Certainty Isn't a Sin

"You will know the truth"

In the last decade or so, we’ve had approximately 500 superhero movies that daringly posed the exact same question: “Are we sure the good guys and bad guys are all that different?”

That question gave way to “Let’s hear the bad guy’s side of the story” movies like Joker and Maleficent and Cruella. “Yeah, she wanted to kill puppies to take their fur… but here’s why she’s misunderstood.”

At the same time, the flaws of the good guys are always on display. They’re always morally ambiguous and their determination to stand up to the bad guys is questioned. There was no better encapsulation of this than 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home (spoiler alert) in which Aunt May insisted the villains just needed to be rehabilitated rather than defeated. The classic “We’re no better than the bad guys if we hurt the bad guys” speech was trotted out. Predictably, this resulted in her death at the hand of said villains.

As both bad guys and good guys get pushed out of their respective black and white and into a gray, neutral territory, this same kind of thinking seeps into our doctrine.

Who are we to say someone definitively isn’t saved? Isn’t it arrogant to say we have right doctrine? Won’t people be turned away if we don’t come to them with ambiguity and a willingness to admit we might be wrong about Jesus? Certainty and “thus saith the Lord” kind of talk are off-putting, right? We don’t want to be “dogmatic,” do we?

Because of all of this, David repeatedly calling for God to crush his enemies while maintaining his own righteousness makes us seriously uncomfortable.

How did David know he was right? Was he really so different from them?

Of course he was. God has not left us in the dark as to what is pleasing to Him and what is not. But in our false humility we imbibe a “Has God really said” mentality to any Scriptural diagnosis that would give us such certainty.

That’s why so many drone on and on about how all of us are “broken sinners.” But broken sinners have no moral authority to tell anybody they’re wrong or call them to repentance.

Here’s what we have to realize:

Certainty isn’t a sin.

Yes, certainty can be taken too far to the point where we don’t allow anybody to disagree with us without being called a rank heretic (as I wrote on here).

But for many people, that’s not the problem. Their problem is with feeling assured enough in their own beliefs and righteousness in Christ to call good, good and evil, evil.

They feel they are embodying a Christ-like humility by throwing everyone into the same pot of moral ambiguity. Me and Cruella DeVil, we’re not so different after all, the thinking goes.

No, you can be certain when you are righteous before God. Not because of your own goodness, but because of Christ (2 Corinthians 5:21) and the Spirit (Romans 8:14).

You can be certain you are saved, not because of your precise obedience but because He is faithful and righteous to forgive us as we confess our sins (1 John 1:9).

You can be certain that the bad guys are the bad guys. Romans 1 and all the other lists of sins (Galatians 5:19-21, 2 Timothy 3:2-5, Revelation 21:8, etc.) give us the clarity to say what is good and what is evil.

You’ll find there are plenty of sins, but certainty isn’t one of them.

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