We live in a changing world. Everything changes. Nothing remains the same. This is life - as we know it; but what if there's something else, something that's unchanged, unchanging and unchangeable! You may ask the question, "Is such a thing possible?" In the Bible - in the heart of the Old Testament, there's a long Psalm, containing twenty-six verses. It's Psalm 136. The second part of every single one of these twenty-six verses says this: "God's love endures forever." Some things are worth repeating - again and again and again ... We read the same thing, again, in Lamentations 3:22 - "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases." Here, we read something else about the enduring love of God, the "forever" love of God - "His mercies ... are new every morning" (Lamentations 3:22). New! That's the word many people like to hear. In our ever-changing world, the old is thrown away. It's out-of-date. Here, we have God's unchanging love described as new! When we're reading Psalm 136 and Lamentations 3 , we're reading words from a very long time ago - but they are words that speak to us of something that doesn't grow old, something that's always new - the love of God. In today's world, something that starts off new, very soon, becomes old. The love of God isn't like that - His "mercies never come to an end." (Lamentations 3:22). When everything else is going past its "sell by date", the love of God remains the same. His love is for today - not just yesterday. His love is not only for today. It's for tomorrow. It's for every tomorrow. His love is a faithful love - "Great is Your faithfulness" (Lamentations 3:23). "New every morning" - Day-by-day, God chooses to be faithful. He chooses to keep on loving us. He chooses to never stop loving us. Love - this is His eternal choice, the choice that He affirms to us, again and again and again ...
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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