Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

Announcer: The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals presents the timeless teaching of Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: The arsenal of Paul's life contained these two weapons: words and works, and they were both from God in divine revelation and divine power. Oh, how we need Christians who, like Dorcas in the Book of Acts, are full of good works and acts of charity. Oh, what a Christian she was.

Does God's light shine through you? Christ commanded it, "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven."

Music: God's Word is good for Godly gain,

To teach, rebuke, correct, and train,

Equipped by Him with every tool,

To pursue the work God has for us to do.

God's Word is all the Christian needs,

To grow in grace and do good deeds.

Announcer: Over a half a century ago, the late Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse, then pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, saw the need to spread God's Word beyond the hearing of his local congregation. He started the radio ministry which has become known as Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible.

The application of God's Word as taught by Dr. Barnhouse is as relevant today as when he first taught over the radio airwaves decades ago. The message we'll be featuring on today's edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is entitled Words and Works.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus said, "Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me, or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves." Jesus sought to draw people to himself by the words he spoke and the works he performed. Likewise, the Apostle Paul did everything he could in word and in deed to bring others to obedience in the Lord. Are you seeking to draw people to Jesus Christ by your words and your works?

The scripture text for today's edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible: Romans chapter 15 and verse 18. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with a message entitled Words and Works.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto Thee, our Father and our God, and in the Holy Spirit, once more we worship and praise Thee for Thy goodness and grace. Once more we delight to acknowledge that Thou art our God, and there is no other.

Thou art the one true God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, showing Thy mercy and grace to us through His death for us upon the cross, and showing Thy righteousness in promising that Thou wilt judge sin in the last day. Use the Word in this hour to build us in Thy truth. We ask it in the name and for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Our text is in Paul's epistle to the Romans in chapter 15 and verse 18, where Paul says that his purpose was "to win obedience from the Gentiles by word and deed." In previous studies, we've seen that we who are believers in Christ are left here on this earth to be witnesses to Him, and that we are to win others to obedience to Him. We have been given certain methods by God, and we are to follow these methods in our work. If we attempt to work in worldly fashion, we are not going to do the work that God wants done.

This principle is well stated in several passages of the scriptures, especially in the instructions that the Holy Spirit gave through Paul to the Corinthian church. For there we read in Second Corinthians 10:3 and 4, "Though we walk in the flesh, we are not carrying on a fleshly war, for the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly, but mighty in the sight of God to the pulling down of strongholds."

Now, in order to understand this passage, we must establish the meanings of some of the words. The Revised Standard Version is absolutely wrong at this point, and no Greek scholar in the world could justify the translation that they have given. Apparently, the translators were trying to bring the language down to date. They would probably argue that people do not understand such notions as the flesh, and so they have substituted the world.

But there is a vast difference between the flesh and the world. We have shown this at length in a previous study, but it's well to sum it up here. The flesh in the New Testament is not merely the material that covers the bones of a human or animal body, or the body itself, nor is it merely the human or mortal nature. Arndt and Gingrich in their great lexicon define the flesh as follows: "The flesh is the willing instrument of sin and is subject to sin to such a degree that wherever flesh is, all forms of sin are likewise present and no good thing can live in the flesh."

As Romans 7:18 says, "I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it." The world, on the other hand, is not merely the earth ball on which we live, nor even the world of mankind of which we are a part. While the word has these meanings on occasion, the spiritual meaning is quite different. The world and everything that belongs to it appears as that which is at enmity with God, that is, lost in sin, wholly at odds with anything divine, ruined and depraved.

This world is ruled by the prince of this world, the devil, and lies in the power of the evil one. The Christian must have nothing to do with this world of sin that is at enmity against God, except to live in it and win men out of it to the obedience of Christ. Now, instead of desiring it, one is to keep oneself unstained by the world. When he takes this attitude, the Christian is naturally hated by the world, as his Lord was hated.

Now, when our illustrative text states that "though we walk in the flesh, we are not carrying on a fleshly war, for the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly," it is stating a far different truth than if we followed the revision and read "though we live in the world, we are not carrying on a worldly war." The world is the sum total of the combination of all the elements of humankind, plus the admixture of Satan's advice and leadership through the ages.

The worldly wars that we know have come down through history, and the weapons have been clubs, bows and arrows, catapults, muskets, rifles, machine guns, cannon, and then bombs: exploding powder, gelignite, uranium atoms, and now the super bombs of hydrogen and cobalt. The world wars in their cold phases are carried on by economic pressures, diplomatic bribery, and all forms of human subtlety. A war of the flesh is something quite different.

The purpose of movements of the flesh is always that of advancing the desires of the flesh. The methods of the flesh are those of pleasure and pride. The pattern of the flesh can be seen in the results of television and the movies; Hollywood is its present capital. When the flesh sings a solo in church, one remembers the voice and the singer, but not the message. When the flesh preaches a sermon, one remembers the diction and the oratory and the manner of delivery and the gestures, but there is no power to feed the soul and transform the life.

The flesh flatters; the Spirit convicts and converts. We come back to our text in Romans, then, and see that all that we do individually as individuals, and all that we do collectively as the church of Jesus Christ, must be done in God's way and not in the way of the flesh. The weapons that are set before us in our text are these: by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, and by the power of the Holy Spirit.

The word is that which is preached. Now, it's the fashion today in theological circles to call this the kerygma. Let's face it, though it's a Greek word in the New Testament, this is a fleshly term, for its use in theology is an attempt to separate the message of the Bible from the Bible itself in order to lessen the thrust of the finality of the divine revelation. The deed, it is easy to understand, is the action of the life, whether or not it be accompanied by spoken words.

These four things, then—the word, the deed, the signs and wonders, and all in the power of the Holy Spirit—these are the weapons that we have to use in our Christian life and work. Let's look at each of these in turn. Let's look first at the word. The content of Paul's message was the person and the work of Christ. He reminded the Corinthian believers, "In what terms I preached to you the gospel, which you received, in which you stand, by which you are saved, if you hold it fast, unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter and various groups of the disciples."

This was the content of the message that he preached, and we can be sure that there was no change in this content when preached to churches other than that of Corinth. And since the phrase "according to the scriptures" occurs twice, we may state freely that Paul's preaching stuck closely to the text of the Old Testament, even while his own work was forming the basis of the central portion of the New Testament.

The word, then, was a preaching about a person, but linking that preaching to a divinely revealed document. And he now tells us that he can be proud of the fact that his preaching was effective, producing the great desired result: the obedience of those who listened to him. This result had been prophesied in a great passage in Isaiah's prophecy.

We read in Isaiah 55, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return not thither but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it."

Our text announces the complete fulfillment of this prophecy. It lays the groundwork also for the theological expression of this truth, which we find in the epistle to the Hebrews where we read in 4:12, "The Word of God is living and powerful, sharper than any two-edged scalpel, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart." This word is the written word about the living word, the Lord Jesus Christ.

And while there is a welcome trend among Protestant exegetical thinkers back to the biblical position which sees an identity between the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history, there is an unwelcome trend to lessen the Bible by attempting to make Christ its enemy. This is perhaps the greatest theological subtlety of our day. I recently ran across an outspoken expression of this attempt in an article in a French publication, La Revue d'histoire et de philosophie religieuses, the Review of Religious History and Philosophy.

And there Professor C. Hauter writes on the subject of Christology and the inspiration of the scriptures. He says that it's necessary to trace all piety ultimately to God, and that this encounters a serious distinction which separates God from the Word of God. He holds that any attempt to make the Word, that is the text—the Bible—the exclusive source of all religious piety ends in the identification of this Word with God himself, making the Bible essentially divine. Well, I would agree with him, and I'm not afraid of making the revelation itself a divine revelation, as much a part of God as my word is a part of me.

Yes, even more, because God is perfect, and both I and my words are imperfect. But Hauter continues that since the word is never a person and can only be the manifestation of a person, an impossible situation for him arises. This situation is not impossible for me because just as Christ is a manifestation of God the Father, so the written record is a presentation of the thoughts of God in the terms that he wished us to have the truth as he has given it to us in the Bible.

But now comes the point at which Christian thinkers must take a deep breath and realize what some thinkers are trying to do with the Bible. For Hauter notes that when Philip asked Christ in the 14th of John to show him the Father, Jesus, says Hauter, did not refer them to the Bible but to himself. And Hauter attempts to teach that Christ was thereby thrusting the Bible into an inferior position and denying its inspiration.

