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: We are to ask the Lord's blessing even on believers whom we think are a little queer. They may think that we are a little loose in our practices. We will never judge them, and they must never judge us.

What will bring us to this oneness of mutual tolerance within the body of Christ? We must contemplate that both those who disagree with us and those who agree with us have been redeemed by God through the Lord Jesus Christ.

The love that won us will ultimately enable us to love all who have been loved by our God and Savior. But whatever the attitudes or practices of any man, the strong believer will cry out with Paul, "Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again in the yoke of bondage."

Brethren, love one another. Brethren, judge not that ye be not judged. Brethren, love one another. Our Lord has said, "By this shall men know that ye are my disciples, if you love one another."

Guest (Male): Over a half a century ago, the late Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse, then pastor of 10th 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 will be featuring on today's edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is entitled "The Believer and the First Day."

Many parts of our country once enacted blue laws, forbidding businesses to operate on Sundays. Stores and shops are closed on Sundays in many parts of Europe, but the Lord's Day was never meant to be a day of restrictions and regulations to be imposed on the unbelieving world around us. It is a day of celebration and worship for the people of God.

How should Christians observe the first day of the week, and thereby honor the Lord? The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible, Romans chapter 14 and verse 6. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with a message entitled "The Believer and the First Day."

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto thee our Father and our God and in the Holy Spirit. We cannot bless men. We cannot give any good to any man, but through us thou canst speak the word that will bring life, the word that will bring comfort, consolation, strength. For the word comes from thy book, and by thy Holy Spirit, taking the things that are of Christ and ministering them to our hearts.

So bless, we pray thee in this hour, and we ask it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Now in the 14th chapter of Romans and the sixth verse, we continue in our study of the seventh question. We read, "He who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord, and he that observes not the day, does so in honor of the Lord."

A Christian's attitude toward the observance or non-observance of a day depends on his relationship to the Lord. It is possible for two groups of believers to maintain contrary views in such matters, and yet both groups be equally pleasing to the Lord.

The issue is not the legalistic keeping of a set of rules, but the individual's conviction that his behavior in all such matters is what he believes the Lord wants him to do.

In Scotland, the old Covenanters began their catechism with the famed question, "What is the chief end of man? The chief purpose of man?" And the answer is, "Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever." The main purpose in life, the reason for which God has created and redeemed us, the answer to every ramification of life is that we should glorify God.

If we seek to please him, he will know it. We cannot deceive God. It's possible to deceive others. It's possible to deceive ourselves, but we cannot deceive God. If therefore we order our lives with the one aim of glorifying him, we are answerable to him alone for what day we observe and how we observe it, or whether we observe any day.

Since, as we have seen, there is no Sabbath day since Christ has died and risen again, and since the early church celebrated the first day of the week as the day of Christ's resurrection, how should we act on that first day?

Certainly, we must realize that the day is for believers only. We must not force unbelievers to observe it. I remember very well a hearty discussion on this point, into which I was plunged just after I came to Philadelphia as the young assistant to a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. At the same time, I was preaching on Sundays in a little church.

I received a call from a minister who asked me to circulate among my church members a petition to force the authorities to close the Sesquicentennial World's Fair on Sunday. The man was rather taken aback at my flat and categorical refusal. When he asked my reason, I replied by asking him if he would vote for a law to force Jews and other non-Christians to take the communion service.

He replied that of course he would not. Well, I then said this, "The communion service is a memorial of the death of Christ, and is to be taken only by someone who has believed in that death and who is trusting in that death for his salvation." In the same way, the celebration of the first day of the week is to remember the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead.

And the only person who can keep that day in any way that satisfies God is the man who believes that he has been raised from the death of his old self into the newness of life in Christ. Sunday is for the resurrected person.

Now I well realize that such an answer is startling to someone who has attempted to replace Saturday by Sunday, by making the day of the resurrection conform in observance to the legalism of the day of death that was assigned between God and Israel. But this is how I read the scriptures, and this is the idea that I must hold before God.

