Jon Barlow just pointed out how Calvin viewed temporary faith. Go read it. So the question is, if this is true, then how can we have confidence that we truly are believers?

Perhaps one reason we are getting two different answers to this question has to do with confidence in God’s providence in keeping covenant with His people. If God simply allows the less-than-true-believers to remain uninformed of their true “inner” state, then we can have no confidence in ourselves or others. In that case, we must insist that Calvin is wrong to insist that the “human heart has so many crannies where vanity hides, so many holes where falsehood lurks, is so decked out with deceiving hypocrisy” that can’t be exposed by a few sermonic tests.

Of course, since these criteria are only available for the more mature, one can only wonder about the true state of one’s infants and toddlers. In that case, when a Christian woman has a miscarriage, the memorial service is “almost the same” as a funeral for an unbeliever, as one PCA pastor insisted to me (a great guy, by the way; I hope expressing disagreement is not taken as anything personal). The argument is simple:

• God gives those who are elect to eternal life a true and persevering faith.
• Not all covenant children remain in the faith
• Thus, not all covenant children are elect.
• Therefore, you don’t know if any baby, preborn, or recently born, is elect.
• Therefore, you can give grieving parents no real confidence that they will ever see their child again.

But if God promises that he will not mislead us, then we can take perseverance in the faith as a sure sign of election.

Our covenant children who have been required to persevere only a short time are shown, by God’s gift of perseverance, to be elect. Not just probably, but infallibly. On the other hand, as I posted last night, we can warn our covenant children (just as we can warn covenant adults) to continue in their professed faith.

If there is something defective, we can be confident God will show this to us through the fruit of faith or a lack thereof–not a lack of discipline in morning devotions, but a wholesale abandonment of the Faith. The flesh, if it is dominant, cannot fail to rise up eventually. And God will allow this to happen so that we can continue to trust him for our salvation, as he has offered Himself to us through Christ according to his Covenant.

The correct posture is not “inward” to those “crannies” where vanity may hide. The correct posture is foreward.

Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through the faithfulness of Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained.

This is ow we should encourage one another, whether adults or little children.