Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

Guest (Male): The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals presents the timeless teaching of Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: God raised Jesus Christ from the dead and set him at his own right hand in the heaven, and put us here on this earth, a body of feeble believers, unrecognized by the world, but empowered by him. We are to be his witnesses, and he works through us, speaking his words, acting his life of love, performing spiritual, not natural wonders through us, and taking all the glory to himself.

Guest (Male): 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 “Signs and Wonders.” The Holy Spirit powerfully worked through Paul and the other apostles to authenticate their gospel message with miracles, signs, and wonders. Countless people in our day seek miracles, signs, and wonders in their spiritual experience. What are the characteristics of signs and wonders in the time of Christ and the apostles, and can we expect such spiritual manifestations in our day? The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible: Romans chapter 15 and verse 19. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with a message entitled “Signs and Wonders.”

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto thee, our Father and our God, and in the Holy Spirit. We thank thee that thou art the same yesterday, forever, and today. There is none like unto thee, and we glory in the fact that daily thou dost prove thyself to all who are willing to abandon themselves to thee. Fill us with the joy that our hearts may overflow with gladness toward thee, so that this overflow may be seen in our lives, in all our relationships with others, that they may see thee in us and glorify thee. We ask it in the name and for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

We come now to the 15th chapter and the 19th verse, where we read, “to win obedience from the Gentiles, by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Now, God raised up Paul in order to break through the barrier of racial discrimination which had existed in the hearts of the Jews against the Gentiles. And what Paul did was a new thing in the religious history of the world, bringing the gospel to the Gentiles. And from our point of view—Gentiles by birth, without hope, without God, and without Christ—Paul brought the difference between eternal separation from God and eternal oneness with him. It was the difference between hell and heaven.

Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “When I came to proclaim to you God’s secret purpose, I did not come equipped with any brilliance of speech or intellect, but it was my secret determination to concentrate entirely on Jesus Christ himself and the fact of his death upon the cross. What I said and preached had none of the attractiveness of the clever mind, but it was a demonstration of the power of the Spirit of God.” And then after outlining the nature of the divine revelation, he continued, “It is these things that we talk about, not using the expressions of the human intellect, but those which the Holy Spirit teaches us, explaining spiritual things to those who are spiritual.”

But in addition to the words, there was the great fact of his life. His preaching was backed up by a complete devotion to Christ. God recognized this devotion and the nature of the deeds which supported the words that he allowed Paul to include in the divine revelation under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit as an expression of proper pride in what had been given him to do. Not only in our context does he say that in Christ Jesus, I have reason to be proud of my work for God, but to the Corinthians also he writes concerning some teachers who pretended to lead them astray.

“Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one. I am talking like a madman—with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings and often near death. Five times I have received the forty lashes less one. Three times I have been beaten with rods, once I was stoned. Three times I have been shipwrecked, a night and a day I have been adrift at sea. On frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brethren; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And apart from other things, there is the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to fall, and I am not indignant?”

But all of these words and all of these deeds that Paul lived and spoke were backed up by the evident power of God’s hand upon him in a supernatural way. In another passage, he told the Corinthians, “The kingdom of God does not consist in talk, but in power.” And to the Thessalonians he wrote, “Our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction.” You see, the speaking of words and the living of a life would have produced no results if God had not intervened in two ways.

The power that he manifested in Paul in the signs and wonders he gave him to perform was matched by the power of the Holy Spirit in the lives and hearts of those who heard the word and saw the deeds. And this combination of the word and the Spirit can alone produce faith in unbelieving hearts. This combination of the word and the Spirit can alone give eternal life to those who are dead in sin. It alone can bring about the new birth. The reason that this is true is that the transformation which must take place in a human soul is not a human act, but a divine sovereign act of the Lord God Almighty.

Paul knew this, and this is why he gives all of the glory to Christ. He knew that God had never promised to bless our preaching or our eloquence or our logic or our charm or any of our attainments. What God has promised to do is to use his word through us, backed up by our Christian living, and all this with his empowerment upon us so that it shall be seen that all is of him, through him, and for him. The word of God backed up with Paul’s godly life was authenticated by divine credentials. Paul tells them that through him, God had wrought signs and wonders.

Now, it’s necessary for us to look at these words and find out exactly what they mean in the New Testament usage. The lexicon gives us the following outline of the meaning of the word “signs,” *semeion*. The sign or distinguishing mark by which something is known. For example, the shepherds in the fields at Christ’s birth were told that as a sign, they would find the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. Christ declared that he himself would be a sign to his generation, even as Jonah had been a sign to his.

In the second place, the word is used to denote a sign consisting of a wonder or miracle, an event that is contrary to the usual course of nature. These works of divine origin were performed by God himself, by Christ, or by men of God. Now, the second word translated “wonder,” *teras*, is used 16 times in the New Testament, and always with the word “signs” as a companion synonym: “signs and wonders.” Paul was able to claim that some of these signs and wonders had been worked through him.

Now, if we understand why, we will be able to understand the whole of the teaching about signs, and we will not be deceived by the effort of false teachers in our day to draw us away from the simplicity of the word of God. Perhaps the difference may best be set forth in terms of time. The important factor lies in the existence of the New Testament in our day and its nonexistence 1,900 years ago. Paul never heard the Sermon on the Mount or read the precise words that God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.

Paul never read the book of the Acts, the epistles of James, Peter, John, or Jude. He never heard of the apocalypse. Only little by little was the New Testament given by God. There wasn't even a line of it written for at least a quarter of a century after the cross and the resurrection and Pentecost. And yet, during that generation, there were many thousands of believers who attended the gatherings for the breaking of bread and who witnessed the baptism of those who were being joined to the church.

What were their credentials? What are my credentials? My credentials lie in faithfulness to the word of God. The standard is the Bible. Every man who puts forth an idea about spiritual things, whether through the spoken or the printed word, must be willing to have that idea put up against the word of God. The idea is to be accepted or rejected depending on whether it squares with the word of God, as it is illuminated to my heart by the Holy Spirit. Now, since I am human and fallible, I cannot claim that my interpretation is infallible in general, but it must be final and infallible in my relationship to God in my own heart.

And at the same time, I recognize clearly that each believer is in exactly the same position toward God. We are not robots accepting the doctrine of a church and being taught by the clergy and with any thought that any church is infallible. We know that this is not true. God is not making robots, but God is making sons and teaching them in this way. Now, I know that since some of our interpretations differ, I must be sure and certain in my own soul that I am not allowing myself to be deceived by any discoloration of sin within me and that I am seeking to be yielded in every part to the Lord Jesus Christ.

I must suspend judgment about any man who disagrees with me, waiting quietly until the day comes when the Lord himself shall call us before his judgment seat to try our thoughts, our ways, our motives. With all subterfuge put aside in the clear light of his presence, he will assess the judgment or give the praise as he sees our hearts open before him. I am to look to the history of the church, the history of dogmatics, to see how the church has met each idea as it has come into being, and to realize that God has always been at work within his church, even in the sections that obviously have departed from the word of God.

We can easily see that there has been a growing unanimity throughout the centuries concerning the great essentials of the faith. Each generation of Christians has added its approval to these essentials: that Jesus Christ is the Lord God, the Word made flesh to dwell among us; that he came to pour out his life as a satisfaction for sin, a perfect expiation; that he died as our Savior; that he rose again in the same body in which he died; that he ascended into heaven where he is seated at the right hand of the Father; that he is coming again to judge the living and the dead. All these truths are accepted by the whole mainstream of Christianity.

It’s only in the secondary doctrines that we must submit our premises for reexamination at any moment and be ready to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit in the light of the word of God. In the final day, he tells us that he will show what our hearts’ thought really was and what were the motives which moved us. With all subterfuge put aside in the clear light of his presence, he will assess the judgment or give the praise as he sees our hearts open before him. Now, in the first century, at the time Paul was writing this epistle, the conditions were not the same.

There was no right-angle square of the New Testament by which all ideas were to be objectively measured. When the believers came together for their weekly gathering around the bread and the wine, one or another rose to speak. The Holy Spirit came upon an individual with some word of edification or comfort. How were the listeners to know whether this man was speaking from Satan, from himself, or from God? The divine authentication came through the wonders that God wrought through the man. One would be able to speak suddenly in a tongue that he had never learned, and to men of that mother tongue who did not speak his language.

Or a man rose to speak and first reached out to touch the sick and restore them to wholeness, and then as he continued to speak, all knew that God had set his hand upon the man and the ministry was an approved one. These were the signs and wonders which prevailed in the church until the New Testament was completed. But when the New Testament was finished, the partial gifts were done away. How important to know that today is the day of the silence of God. Oh, I know there are those who claim still to possess miracle powers, but let us examine their claim.

Now, I do not deny for a moment that God has all power and that he could do anything that he wanted to do. But I believe the Bible teaches that it is not his plan at the present time to present men with powers and wonders and signs to convince them by the force of his majesty. Only the natural senses would be won over by such display. In fact, it was stated in the New Testament they will not believe though one rose from the dead. And Christ said when he was here upon the earth, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”

Signs followed the resurrection and ascension of the Lord only in the days of the apostles. And when the New Testament came into being, the faithfulness of any man depended entirely on his conformity to that revealed revelation. Now, someone may ask about the pretensions of those who claim to perform miracles of healing in our day and time. Again, I remind you that God could do anything that he wished, but I believe that the Bible teaches that we are not to look for signs and wonders.

Now, we would admit immediately that there are many so-called cures that result from psychological means. A person truly thinks himself to be sick. Someone comes along and demonstrates some type or other of supposed faith cure. The person says, “I’m well,” and the psychological symptoms vanish. What he has been cured of is not a sickness which he never had, but the psychosomatic idea that he was sick. Such a cure could be affected if the supposedly sick person placed his faith in God, in turnip roots—as they do in one tribe in Africa—or in any form of religious belief, relics, and so on.

