The Word of God, spoken by Jeremiah, still needs to be heard today –
“O land, land, land! Listen to the Word of the Lord!” (Jeremiah 22:29).
God has much to say to this land and every land. Are we listening to His
Word? or Have we closed our ears? Jeremiah speaks of our Saviour, Jesus
Christ – “The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will grow a
righteous Branch for David” (Jeremiah 23:5). Like Jeremiah, we must
direct attention to the Saviour. Speaking God’s Word, Jeremiah said, “I
am a God who is near. I am also a God who is far away” (Jeremiah
23:23). We must maintain these two emphases in our preaching. God is
greater than we can imagine, yet He has come near to us in Christ.
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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