Don't Play Off The Biblical Writers Against Each Other

"So in the Holy Scriptures we continually find passages with forceful admonitions, earnest appeals, and warnings against apostasy. We also meet passages full of consolation about the unchangeablenss of God's grace, of God's loving, all-determining grace. One might think for a moment that we are confronted here with two incompatible trains of thought, which one could label the 'apostasy of the saints" and the 'perseverance of the saints'...If we examine the witness of Scripture carefully, we observe immediately that it is not correct to say that one Biblical writer is dynamic in his description of the life of faith, while another works with purely static data, data of stability and immutability. If that were so, one could postulate differing Biblical-theological teachings, with one writer thinking in terms of election and another in terms of human responsibility. It is clear, however, that with such a method of division we do not really get at the problem of perseverance and apostasy. For what is striking about the Scriptures is that the passages concerning the steadfastness of God's faithfulness and the passages with admonitions are inseparable. We do not encounter a single passage that would allow anyone to take the immutability of the grace of God in Christ for granted...Only if we have some understanding of the depth of the correlation between God's grace and faith will we be able to go ahead correctly here...For the Scriptures, then, there is apparently no unbearable tension or opposition between the gracious faithfulness of God and the dynamic of life, because it is in the thick of the dynamic of the actual struggle of life that Scripture speaks of perseverance in grace." (G. C. Berkouwer)