He doesn't leave us in doubt, for he continues teaching that at the very core of verbal inspiration lies the conviction that truth is no human product, even though the theory attempts to make the word participate in the absoluteness of the truth. And again, says Hauter, John's concept of Christ offers the solution of Christ's words, "I am the truth," inferring that Christ was thereby saying that the Bible was not the truth.

Now, this pernicious doctrine is going to be preached more and more, and Christians should be warned of its error. For it seems very plausible to say, "Oh, we must go past the Bible to Jesus himself." And certainly this is true, we must go past the Bible to Jesus himself, but in doing this, we must not be led to think that the Bible is cast aside and that our religious concepts are thereby formed within our minds by some work of the Spirit and our flesh apart from the Bible itself.

Let us be bold and put it clearly: there is no Christ for any man apart from the Bible. And our critics must not say that we're putting the book ahead of the Lord; this is ridiculous. Can anyone to whom I have given a verbal promise be told that they should be satisfied with me rather than with the fulfillment of the promise, and that the promise is unimportant? Which is true that in dealing with me, there is the possibility that the promise will not be kept, for I may break a leg or have a lapse of memory or plainly reveal myself to be someone whose word cannot be relied upon.

But none of these possibilities exist in God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And therefore, we may not make Christ the attacker of inspiration by his statements that he is the incarnation of God and that he is the truth. The word is the living word, the Lord Jesus Christ, as revealed to us in the written word, the Bible.

And we now turn to the second of the weapons that Paul used in his spiritual warfare. He speaks of the fact that he won his hearers to the obedience of Christ by word and by deed. These two ideas go together like the heads and tails of a coin. The words are the divine words that have been preserved for us in the scripture, and the deeds are the actions of the life that has been transformed by the incoming of the Holy Spirit in our regeneration.

This marriage of words and works is to be found in the person of Christ, in the lives of those who were his followers, and this same union must be impressed upon all believers. When Christ rose from the dead, he met the disciples on the road to Emmaus. They were sad, and when he asked them the reason, they told of the death of Jesus. But in what terms did they describe the Savior whom they did not yet understand as being alive from the dead? They said in Luke 24:19, "He was mighty in work and word before God."

And when Stephen was put on trial, he rehearsed the history of the Old Testament and described Moses as mighty in his words and his deeds. Now, this union of words and works was a part of the common preaching of the apostolic age. To the Colossians, Paul wrote, "Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus." And for the Thessalonians, he prayed, "Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word."

John also uses these two words in the same phrase; in fact, he reinforced each of them and gave us a powerful call to holy speaking and holy living. He said in First John 3:18, "Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth." For of what value can the words be without the actions to back them up?

The other day I ran across a story that will help explain this. I was reading the latest issue of the Roman Catholic Biblical Quarterly and came across an account of the dedication of a new building on the Hebrew University campus in Jerusalem. The rector of the university gave an address in which he talked of his long association with famous biblical scholars and he gave some revealing and sometimes some humorous anecdotes concerning them.

And one was about a famous German scholar, Nöldeke, one of the grand masters of Arabic scholarship. Few men knew more Arabic than Nöldeke, but he knew it only on paper. When he went to the Middle East, said the rector, he did not know enough spoken Arabic to order a cup of coffee, though he was the greatest scholar in the world on written Arabic.

Now, there are Christians like that, alas. They have a vast knowledge of the words of scripture and the words of Christian theology, but these are all in the realm of ideas. Christianity on paper, one might say. But when it comes into the realm of deeds, they are strangely lacking. I have never heard of anyone being won to the obedience of Christ by those who have no more than the paper form of truth.

Such artificiality may make converts who shall be apt to divide churches and separate brethren. Such Pharisaism may bring so-called converts into a legalism that is highly offensive to all who desire sincerity and truth. C.S. Lewis has described the Pharisee in several types. He says some were all rules and relics and rosaries; others were all drab clothes, long faces, and petty traditional abstinences from wine or cards or the theater. Both groups, he said, had in common their self-righteousness and the almost infinite distance between their actual outlook and anything that God really is or commands. The wickedness of other religions was the really live doctrine in the religion of each. Slander was its gospel, and denigration its litany.

Oh, how we need Christians who, like Dorcas in the Book of Acts, are full of good works and acts of charity. Oh, what a Christian she was. There was nothing of the frump about her, for the word Dorcas means gazelle. If God had not transformed her life, she could have been the type that God condemns, the type that lives for the hairdresser, the jeweler, and the couturier. But her beauty of form was subordinated to the beauty of soul. She was not only a saint; she was saintly.

Some time ago I read a little piece of sarcasm calling upon ministers not to use hackneyed illustrations. Several were mentioned that have been much overused, but one was mentioned that I'm going to repeat even if it has been used by every preacher, professional and amateur, in the country. A little boy was accustomed to attending church in a building which had beautiful stained-glass windows. He had often looked at these pictures, probably while the sermon was going on. I can remember many things that occupied me when I was a small boy sitting through sermons that were not on a boy's level, which most sermons can be if time enough is taken in their preparation and if they are bathed enough in prayer.

The boy knew that the windows were filled with pictures of the men of the Bible and he had read the inscriptions: Saint Matthew, Saint Mark, Saint Luke, Saint John, Saint Paul, and many more. And one day he was asked, "Jim, what is a saint?" And he replied instantly, "A saint is a person whom the light shines through."

Oh, hackneyed or not, it can carry a powerful thrust if you're willing to face the question: does God's light shine through you? Christ commanded it, "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven." The arsenal of Paul's life contained these two weapons: words and works, and they were both from God in divine revelation and divine power. Now, how they were used will be seen in our next study.

And our God and Father, we pray Thee that the Holy Spirit may take these words to our hearts. We thank Thee for the richness of Thy book, the wonders that it reveals to us of the living word, Lord Jesus. And may we always be willing, not in putting aside the Bible but by using it to come through it to Thee, and to hear Thee speak to us in every line, and to glorify Thee and acknowledge Thee as our Lord. And we give Thee the praise, O God our Father, through Jesus Christ the Lord and in the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Announcer: We must imitate the example of the Apostle Paul and do everything we can to win others to the Lord Jesus Christ by our words and our deeds. Today's message entitled Words and Works is available for you by calling toll-free 1-800-488-1888. Again request, Words and Works, or simply ask for message number R15-24. You may also listen to additional teachings by Dr. Barnhouse via the internet; visit us online at AllianceNet.org.

The Bible declares that every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father, but what are the implications of the lordship of Jesus Christ for our lives today? We would like to make available to you a free CD message called Jesus is Lord by the great British theologian and pastor, Dr. John R.W. Stott. Dr. Stott preached this powerful message at one of our first Philadelphia Conferences on Reformed Theology, and it's our pleasure to offer it to you free of charge. Ask for your free CD copy of Jesus is Lord when you call or write.

Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is a radio ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We exist to promote a biblical understanding and worldview. Drawing upon the insight and wisdom of Reformation theologians from decades and even centuries gone by, we seek to provide contemporary Christian teaching which will equip believers to understand and meet the challenges and opportunities of our time and place.

We also produce the radio broadcast, The Bible Study Hour featuring the teachings of the late Dr. James Montgomery Boice, and Every Last Word featuring the teaching of Dr. Philip Graham Ryken. Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible comes to you through the generous gifts of our listeners. If you have benefited from the broadcast and would like it to continue, please prayerfully consider a donation to help us keep this ministry on the air.

For more information or to make a contribution to help further our work, contact us by calling toll-free 1-800-488-1888. That's 1-800-488-1888. Write to us at Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Box 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103. Visit us online at AllianceNet.org. When you contact us, be sure and ask for a free resource catalog featuring books, audio teachings, commentaries, booklets, videos, and a wealth of other materials from outstanding Reformed teachers and theologians, including Drs. Donald Grey Barnhouse, James Montgomery Boice, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and Philip Graham Ryken. Thanks for listening today; join us again next time for more classic teaching on Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible.

Music: The Bible has commanded works to do,

God's saving work on our behalf,

Which draws our souls from death to life,

And rescues us from needless strife.

Amazing gift on earth so hard,

The life-imparting Word of God.