalf of the sinner who has no standing before God on his own.
There is nothing that the sinner can defend himself with to God. Because of his sins, he is guilty as charged and he is under God’s wrath and subject to spend an eternity in Hell. But Christ, in taking the sins of certain people upon Himself and paying the penalty for those sins, can now be, as Job says, the “daysman betwixt” the once angry God and the person who has offended God by transgressing His Law. So there is “an advocate with the Father,” who is the Lord Himself.
The interesting thing about this word “advocate” is that here in 1 John 2, this is the only place where this word has been translated as “advocate.” We do not find this word translated as “advocate” anywhere else in the Bible.
The Greek word is “parakletos” or “parakleton” and it is found four or five other times in the New Testament. Maybe you have heard theologians talk about the “paraklete.” “Paraklete” is the Greek word for the Holy Spirit, who is the Comforter.
So this word that is translated as “advocate” is translated as “Comforter” in every other case in the Gospel of John. It is the word that is found in John 14. Actually, I will read starting at John 14:15 because that verse will tie in. It says in John 14:15-16:
If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter…
This is the Greek word “parakleton” in this case, and it is the same word that is translated as “advocate” in 1 John 2:1. This is really incredible because this is the same Strong’s number as we find in John 14:26, where we read:
But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost…
The word translated as “Comforter” is the Greek word “parakletos.” It has a different Greek ending, but it is the same word that we find in John 14:16.
We also find this in John 15:26:
But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me:
And in John 16:7:
Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.
In every case, it is the Greek Word “parakletos.”
If we look closely at 1 John 2:1:
…if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous:
This verse is basically saying that Jesus is the “Comforter.” He is the Holy Spirit.
This is not too amazing to us because we know that God is three Persons and yet One God. This is why we have passages like in Isaiah 9, where it says, “For unto us a child is born,” and one of His names is “The Everlasting Father.” The name of the child is “The Everlasting Father.” He is the Father. He is the Comforter. He is Christ.
This is a mystery that we can not solve. We can not try to divide God up. We know that there is One God and that solves the problem. “These three are One.” He is the Father. He is the Comforter. He is the Son. Yet, there are three Persons. They are also very much real personalities in the Bible.
So here we have a verse that is identifying and further verifying that God is a Triune God, 1 John 2:1:
…we have an advocate (a Comforter) with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous:
He is the “righteous man from the east.” He is the “righteousness (that) exalteth a nation,” as we read in Proverbs. He is righteousness Himself. He is the “breastplate of righteousness.”
In order to be righteous with God, we must have on something that is put on us by God Himself, and that is the Righteousness of Christ. He is that “fine linen” that the saints are “clothed” with. He is our Purity and our Holiness. He is the One without sin who died for our sin in paying the penalty for it and who washes us and makes us clean and right in God’s eyes. So He is “Jesus Christ the Righteous.”
It continues in 1 John 2:2:
And he is the propitiation for our sins…
This word is a big English word. It is not really that big in the Greek. It is the Greek word “hilasmos.” He is the “propitiation.”
What does that mean? What does it mean to be the “propitiation?”
Turn to 1 John 4:10, where it says:
Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
This is the same Greek word for “propitiation,” but there is another word that is right above this word in the Strong’s Concordance. It is very similar and very closely related. This word is found in Romans 3. We read in Romans 3:24-25:
Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;
One last place that this word is found is in Hebrews 9. This is going to help us a lot in understanding this word. In Hebrews 9, God is describing the inside of the Holy of Holies where the high priest would go once a year to sprinkle blood upon the Mercy Seat, which is, of course, pointing to Christ’s sacrifice and His atoning death. We read in Hebrews 9:5:
And over it the cherubims of glory shadowing the mercyseat…
This is the same Greek word that we find in Romans 3:25 for “propitiation.”
…of which we cannot now speak particularly.
This word that is translated as “propitiation” in Romans 3 is translated as “mercyseat” in Hebrews 9.
We can understand this very clearly because the “mercyseat” would be placed on top of the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark of the Covenant would contain the “tables of stone” on which the Word of God was written by the “finger of God,” and it represented the Law of God that is condemning mankind. It is condemning every single human being, but the high priest would go into the Holy of Holies with the blood of the sacrificial animal and he would sprinkle it upon the Mercy Seat. So the “propitiation” is the Blood of Christ that covers over the sins of an individual who is one of God’s elect, so that the Law’s demands are satisfied. They are met.
