“The Lord is the only God. He is the living God and eternal King”
(Jeremiah 10:10). The contrast between God and the gods is simple. God
made us. We made the gods. In the Lord our God, there is majesty and
mystery - the majesty of the “eternal King”, the mystery that He is
always beyond our understanding. Before this majesty and mystery, we bow
down in worship. We acknowledge his greatness. We give Him glory. He is
worthy of our worship. When God speaks His Word to us, “Obey Me, and do everything that I have told you to do. Then you will be My people, and I will be your God. I
will keep the oath I made to your ancestors and give them a land
flowing with milk and honey, the land you still have today.” We are to
give our answer, “Yes, Lord” (Jeremiah
11:4-5). There will be many times when our "devotion" to the Lord will
be put to the "test" (Jeremiah 12:3). These will be times of temptation -
times when our 'Yes, Lord' could so easily become 'No, Lord.' When this
happens, may God help us to return to Him and hear, again, His
wonderful Word of amazing grace: "I will have compassion on them again ..." (Jeremiah 12:15).
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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