CHAPTER 11: The Witness of the Spirit in Puritan Thought
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Witness of the Spirit
in Puritan Thought
‘The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God,’ wrote Paul (Rom 8:16, KJV). Our aim in this chapter is to discover what the Puritans taught about the Spirit’s work in assuring believers of their salvation. The work of the Holy Spirit is the field in which the Puritans’ most valuable contributions to the church’s theological heritage were made, and the subject of assurance in particular is treated with great fullness and profundity by some of the finest Puritan minds—notably Richard Sibbes, the ‘sweet dropper’, in his exposition of 2 Corinthians 1 (on v 22; Works, III), in ‘a Fountain sealed’ on Ephesians 4:30 (Works, V) and elsewhere; Thomas Brooks, one of the greatest of the later Puritans, in Heaven on Earth. Or, a Serious Discourse touching a well-grounded Assurance (1654; Works, II); and Thomas Goodwin, in his three sermons on Ephesians 1:13 and in the second book of the second part of his great treatise Of the Object and the Acts of Justifying Faith (Works, I, VIII). Alexander Whyte called Goodwin ‘the greatest pulpit exegete of Paul that has ever lived’, and perhaps justly; Goodwin’s biblical expositions are quite unique, even among the Puritans, in the degree to which they combine theological breadth with experimental depth. John Owen saw into the mind of Paul as clearly as Goodwin—sometimes, on points of detail, more clearly—but not even Owen saw so deep into Paul’s heart. Goodwin, Sibbes and Brooks will be our leaders in this study. We shall find them in substantial agreement (especially Sibbes and Goodwin, between whose thoughts on this subject there is an evident genealogical connection); and they represent the main current of Puritan thinking. At the close, we shall introduce John Owen, who makes some necessary exegetical adjustments to his predecessors’ position without disputing its theological and experiential substance. Let us see now what these teachers have to say.
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The Puritans speak of assurance sometimes as a fruit of faith, sometimes as a quality of faith; they talk both of assurance growing out of faith and of faith growing into assurance. Assurance is to them faith full grown and come of age; there can be faith without assurance, but where assurance is present it is present as an aspect of faith, organically related to it, not as something distinct and separable from it. This being so, we must start our study by reviewing what the Puritans taught about the nature of faith in general.
Faith, said the Puritans, begins in the mind, with belief of the truth of the gospel message. It results from spiritual illumination. In illumination, the Spirit both enlightens the mind, making it capable of receiving spiritual things, and impresses on the mind the objective reality of those things of which the word of God bears witness. The knowledge of spiritual realities thus given is as immediate and direct in its way as is the knowledge of material things which we gain by sense, and it brings with it a quality of immediate conviction analogous to that which sense-perception brings. Scripture refers to the process in terms borrowed from the senses—seeing, hearing, tasting (Jn 6:40; Eph 4:21; Heb 6:5)—and tells us that it yields full assurance of understanding (Col 2:2). This spiritual appreciation of spiritual things is mediated to man, as a thinking being, by reasoned exposition of Scripture and rational reflection upon it. Man cannot come to know any spiritual object except through the use of his mind; but spiritual knowledge goes beyond reason. It is not a mere logical or imaginative construction, nor is its certainty the derived certainty of an inference drawn from more certain premises; its certainty springs from an immediate awareness of and contact with the thing known. It is not a ‘notional, swimming knowledge’, second-hand and unstable; it is ‘real’ and ‘solid’ knowledge, the product of a direct cognisance by spiritual sense of the things known. The divine operation whereby it is given is what Calvin and his successors called the testimonium internum Spiritus Sancti—the inner witness of the Holy Ghost. Paul refers to it in 1 Corinthians 2:4 as the ‘demonstration of the Spirit’.