The Law demands for each sinner eternal damnation. The Law demands that you and I and everyone else spend an eternity in Hell for our transgressions against the Law of God. Yet Christ came to be a “propitiation” for our sins. He came to be the One who gave His life, “For the life…is in the blood,” and to endure the equivalent of an eternal damnation on behalf of this “great multitude” of people out of the human race whom God intends to save.
So He died in our stead, in our place, and we are now free, as far as the Law is concerned. The Law will not be able to point the finger at us on Judgment Day. It will not be like an angry husband demanding vengeance, except for those who do not find salvation. For those whom Christ died for, it can not do anything to us. The Word of God, the Law, becomes the believer’s friend and our delight. It becomes our strength and our encouragement. It becomes something that we love.
Turning back to 1 John 2:2:
And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.
Here is where people get into trouble. Here is where all kinds of gospels veer off course and go astray because they believe that this verse teaches that Jesus died for everyone. It says it right here:
And he is the propitiation…for the sins of the whole world.
Yet, we know that this is not possible and that they are not correctly understanding what the Bible is teaching or what Jesus endured and went through on the Cross. He took the sins, “Who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree,” then God poured out His wrath upon Him until Christ paid the penalty for all the sin that He was bearing.
I am not saying that this is out of the realm of possibility, as far as God’s power and His might. If the Lord Jesus would have taken the sins of, by the time the world ends, thirteen or fourteen billion people, more or less, if He would have taken them all and if God would have measured the “cup” to the degree for the sins of every human being, then it would be that no one would go to Hell. No one would be cast into Hell. Hell would not even need to be created. It would not need to be a place where God is going to cast all of the unsaved of the world, because Christ would have died for everyone. Yet the Bible is very clear that God will create Hell and that He is going to throw a great many people into Hell on the Last Day.
So it is an impossibility for Jesus to have died for the sins of every human being, else God would be unjust. It would be unjust for Jesus to have died for everyone’s sins and then to have someone come before His throne on Judgment Day to stand before Him where they could say, “Well, Jesus died for all of my sins. He paid the penalty for all those sins.”
But what if they committed the sin of “unbelief?” That is also a sin, is it not? “Unbelief” is also a sin. Christ would have had to die for every sin of every person and not just to the exclusion of this one particular sin of “unbelief.”
Therefore, it just is not what the Bible teaches. God in His Word teaches that Christ has His people, His elect, those “chosen” in Him “before the foundation of the world,” “predestinated” to salvation. These are the individuals whose sins Jesus died for.
They are out there in the world and Christ is the only possible way of salvation in the world. “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” There is no other method, no other formula, no other religion or gospel. It is only the true Gospel of the Bible that can save and it is only Christ’s work that can save a person. This is why 1 John 2:2 says:
…but also for the sins of the whole world.
In 1 John 2:3, it goes on to say:
And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments.
This is getting back to the question that we are looking at. “Am I a child of God? Am I a believer?” How can I know?
One problem and one caution is that we have to know what His commandments are. We have to know what His commandments are. We must know the correct teaching of the Bible in order to look at how we are doing in keeping God’s commandments. Jesus said, “If ye love Me, keep My commandments.”
If we are not keeping His commandments, this is evidence that we do not love Him, is it not? Is that not evidence that we do not love God if we are not keeping His commandments? Remember, God said, “We love Him, because He first loved us.” If we have evidence that we do not love Him, this is letting us know that He never loved us.
Does God love you? Well, how are you doing in relationship to the Word of God and the commandments of God? We all sin. We are all in the body. We all fail here and there and transgress the Law. Even David, who was a child of God, sinned against God. But we are talking about an ongoing, continuing disobedience to the Law of God that you know about. You are aware of it and you know what it is.
In the life of a child of God, if God is dealing with someone, there is going to be correction and chastisement. There are going to be times when we fall into sin and all of a sudden it seems like everything is going wrong. God can chasten very sorely when we are falling into a sin. Things start going wrong at work and there is illness in the home and then for some reason a bill that we never knew about shows up.
