Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

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

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: There can be no doubt from scripture that those whom God has chosen for his own have a right to say that God is their God. This we say today, the God of the Lord Jesus Christ, the God of the open tomb and the resurrection, the God of the Bible is indeed our God. But that knowledge must be very humbling. It must drive us to a humble walk with him and a momentary seeking to acknowledge him and to do his will. Over a half a century ago, the late Dr. Donald Gray 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 outreach 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 Charge Against the Orthodox. If you needed surgery, would you trust your life to someone who only claimed to be a doctor? You need to know that your surgeon has the necessary training and credentials to prove what he claims to be.

There are many people, even religious leaders, who say they know God, but who lack the spiritual reality to back up what they claim. Do you merely profess a relationship with God or do you actually possess it? The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is Romans chapter two and verses 17 through 24. Here again is Dr. Donald Gray Barnhouse with a message entitled The Charge Against the Orthodox. Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto thee, our Father and our God, and in the Holy Spirit. May thy word come to us in power in this moment and speak to our hearts.

We pray thee for all who have religious pretensions and who do not live up to them. This may mean that we must all pray for ourselves, for we all cease so high and live so low in comparison with the grace that thou hast manifested toward us and the love that thou hast given us. So make us humble and bless thy word to us for Jesus' sake and in his name. Amen. In our studies in the second chapter of Romans, we now come to a sharp division in the subject matter. With the 17th verse, there is a distinct change.

Indeed, it would have been better if a new chapter division had been made at this point. We must never forget that the Bible was divided into chapters some 12 or 13 centuries after it was completed. And the men who made the divisions sometimes put asunder what God had most assuredly joined together. And at other times, they joined together what God had put asunder. Up to this point in our chapter, the Holy Spirit has been speaking of the great principles that underlie the divine judgment. The moralists of the world are brought under the scrutiny of God's gaze and are found wanting.

At this point, the subject changes from judgment against ethical men to judgment against religious men. For there is a religion that must be looked upon in itself. There are those who are attached to form, ceremony, liturgy, religious precepts and practices and all the attitudes that go with such attachment and who are yet alien to the grace of God. They have ritual without redemption, works without worship and form of service without the fear of God in its proper sense. And thus, they come under the condemnation of God. It makes no difference what name they go by, the principle is the same.

In the day when the New Testament was written, the argument was against the religious Jew. Today, it would be against the zealous Roman Catholic or the fervent fundamentalist just as much as it would have been against the Jew in Paul's day. The profession of religion, even though it be divinely revealed religion, is not enough if the ones who profess the religion are not in some sense transformed by it. The reality of possession is 10,000 times more important than the formality of profession. And let no one think that I'm saying that formal acceptance of a creed is not necessary.

I go so far as to say that there never can be any true ethics. And I emphasize the word true in every possible way. There can never be any true ethics apart from a fundamental creed about the Lord Jesus Christ and personal surrender to him. Any ethics that are not founded on the life and work and teaching and death of the Lord Jesus Christ can never be called by the term of Christian ethics, even though they may be patterned on the teachings of Christ. We have moved slowly through the previous verses because there was much that needed explanation.

In the paragraph that lies before us now, we can move much more rapidly, for the matter is spelled out in the greatest simplicity so that we need but read it to understand it. The commentators are about equally divided on this chapter, half saying that the whole chapter applies to the Jews of Paul's day and the other half saying that the reference to that religion begins with the 17th verse. I'm inclined to hold with the latter group and to consider that the sphere of religious profession is discussed from this point. The paragraph reads, Behold, thou art called a Jew and restest in the law and makest thy boast of God and knowest his will and approvest the things that are more excellent, being instructed out of the law and art confident that thou thyself art a guide of the blind, a light of them which are in darkness, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of babes, which hast the form of knowledge and of the truth in the law.

This then was their high claim and we must state at the outset that the claim was true. God had called the Jew. God had given to him the revelation of divine truth. The Old Testament may never properly be considered as the record of man's gropings after God except by those who are unbelievers. The true believer, whether of the Jews or the Christians, who follows the teaching of the word of God, knows that the Old Testament and the Christian knows it also for the New Testament, knows that it is a divine revelation from God. It does not proceed from man but from God.

Peter writes, The prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. The highest testimony to this fact comes from the Lord Jesus Christ himself. I do not believe it is possible for any honest man to take the New Testament record of the life and teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ and come to any other conclusion than that he himself believed in the verbal inspiration of the Old Testament and founded all his teaching upon it. Time and again, he appealed to the law as he called the whole of the Old Testament.

Using the name of a part for the whole, he appealed to it as being the final court of appeal in spiritual questions. The evidence is there. He based the whole of his teaching on the question of life after death on a single word in the book of Exodus. God had not said, I was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but he had said, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not I was but I am. Jesus replied with a tone of triumph, God is not the God of the dead but of the living.

Even more important was his statement to the woman of Samaria in the famous conversation which took place by Jacob's well. He had offered her salvation and she had revealed her spiritual ignorance in order to awaken in her the sense of need. He had told her to call her husband and when she replied that she had none, he had told her in a phrase the story of her dissolute life. She had lived with a succession of men. She immediately changed the subject as people so often do when the conversation about their souls comes to close grips to the stinging reality of sin and had asked him a theological question in order to change the subject.

The Jews said that the only place to offer a sacrifice was in Jerusalem. The Samaritans practiced their religion on Mount Gerizim. Who was right? She asked. It was evidently a theological bone that had been gnawed by the people of her town without end. If people can get up enough steam to be excited about a thing like that, they can cover over the fact that they are denying all the realities of a spiritual faith. Now the Lord Jesus answered her in two ways. His answer included the great revelation of spiritual demands made by God, but it also settled in passing the question that she had asked.

He told her that the hour was coming, yes, that it had then arrived when there was to be no more localized worship. Men were henceforth to discard all outward forms of religion and have a religion, the religion of the heart. For, said he, God is spirit and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. But in passing, he gave her the answer that forever settles the question of the Old Testament and proves that the Jews were correct in their position which gave them their preeminence in the spiritual world. It is very fortunate that our Lord Jesus Christ had never seen a copy of Emily Post's book on etiquette.

It would have cramped his style no end. Mrs. Post says that religion must not be discussed, that it is an intimate and personal matter about which others must have no concern. But the Lord Jesus Christ did not follow this attitude and he certainly would never have accepted the false thinking of those who hold that there is good in all religions and that all men are seeking after the same God and that every man shall pray and act in the way that he thinks best. The Lord Jesus had been extremely polite to the woman to the point where it had surprised her that he should have addressed her at all.

He had offered her salvation and was about to confer upon her the supreme dignity of the revelation of his person and his being and was to make her his ambassadress to the town on the top of the hill. But first of all, he turns upon her and says, Ye worship ye know not what. We know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. Now three things should be noted in this text. First, the Lord Jesus associates himself with the Jews and with the Old Testament revelation. Secondly, he denies that the Gentiles have any knowledge of truth.

Thirdly, he appeals to the Old Testament as to the supreme authority in the matter in question. His phrase, Salvation is of the Jews, coming after the question as to the place of worship is a direct appeal to the law of Moses in which it was set forth that there was but one place of sacrifice. We read in Leviticus 17 that any man who killed any animal as a religious sacrifice in any place whatsoever, except at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, was to be cut off from among his people. The reason given for this is then expressed, And they shall no more offer their sacrifices unto devils after whom they have gone a-whoring.

It is a fact then that the Jews possessed the truth of God and that it had come to them by divine revelation. They were the most highly privileged people of all the earth. In making the application that follows from this premise, I do not propose to limit myself to that generation of Jews that lived in the time of the New Testament. The truth is just as applicable to them and to other groups today. It is most applicable to those who call themselves fundamental. I'm not speaking of the fundamentalist, but the fundamental man who takes pride in the possession of the New Testament and of being the guardian of sound doctrine and pillars of orthodoxy.

We have every right then to make the spiritual application of this passage and to call it The Charge Against the Orthodox. The spirit of the paragraph is a great, loud cry. Are you practicing what you preach? And before proceeding any further, the present preacher must answer the query that may arise from someone who listens to these words. They may say to me, Are you practicing what you preach? And any true preacher with a sense of the holiness of truth and a knowledge of the perfection that he holds within his hands as he reads from the word of God must answer immediately with Saint Paul, We have this treasure in earthen vessels that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us.

But I can say in the sincerity of God that day by day I seek to keep short accounts with God, to have all the outbreaks of the Adamic nature swiftly dealt with. And that it is possible for me to say, I believe as truly as the apostle said it, not as though I had already attained, either we're already perfect, but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which I also am apprehended of Christ Jesus. Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended, but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

A true minister must follow the pursuit of holiness. Now our text in Romans is one of the great blasts of this book against the doctrine of antinomianism or lawlessness, which holds that as long as one believes a certain set of formulas, it's possible to do as one pleases. The Bible everywhere argues against such a heresy and everywhere preaches that the doctrines must produce holiness or it is not true doctrine truly held. These people in our text had the name of being God's people. They knew that God had called them and had made them the channels of his revelation.

Instead of being driven by this stupendous fact to an extraordinary humility, they seized upon it as a patterer for their human pride. They rested upon their possession of the law which had become a couch to them instead of a goad. They made their boast in God. That is to say, they had come to the place where they thought that they had a patent and a copyright on God. The next phrase said that these people knew the will of God, but the context shows that they did not do that which they knew. James has written, Therefore to him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin.

Furthermore, the argument continues, this knowledge had built in them an attitude of approval of things that were more excellent. The word for approve means to recognize as genuine after examination. All this great moral advantage came to them because they were instructed out of the law of God. They were living with the divine standard and this gave them the inestimable advantage of being right in their moral judgments and being right in such judgments gave them confidence. That their confidence was placed in themselves instead of in God was a great sin, but they did not know it.

They were self-confident, having arrogated to their own sense of discrimination that which was theirs by a revelation from without, from God. But this self-confidence put them in a place of arrogance where they nominated themselves as the guide of the blind, the light of them which are in darkness, the instructor of the foolish and the teacher of babes. And Job described them in answering men of their type who came to him in his distress. The irony of his words bring out the same truth as is expressed in our text, for in Job 12, he says to his comforters, No doubt but ye are the people and wisdom shall die with you.

So our text then repeats the basis of their false self-confidence. They had been given by the grace of God the true revelation in his law and thus they possessed the form of knowledge and of the truth. There are several words in the New Testament that are translated by our word form. The one in this text does not refer to the shape, external appearance, the pattern, image or example, but the form befitting knowledge and truth, the form truly expressing knowledge and truth, the final divinely given knowledge and truth. It is right therefore that I apply this passage, originally spoken to the physical descendants of Abraham, to all who claim to be the spiritual descendants of Abraham.

The terrible things that are now said are said to us as well as to them. High and holy privileges may become so misused that they become a curse instead of a blessing. Malachi had prophesied this to the priests of the Jews. In Malachi two, we read, If ye will not hear and if ye will not lay it to heart to give glory unto my name, saith the Lord of hosts, I will even send a curse upon you and I will curse your blessings. Yea, I have cursed them already because ye do lay it to heart.

The blessings were undoubtedly theirs as similar blessings are undoubtedly the possession of the Christian world and even greater blessings, for we have the New Testament and covenant of God as well as the Old Testament and covenant of God. Through the Lord Jesus Christ, it has been made possible for some Gentiles to become fellow heirs of the promises. We are So the terrible things that are now said to them in that day are said to the Christian world in our day. Our text continues, Thou therefore which teachest another, teachest thou not thyself? Thou that preachest a man should not steal, dost thou steal?

Thou that sayest a man shouldst not commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery? Thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou commit sacrilege? Thou that makest thy boast of the law, through breaking the law dishonorest thou God? In other words, God makes the formal charge that these highly privileged people made no attempt to practice what they preached, though they were extremely proud of the fact that they knew what truths should be preached and knew enough to preach it. The result was that the prophecy of Isaiah was fulfilled. The name of the true God was blasphemed among the Gentiles because the people that should have been growing in the image of the holiness of God were walking in sin behind the mask of hypocrisy.

It happened in the days of Christ because of the arrogance of the Pharisees whose very name has become a synonym for all that is hatred and hypocrisy under the cloak of religion. It happens in our day because of the manner of life of nations, churches, individuals. The nations of the West are called by euphemism the Christian nations. But the horror of colonial exploitation has given our God a black name among the denizens of the habitations of cruelty who found no difference between their own way of doing things and the western way of doing things, except that the West had more power to back up their demands.

