Rom. 8:16:—“The Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”
“THE Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” This is one of the texts of the Bible to which the Christian heart turns with especial longing and to which it clings with especial delight. On it has been erected the great Protestant doctrine of Assurance—the great doctrine that every Christian man may and should be assured that He is a child of God—that it is possible for him to attain this assurance and that to seek and find it is accordingly his duty. So much as that it certainly, along with kindred texts, does establish. The Holy Spirit Himself, it affirms, bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God; and then it goes on to develop the idea of childship to God from the point of view of the benefits it contains—“and if children then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”
It is quite obvious that the object of the whole is to encourage and enhearten; to speak, in a word, to the Christian’s soul a great word of confidence. We are not to be left in doubt and gloom as to our Christian hope and standing. A witness is adduced and this no less a witness than the Holy Spirit, the author of all truth. We are not committed to our own tentative conjectures; or to our own imaginations and fancies. The Holy Spirit bears co-witness with our spirit that we are God’s children. Surely, here there is firm standing ground for the most timid feet.
No wonder that men have seized hold of such an assurance with avidity, and sought and found in it peace from troubled consciences and hesitating fears. No wonder either if they have sometimes, in their eagerness for a sure foundation for their hope, pressed a shade beyond the mark and sought on the basis of this text an assurance from the Holy Ghost for a fact of which they had no other evidence, if, indeed, they did not feel that they had evidence enough against it; an assurance conveyed, moreover, in a mode that would be independent of all other evidence, if, indeed, it did not bear down and set aside abundant evidence to the contrary. This occasional use of the text to ground an assurance which seems to the observer unjustified if not positively negatived by all appearances, has naturally created a certain amount of hesitation in appealing to it at all or in seeking to attain the gracious state of assurance which it promises. This is a most unprofitable state of affairs. And in its presence among us, no less than in the presence of a somewhat exaggerated appeal to the testimony of the Spirit, we may find the best of warrants for seeking to understand just what the text affirms and just what privileges it holds out to us.
And here, first, the text leaves no room for doubt that the testimony of the Holy Spirit that we are God’s children is a great reality. This is not a matter of inference from the text; it is expressed by it in totidem verbis. Exactly what is affirmed is that “the Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” The actuality of the Spirit’s testimony to our childship to God is established, then, beyond all cavil; it is entrenched in the same indeclinable authority by which we are assured that there is a Spirit at all, that there is any such thing as an adoption into sonship to God, or that it is possible for sinful mortals to receive that adoption,—the authority of the inspired word of God. That the Spirit witnesses with or to our spirits that we are children of God is just as certain, then, as that there is such a state as sonship to which we may be introduced or that there is such a being as the Spirit of God to bear witness of it. These great facts all stand or fall together. And that is as much as to say that no Christian man can doubt the fact of the testimony of the Spirit that we are children of God. It is accredited to him by the same authority which accredits all that enters into the very essence of Christianity. It is in fact one of the elements of a full system of Christian truth that must be acknowledged by all who accept the system of Christian truth. It would seem to be equally clear from the text that the testimony of the Spirit is not to be confounded with the testimony of our own consciousness. However the text be read, the “Spirit of God” and “our spirit” are brought into pointed contrast in it, and are emphatically distinguished from one another. Accordingly, not only does H. A. W. Meyer, who understands the text of the joint testimony of the Divine and human spirits, say: “Paul distinguishes from the subjective self-consciousness, I am the child of God, the therewith accordant testimony of the objective Holy Spirit, Thou art the child of God”; but Henry Alford also, who understands the text to speak solely of the testimony of the Spirit, borne not with but to our spirit, remarks: “All are agreed, and indeed the verse is decisive for it, that it is something separate from and higher than all subjective conclusions”—language which seems, indeed, scarcely exact, but which is certainly to the present point. It is of no importance for this whether Paul says that the Spirit bears witness with or to our spirit; in either case he distinctly distinguishes the Spirit of God from our spirit along with which or to which it bears its witness. And not only so but this distinction is the very nerve of the whole statement; the scope of which is nothing other than to give the Christian, along with his human conclusions, also a Divine witness.