God speaks to His people about their sin - "The people of Jerusalem turned away from Me without ever returning ..." (Jeremiah 8:5). He is not pleased with them. He is calling them to return to Him - "Change the way you live ..." (Jeremiah 7:3).
The life of Israel is “like the desert” (Jeremiah 9:12). This moral and
spiritual desert is described in Jeremiah 9:13-14 - “The Lord answered,
They’ve abandoned My teachings that I placed in front of them. They
didn’t obey Me, and they didn’t follow them, They followed their own
stubborn ways and other gods ...” This was a serious situation. These
words are very relevant to today’s Church and world. God is not being
taken seriously. His Word is being ignored. The situation goes from bad
to worse. God is speaking. Few people are listening. He speaks through
His Word. Few people are reading His Word. We must listen to what God
says and do what He tells us to do.
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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