But this type of thing cannot cause a truly fractured bone to knit in an instant or restore sight to a person who has lost eyeballs through disease or accident. Such cures have never been affected since the apostolic days. There may be claims to the contrary, but there are no valid proofs. Now, what are we to say of people who claim to have such powers? We dismiss from our discussion those who are fakes. We know that there are such and there is abundant evidence to prove the quackery. We also confess at once that we believe that God has done amazing things on occasion, things that transcend our feeble abilities to understand.

But for the most part, these so-called cures are wishful thinking and cannot be classified as signs or wonders in the biblical sense. The phenomenon of so-called speaking in tongues must be listed with such professions of healing. Now, it must be understood that I have not been speaking of divine healing, but of divine healers. God is sovereign and he can do as he pleases. But there is no way that anyone can go to the Bible, select some formula, and following it, produce the healings or the tongues. Well, what of those who profess to speak in tongues?

If they suddenly began to preach the gospel in a tongue that they had never known, and a person of that language should hear and be saved, well, I would give that more serious consideration. But I’ve checked in my travels all over the world and have never heard of any missionary who had ever heard of anyone who did this thing. But we’re willing to give such people the benefit of the doubt and believe that their experiences are from human spiritual pressure that is not contained in the bounds of biblical revelation.

Some time ago, I talked with a young man who was connected with one of our outstanding Protestant magazine publications. He, it was whispered, had been with some people who had led him on into an experience where he was carried out of himself and began to make noises with his mouth. He was told that this was speaking with tongues. I questioned him very closely. The story is too long to recount here, but I am convinced that the summary of it might be as follows: he was so deeply eager to be spiritual and to know the power of God that he whipped his being, he urged himself, his consciousness toward something that had been described to him as desirable, and he did this to the point where his control broke and he was carried over into delusion, arising from a self-induced disorder of the nervous system. One has to be careful even in the search for holiness, lest one fall into such deception.

The signs and wonders which are commonly performed today by multitudes of believers in Christ are spiritual rather than physical. A Christian was once asked whether he could turn water into wine as Christ had done. He replied that he had frequently done a much more wonderful thing that was indeed miraculous. And when he was asked what it was, he told the story of a drunkard who had brought his family into abject misery until he was saved. And he ended with this statement: “Thus it was by the power of the gospel that we turned whiskey into milk for babies.”

Oh, I have seen liars turned into men of truth. Men and women of loose morals turned into men and women of purity and uprightness. I have seen lazy youths become industrious. Men whose eyes were filled with the glitter of gold leave it all and go to far fields to serve Christ and mankind in simple tasks of love. I know a dear old lady, one of the most saintly women I know, and I’m one of the few people that know that in her girlhood days, abroad in a foreign city, she was arrested again and again as a prostitute and was finally expelled from the country and came to the United States where God saved her and she was absolutely transformed.

Oh, the grace of God. These are the signs and wonders that count in our day. Now, when we understand this rightly, we can see that this is the fulfillment of Christ’s words, which say that those who follow him will do greater works than he did, because he would be serving us from the throne of God. If someone asks how these works which we do can be greater works than those performed by Christ, the answer is simple. He was God. And it was no expenditure of majesty or power for him, the creator of the universe, to do simple things like turning water into wine, walking on the sea, or raising men from the dead.

But when we, poor sinners that we were, become saved in Christ, and when we lay hold on God’s power to walk after him, we’re doing it as members of a race once made lower than the angels and fallen from that position to a place as low as that of fallen angels. And from that place, we start. From those depths, we emerge, created anew in Christ. And with our feeble faith laying hold upon the strength of the Almighty, the eternal treasure is in the vessels of earth. And when men see our good works, they are forced to glorify our Father which is in heaven. This was Paul’s glory, and it is ours also.

You have tasks and problems that lie before you. Remember that you have these same keys to power: the word of God, the life of Christ within you, the effectiveness of his working through you, and all by the power of the Holy Spirit. And our God and Father, we pray thee that thou shalt bless the truth to each heart. Oh, that thy people would arise to the possibilities of our witness in Christ, to be empty vessels filled by thee to overflowing, to abundant overflowing. Speak the word to each heart in this hour that those who know thee may live for thee in triumph. And to thee be all the glory through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Guest (Male): The miracles, signs, and wonders performed by Christ and the apostles authenticate the gospel message of salvation found in Christ. We hope you’ve benefited from today’s message, “Signs and Wonders.” To listen to additional teaching by Dr. Barnhouse, visit us online at AllianceNet.org. An audio copy of today’s teaching is available by calling us toll-free: 1-800-488-1888. Request “Signs and Wonders,” or simply ask for message number R15-25.

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 Doctors 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.