Assurance

When I was a boy I remember sitting in the church where I grew up and hearing the minister giving a children's talk. There was a boy there a little bit younger than me called Michael, Michael Derosaire. The minister asked if the children expected to go to heaven. Michael was a good little boy and so he said that he hoped to go to heaven - which I thought was a pretty good answer. You don't want to sound too confident. But the minister wasn't happy with that. He wanted the children to know they were going to heaven.

I once heard Sinclair Ferguson talking about Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) Pope Clement VIII’s personal theologian and one of the most able figures in the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation movement in the sixteenth-century. On one occasion, Bellarmine wrote:

“The greatest of all Protestant heresies is _______ .” As Ferguson puts it "Complete, explain, and discuss Bellarmine’s statement. How would you answer? What is the greatest of all Protestant heresies? Perhaps justification by faith? Perhaps Scripture alone, or one of the other Reformation watchwords? Those answers make logical sense. But none of them completes Bellarmine’s sentence. What he wrote was: “The greatest of all Protestant heresies is assurance.”

Bellarmine absolutely hated the fact Protestants wanted people to know they were going to heaven. I think the fear is that if people know they are going to heaven they will become complacent and self-satisfied. And yet God wants us to assured of salvation. He want us to know it will all turn out well in the end.