AG STUDY GUIDE FINAL - The Forerunner

Rushdoony, The Necessity for Systematic Theology
P: Perseverance of the Saints
And I Will Lose None Of Them!
“…Perseverance of the Saints is the almighty work of God to keep us, through all
affliction and suffering, for an inheritance of pleasures at God’s right hand
forever.” ~ John Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy, page 73
The grace that theologians from Augustine to Calvin were defending was truly amazing.
Jesus went to a bloody cross, they said, in order to ransom the elect; those whom the
Father had given Him. Looking over the porticos of Solomon’s temple – the very
symbol of salvation for God’s elect children, Jesus declared:
“My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give them
eternal life and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of My
hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; and no one is
able to snatch them out of My Father's hand.” ~ John 10: 27-29
Later, at the Last Supper, He affirmed this bold guarantee when He joyfully presented
the eleven disciples to the Father and declared,
“While I was with them, I kept them in Thy name…I have guarded them and
none of them is lost, but the son of perdition; that the Scripture might be
fulfilled.” ~ John 17:12
…thereby affirming God’s absolute sovereignty over everything, including even the evil
decisions of His enemies. All this being true, it becomes logically necessary — to use the
words of the Holy Spirit in the epistle to the Hebrews — that God and God alone is the
“…author and finisher of our (the elect’s) faith.” ~ Hebrews 12:2
This truth was summed up well in the 17 th Chapter of the Westminster Confession of
Faith,
“They, whom God hath accepted in his Beloved, effectually called, and sanctified
by his Spirit, can neither totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace, but
shall certainly persevere therein to the end, and be eternally saved.” ~
Westminster Confession of Faith, 17:1
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