Goodwin puts it thus: ‘The Holy Ghost, when he doth work faith in us … doth two things: First, He doth … give us a new understanding … 1 Jn 5:20 … a new eye to see Christ with.… Secondly, himself cometh with a light upon this new understanding, thus bestowing a spiritual sight’ of spiritual realities. This spiritual knowledge is in fact more certain than anything else. It may be obscured by temptations; one who has it may for a long period be so out of touch with himself, or so inwardly confused and depressed, as to doubt and deny it; but it will prove dominant in the end, and in the long run the effect of his lapses from it will be to make him realise how utterly and unshakeably he is in his heart convinced of it. Such is the knowledge of divine things given to all true believers, and it is the quality of certainty attaching to it which guarantees them against finally falling away. This witness of the Spirit to the objective truth of the gospel is the fundamental factor in personal faith, and this ‘full assurance of understanding’ of the gospel that the Spirit gives is prerequisite for personal assurance of salvation.
Faith is, of course, more than mental enlightenment. It extends from the head to the heart, and expresses itself in what Baxter calls a ‘practical trust’ in God through Christ. Man turns from self-reliance and sin to rest his soul on Christ and the promises. Hereby he both expresses and establishes the habit of faith in his soul; and faith, once established, asserts itself as the dynamic of a new life. It begets hope; it works by love; it steels itself to patience; it lays itself out in well-doing; it causes joy and peace to arise naturally and spontaneously in the heart. ‘Faith is the master-wheel; it sets all the other graces running.’ ‘Faith is the spring in the watch that sets all the golden wheels of love, joy, comfort and peace a-going.’ Faith is thus regarded as containing a measure of assurance within itself from the outset; the believer hopes, loves, serves and rejoices because he believes that God has had mercy on him.
But this is not the ‘settled, well-grounded’ assurance which the Puritans regarded as alone worthy of the name. The young convert may in exceptional cases enjoy continual strong consolation, but usually such assurance is not given till faith has been tried and seasoned, ripened and strengthened, by conflict with doubt and fluctuations of feeling. The Puritans were somewhat suspicious when transports of rapture accompanied the first profession of faith; they never forgot that in Jesus’ parable it was the stony-ground hearers who received the word with such notable joy. True, sound, thorough converts, they held, do not usually start like that. ‘Full assurance’ is a rare blessing, even among adults; it is a great and precious privilege, not indiscriminately bestowed. ‘Assurance is a mercy too good for most men’s hearts.… God will only give it to his best and dearest friends.’ ‘Assurance is the beauty and top of a Christian’s glory in this life. It is usually attended with the strongest joy, with the sweetest comforts, and with the greatest peace. It is a … It is a … crown that few wear.… ’‘Assurance is meat for strong men; few babes, if any, are able to bear it, and digest it.’
Assurance is not normally enjoyed except by those who have first laboured for it and sought it, and served God faithfully and patiently for some time without it.
Assurance comes in as a reward of faith.… A man’s faith must fight first, and have a conquest, and then assurance is the crown, the triumph of faith … and what tries faith more than temptation, and fears, and doubts, and reasonings against a man’s own estate? That triumphing assurance, Rom. 8:37, 39 … comes after a trial, as none are crowned till they have striven.
Assurance of this kind is not essential to faith; as Brooks puts it, it is of faith’s bene esse, not of its esse. It is, in fact, an aspect of faith which normally appears only when faith has reached a high degree of development, far beyond its minimal saving exercise. Goodwin speaks of assurance as both ‘a branch and appendix of faith, an addition or complement to faith’ and ‘faith elevated and raised up above its ordinary rate; the Scripture speaks of it,’ he says, ‘as a thing distinct from faith (though it doth coalesce with it, and they both make one).’ This was the general Puritan conception of assurance.
It is evident that ‘assurance’ to the Puritans was something quite other than the ‘assurance’ commonly given to the convert of five minutes’ standing in the enquiry room (‘You believe that John 1:12 is true and you have “received him”? Then you are a son of God’). The Puritans would not have called mere formal assent to such an inference assurance at all. Professions of faith, they said, must be tested before they may be trusted, even by those who make them; and assurance, to the Puritan, was in any case more than a bare human inference; it was a God-given conviction of one’s standing in grace, stamped on the mind and heart by the Spirit in just the same way as the truth of the gospel facts was stamped on the mind when faith was born, and carrying with it the same immediate certainty. ‘Assurance,’ says Brooks, ‘is the reflex act of a gracious soul, whereby he clearly and evidently sees himself in a gracious, blessed and happy state; it is a sensible feeling and an experimental discerning of a man’s being in a state of grace.’ The operative words here are sensible and experimental. Assurance is the conscious fruit of supernatural enlightenment, and cannot exist till it pleases God to give it. The young convert’s position is really this: as he believes and obeys, he will know a measure of peace and joy, for real believing at once brings real comfort (‘no man looks upon Christ but cometh off more cheerly’; ‘there is a voice of God’s Spirit speaking peace to his people upon their believing’). He may think and hope, and with reason, that he is a child of God. But he cannot say, in the unqualified sense of John’s first Epistle, that he knows his sonship until the Spirit sets this certainty home on his heart. Till the Spirit does so, in the Puritan sense, at any rate, he lacks assurance; which, said the Puritans, seems to be the case with most Christian people.
When this supernatural assurance dawns, it transforms a man’s entire Christian life. ‘It is a new conversion,’ says Goodwin; ‘it will make a man differ from himself in what he was before in that manner almost as conversion doth before he was converted. There is a new edition of all a man’s graces.’ This sounds startling, but Goodwin means what he says, and works the idea out. Assurance, he tells us, increases faith (faith ‘receives a new degree’); and this invigoration of faith results in a new release of energy at every point in one’s Christian life.
In the first place, it deepens one’s communion with the Triune God in meditating on the ‘plot’ of redeeming love.
In assurance … a man’s communion and converse is … somtimes with the Father, then with the Son, and then with the Holy Ghost; sometimes his heart is drawn out to consider the Father’s love in choosing, and then the love of Christ in redeeming, and so the love of the Holy Ghost, that searcheth the deep things of God, and revealeth them to us, and taketh all the pains with us.…
Nor is this all. The coming of assurance quickens the spiritual understanding: by it ‘the eye of the soul is strengthened to see further into truths; all truths are more clearly known by this’. It makes a man bold and powerful in prayer. It makes him holier, though he was holy before: ‘all assurance that is true assurance … maketh a man holy’; ‘nothing makes the heart more in the love, study, practice, and growth of holiness, than the glorious testimony of the Holy Spirit.’ Assurance makes a man tireless in Christian service: ‘when once … the love of God is shed abroad in a man’s heart, it makes a man work for God ten times more than before’; ‘assurance will strongly put men upon the winning of others.… A soul under assurance is unwilling to go to heaven without company.’ Finally, assurance brings with it the ‘joy unspeakable and full of glory’ of 1 Peter 1:8, which is one of Goodwin’s favourite texts in this connection. Such assurance as this, so far from encouraging presumption and laziness, is in fact the strongest possible incentive against sin, for its possessor knows that by sinning he will jeopardise his assurance, prompting God to withdraw it, and there is nothing that he is more anxious to avoid than that. These, then, are the chief fruits of assurance.
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How does the Spirit assure? One’s answer to this question turns on the sense given to Romans 8:16, which speaks of two witnesses giving evidence together, the Holy Spirit corroborating the testimony of our spirit. The Puritans identified ‘our spirit’ with the Christian’s conscience, which, with the Spirit’s aid, is able to discern in his heart the marks which Scripture specifies as tokens of the new birth and to conclude from them that he is a child of God. The Spirit ‘writes first all graces in us, and then teaches our consciences to read his handwriting’. Without the Spirit’s aid, man can never recognise the Spirit’s handiwork in himself; ‘if he do not give in his testimony with them, your graces will give no witness at all.’ Sometimes the Spirit’s help here is given in full measure; sometimes, however, to chasten us for sin, or to try our faith for a time, this help is partly or wholly withdrawn; and because the Spirit is not always active to enable us to know ourselves to the same degree, the witness of our spirit inevitably fluctuates: ‘a man shall find the same signs sometimes witness to him, and sometimes not, as the Spirit irradiates them.’ We must recognise that God is sovereign here, to give more or less assurance in this way as he pleases. Thus far, all Puritans are agreed.