The rule that might made right forced people with a less mechanical civilization into subservience to the peoples with the greater guns and the non-Christian brutality that followed the flags of the Occident caused the God who was supposed to be honored in our western world to be blasphemed. The same thing has happened in the field of religion. If we read the article in the encyclopedias under the rubric Inquisition or if we go to any great dictionary and see the common meaning that is applied to the word Jesuit in the usage of a multitude of writers. If we listen to the scorn of people who talk about squabbles among fundamentalists or their lack of holy living, we can see how the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of the actions of religious bodies and groups which profess more than they possess.

And as the actions of nations and churches are the combined actions of individuals, it is not astonishing that the isolated actions of the individuals contribute their sum to the surrounding blasphemy. God's indictment is not an indictment of any one race, religion or group, whether it be a majority or a minority. It is an indictment of those who are highly privileged because they live in the lands of the open Bible with the account of the life of the Lord Jesus Christ and with the full revelation of the will of God and of his demands for holy living.

The chapter which we are studying is an expression of the principles of the coming divine judgment and the present paragraph is God's assertion and proclamation that profession of religion will not save a man from judgment. We shall see as we proceed that no man can attain perfection by himself, but we shall see that he must have received the perfection of Christ put to his account by a loving God on the basis of the death of the Lord Jesus, the son of God. And the proof of that possession of Christ is that his presence begins to color all the life and that little by little the life of Christ must come to dominate the actions, the emotions, the affections and the will and even the very thoughts and intents of the heart.

The practical conclusion of such a study as that we have had in this hour includes a warning and an encouragement. It is a warning to any man who puts his trust in religion or who thinks that his church can save him or who hopes that formal acceptance of a creed or of rites and ceremonies will serve him in lieu of righteousness which can come only through Christ. To all such our text warns that the judgment of God will tear away every mask and disclose the skeleton that lurks behind the pretense of life. Faith in Christ that produces life is the only substitute that God will accept for human perfection.

If you are not perfect, then you must have faith in Christ. And the encouragement is for those who have cast themselves utterly upon the Lord Jesus. He is the Lord of all grace and the soul that comes to rest on him will discover that his grace and tenderness and faithfulness combine to bring us on to the pathway of the justified ones which shines more and more until the perfect day. In him is all our hope and confidence. And our God, we pray thee this day that thou shalt take this message to each listening soul that none may be hiding in a refuge of false hope.

Convict of sin those who have had profession without possession and bring them to the simplicity of that faith which brings life moment by moment. We ask it through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

Guest (Male): Neither fundamentalism nor formalism mean anything apart from true faith. Beware of religious ritual without real redemption which is found only in Jesus Christ. We hope you've benefited from today's message by Dr. Barnhouse entitled The Charge Against the Orthodox. You can listen to additional Bible teaching by the late Dr. Donald Gray Barnhouse anytime, anywhere around the globe via the internet by visiting the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals website at alliancenet.org. An audio copy of today's teaching is available by calling us toll-free at 1-800-488-1888. Today's message again is entitled The Charge Against the Orthodox or simply request message number R2-11.

We would also like to make available to you a free copy of Dr. Barnhouse's booklet entitled Secure in Christ. The world is full of difficulties, dangers and uncertainty and we long for a true sense of peace and security. This free booklet will point you to the true and lasting security that is ours in Christ. Dr. Barnhouse reveals the glorious truth of the gospel that Jesus is willing and able to keep you eternally, powerfully and unshakably secure in him. Are you discouraged by your sin and failure and are you struggling in your faith? Ask for your free copy of Secure in Christ when you call or write.

Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is a radio ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals exists 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 materials which will equip all believers to understand and meet the challenges and opportunities of our time and place. 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 keep this ministry on the air.

For more information or to make a contribution to support and further our work, please contact us by writing Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Box 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103. Call toll-free 1-800-488-1888 or visit us online at www.alliancenet.org. Be sure and ask for a free updated resource catalog featuring books, audio teachings, commentaries, booklets, daily devotionals, videos and a wealth of other materials from outstanding Reformed teachers and theologians including Donald Gray Barnhouse, James Montgomery Boice, Michael Horton and Martin Lloyd-Jones. Then join us again next time for more classic teaching on Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible.