Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

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

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Complete transformation in the life of Martin Luther came when the verse, "The just shall live by faith," laid hold upon his heart from the reading of the first chapter of Romans. We know that Wesley felt his heart strangely warmed in that little London prayer meeting in Aldersgate, when the truths of Romans were being set forth.

These indications of the power of the Word of God in working through the doctrines taught in Paul's greatest epistle should awaken our attention and lead us to see that time spent in the study will be worthwhile.

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 weekly 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, "Introduction to Romans."

Doctors in a busy emergency room have no margin for error. Unless they quickly and accurately diagnose and treat every patient, they will lose lives. Most people today do not realize that mankind is in a desperate state of spiritual emergency.

Paul's epistle to the Romans gives the most complete diagnosis of the disease that infects every person and reveals God's cure that offers spiritual healing and eternal life. The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is Romans 1 and verse 1. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with a message entitled, "Introduction to Romans."

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ we come unto thee our Father and our God and in the Holy Spirit. The entrance of thy words giveth light. May it be so for many dire hearts in this hour. The world is so sick in our day, oh God our Father.

We pray thee that there may be that illumination which will bring relief to troubled hearts. To all that has been born again and who have thus become thy children through faith in Christ Jesus, we pray that thou will give that peace which passeth understanding.

To those who do not yet know thee, we pray that thou will give that stirring of conviction which shall arouse them from their spiritual torpor, that they may come to find rest in thee. Bless now the going forth of thy Word, for we ask it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the name that is above every name. Amen.

Many years ago in the early days of radio, listeners were attempting to get my program from a distant station that was broadcasting on a wavelength so near to that of another station that the two programs sometimes became confused. From New York a certain minister was preaching his sermon at the same time that my Bible study was going forth.

Friends told me that a woman who was trying to unscramble the two broadcasts said, "If I hear a voice talking about the dignity of human personality, I know that I have the New York station." "If the voice says that a man must be born again, I know that I have Dr. Barnhouse from Philadelphia."

Within that exaggeration there is a profound truth and within that truth there is the expression of the ministry which I seek to exercise. I am convinced that the ministry which seeks to exalt mankind can in the end do no good for mankind.

On the contrary, the ministry which will teach the truths of man's complete ruin in sin and God's perfect remedy in Christ can best reach the heart of the need of the human race and can bring the only remedy that can heal the heart which God has declared to be incurable in Jeremiah 17:9.

With the content of the Bible before me, why have I chosen to direct your attention to that Epistle of Paul's which was sent originally to the Roman church? It is because the Epistle to the Romans has the most complete diagnosis of the plague of man's sin and the most glorious setting forth of the simple remedies of justification by faith apart from the works of the law.

The Swiss commentator Gode pointed out that every movement of revival in the history of the Christian church has been connected with the teachings set forth in Romans. He writes, "The Reformation was certainly the work of the Epistle to the Romans and that to the Galatians. It is probable that every great spiritual renovation in the church will always be linked both in cause and in effect to a deeper knowledge of this book."

Luther wrote, "The Epistle to the Romans is the true masterpiece of the New Testament and the very purest gospel which is well worth and deserving that a Christian man should not only learn it by heart word for word but also that he should daily deal with it as the daily bread of man's soul."

It can never be too much or too well read or studied, and the more it is handled, the more precious it becomes and the better it tastes.

One of the greatest fathers of the church, Chrysostom, had it read to him twice a week. Coleridge said that the Epistle to the Romans is the most profound writing that exists.

The latter thought must not frighten the reader, for it most certainly is true that that which is set forth in this Epistle are the truths which have entered into the hearts of many simple men and given them a light and a life which was utterly beyond their natural capacities.

A scientist may say that mother's milk is the most perfect food known to man and may give you an analysis showing all its chemical components, a list of the vitamins it contains and an estimate of the calories in a given quantity. A baby will take that milk without the remotest knowledge of its contents or value and will grow day by day smiling and thriving in its ignorance. So it is with the profound truths of the Word of God.

There is in the book of Romans that which will delight the greatest logician and hold the attention of the wisest among men. And there is that in the book of Romans that will take the humblest soul and bring him in tears of repentance to the feet of the Savior and give him the knowledge of the true value of his soul in the light of eternity and a true concept of the dignity of human personality when it has been lifted up to the grace of God in Christ.

What was it that turned the simple Bedford tinker into the great John Bunyan? Certainly not the intellectual capacities of a Francis Bacon, certainly not the literary gifts of Shakespeare. But in prison, John Bunyan laid hold on the truths that are set forth in the Epistle to the Romans.

Or to be more accurate, the truths which are in Romans laid hold upon John Bunyan and gave us his transformed life and his clear insight into the pilgrim progress of the human race as a camp of displaced persons, uprooted from their natural home and on their way to a far country which is not of this planet, either in its roots or in its ideals.

Sometimes Bible study is made difficult for people because they attempt to study the book in ways that are too technical for their state of spiritual growth.

So in studying the Epistle to the Romans, it is helpful to understand what may be called perhaps the doctrinal plot of the book. What is it all about? The book has been called a treatise and it comes to us in the form of a letter.

Its addressed originally to the little church that had been established in Imperial Rome. Paul had never been to the capital of empire, but he had a great desire to go there because he knew there were Christians in that city and he wanted to teach them the truths which God had revealed to him.

No one knows how the church of Rome had become established. Certainly none of the 12 disciples had been there. For Paul tells us this in no uncertain terms.

In the closing portion of his letter, when he is talking about his own experiences, Paul recounts the geographical areas in which he had already preached and says, in chapter 15 and verse 20 and 21, "Yea, so have I strived to preach the Gospel not where Christ was named, lest I should build upon another man's foundation. But as it is written, to whom he was not spoken of, they shall see. And they that have not heard, shall understand."

This disposes of course of the idea that Peter had been to Rome and founded the church there. We can readily understand that in the complex movements between the capital and the distant points of empire, many Christians traveled on business.

Even as all America moves to New York or Washington, and that little by little, a small band of believers had gathered together in the simple fashion of the early church to break bread and remember the death and future coming of the Savior.

As soon as Paul told them that it was his desire to come to Rome because he wanted to preach where no disciple had been before him, he added that he had had this desire for many years. In many of his epistles, there is revealed the fact that the heart of Paul was moved as soon as he heard of a group of believers in any city.

He began to pray for them. He wanted to visit them. And in anticipation of his proposed visit to Rome, he wrote this letter to pave the way for his coming among them.

In studying the Epistle to the Romans, the procedure I shall follow may be likened to two different views of a farm. A man has purchased a farm and has the opportunity of flying over it to get a view of its contours from the air. He gets the overall picture of fields and woods and farm buildings.

After this he begins his work on the farm, and year after year he goes from field to field, plowing, disking, harrowing, fertilizing, planting, cultivating, harvesting. As time goes on, he learns to know that farm as well as he knows the curve of his child's cheek.

He will remember a thousand details that he learned while going about his daily farm work. First, we fly over the whole book, so to speak. Later we may put in the plow at the very first verse and begin to go down the furrows until a whole field has been turned over.

There will be need for further harrowing and cultivating by the individual student, but it will well repay the labor because this is the greatest of all the epistles, where you can enter into much knowledge of the plan of God. And your study will pay the greatest dividends if you will come into this field to think and to meditate.

Paul, the writer of this Epistle, had been a Jew and had been brought up to know the law. He had fallen into the common assumption of the Israel of his day that his people had a patent and a copyright on God and that God belonged only to the physical descendants of Abraham.

Paul was certainly not an anti-Semite, but he was a Semite anti. God had to lift him out of the narrowness of his position and make him see that God and salvation were not narrow and restricted by race, but that the love of God included the whole wide world and every son of Adam, no matter whether the flesh were black or white or brown.

In the beginning, Saul had been the enemy of the Christian faith. He was the greatest persecutor, so bigoted in his ways that he killed anyone who did not agree with him.

Any who followed the Lord Jesus became the object of his hatred. It was this man whom the Lord God would stoop to save and through whom he would bring blessings to the world by unfolding the truths which had been so long announced and overlooked.

Paul, as a Jew, knew that there were great promises that had been made to Abraham, the father of all who believe. The Epistle to the Romans is the demonstration of the truth of two of the greatest promises of the Old Testament.

God had said to Abraham, "In thee shall all the families of the Earth be blessed." And he had also said, "In thy seed shall all the nations of the Earth be blessed."

Worldwide promise to both families and nations. Worldwide promise of salvation. Individual salvation and universal salvation were foreseen and promised as early as the time of Abraham.

It would be a poor forlorn world if there were not the hope that someday, somehow, there would come peace and righteousness upon this Earth. The tragedy is that men seek to get it by human means instead of in the way that God provides.

The work of Paul was to speak to the little church which had been founded in the chief city of the world and through them to tell all men everywhere that those promises were now being fulfilled. In the book of Romans, the first eight chapters and the last five chapters set forth that salvation which is for you and me today.

A salvation in which all families of the Earth are included and to which they are all eligible. The ninth to the 11th chapters were to remind the world that there shall be national, governmental blessing and righteousness upon the Earth, not through any League of Nations or United Nations, but through God's dealings with the Jews.

We see the Jews returning to Palestine and the flag of Israel unfurled on the Earth once more. We must recognize the hand of God in this. The ancient promises have never been abrogated, and God still purposes to bless this Earth, even the remotest nations, through his people Israel.

Indeed, there is no hope for this world until the plan of God is brought to full fruition and until the Jews shall become what we might call the colonial administrators of the creation of God.

There then in brief is the story of this great book. Salvation for individual souls from any stage of sin and ultimate salvation for the nations through the intervention of God in Christ.

The human writer of the Epistle was Paul, who had been the Jew Saul of Tarsus. But the writing cannot be considered a mere product of human thought, any more than the Lord Jesus Christ can be considered the mere human product of the body of the Virgin Mary.

As our Lord was conceived by the Holy Spirit and came forth from the womb of the virgin, born into this world without a human father, and thus called the Son of God. So the Epistle to the Romans, like all other portions of the Word of God, was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the mind of the writer and came forth as the spotless Word of God.

The virgin mind of man became the nesting place of absolutely divine ideas, even as the virgin body of Mary became the nesting place for that holy thing which was to be born of her.

Both of course were imperfect, for the Virgin Mary was a member of this sinful human race, sinful as we all are. And the minds of Paul and the rest were human minds. But God preserved them both in the miracle of the virgin birth and in the miracle of inspiration.

Thus as we turn to the book of Romans, we turn to the eternal Word of God. Paul could never forget the pit from which he had been dug. The Lord had taken him out of the miry clay and put his feet upon the rock and for him all things were new. He could never forget it.

This is why Paul styles himself as the servant of Jesus Christ. In the original language, there is a figure of speech hidden in the word "servant" which is worth bringing forth. Paul calls himself more than a servant. He calls himself a bondslave of Jesus Christ.

The phrase goes back to a ceremony described in the books of Moses. The early men of Israel had an economic system set forth in the laws of Moses, governing the man who got into debt. He became the property of his creditor, in very fact his slave. But the slavery had a term, an end.

When the seventh year rolled around, all of these slaves were liberated and could go forth once more as their own free men, masters of themselves. Some of them, however, realized certain things about their own lack of ability to maintain themselves in the rugged economy of a cruel world.

They remembered that when they had been their own free men, they had not eaten well perhaps. But that now under kind masters, they were well housed and well fed. They looked toward their future freedom with some trepidation as they realized that they might soon be once more in a life of hunger and cold.

The law provided a way for them to remain as slaves to their kind masters. No doubt there were some who sought to escape the bondage of hard taskmasters, but there were others who knew the kindness and love of their master's heart.

Such a one could go to his owner and tell him that he desired to remain a slave. He would then be taken to the tabernacle where the priest would lead him to the doorpost and bore a hole in the lobe of his ear with an all. From that time he was the slave of his master. He was known as a bondslave.

He could have been free if he wished, but he chose to remain as the slave of a kind master. Wherever he walked, his ear proclaimed the character of his master. The story has been told in one of the hymns of Francis Havergal, "I love, I love my master, I will not go out free, for he is my redeemer. He paid the price for me."

"I would not leave his service, it is so sweet and blessed. And in the weariest moments, he gives the truest rest." Now this is the song of Paul in the opening lines of his Epistle, "I love, I love my master, I will not go out free."

There is hidden in this descriptive word a great truth concerning the inner nature of true liberty and true freedom. We are in a world where wars must be fought to protect men from bondage and to bring him back at least a minimum of four freedoms.

Before Adam fell, man knew the reality of freedom. He had all things except the one small fruit that remained as a token of his dependence upon God the Creator. It was because our first parent wanted freedom from God that he declared the independence of the human race and lost all our freedoms.

Ever since that time, men have been enslaved by a thousand masters and chiefly by the fears and dreads of their own hearts. Slavery to self is a bondage that includes all other slaveries, and there is no freedom apart from the work of God who wrought so effectively in Christ to set men free.

In the midst of their bondage, men have been guilty of building up a system of counterfeits that they might pass as freedoms when they are unwilling to accept the true freedom that comes through the death of Jesus Christ and his purchase of our souls from the bondage to self and sin.

Until they come to Christ, all other freedom is a will-o'-the-wisp. Men talk about freedom to worship. There is no such thing outside of Christ. Do not misunderstand. I would fight to the death to protect your right to make a fool of yourself religiously.

It is only in a civilization greatly influenced by the New Testament that such a freedom could arise. How many men have been killed by those who wished to force them into some religious slavery. There is no bigotry or intolerance as bad as religious bigotry and intolerance.

But we must remember that freedom to make a fool of yourself religiously rises from the words of Jesus Christ who held out his hands to Jerusalem saying, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them that are sent unto thee. How oft would I have gathered thee to my bosom as a hen gathereth her chicks, but ye would not."

He loves men. And there has never been any thought of coercion with Christ. He loves men and wants them to love him in his way. To talk about the freedom of religion in God's sense is akin to talking about the freedom of love.

What freedom is there in love unless it has the consent of the beloved? If a man cries that he wishes freedom to love and the woman does not desire his approach, it becomes a monstrous thing. There is in like manner a freedom of religion that is mere rape.

Men seek to lay hold upon God in ways that are foreign to his holiness. Christ said, "No man cometh unto the Father but by me. And he that climbeth up by any other way is a thief and a robber."

And how shall there be freedom from want when the soul refuses the inflow from the springs of Calvary? We read from time to time of the suicide of people who have been considered rich and successful. Men of distinction ended it all.

They never lacked a meal or a luxury, but they could not have a freedom from want because they had never humbled themselves to say, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want."

And how shall there be freedom from fear if there is death in the heart? The clutching torment that walks as close companion to so many lives can be removed by nothing other than the love of Christ which passeth knowledge. The Spirit has said, "Perfect love casteth out fear for fear hath torment."

And it is his love, not ours, that takes away the fears. And what will be our freedom of speech if the Lord has not touched our hearts and of whose abundance the mouth speaketh? Of course you may say what you please now. You are on that portion of the Earth where liberty of babbling is still assured.

But the time will come when every mouth shall be stopped and all the world shall be brought guilty before God. Of what use is freedom of speech to the dumb? The only voices of men that will be heard at the judgment bar of God will be those who have learned to sing the song, "Unto him who loved us and washed us from our sins in his own blood."

The Epistle to the Romans will tell us how we may have the one freedom that will bring all others. And if we will stand like Paul, the bondslave of Christ, we shall have entered into the truth that makes men free and we shall be free indeed.

And our God and Father, we pray thee that thou shall give restlessness to any who have not been born again. But upon all thy believing own, may thy grace, thy mercy and thy peace abide. And unto thee be the glory and the majesty, the dominion and the power now, until our Lord Jesus comes again and forever. Amen.

Announcer: Many years ago, the great truths of the book of Romans sparked the spiritual awakening known as the Reformation. A rediscovery of this landmark Epistle can awaken our generation as well. We hope you have benefited from today's message entitled, "Introduction to Romans."

To listen to more Bible teaching by Dr. Barnhouse, tune in anytime, anywhere around the globe via the internet by visiting www.alliancenet.org. That's alliancenet.org. An audio copy of today's teaching is also available by calling us toll-free. 1-800-488-1888. Today's message again is entitled, "Introduction to Romans," or simply request message number R1-1.

We would also like to make available to you a free copy of our booklet entitled, "Why and How to Study the Bible." Christians have many excuses for why their Bibles never find their way off the bookshelf. "I don't have enough time." "Scripture is too hard to understand." "I just don't know where to begin."

This free booklet explains why Bible study is so important and how to dig into the scriptures in a way that will make them come alive. You can enjoy a lifetime of fruitful study and application of God's Word. Ask for your free copy of, "Why and How to Study the Bible," when you call or write.

Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is the radio ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We seek to provide contemporary Christian teaching which will equip believers to understand and meet the challenges and opportunities of our time and place.

The Alliance also produces 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 full list of stations carrying our programs, visit our website, alliancenet.org.

Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible comes to you through the generous gifts of listeners like you. For more information or to make a contribution to help further our work, contact us by calling us 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. Be sure to 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. Join us again next time for more classic teaching on, "Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible."