Jeremiah was not a popular prophet. He didn’t tell the people what they
wanted to hear. He wasn’t concerned with gaining their approval. He was
determined to keep on speaking God’s Word – whatever the people thought
about him, said about him or did to him. The first priority is
faithfulness. We must not make relevance the be-all and end-all.
Relevance must be built on faithfulness. The two are to be held together
– faithfulness and relevance. If we do not remain faithful to God’s
Word, our words will be irrelevant. They will not be God’s Word for the
people. “Your Word is truth” (John 17:17) – This must be at the heart of
both our preaching and our living.
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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