‘I
will exalt You, O Lord’(Psalm 30:1). God is not exalted because we exalt Him. We exalt Him because He is exalted.: ‘He is exalted, for ever
exalted, and I will praise His Name’(Mission Praise,217). How do
we come to the point where we say, ‘I will exalt You, O Lord’? We
realize our need of Him - ‘when You hid Your face, I was dismayed’(Psalm
30:7). We look to Him for mercy - ‘To You, O Lord, I called; to the
Lord, I cried for mercy’(Psalm 30:8). God hears and answers our prayer -
‘You turned my wailing into dancing; You removed my sackcloth and
clothed me with joy’(Psalm 30:11). God calls us to worship Him - ‘Sing
praises to the Lord, O you His saints, and give thanks to His holy
Name’(Psalm 30:4). ‘The joy of the Lord’, His ‘unutterable and exalted
joy’, gives us ‘strength’(Nehemiah 8:10; 1 Peter 1:8). We worship God:
‘O Lord my God, I will give thanks to You forever’(Psalm 30:12).
A response to a comment by G. R. Osborne on Berkouwer’s understanding of the doctrine of final perseverance
In his contribution to Clark Pinnock (editor), Grace Unlimited (1975), G. R. Osborne states that Berkouwer, in Faith and Perseverance, pp. 9-10, “speaks of the time less ness of the doctrine of final perseverance, founded on ‘the richness and abidingness of salvation” (p. 188, emphasis mine). This single-sentence comment on Berkouwer’s view hardly gives a fair indication of the type of thinking found in Chapter 1 of Berkouwer’s Faith and Perseverance - “Time li ness and Relevance” (pp. 9-14, emphasis mine). Berkouwer insists that “the living preaching of the Scriptures, which offer no metaphysical and theoretical views about … ‘permanency’ as an independent theme in itself, does nothing to encourage ‘a continuity which is … opposed in any way to the living nature of faith” (p. 13). Berkouwer stresses that “The perseverance of the saints is not primarily a theoretical problem but a confession of faith” (p. 14) and that “The perseverance of the saints is unbreakably connected wi...
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