But what is meant by ‘the Spirit beareth witness’? Here, there is a difference. Some of the Puritans equate the witness of the Spirit to which Paul refers with the work of the Spirit in enabling our spirits to bear witness, as described above. Thus, John Goodwin, the Arminian Puritan, writes:
The expression of witnessing with our spirits plainly implies that it is but one and the same act of witnessing … jointly in common ascribed unto the Spirit of God and the spirit of man, and that the Spirit of God doth not bear any such witness … apart from the spirit of man … from whence it appears, that the witness, or joint-witnessing, of the Spirit here spoken of, is only a fortifying, strengthening, raising and enriching of the witness of testimony of a man’s own spirit.
On this view, the Spirit bears witness when the believer finds himself able to infer with confidence from the evidence of his heart and life that he is a child of God. But Sibbes, Brooks and Goodwin, among others, hold a different view. They take the text as referring to two distinct modes of witness, the first being inferential, as described above, and the second being that of the Spirit testifying, no longer indirectly, but immediately and intuitively; not merely by prompting us to infer our adoption, but by what Goodwin calls an ‘overpowering light’ whereby he bears direct witness to the Christian of God’s everlasting love to him, of his election, and his sonship, and his inheritance.
Sibbes says:
The Spirit … witnesses … by … whatsoever of Christ’s is applied to us by the Spirit. But, besides witnessing with these witnesses, the Spirit hath a distinct witness by way of enlarging the soul; which is joy in the apprehension of God’s fatherly love.… The Spirit doth not always witness … by force of argument from sanctification, but sometimes immediately by way of presence; as the sight of a friend comforts without help of discourse.
There is a twofold assurance of salvation, says Goodwin:
the one way is discoursive; a man gathereth that God loves him from the effects [i.e., marks of regeneration], as we gather that there is fire because there is smoke. But the other is intuitive … it is such a knowledge as whereby we know that the whole is greater than the part.… There is light that cometh and overpowereth a man’s soul, and assureth him that God is his, and he is God’s, and that God loveth him from everlasting.
Goodwin analyses this direct witness in much detail. It is, he tells us, self-evidencing and self-authenticating; and it is analogous in character to the Spirit’s witness to the objective truth of the gospel. In each case, the Spirit witnesses to the truth of the word of God and its application to the individual. In creating faith, he convinces the sinner that the conditional promises of the gospel are held out by God to him (e.g., ‘come unto me, all ye that labour … and I will give you rest’), and prompts him to make the appropriate response, i.e., to trust. In giving assurance, he convinces the Christian that the absolute promises of Scripture include him in their scope (e.g., ‘my sheep … shall never perish‘), and moves him to make appropriate response, i.e., to rejoice. Goodwin explains:
When we say that [assurance] is an immediate testimony, the meaning is not that it is without the Word; no, it is by a promise; but the meaning is, it is immediate in respect of using your own graces as an evidence or witness: but he bringeth home a promise to the heart, some absolute promise.… We do not speak for enthusiasms;it is the Spirit applying the Word to the heart that we speak of.
What happens is that
God says unto a man’s soul (as David desires) ‘I am thy salvation,’ and as Christ said on earth to some few, ‘Thy sins are forgiven thee,’ so from Heaven is it spoken by his Spirit … that a man’s sins are forgiven him, and he is owned by the whole trinity to be God’s child.
The Spirit applies words and thoughts of Scripture to the heart so powerfully and authoritatively that the believer is left in no doubt that they are being spoken by God to him.
This direct testimony does not normally begin to be given until a man has first gained assurance by the lower road of Spirit-guided inference; our spirit is the first to witness, and God’s Spirit joins his witness with it later; but when the direct testimony is experienced, it creates a degree of joy to which the other could never give rise. ‘It works that joy in the heart which the saints shall have in heaven.… It is not a bare conviction that a man shall go to heaven; but God telleth him in part what heaven is, and lets him feel it.’ It is pre-eminently as thus witnessing to our adoption that the Spirit is the ‘earnest of our inheritance’ (Eph 1:14), Goodwin thinks. The Spirit’s immediate testimony takes a man’s mind off himself, and centres him wholly upon God, and through it he foretastes heaven on earth. Goodwin insists that Christians do not enjoy the full riches of assurance till they know, not merely the Spirit’s indirect witness through conscience, but his direct witness also; those who lack it, therefore, should stir themselves up to seek it from God.