I defend my right and duty to preach what I believe, but I defend the right and duty of another Christian to teach differently from this if he has not seen the truth as I have seen it.

I may not bar a man from Christian fellowship because his opinion is not the same as mine on such secondary matters as the observance of a day. But what is a Christian to do, or what may he not do on the first day of the week?

I recall stories of how Scotch children were forced to keep a legalistic Sabbath on Sunday. There was the boy whose grandmother said, "Donald, Donald, you maun't a whistle on the Sabbath."

He was not allowed to whistle, but he could not understand why the birds sang, and the dogs barked, and the cats were frisky, but boys were supposed to be preternaturally silent. And it must have taken life in a straightjacket to mold such a boy into the man who would later write such a hymn about heaven as, "Where congregations ne'er break up and Sabbaths have no end."

In my own upbringing, I experienced what most Christians knew around the turn of the century. Life began to slow down after Saturday noon. The main cooking for Sunday was filling the house with odors of homemade bread and roasting meat or chicken.

Clean clothing for the next day was laid on my bed. There was a solemnity about Saturday night. It was not a night of parties and dates, but of home music and games, and a sort of rehearsal of the Sunday school lesson. We recited our memory verses for the next day and went early to bed, clean and shiningly ready for the Lord's Day.

In the morning, after breakfast and Bible reading, we started off for Sunday school, walking with father, while mother came along behind with the girls. After Sunday school and church, we returned home to the biggest dinner of the week, with all the main dishes previously prepared, and with little to do but enjoy it.

In many homes, the observance of Sunday afternoon was a problem. Some children read, but for me, Sunday afternoon meant two or three hours of playing chess with my father, who taught me chess in order to keep me close to home on Sunday afternoons.

Then there was a Christian Endeavor meeting, evening church service, and home to bed. There was enough diversity in the Sunday school and the young people's work to keep up interest. While the church services were endurable as I looked at the people, watched my father come down from the choir to sit beside me during the sermon, turned over the pages of the hymn book, and explored hymns that we did not use very often, or wrote on the edge of the Sunday school paper.

And engraved on my mind are the words of the text, which was painted above the arch above the choir in our church, "Seek those things which are above."

My mother was a woman of deep spiritual experience, with a real knowledge of Christ. She sat beyond my father in the pew and kept an eye on my sisters. Now, no thought of legalism in the observance of Sunday ever occurred to me until I left home for my later studies.

In those days, I spent Sunday afternoons reading or going to special meetings in missions or churches. A young man of my acquaintance solemnly informed me that it was a sin to ride in a streetcar on Sunday. He asked me to walk with him all the way from downtown Los Angeles out to Highland Park. I did so once, but his legalism offended my spiritual sensibilities.

Although only in my teens, I was beginning to enter into the great truths of grace alone, and I have never been bound by Sabbath keeping since that time.

Now, I do not state these experiences in order to force anyone into my mold. I set forth what I have known and lived as a testimony of how the Lord led me. Every other believer must seek to be so related to his Lord that he can answer with a clear conscience to the Lord alone.

I judge no man, nor may he judge me. God is able to make me stand. I am aware of the fact that the earliest manuscripts of the Greek New Testament do not contain the second half of this text in Romans. The revision reads, "He who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord."

The older version adds, "And he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he does not regard it." Now whether this latter clause was added to the original, or whether it is an integral part of it, makes no difference. The thought is there inescapably, and an interpreter would have to include it in order to reflect the spiritual teaching of the passage.

The whole idea is that there are individuals who have absolutely opposite views on questions like this, and that God accepts both of them. Each must follow what he believes to be correct. He is not to contend about matters which are scruples to some, and liberty to others.

Before leaving this subject, I wish to quote a paragraph or two from Gerald Cragg, who has seen clearly how the two questions of food and days are intertwined in our context. He writes, "The conscious effort to promote God's honor is more important than the forms by which we try to do so. Some will use one method, some another. But in either case, it is the Godward intention that matters.

"And whatever means we adopt, the test of our genuineness will be the measure in which gratitude and praise are the distinguishing marks of our lives. In this respect, both he who observes the day and he who observes not the day, and he who eats and he who abstains, can find a level of agreement deeper than the external differences which divide them.

"Though the special problem which Paul cites is one which has ceased to be of pressing importance, the experience to which he points has been repeated in every century of Christian history. We may not all confess our faith in the same terms, or worship according to the same rights, or govern ourselves according to the same discipline.

"We may not find it easy to cooperate in common tasks, but age after age, men who could not agree in other things have united to praise God with a single voice. Our hymn books are still the greatest manuals of Christian unity.

"You'll find the same hymns being sung in the most ultra-fundamentalist meetings and in the highest liturgical churches. We praise the Lord with the same words."

Now, this matter of the Lord's Day and eating and drinking may be tied to the great central observance of the whole church, that of eating the bread and drinking the wine of the communion. The great Greek lexicon of Arndt and Gingrich leads us to a most interesting union of the two, our daily bread and the communion bread.

In Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians, he tells of the Lord's Supper and says, "The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion of the blood of Christ?" The standard Greek text uses a word which has given us our English word, "eulogy."

The lexicon points out that some manuscripts, though not the oldest nor the best, uses the Greek word for "thanksgiving," from which has been derived the term "Eucharist," which is a technical term for the bread of the Lord's Supper. In modern Greek, the common word for "thank you" is "efcharisto."

This is the word that is used in our text for "give thanks." Now, in the light of this, we can understand that the meaning of this verse is simple and straightforward. But it's perhaps legitimate to point out that there is a play on words, which, though not intentional, may prove suggestive to us. Giving thanks recalls that simple gesture in which we pause and remember that the food on our tables is a sign that God's mercy underlies all our lives.

But in the original, it is related to the word which gives us Eucharist. At all events, whether at the Lord's Supper or at our daily meals, we are reminded that the sacred and the secular are intimately bound together. Actually, they are not so much distinguishable objects as different ways of looking at the same things.

We rightly abhor a religion which forgets real men and their actual needs, and allows itself to become the hobby of people whose minds are always in church. Faith is concerned with exactly the same objects and relationships with which any other approach to life must deal. But it sees them in a new light.

It sets them in a certain perspective and interprets them in terms of a central principle, which is God. This is why our common meals are sacred, and our holiest symbolism uses simple articles of daily use.

Though I would prefer to call it an ordinance rather than a sacrament, I understand Cragg when he says that the heart of every sacramental act is that we use ordinary things to declare extraordinary truths. We set forth common bread and learn with wonder that God can use it to convey to us the meaning of self-sacrifice, which is at the heart of divine love.

We relate the eternal and the temporal. We affirm that the transcendent so enters the world of ordinary affairs that situations in which we happen to be placed are wholly transformed.

But if the sacred meal of the communion is related to ordinary things, the common meal should equally be related to sacred things. Paul is telling his readers that when they thankfully receive their daily bread as from God, and accept it as a gift from his mercy, they discover that the simple ritual of a common meal is touched with something of the glory of divine communion.

This is the true emphasis of reformation teaching. The holy table stands not only in the sanctuary, but in each believer's home. In his own household, every man is a priest unto God. As such, it is his duty and privilege to give thanks.

Moreover, that attitude of consistent gratitude is a much more decisive force in determining the religious quality of a life than any pattern to which that life may conform. It is more important to give thanks than it is to eat or to abstain from eating. It's only the name of God when invoked that sanctifies us and all we have.

It remains true, of course, that both parties, the man who eats and the man who abstains, the man who esteems one day above another, and the man who esteems all days alike, can promote a common end, that is, the advancement of God's glory, only because the issue at stake is essentially indifferent in character.

If some fundamental moral divergence were involved, those who held opposite views could not alike give thanks to God. To sum it all up, the most important feature of this 14th chapter of Romans is that the Apostle Paul decides nothing. He does not take sides. He does not state his own opinion or attitude.