God can chasten and correct someone severely who is falling into sin, and this just makes us aware of what we did. Of course, these kinds of things can happen to anyone, but I am talking about, for example, a string of circumstances where God makes it very clear to us because this is something that is a little unusual. Things do not normally happen like this—we are being chastised.
As a believer, as a Christian, we know when we are being chastised, and this makes us aware of the sin. Plus, the chastisement can get more grievous as we go on in the sin, continuing on in it, whatever it is, and we become acutely aware that this is something that God does not want in our life anymore. So this is one way in which we can have assurance.
However, if we continue to commit this sin, we have to ask ourselves, “Do we love Christ?” Do we love Christ? “If ye love Me, keep My commandments.” So it could also be that we are not saved and not yet a child of God. If so, we do not have the strength of spirit within to turn from the sin and to repent. This is because repentance must come from God. It must flow from Him.
So as we are endeavoring and trying to turn from this sin or that sin, our weakness is being shown to us from God repeatedly. We have no strength. We fell into the same sin once again, so God is showing us that we may not be born again and that we may not be a child of God. We need strength in our “inner man,” like the Bible talks about all over the place. “I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee.”
God is the One who strengthens our “ankle bones,” so-to-speak, so that we might walk in His commandments. Otherwise, we are like a cripple. We try to get up, but we fall flat on our face. We try to get up again and we fall again, because we have no real ability to do the will of God. But we can pray to God that He might strengthen our “ankle bones” so that we could walk within His Word and do His will and keep His commandments, just like the lame man whose “feet and ankle bones received strength.”
Turn to 1 John 3:24 and look at this verse:
And he that keepeth his commandments dwelleth in him, and he in him. And hereby we know that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he hath given us.
This verse is linking and connecting the keeping of God’s commandments and the Spirit of God. We keep His commandments and this is evidence that we might have the Spirit of God within us.
Turn to Romans 8:15-16, where it says:
For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:
God is saying that there can be assurance of salvation. You can know. Someone who is one of God’s people can know that they are truly saved when God’s Spirit witnesses to their spirit.
This has a lot to do with keeping God’s commandments because what happens when we fail to keep God’s commandments? When sin is ongoing, doubt enters in. So if God is strengthening us by His Spirit in the “inner man” to turn away from sin, then we can have some evidence of salvation. Also, we are waiting. We are waiting on the Lord for His Spirit to testify to our spirit.
In other words, we never look at ourselves and we never examine our lives, as God tells us to do, to the point where we say, “Now, I do this and I do that. God tells me to go out into all the world with the Gospel, and I do this. I also support faithful ministries.” It is like we have a checklist and we are checking it off. “I am okay here. I observe Sunday the Sabbath. I observe and do these things, so now I am going to tell myself to relax because I must be a child of God. I am going to say to my soul, ‘You are a believer. You are guaranteed Heaven.’”
No, this is not what it says, does it? It does not say that our spirit witnesses to our spirit, but that God’s Spirit witnesses to our spirit. So the Word of God is finally going to be the convincer.
We can go to God and we can pray, “Father, Father, have mercy on me. I do see some evidence that I am a child of God. I do see some fruit even in my life, but I want to be sure. I want to be absolutely certain. I do not want to come down to the moment when there is time no more and not know and to be in doubt on that Last Day. I do not want to know that you are returning in Judgment and yet be unsure of my salvation. So I beseech Thee, I ask You, I implore You, let me know. Convince me. Speak unto my soul. Speak to me through Your Spirit to convince my spirit. ‘Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.’”
So God is letting us know by telling us, “the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit,” that we have to wait on Him ultimately and finally to confirm this. Then we can have true assurance of salvation.
One last verse that I want to turn to is Psalm 35:2-3:
Take hold of shield and buckler, and stand up for mine help. Draw out also the spear, and stop the way against them that persecute me: say unto my soul, I am thy salvation.
You see, this is what we need. We need God to speak to our soul, “I am thy salvation.” We need Him to create within us a “new heart” and then to confirm the fact that we do have “a new heart and a new spirit.”
Of course, God is not going to speak through a dream or a vision or a tongue. The heavens are not going to open up with a flash of lightning to come down to speak to our heart that we are a child of God. But God speaks to us in a “still small voice,” through the Word of God, through the Bible. This is how God “speaks,” because “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” Then we can know. We can know. Just like any other spiritual gift, God can give the gift of repentance.