Who Am I?

I am currently a seminary student under care of the St. Lawrence Presbytery, and I expect, Lord willing, to graduate in May 2013. I was born in Malden, Mass., in 1979. My father left when I was 2, so I have never known him or had any fatherly influence in my life besides my grandfather and an uncle. My mother moved in with her parents from the time I was 5 until I was 9. My mother and grandparents were Roman Catholic, and I was made to attend church occasionally, but they did not teach me the Bible.

At the age of 9, we moved to Lander, Wyo., where I grew up. From a very early age, I had an especially rebellious streak and began to actively hate God. In about 6th grade, I began to become interested in witchcraft and the occult, and would read and steal books about it from the library. The summer before 8th grade I started using drugs, experimenting with inhalants and marijuana, and, soon after, alcohol. My interest in the occult increased and I got into New Age things like Ouija boards, tarot cards, numerology, astrology, runes, divination, demonology, transcendental meditation, and Satanism, which culminated in me writing a literal contract to sell my soul to the devil. I was so actively antagonistic toward God that I rolled a cigarette from a page of a pocket Bible and dared God to strike me with lightning during a thunderstorm.

The summer before I was to start high school, I built a pipe bomb at a friend’s house. It went off in my hand, split on one side and shot out of my hand like a rocket, ripping through a metal building and hitting a car inside. It nearly severed three fingers of my left hand and sprayed burning gunpowder on my friend. Thankfully, no one was killed. My fingers were reattached and I experienced minimal loss of function.

All this drug use and other delinquencies, coupled with missing the first few weeks of school due to the bomb injury, led to my dropping out of high school. I spent my time in drugs and trouble.

Conversion

At 17, I stole a marijuana pipe from some friends, which led to my alienation from them; so I spent a lot of time at home. One night while getting drunk at another friend’s house I stole a Bible catechism. During my time in isolation I started to read the catechism. God had begun to cut me off from things and draw me to Himself. The things that struck me the most were questions about the final judgment and second coming.

Somehow the Bible started to appeal to me. I would sneakily listen to Christian radio when no one was home. When someone came home, I would spin the dial so no one could know what I had listened to. I would go to my grandfather’s garage and read some of his liturgical material, which had Bible passages in it, and hide them when he came into the garage.

My grandfather had a Gospel of Matthew in booklet form, and I asked him if I could borrow it. He gave it to me, and I proceeded to read it from start to finish. I was soon confronted with the Sermon on the Mount and I said in my mind, “He can’t mean what I think He means about lust, because that would drastically change my life.” I began to be convicted about my sin. I used to steal from my mother; I would steal 100 dollar bills at a time with no conscience. I also stole her Diet Pepsi regularly, which was one of the first things I was convicted about in my conscience. I knew that this habit was sin and stopped stealing from her.

I later received a Bible from my grandfather and started to read through it. I was terrified at God’s words of judgment, and I would sit reading with my whole attention affixed to the Bible. I felt very guilty and feared God.

A turning point came after I read in the catechism about the Lord’s Day. I did not know at that time, nor could I determine, whether the Lord’s Day was on Saturday or Sunday; so I tried not to work on either. I went on a winter camping trip with my uncle, and we had to build snow shelters on both Saturday and Sunday. I remember sitting inside the snow shelter with great guilt because I knew that I had violated the Sabbath.

When we got home after the weekend I was in the same guilty state and was lying on the couch thinking about my guilt. All of a sudden, blasphemous thoughts came rushing into my mind with violence and anger. The thoughts were directed against the Holy Spirit. I had recently read Matthew 12 about the sin that would never be forgiven. Great fear and horror filled my soul. I got off the couch and ran into my bedroom and looked up, pleading with God that I did not want those thoughts and that I did not agree with them. They kept coming with violence.

I thought about Matthew 12 and about all the things I had done in my life: selling my soul to the devil, renouncing God, rolling the cigarette from Bible paper, and other wicked things. I thought then that I could never be forgiven and that I had committed the unpardonable sin. I went into despair. I laid on my floor in my sleeping bag, pale white and waiting only to die and go to hell. I thought how foolish I was to have removed all hope of getting to God by my earlier life. Before I hated God, and now He was all I wanted. I thought of how God would not receive me and how I was only His enemy and in great guilt.

I lay many days in my room, and I turned on the Christian radio station, hoping for some word of hope. I would hear song after song about righteousness. A song came on that sung about the great commandment to love God with all your heart, and I was overwhelmed with waves of guilt. I felt so condemned and unworthy. I knew that I was utterly under damnation and thought that there was no way out.

I thought about just leaving all of this, forgetting about Jesus and going back to drugs, but I knew that the Bible was true and that I would be going against conscience and conviction to do so. I could not turn back. No human being had ever argued for the truth of the Bible to me, and I was as ignorant as anyone ever was on anything religious, but I felt like that man who said about Jesus, “No one ever spoke like this man” (John 7:46).

I began to read through the Bible looking for something that would save me. I pled, like the man who beat his breast, that God would have mercy on me, a sinner, and forgive me. The Bible kept me from utter despair as I saw glimpses of hope, especially in the Psalms.

A group of old friends came over one day and said that they, too, had come to know Christ. They brought me a book called Stomping out the Darkness by Neil Anderson. I opened it to a chapter about the battle for your mind. The first lines said, “If Satan can put a thought in your mind, and he can, how much easier is it for him to make you think it is your own.” Upon reading this, I had a burst of joy and hope. Perhaps I was not guilty of the evil thoughts that had been storming my head. This gave me even more resolve to hope in the gospel and that I could actually be saved.

I read and read the Bible, all the while struggling with constant mental attacks and weak assurance. At length, the attacks were beaten back with Scripture, especially John 6:37. “All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” This was my hope, and it was what kept me from despair.

Christian Life

For the next 10 years, the unpardonable sin was a daily struggle. I was under almost incessant mental attack from blasphemous thoughts. From this I was constantly struggling with my assurance. The internal accusation that I had committed the unpardonable sin was most terrifying, and not easy to disprove for a person who knows he is utterly sinful.

Thus, this struggle is one of the most formative factors in my Christian life. It forced me into the Word. It showed me that nothing but the Word can be relied upon for hope, because nothing short of it will hold up under such heavy trials. It showed me the patience of God and how longsuffering He was toward me in my struggling doubt. It made my spiritual welfare and my soul’s salvation of utmost importance in my life, and kept me from dozing off into laxity about my soul. It caused me to seek to obey God in the minutest detail and desire to be holy. It forced me to learn patience, because it would not go away. I had to endure in hoping on the gospel. I learned that God’s promises come to pass just as He said.

I have come, at length, to be totally delivered from this struggle. Although I am glad it is over, I am grateful to have gone through it. If this all seems unusual, one can refer to John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, an autobiography wherein he details an almost identical account to mine.

Not long after my conversion, I sought to give restitution to everyone that I had ever wronged—which was a lot of people.

In 1999, I received my G.E.D. and the next fall started attending community college. At the end of 2000, I moved to Alabama to live with a pastor and his family for discipleship. In June 2001, we moved to Colorado to plant a church. In Sept. 2002, I moved to Minneapolis Minn., to go to Bethlehem Baptist Church, where John Piper is the pastor. I learned a lot at Bethlehem, and Piper is one of the biggest influences, along with Jonathan Edwards, on my theology. I moved back to Wyoming in 2003 to finish at the community college; while there, I met my future wife, Andrea Hayden, on a Christian singles web site. After graduation I moved to Fulton, N.Y. We were engaged in July and married in October 2005.

I became a member at the Fulton, N.Y., RP Church, where Andrea was a member. Pastor Nick Iamaio approached me about being taken “under care” as a student of theology, and on Apr. 18, 2006, the St. Lawrence Presbytery voted to take me under their care. According to presbytery’s counsel I enrolled in SUNY Oswego, earning a B.S. in computer science, and am now the RP Seminary’s system administrator.

God can save anyone, no matter how wicked, and He can do it without human aid. The gospel is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes.

—Scott Doherty is systems adminstrator for the Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, Pa. He is also a seminary senior who will graduate in May. An RP Seminary feature appears semiannually in the Witness.