Goodwin expounds the phrase in Ephesians 1:13, ‘sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise’, as a reference to this direct testimony. In so doing he identifies with a line of thought that goes back through Sibbes and John Preston to the architect of so much Puritan practical theology, William Perkins; but he makes more of it than any of his predecessors had done. He suggests that ‘sealing’ is a part of the ministry of the Spirit promised by Christ in John 14, and calls attention to the words ‘in that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you’, and to the promise that Christ himself would manifest himself to the disciples (vv 20–21). These promises, he holds, are fulfilled in the Spirit’s direct witnessing; and whenever the New Testament mentions the receiving of the Spirit at some point subsequent to believing, the reference is to a conscious experiencing of the Spirit’s direct witness. This, he suggests, is the inner, experiential aspect of the charismatic outpourings of the Spirit recorded in Acts and in such passages as Galatians 3:2.
In his capacity as a ‘sealer’, the Spirit was not given before Jesus was glorified (Jn 7:38f); full assurance is a specifically New Testament blessing. Clearly, Christ had to be glorified before the Spirit could witness to believers of their union with him in glory.
Then Goodwin proceeds to a remarkable piece of sacramental theology. This ‘sealing’, he says, ‘is the great fruit of your baptism.’ Here he develops a line of thought peculiar to himself. Its basis is the scriptural and Reformed conception of baptism as a sign and a seal. As a sign, it signifies God’s reception and appropriation of a person into saving union with himself: one is ‘baptized into the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost’ (Mt. 28:19). As a seal, it assures that person, as did circumcision in Old Testament times, that God has entered into covenant with him, pardoning his sins and making him an heir of the promised inheritance. Says Goodwin:
The seal of the Spirit is the proper work that answereth to baptism. Therefore … it is called ‘baptizing with the Holy Ghost’ (Acts 1:5, 11:16), because it is that which is the fruit of baptism, it answereth that outward seal.… Peter biddeth them be baptized, and they should receive the promise, Acts 2:38.
The gift of the Spirit thus witnessing brings home to the believer what his baptism symbolically proclaimed to him: an assurance that he is now God’s, and God is henceforth his. In the early church, says Goodwin, ‘baptism was the ordinance to the newly converted, which conveyed the Spirit as sealing’; the outward and inward seals were commonly received together, as Acts shows, and the Epistles suggest that ‘almost all the saints in the primitive times [were] sealed.’ The position for later ages, however, is that the two are normally not conjoined, most of God’s people being baptised in infancy; but believers who have received the outward seal of baptism are thereby authorised and encouraged to seek from God in faith the complementary inward seal of the Spirit. When, or whether, God will give it to them they cannot know in advance; they must bow to his sovereignty here; but they can be sure that they will not find it unless they seek it, and that it is supremely worth seeking.
To confirm his view of the connection between baptism and the ‘seal’ as he conceived it, Goodwin makes a striking appeal to the baptism of Christ, the representative Head of God’s elect. He lays down the principle that, since it is of Christ’s fullness that we receive, ‘whatsoever work God doth upon us, he doth upon Christ first.’ Now, Christ was sealed (Jn 6:27) at his baptism, when the Spirit descended on him and he heard his Father say: ‘This is my beloved Son.’ This, says Goodwin, was a giving of direct assurance analogous to that which the ‘seal’ brings to believers.
Though [Christ] had the assurance of faith that he was the Son of God … out of the Scriptures, by reading all the prophets … yet to have it sealed to him with joy unspeakable … this was deferred to the time of his baptism. He was then anointed with the Holy Ghost [Acts 10:38].… Answerably [cf 2 Cor 1:22] [God] hath sealed and anointed us, just as he sealed and anointed Christ in his baptism.
And the mode of the sealing of Christ conformed precisely to the mode of the sealing of Christians.
It is always, I say, by a promise.… Jesus Christ was sealed … by a promise.… What was it? ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’ This is a Scripture promise … Is. 42:1 … That which had been spoken before of the Messiah was brought home to his heart.
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How much of this line of exposition is acceptable? Certain facts are clear. The reception of the Spirit after believing certainly had experimental repercussions for New Testament Christians, as Acts and Galatians 3:2, etc, make plain; it produced, not merely charismatic action (prophecy, tongues, miracles) but also great joy, boldness and vigour in Christian life and service. John 14–16, as Goodwin points out, certainly links the coming of the Comforter with a new depth of assurance and a new intimacy of communion with God. Romans 8:16 certainly admits, grammatically, of either of the exegeses reviewed above, and certainly refers on any view to a strong God-created and God-sustained conviction of one’s standing in grace, which Paul and his readers shared. It seems certain that the Puritans are in fact directing our attention to one of the experiential dimensions of New Testament faith of which we know too little today, whichever mode of conceiving the twofold witness we adopt.
But it seems incorrect to equate the dawning of assurance, direct or indirect, with the ‘seal of the Spirit’ referred to in Ephesians 1:13, 4:30 and 2 Corinthians 1:21. Goodwin’s interpretation, that the Spirit is the sealer, the ‘efficient cause’ of the sealing operation, and that the sense of assurance is the seal, is not what the Greek means. John Owen, discussing these texts, rightly dissents from this exposition. ‘It is not said that the Holy Spirit seals us, but that we are sealed with him. He is God’s seal unto us.’ Nor is he called a ‘seal’ because he makes us sure that God’s promises are true and apply to us: ‘This were to seal the promises of God, and not believers. But it is persons, and not promises, that are said to be sealed.’ Owen’s own alternative is as follows: ‘This is to seal a thing,—to stamp the character of the seal on it.… The Spirit in believers, really communicating the image of God, in righteousness and true holiness, unto the soul, sealeth us.’ If safe-keeping is part of the thought that the metaphor of God ‘sealing’ us is meant to convey, then ‘it denotes not an act of sense in the heart’, but a guaranteeing of security to the person. Assurance, as a conscious condition of mind and heart induced by the Spirit’s witnessing activity, comes as a spinoff from the sealing rather than being integral to the act of sealing as such.
Christ’s baptism, which Owen discusses in detail, was certainly the prototype of our sealing; but the seal given to him was the gift of the Holy Spirit in all fullness, anointing him for his messianic public ministry, and the word of assurance given with it was something distinct from it. Correspondingly, ‘God’s sealing of believers … is his gracious communication of the Holy Ghost unto them … to enable them unto all the duties of their holy calling, evidencing them to be accepted with him … and asserting their preservation unto eternal salvation.’ Assurance may come with the gift, but it is not to be equated with it. The seal is not any particular operation of the Spirit, but the gift of the Spirit himself.
From the vantage-point of his insight that, since we are sealed with the Spirit ‘in Christ’ (Eph 1:13), we must understand our sealing in the light and by the pattern and paradigm of his, Owen writes: ‘It hath been generally conceived that the sealing with the Spirit … gives assurance … and so indeed it doth, although the way whereby it doth it, hath not been rightly apprehended.’ The truth is that it is the presence of the Spirit, as manifested by his total action in the life, and not any single element in that action, which is the ground of the believer’s assurance that he is God’s (1 Jn 3:24; 4:13; Rom 8:9). Consequently the assertion that Spirit-sealing is chronologically a post-conversion event must be given up and the aorist participle of Ephesians 1:13 must be taken, in a way that is perfectly natural in Greek, to mean: ‘upon believing you were sealed.… ’ For Scripture forbids us to postulate an interval of time between believing and being sealed. All who believe have the Spirit; all who have the spirit have been sealed with the Spirit; and those who have not been thus sealed are not Christians at all.
However, the doctrine of the Spirit’s witness through the awakening of joy in the light of the knowledge of God’s love has a much broader scriptural basis than a particular exegesis of the ‘seal’ texts. Owen affirmed the reality of this witness by God’s sovereign gift of supernatural joy, though he would not identify it with the ‘seal’. He wrote:
Of this joy there is no account to be given, but that the Spirit worketh it when and how he will; he secretly infuseth and distils it into the soul, prevailing against all fears and sorrows, filling it with gladness, exultations; and sometimes with unspeakable raptures of mind.
Owen’s statement would, I think, have been subscribed by all the Puritans. Whether or not they regarded such experiences as experiences of assurance in the strict sense, whether or not they believed that Romans 8:16, or the ‘seal’ texts, referred to them, none of them doubted that such things happened, and that it was supremely desirable for every Christian that such things should happen to him. This is the central fact to fasten on in our assessment of the Puritan teaching on this whole subject, and our reflections on its relevance to ourselves today.
1.Thomas Goodwin, Works, ed J. Miller (James Nichol: London, 1861), VIII:260.
2.Thomas Watson, A Body of Divinity, p 151.
3.Thomas Brooks, Works, II:359.
4.Ibid, II:335, 316f, 371.
5.Goodwin, Works, VIII:346.
6.Brooks, Works, II:371.
7.Goodwin, Works, VIII:346, 352; I:236.
8.Brooks, Works, II:316.
9.Goodwin, Works, I:233.
10.Richard Sibbes, Works, III:456.
11.Goodwin, Works, I:257.
12.Ibid, VIII:355.
13.Ibid, VIII:379.
14.Sibbes, Works, V:442.
15.Goodwin, Works, I:250.
16.Brooks, Works, II:522.
17.Goodwin, Works, I:250.
18.Brooks, Works, II:515f.
19.Goodwin, Works, VI:27.
20.Ibid, I:306.
21.Ibid, VIII:366f.
22.John Goodwin, A being filled with the Spirit (James Nichol: Edinburgh, 1867), p 449; so also Watson, op cit, p 174, Thomas Manton, Works, XII:129, and others.
23.Sibbes, Works, V:440.
24.Goodwin, Works, 1:233.
25.Ibid, I:250.
26.Ibid, I:260.
27.Ibid, I:260.
28.See Sinclair B. Ferguson, John Owen on the Christian Life (Banner of Truth: Edinburgh, 1987), pp 117–121. Calvin had construed the phrase ‘the Holy Spirit of promise’ in Ephesians 1:13 as meaning that the Holy Spirit ‘verifies and confirms the promises in and to the hearts of believers’ (Matthew Pool, Annotations, 1685, ad loc). Perkins then explained the confirming of God’s promise in terms of the Spirit bestowing assurance of personal salvation: ‘When God by his spirit is said to seale the promise in the heart of every particular believer, it signifieth that he gives unto them evident assurance that the promise of life belongs unto them’ (cited from Ferguson, op cit, p 117). Finally, Sibbes and Preston introduced the thought that this assuring activity of the Spirit is temporally subsequent to, and thus distinct from, the dawning of personal faith. Preston preached it thus: ‘You will say, what is the seale or witness of the Spirit? My beloved, it is a thing that we cannot express…a certain secret manifestation, that God hath received us, and put away our sinnes: I say, it is such a thing, that no man knowes, but they that have it’ (The New Covenant, London, 1634, pp 400f; my italics). The ‘seal’ of the Spirit (i.e., the Spirit in his role as God’s seal, set upon us to mark us out as his possession) is here equated with a particular form of witnessing activity that takes place subsequent to conversion (‘after that ye believed’, Eph 1:13, KJV).
29.Goodwin, Works, I:248.
30.Ibid, VIII:264.
31.Ibid, I:248.
32.Ibid, I:245.
33.Ibid, I:249.
34.Owen, Works, IV:401.
35.Ibid, I:400. ‘When we seal a deed or grant to any one, we do not say the man is sealed, but the deed or grant’, I:243.
36.Ibid, I:242.
37.Ibid, I:243.
38.Ibid, IV:399–406.
39.Ibid, IV:404.
40.Ibid, IV:405.
41.Ibid, I:253. This is the first of two ways whereby the Spirit brings joy to the Christian heart, namely that whereby ‘he doth it immediately by himself; without the consideration of any other acts or works of his, or the interposition of any reasonings or deductions and conclusions’ (p 252). The other way is by blessing our ‘consideration’ (deliberate thoughts) of God’s mercy so that they issue in rejoicing.