(05)Clearing Our Minds…Certainty Amid the Uncertainty

by Eugene Higgins

Certainty Amid the Uncertainty


It is likely your email inbox has been filling up with fresh messages from every conceivable company and place of business – restaurants, airlines, banks, hardware stores, clothing establishments – all telling you of the special steps they have taken to insure your safety. Until the recent wide-spread closures, everybody from your local Applebee’s to your regional Zoo wanted to assure you 

  • that it was safe to go there (you mean it wasn’t in the past?); 
  • that they have meticulously cleaned their facilities (you mean they hadn’t previously?); 
  • that they consider our safety and that of their employees to be the top priority (you mean they didn’t before?) 

Assurance is a great thing. Whether it is valid or vacuous depends on the integrity of the one giving the assurance and the accuracy of his or her knowledge. One beloved elder in the Pennsauken meeting, the late Mr. Everett Curran, Sr, used frequently to quote Isaiah 32:17, “And the work of righteousness shall be peace; and the effect of righteousness quietness and assurance for ever.” He loved to stress that the word “assurance” meant security and that, therefore, this verse was speaking about eternal security
Ours is an uncertain world. When the new year dawned in January, none of us could have foreseen what it would be like in March. It was the famous Philadelphian, Benjamin Franklin, who said that “in this world nothing is certain except death and taxes.” Had he listened a little more closely to his friend George Whitefield, he might have learned that there are many other things that are certain.

Our faith is in a sure record

2Pe 1:19  We have also a moresure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts: 

Our faith rests on a sure foundation

Isa 28:16  Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste. 

Our faith provides a sure hope

Heb 6:19  Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil; 

Despite whatever unbelief may fill the world, these are some of the things “most surely believed among us” (Luke 1:1). These certainties enable us to echo Peter’s words, “We believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God (John 6:69).
Just as we did not know, in January, what March would bring, we do not know, in March, what April or May will bring (if the Lord has not come). But facing an unknown and uncertain future, the child of God still has an assured fact. In the next to the last verse of our Bible (by some estimates the 31,101st verse) the Lord Jesus does not simply say “I come” or even “I come quickly” but “Surely I come quickly.”
This is what Ira Sankey wrote about the hymn “Blessed Assurance”:“During the recent war in the Transvaal, (said a gentleman at my meeting in Exeter Hall, London, in 1900) when the soldiers going to the front were passing another body of soldiers whom they recognized, their greetings used to be, ‘4-9-4, boys; 4-9-4;’ and the salute would invariably be answered with, ‘Six further on, boys; six further on.’ The significance of this was that in ‘Sacred Songs and Solos’ (a number of copies of the small addition of which had been sent to the front), number 494 was, ‘God be with you till we meet again’; and six further on from 494 or number 500, was ‘Blessed Assurance, Jesus is mine.’”
We have a blessed assurance indeed – or as Isaiah wrote, assurance forever”! 
“He which testifieth these things saith, ‘Surely I come quickly.’ ‘Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus’” (Rev 22:20). 

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