Alyssa writes in to ask this, "Pastor John, I grew up in a wonderful Christian home where the gospel was lived out before me every day and I trusted Christ as my Savior in my youth. However, around the age of 14, I began to wrestle with many questions about the Christian faith.

Over the seven years since, I have spent countless hours studying the Christian worldview and apologetics as well as other worldviews. I see no lack of evidence for the Christian faith, but my mind always comes up with more questions that don't seem to have satisfactory answers in order for me to feel honest about believing the things in God's Word.

At the end of the day, I don't understand how I can ever know any truth for sure since I will never be able to collect all the facts about anything. How can we as finite humans be certain that we have found the truth when we are limited by our own humanity?" That is so good.

The issues of knowing and certainty and assurance are so, so relevant. Everybody, everybody deals with these things at some point. So as I understand it, here's the key, final, decisive question. How can we as finite humans be certain that we have found the truth when we are limited in our own humanity?

We're finite, but we want certainty, and they don't seem to go together. So before I answer the question, which I will, I'll give an answer that I think is biblical. Let me put some biblical truth in front of us here. The first is to be sure that we're aware God really does want us to have full assurance of his reality and the truth of the gospel.

Full assurance, certainty, deep, strong, unshakable conviction. He did not design a world where that's impossible for fallen, finite people. First John 5, "I write these things to you who believe in the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life." John 7, 17, "If anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether the teaching is from God." Hebrews 6, 11, "We desire each of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope to the end." Colossians 2, 2, "I struggle for them that their hearts may be encouraged to reach the riches of full assurance of understanding." And Romans 1, 20, "God's invisible attributes have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made, so they are without excuse, for although they knew God, they knew God, they did not honor him as God." So God did not design the world and the way of salvation and the process of revelation and the nature of the Bible and the work of the Holy Spirit.

He didn't design any of those so that we would only have good probability judgments about the truth. He did not intend for us to cross our fingers. I saw a woman sitting in the final of the World Cup. They showed, I think, a woman from Argentina, and she just had her fingers crossed in the last minutes.

I thought, "That's not the way we approach the final judgment. Our fingers crossed. Oh, I wonder if I'm going to make it at the last day." That's a tragedy if Christians have to die with their fingers crossed. He didn't intend us to leap into the dark either. So Elissa is right in asking the question, "How?" That's the right question, "How?" Not "if," but "How can we as finite humans be certain that we found the truth?" And the answer, I think, comes at two levels.

Warranted certainty of another person's trustworthiness is more than the sum of the empirical evidences that he is trustworthy. I know that's a little bit of a complicated sentence. I mean, warranted certainty is more than adding up one, two, three, four, five, I've got six evidences that he's trustworthy, now I can be certain.

That never works. It never works because you can always ask another question, right? I trust my wife that she is faithful to me. I could get evidences from experience, lots of them, but in the end, there would always be a niggling doubt, wouldn't there, if it were just the list of evidences because she could be tricking me somehow.

Just like Elissa says about her own knowledge of God, she studies, she asks questions, she gets answers, and there always seems to be another question because she's finite and I'm fallible about Noelle. So in fact, I have zero doubt that Noelle is faithful to me. She is. I never lose a moment's sleep over it.

So experientially, I have a working certainty, and it's more than the sum of the parts. It's a personal assurance that comes from a personal encounter. Knowing her creates something which is in, yes, the evidences, and then goes subjectively beyond the evidences. I think we can have that kind of knowledge, that kind of personal knowledge of Jesus by our exposure to his self-revelation in the Bible.

The more you get to know him, the more sure you are that he is reliable. Here's the other level. God does not give us certainty by whispering in our ear that we are true or he's true, but he does give us certainty. It is a gift of God. He does it by opening our eyes, the eyes of our hearts, to see the real self-evidencing glory of God in the gospel.

And I get that partly from Ephesians 1, mainly from 2 Corinthians 4, which goes like this. The God of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. In verse 6, "For God who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ." So in both cases, light is imparted by God.

It's the light of gospel or the light of knowledge, and more specifically, it is the knowledge of glory or the gospel of glory. So there is a revelation of the glory of God, the glory of Christ, in the gospel, in the knowledge of the historical revelation given in the Bible that is self-authenticating.

There is a divine and supernatural light. That's the phrase of Jonathan Edwards. A divine and supernatural light imparted to the soul by the work of God, which is a real seeing. It's a real seeing. That's really crucial. It's not irrational. It's a real seeing of what's really there. It's not a guess or a mere deduction by fallible logic.

It is a gift of God through the ordinary means of knowing the gospel. And we should pray for this. So that would be my closing exhortation, is that we would pray, Elissa would pray, "Open my eyes to see this wonderful, self-authenticating light of glory in your Word." Yes. Thank you, Pastor John.

Thank you for the question. On a related note, you may want to check out episode number 226, which is titled, "How Do You Know Christianity is True?" And if you want to ask a question, please send it to us via email at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. Well tomorrow is Friday, and we end the week with a doozy of a question.

If Christ has triumphed over Satan and over every power and principality, why wasn't Satan just eliminated from existence? I'll ask Pastor John that tomorrow. I'm your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John Podcast. 1. What is the reason for the death of Jesus Christ? 2.

What is the reason for the death of the Christ's Son? 3. What is the reason for the death of the Christ's Son's resurrection? 4. What is the reason for the death of the Christ's Son's resurrection? 5.