Each believer is responsible to God, according to the dictates of his own conscience. If we are given any inference as to what Paul himself practiced, it would seem almost certain in the light of this passage, and those in Colossians and Galatians, which we have studied, that he esteemed every day, hour, and minute alike.

But the depth of the teaching here lies in the fact that Paul classifies the observance of days, along with such trivial matters as whether a believer is to eat or not to eat certain foods, concerning which food or which day, Paul is utterly indifferent. He didn't give a care.

Dean Henry Alford says, "Now the question is, supposing the divine obligation of one day in seven to have been recognized by Paul in any form, could he have thus spoken?" The obvious inference from his strain of arguing is that Paul knew of no such obligation, but believed all times and days to be to the Christian strong in faith, alike.

I do not see how the passage can be otherwise understood. If any one day in the week were invested with a sacred character of a Sabbath, it would have been wholly impossible for the Apostle to commend or uphold the man who judged all days worthy of equal honor, who, as in verse six, paid no regard to the day, to any day.

Paul would have had to have visited him with his strongest disapprobation as violating a command of God. I therefore infer, and Dean Alford emphasizes his words, in italics and capitals, "I infer," says Alford, "that sabbatical obligation to keep any day, whether seventh or first, was not recognized in apostolic times."

What I maintain is that had the apostles believed as they, the Sabbatarians do, Paul could not by any possibility have written thus. It is life that is sacred, not days. It is life that is holy, not food and drink. A believer who understands what is written here has liberty to eat whatever he wishes, meat on Friday, yes, on Good Friday, pork or lobster.

But in our liberty, we ask the Lord to bless all other believers, even though their practices may differ sharply from our own. We are to ask the Lord's blessing even on believers whom we think are a little queer.

They may think that we are a little loose in our practices. They may tremble for fear that we are endangering the ark of God in some way. We will never judge them, and they must never judge us.

What will bring us to this oneness of mutual tolerance within the body of Christ? We must contemplate that both those who disagree with us and those who agree with us have been redeemed by God through the Lord Jesus Christ.

The love that won us will ultimately enable us to love all who have been loved by our God and Savior. But whatever the attitudes or practices of any man, the strong believer will cry out with Paul, "Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again in the yoke of bondage."

Brethren, love one another. Brethren, judge not that ye be not judged. Brethren, love one another. Our Lord has said, "By this shall men know that ye are my disciples, if you love one another."

And our God and Father, we pray thee that the Holy Spirit shall bless the truth to each heart in this hour. Give us the joyous freedom of knowing that we are answerable only to thee, and that thou art able to make us stand.

Bless all, especially we pray for those who disagree with us, bless them, and make them sure that they are yielded to thee and answering truly to thee. And make us kind and loving in all of our attitudes. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen.

Guest (Male): If we order our lives with the one purpose of glorifying the Lord, we are answerable to him alone for what day we observe and how we observe it. We hope you have benefited from today's message entitled "The Believer and the First Day." To listen to additional Bible 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. Today's message again is entitled "The Believer and the First Day," or simply request message number R14-8. We would also like to make available to you a free copy of our booklet entitled "Happy Though Poor."

Jesus prayed that his disciples would know the fullness of his joy. But the sad fact is that many believers fail to experience lives of happiness and contentment. This short but powerful booklet calls us to a life of yieldedness to the Lord Jesus Christ, that he may give us fullness of joy and cause that joy to flow through us into the lives of others.

Do you struggle with unhappiness? Ask for your free copy of "Happy Though Poor" 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 Bible teaching of Dr. Philip Graham Ryken. For a complete list of stations carrying our programs, visit our website at alliancenet.org.

Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible comes to you through the generous gifts of listeners like you. 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.

Again, 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. Be sure to ask for a free resource catalog, featuring books, audio teachings, commentaries, booklets, videos, and a wealth of other materials from outstanding reform teachers and theologians, including Doctors Donald Grey Barnhouse, James Montgomery Boice, Martin Lloyd Jones, and Philip Graham Ryken. Thanks for listening. Join us again next time for more classic teaching on Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible.