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: I feel more strongly than I can say that it is my duty to stand and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ and to warn people that much that is being preached from pulpits is not the gospel. The whole of the movement that is seeking to move the church leftward towards socialism is a satanic counterfeit. People speak of the social gospel and present other systems and doctrines under the name of gospel, which the Bible itself says is another gospel, which is not another.

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 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, "Not Ashamed." A man in a small town has a reputation as a coward. His wife avoids conversations with other women because she is ashamed of him. But one day, the town coward saves a baby from a burning house. Suddenly, his wife cannot stop telling others about her husband, the hero.

Jesus suffered the wrath of God to purchase salvation for his people. Are you ashamed to tell others about the hero who gave his life to save you? The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is Romans, chapter one and verse 16. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with the message entitled, "Not Ashamed."

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 we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and that we can come to thee boldly and directly by the new and living way into the holiest of all. Wilt thou bless us as we study thy word together, and may the Holy Spirit, who is the author of the book, be our true teacher above and beyond any human voice. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen.

We are studying together in the epistle of Paul to the Romans and are in the first chapter. He comes to the great statement, "I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth." Not ashamed. You know, the worst thing about good people is that they are often such cowards. We see good people leave a meeting where argument tends to become bitter because they say they do not want to remain in the atmosphere of strife. They thereby run away from a good cause and let it go to the enemy by default.

They were afraid to stay and fight for the right. It is right to be ashamed of things that are ignoble, of strife and disunity, but we must not be ashamed of the causes that are right. When our Lord Jesus Christ was arrested, Peter came into the house and was ashamed to be counted with Christ. He denied that he knew the Savior and went over to the fire where the Roman soldiers were warming themselves and began to partake of the warmth of their fire. Soon he was noticed and identified, and he became ashamed of the wrong things.

There is in the heart of all men of the race of Adam a tendency to be ashamed of the good and the true, the pure and the beautiful. Certain forms of culture cover this shame in some people and leave them champions of the highest things, but there is a natural bent in the heart of all men to wish to appear no better than the mass. When the Lord Jesus looked on Peter after his denial, the Spirit of God brought true repentance to the heart of the erring disciple, and he went out and wept bitterly.

He was now ashamed of his shame. Now he would stand boldly and would be able to say with Paul in the words of our text today, "For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth; to the Jew first and also to the Greek." It is a thing of wonder that some would be ashamed of the gospel. Yet there are people who are ashamed of any position that demands a show of boldness. We call such people cowards.

They are afraid of what some people are going to think. There are some words in the language which mean nothing at all to me and to many others, but which are utterly frightening to timid spirits. Such words represent indeed the great arbiters of life and death to the shy and timorous soul. These people are afraid of opinion, society, convention, the world, precedent, custom, and the like. Such words are to some of us as scarecrows which a farmer has set up in his field.

These scarecrow words have no terror for us at all, and we can no more understand a person who bows before custom, society, and public opinion than we could understand his covering his face with horror lest the scarecrow shoot him with the bent stick under his arm. Yet there are people to whom the terrors of public opinion and public condemnation are real. Let every timorous soul look at the transformation in Peter from shame and cowardice to pride in his Lord and boldness unto death in the proclamation of his gospel.

Let us realize that it is the Holy Spirit who gives the strength that turns timid people into heroes and cowards into martyrs. "I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation." If Christians would only leave the circle of their fears, surrendering to the power of the Lord of all true witnessing, what a change it would make in our churches. I have been told that if you trace on the floor a white chalk circle and put a goose inside it, no inducement in the world can prevail upon the goose to cross the appalling line.

He will starve inside the magic circle, starve to death within sight of food, but he will not move. There are men and women that are more geese than such a goose. The chalk marks of fear of custom and convention have been traced for them in circles of flame. They sit with a group of people and someone says, for example, "Well, after all, all religions are good," and these timid ones are afraid to open their mouths to declare that the proposition is as false as any lie that ever came from the father of lies.

They are afraid to speak out and say that this is not true and that we must obey the divine revelation that has been given to us through the Holy Spirit concerning Jesus Christ. All religions are not good, and we know that many who follow some religion are going to find themselves eternally separated from God. Or these timid ones are present someday when someone says, "Well, we are all worshipping the same God," and the Christian keeps still and does not cry out that God has revealed to us that there are many lords and many gods and that Satan often wears a mask called God and that many people worship Satan under the name of God.

Listen to Jesus Christ talk to the woman of Samaria in the fourth chapter of John. There was no chain of etiquette binding him. He had no gag to stop his speech for the truth. The poor woman was a great sinner, and the Lord gently probed the spot to bring conviction to her heart. In the first choked moment, she attempted to take refuge in a theological question and asked him whether the Samaritan religion was not as good as the Jewish religion. Her words were, "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain, Gerizim, and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship."

If ever there was a moment when Christ might have taken the tone of compromise, this was it. But God cannot have an easy tolerance in matters which affect men's eternal destiny. The Lord Jesus answered her, "Woman, believe me, the hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem worship the Father. Ye worship ye know not what. We know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews." There is our Lord's attitude, stark and categorical.

The Old Testament said that God would never accept a blood sacrifice offered outside of Jerusalem. God knew, of course, that it would be in Jerusalem where our Lord Jesus would be crucified, and all the types had to point to him. It was the Old Testament equivalent of Christ's great words, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me." Those who have come to the gospel of God in Christ have been saved by his sacrifice, and in the measure that we surrender to that gospel, the Holy Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ will bring into our hearts this same sweet definiteness.

It goes forward through the world that crucified the Savior, willing to be joined in him in martyr's death rather than compromise with the truth of the exclusive finality of the death of the Savior as God's means of bringing souls to himself. Let him bring you to the place where you take the stand of Athanasius against the world or cry with Luther, "Ich kann nicht anders" (I can do nothing else). This was where Peter came from his weeping after compromise, and he stood before all Jerusalem to say, "Neither is there salvation in any other, for there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved."

It was this which brought Paul, who had once killed those who believed in the Savior, to cry, "I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation." In our times preceding the Civil War, we have an example of this. In the first copy of The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison set forth the attitude that all right-thinking men should take against slavery. He did it in stern language. There are times when you have no right to think or speak or feel moderately.

You shall not give a moderate warning to a neighbor that his house is on fire, nor moderately rescue your child from drowning, nor moderately snatch your wife from the hands of ruffians. You shall be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. You shall not equivocate, you shall not excuse, you shall not draw back, and you shall be heard. We must stand up for the right which we know to be right and for the truth which we know to be true.

The true Christian will always be a liberal in those things that pertain to the inherent rights of man and in warring against the inequalities and the injustices that hurt the individual. The true Christian will always follow the Lord Jesus Christ when he cries, "How much then is a man better than a sheep?" But the true Christian will know and proclaim that communism and socialism are not the gospel, and that any attempt to introduce these things into our land is a crime against the gospel and against our land.

Paul was not ashamed of the gospel as he moved towards Rome. It was a city of slaves, and he would not center his preaching against slavery. It was a city of lust, and he would not center his preaching on moral reform. It was a city of economic injustice, and he would not center his preaching on momentary palliatives. It was a city built on war's rapacity, and he would not center his preaching on pacifism. Anyone who seeks to preach in such directions cannot find his texts in the Bible.

It is true, of course, that here and there there are the verses which show that peace and righteousness and justice are the byproducts of the Christian faith. But these must be attained not by centering our preaching on their necessity or their moral rightness, but by setting forth the power which alone can bring them into practice in individual lives. To preach a social gospel without the redemptive background of the individual salvation from sin of the individual sinner is like launching a glider instead of a high-powered plane.

A glider may soar for a while on the fickle currents of the wind and climb high on sudden updrafts. But jet propulsion and rockets will take a plane beyond the speed of sound. To preach pacifism and socialism will move small segments of a warlike and greedy populace for the moment, but the gospel of Jesus Christ has always transformed individuals who received it in spirit and in truth and has made them the center of new circles of peace and righteousness. Paul was not ashamed of the gospel.

He was the servant, the bondslave of the living God. He was coming among them as an ambassador, and as the ambassador of triumph. Paul was on the side of the conqueror. He was not ashamed. The word which Paul ministered and which we minister today is the power, the explosive power, the disruptive power of God. There are words in our language which have several different meanings, and power is one of these. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, lists 18 major definitions of the word power and many subdivisions with shades of meaning.

The Greek language has eight different words, all translated by our one English word power. There is the word *kratos* from which we get aristocrat, autocrat, democrat, plutocrat, and which means the power to rule, the dominion of one over another, as when the Bible speaks of Satan as possessing the *kratos*, the power of death. There is yet another word, *exousia*, which means the power of authority, a permit, as when we read that as many as received him, to them he gave the power, the authority, the permission to become the sons of God.

But here in our text, we have a word that is filled with strength and force. It is *dunamis*, the word that scientists have adopted in our terms dynamo, dynamite, and dynamic. It is this power that the gospel is. Romans did not believe much in ideas. Their notion of power was sharp swords and iron yokes on the necks of subject peoples. But the history of Christianity, whatever else it has been, has been the history of the supremacy and the revolutionary force of ideas. Thought is mightier than all visible forces.

Thought dissolves and reconstructs. Empires and institutions melt before it like the carbon rods in an electric arc lamp. And the little hillock of Calvary is higher than the Palatine with its regal homes and the Capitoline with its temples. I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation. And what is this gospel which is the power of God unto salvation? There are terms which have been used so often that people take them for granted and their definitions become fuzzy, no longer sharp at the edges, with a blur that frequently confuses the meaning.

This is true of many different words. And the same word may have quite different meanings to different people. And the word gospel has been bandied about until people speak of the social gospel and present other systems and doctrines under the name of gospel, which the Bible itself says is another gospel, which is not another. Paul writes to the Galatians in chapter one and verse six to nine, "I marvel that you are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel, which is not another, but there be some that trouble you and would pervert the gospel of Christ. But though we or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I now again, if any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed."

Now, putting these verses together with our text, we discover that the true gospel is the gospel of the grace of Christ. The gospel is God's truth about a certain set of historical facts. Do not be deceived. If anyone tries to teach other than that the gospel is truth rising out of a certain set of historical facts, there is perversion. The historical facts are set forth in order in the first epistle to the Corinthians. Paul writes in the 15th chapter of that epistle, "Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand, by which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received: one, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; two, that he was buried; and three, that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures. And after that, he was seen."

Now, in the light of this statement, it is possible to say that nothing is the Christian gospel that does not flow out of these central historical facts: that the Lord Jesus Christ died for our sins, that he was buried, and that he rose again from the dead, and that all of this is in accordance with the record that God has revealed in the scriptures. Let us admit immediately that if these three facts are not historically true, we have no gospel. We have no Christianity. Any attempt to talk about other facts as being the centrality of the gospel is mere blather.

The ethical teachings of Jesus apart from his death for sin, his burial, and his resurrection are mere words and deserve no more attention from the world than the remarks of a congressman extended at length in an appendix of the Congressional Record. The facts of the life of Jesus Christ, if taken apart from his death for sin, his burial, and his resurrection, are pretty little stories to be classified in the literature of the world alongside the Song of Roland. In the ancient Hebrew religion, a little lamb was taken into the house of each family on the tenth day of the month Nisan and kept there until the 14th day of the month in order to be put to death for the sins of the people.

You can imagine the excitement of the children when a little live lamb was brought into the house, how they cared for it, caressed it, loved it. But the lamb had to be taken out of the house and put to death. The live lamb in the house could save no one from sin. And the living Lord Jesus walking about the land of Palestine teaching is not worth a moment's consideration if that life is not ended with his death for sin, his burial, and his resurrection.

I will go even further. If the three historical facts which are the basis of the gospel are eliminated, then Jesus Christ becomes one of the monsters of history. The Pied Piper of Hamelin emptied the houses of that city, first of rats and then of children. If Jesus Christ is not God, putting the seal of his words and works by his death for sin, his burial, and his resurrection, then he is a cursed Pied Piper who taught poor, weak fishermen a set of lies and deluded them into following him in a course which has been marked by drenching blood in religious wars and fiery death of martyred dupes.

A poet set forth the deity of the Lord and wrote, and in this I would follow him: "But if Jesus Christ is a man and only a man, I say, then let us put him among the execrated of history." If Jesus Christ is not risen, let us find the tomb that houses his dead body. Let us give his bones to the dogs and expose him to all the vilification that was heaped upon the body of a Mussolini. The Italian at least made the trains run on time for a few years and left behind him some highways and public works. But the Galilean brought a sword that set at enmity the father and the child, so that a man's foes become those of his own household.

But once we have the three historical facts—Christ died for our sins, Christ was buried, Christ rose again from the dead—then we have the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is the power of God unto salvation. Now we can go to the weary of heart and tell them that the Savior died and that the road has been broken through the barriers so that sinful man can come into the very presence of a holy God. Now we can go to the graveside with the mourner and tell him to dry his tears, that death has not conquered but that the loved one is gone ahead but for a moment.

Now we have the gospel of Jesus Christ, and we can sing: "Give ear, ye deaf; his praise, ye dumb, your loosened tongues employ. Ye blind, behold your Savior come; and leap, ye lame, for joy. He breaks the power of canceled sin, he sets the prisoner free. His blood can make the foulest clean; his blood availed for me." And his blood avails for you. This is the gospel which is the power of God unto salvation, the gospel by which he has saved me and by which he is willing to save you.

And our God and Father, we pray thee that the Holy Spirit shall take this message into many hearts. We pray thee two things: that if there are any that do not know the Lord Jesus Christ, that they may turn to him in this hour and say to thee as best I know, I fling myself on these historical facts and trust the Savior who died for me. And if they go away yet rejecting thee, Lord, give them restlessness until they rest in Christ. And we pray thee for all thy believing own that they may have the courage of their convictions and their conversions, and that they may stand and not be ashamed of the gospel of Christ. And unto thee be the glory and the majesty, the dominion and the power, now until our Lord Jesus come again and forever. Amen.

Guest (Male): The power of the gospel creates courage in the cowardly, turns the timid into titans, and makes the meek into martyrs. You can live boldly for Christ by looking to the cross every day. We hope you have benefited from today's message entitled, "Not Ashamed." Listen to additional Bible teaching by Dr. Barnhouse via the internet, visit us at 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, "Not Ashamed," or simply request message number R1-15. We would also like to make available to you a free copy of our booklet entitled, "Temptation and How to Meet It." This free booklet traces the history of temptation, identifies its various sources and manifestations, and outlines the biblical strategies for effective dealing with temptation in whatever form it takes. Ask for your free copy of "Temptation and How to Meet It" 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.

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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.