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: Christ said to his disciples, "As my father hath sent me, even so send I you." We are left here then in order that the world of mankind may see Jesus Christ in his humility and in his lowliness, ministering to the needs of men, crying when others cry, mourning with those who mourn, feeling all the hurts of humanity, knowing every pang of suffering, hearing every child cry in the night, bleeding a little from every wound in the body of the human race.

Guest (Male): Over a half-century ago, the late Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse, then pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, saw the need to spread God's word beyond the hearing of his local congregation. He started the radio 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'll be featuring on today's edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is entitled "Paul's Heart Desire". What is your heart's desire? You might hear many different answers to this question, such as a loving marriage, a happy family life, a larger house, or a big promotion or raise.

But the apostle Paul was so filled with the love of God that his heart's desire was for the people of Israel to turn to their Messiah and be saved. Does your heart long for the salvation of those who do not know Jesus Christ? The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible, Romans chapter 10. We're looking at verses one and two. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with a message entitled "Paul's Heart Desire".

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 for the great deliverance which thou hast wrought for us in dying for us on the cross, and for the great deliverance which thou hast wrought in us by joining us to Christ in the power of his resurrection.

Bless the truth to each heart in this hour, and may it lay hold upon our minds and hearts and bring us into the freshness and vigor of daily triumph in our Lord Jesus. Bring conviction to any who have not been born again, and growth to all who have become thy children in Christ, through whom to thee be all praise and glory in the name and for the sake of our Lord and Savior. Amen.

We come now to the tenth chapter of the epistle to the Romans. The first two verses read: "Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they might be saved. For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge." Now with this tenth chapter, the epistle to the Romans moves on in its triumphant logic, bringing us ever farther into the plan of God.

The opening verse is astonishing in view of what has just been written in the preceding chapter. The ninth chapter tells of Israel's unbelief and of God's expansion of his plan to bring Gentiles into salvation. The right of God to save whom he will has been explained and vindicated. If God had not had this privilege as a sort of secret weapon, Satan would have triumphed in his plan to have man brought to a place where the holiness of God would be forced to curse mankind and leave mankind under that curse.

But when the love of God is allowed full sway to follow the desire of the eternal purpose, then the grandeur and glory of God become more evident, and we can only be drawn to bow before him in worship. But at the moment when it appears that Israel's sin has brought the nation under such condemnation that there is no future for her, Paul's heart throbs on in a great revelation of love and hope for his people. He cries out, "Oh, for their salvation, brothers, that is my heart's desire and prayer to God."

Now contrast this for a moment with the beginning of the preceding chapter. You remember that that section began with his great moan: "I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh." Here in the tenth chapter, he is pouring out the expression of his love.

If either of these emotions is real, the other one must be there also. We cannot have love for people if we do not grieve because of any sinfulness in them which separates them from the blessings which God can give in fullness only to those who are in his will. While if we have grief because of any wrong that we see, there must follow a love which seeks to bring the erring ones into touch with the only source of pardon and blessing.

It is this marriage of grief and love which shows forth the heart of the Christian who is yielded to the Lord and who is seeking to be as Christ in the world, loving men and drawing them back to God. The world often displays a grief without love, and this can be a rather terrible thing if it's put under close analysis.

Some time ago, an English lawyer wrote an article for a literary magazine on truth, terror, and the common man. In this article, he sought to penetrate the mind of the common man who has passed through some shattering experience. The main body of the article had to do with the inner emotions of very common people who had committed murder.

The writer said, "I heard a murder trial in London about 20 years ago. It was not an interesting trial and there was a moment when, during the lengthy descriptions of the entrances and exits of the building in which the murder had admittedly occurred, the plans and analysis of details that had no quality to them, I found my head nodding in the crowded bad air of the Old Bailey, and was appalled at myself for having allowed it to happen."

There in the dock, a few feet away from me, sat a man whose life was in danger. Every word that was being spoken was a challenge to his life. How could I fall asleep while that was going on? He would have had the right to call out to me, "Couldst thou not watch with me one hour?" But I could not. The words and the arguments of counsel drained all reality, all danger, all human value away from the situation.

And the dramatist then recounts how there was a moment when the whole trial came to life for him. A postman who lived all the way across London from the scene of the murder was recounting how he had been visited by the accused on the day of the crime. He was an old friend of the accused and he was sitting at breakfast in his small suburban home when the fleeing man came falling into the room saying, "Oh Davy, I am bad, bad."

The author writes: "These words, with a ghastly foreshortening, gave a sudden reality, an instantaneous picturing of the man's plight and feeling. At least, they did for me; perhaps to no one else. When I read this account, I began to think of this dramatist sitting there watching it. What he was really doing was acting like a collector with an insect on the end of a needle. He was really reaching into the poor criminal's heart and seeking to extract the inmost emotions of tragedy, terror, and perhaps true repentance, and to wring from them the last juicy drop of interest for his readers."

He was completely detached from the man as a man. And the proof of this lies in his confession. He says, "I know that I knew how the lost, the hunted, the unattractive young murderer was feeling. And that when it became obvious what the verdict must be, I left the court rather than wait for it. My curiosity did not extend to trying to gauge his feelings when he was sentenced to death. I did not want to watch his face and try to see in it what happened in that rarest, that grimmest, that most ghastly of moments. I had had what I went there for. I had heard it in, 'Oh Davy, I am bad, bad.'"

Now if Paul had met such a man, he would have watched with him through his agony. He would have understood in the anguished confession a repentance which might be that which God himself had fostered and would care for. For in Paul's anguished cry for his people, he is reflecting the compassion and love of his Lord, who said of himself: "Then shall the king say unto them on his right hand, 'Come, ye blessed of my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and ye gave me meat. I was thirsty and ye gave me drink. I was a stranger and ye took me in, naked and you clothed me. I was sick and ye visited me. I was in prison and ye came unto me.'"

And he added, "Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me." We are left here in this world to replace Christ as God's witness of his purposes and doings. The Christian who knows the Lord Jesus Christ in any depth of being knows this compassion towards all the race, but knows it doubly for all those who have been the special object of his redemptive love and saving care.

It was this that made Paul cry to the Corinthians, "Who is weak and I am not weak? Who is offended and I burn not?" The Greek of that last phrase is, with vivid literalness, "Who is scandalized and I am not on fire?" Phillips has translated it: "Does anyone have his faith upset without my longing to restore him?" Now this rendering perhaps can give us a deeper insight into Paul's meaning.

The problem of his own people lies heavy upon him, a burden that presses him beyond measure. His own people on the whole have rejected the Lord Jesus Christ and he groans because of this. But his prayer and his cry seem to indicate that there is yet much hope. If only they can be brought to see the true nature of salvation, perhaps they can be led to turn from themselves and back to the grace of God.

For this is the theme of the whole epistle to the Romans, that there is only one way of salvation, and that one way is God's way: by grace through faith on the grounds of the redemption provided in Jesus Christ. Christ was presented by God as the one rock on which all righteousness must rest and on which salvation must be secured. God will never look at any man who is not standing on Christ.

But as Paul has just shown in the previous chapter, this foundation rock had become a stone of offense and a rock of stumbling, upon which the nation had fallen to their own righteous condemnation. The nation had been proud of religion and of their relationship to God as long as they thought that they could maintain their pride and think of themselves as blessed because of something within themselves.

But when it became necessary to face the fact that no man can be saved until he has been humbled to the dust and brought to see his own inner corruption and worthlessness, Israel had turned away from Christ. In reality, they used all the terminology about God which they had learned from their long history of divine revelation. They used this terminology, I say, to make a cloak for another being whom they called by the name of God, but who is not God at all.

Make no mistake about it. Though the vocabulary may be orthodox, the reality is not there if some of the glory is given to man. The being who is called by the name of God is not the true God if he is not the God of all grace, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Paul was situated in the best possible position for weighing the factors that ruled the life of his people. He had been one of them.

He could bear them witness that they were zealous, earnest, religious. He knew this from his own heart experience. Paul was like a man who was on a sinking ship. He had been in the water. He had been near to the drowning, but he had been rescued. And now he stands safe on the rescue ship and follows with weeping eye the struggles of those who yet flounder in the waves and longs that they too may come to salvation.

Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they might be saved. For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge. Look at Paul before God had revealed Christ in him. He had been brought up in Tarsus, far from Jerusalem, and in a day when there was little communication between the small country town in Asia Minor and the capital of the Roman province of Palestine.

We know that his father was a wealthy man who had been able to purchase the right of Roman citizenship at a great price. Paul had had all the advantages of learning. And when he had concluded his studies at home, he was sent to Jerusalem to pursue his graduate studies, as it were, and thus he came to sit at the feet of Gamaliel. We can well imagine the delight of the Pharisees when this brilliant young man came to them.

We know that he was not a striking physical personality, but his teachers must have recognized almost immediately that they had before them one of the most brilliant minds they had ever encountered. He came to Jerusalem filled with all the excitement that a young Jew could have upon arriving in the city of David and Solomon. Yes, the city of the Messiah. And he was told immediately that there was tragedy from their point of view, tragedy.

A group of the people had gone aside after a man named Jesus Christ. Oh yes, there was talk of his resurrection, but this was not accepted by the rulers of the people. They still held the attitude that they had had when the officers who had been sent to arrest Christ failed to bring him back. As we read in John 7: "Are you led astray, you also? Have any of the authorities or of the Pharisees believed in him? But this crowd who do not know the law are accursed."

Now almost certainly Paul had not known about Jesus Christ during the time of Christ's presence here on earth. Paul had arrived in Jerusalem in the midst of the great conflict, and his letters of introduction had taken him straight to the rulers of the people. And his first knowledge of Jesus Christ was the biased, garbled account of those who had made themselves Christ's enemies. There was just enough truth in what the leaders told Paul to inflame him with great hatred toward the followers of Christ.

The rulers told him the truth that Christ had taught against the temple. In the beginning, the Lord Jesus had called it the house of God and had respected its precincts. But in the end, Christ was forced to show what it had become and gave it the most terrible name that could be applied to a house that had been devoted to the worship of God. He called it the house of men: "Behold your house is left unto you desolate."

There was also in the teachings of Christ that which led to the minimizing of forms, liturgy, ritual, and ceremonialism. To those who were steeped in tradition and who considered that the inwardness of faith was the careful observation of outward prescriptions, the teaching of Christ had come as a death sentence. Paul speedily adopted their attitude and had been moved with tremendous zeal against the Christians.

In fact, Paul was among the first of those who fulfilled Christ's words of prophecy to his disciples the night before the crucifixion. Our Lord had spoken to them after they had all left the upper room and were on their way to the Mount of Olives, where he was to be arrested. "I have said all this to you," Christ told them, "I have said all this to you to keep you from falling away. They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God."

It was in this honest spirit that Paul had followed the Pharisees and had been the agent of the earliest persecutions. Just before his experience on the Damascus road when he had met the Lord Jesus Christ, Paul had gone to the high priest still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, and asked for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way—that is to say, followers of Christ—he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.

Paul knew that his zeal for God had been honest. He had a passion to serve God and to do what he thought was right. And now as he writes this epistle, he looks back at the others of his race who were in the same predicament in which he had found himself before the light of God shone upon him and Christ was revealed to him. He could not but have the earnest desire of the heart for their salvation.

He could not but pray to God that they might be saved, that they might be moved. He, Paul, was inevitably moved to this by the pathetic sight of their earnestness. Misguided indeed, guiltily misguided, utterly inadequate to constitute for them even a phantom of merit. And yet to the eyes that watch it, a different thing from indifference or hypocrisy. For Paul knew that the men of Israel were not indifferent. He knew that they were not hypocrites.

All the more, therefore, he was torn in his heart as he saw them wrong, but so honestly wrong. They had zeal, and their zeal was fire without light. It was Jonathan Swift who said that violent zeal for truth has a hundred to one odds to be either petulancy, ambition, or pride. Now there were of course those in Paul's day whose zeal was of that terrible sort. There was even a party called the Zealots.

This group believed that they had been called to extend the kingdom of Israel over the whole earth, and that this had to be done by force. And they had to be destroyed by the armies of Titus at the fall of Jerusalem in the year AD 70. But Paul realized that the zeal of most of his compatriots was a purer zeal than this. It arose from an honest jealousy for the name of God, a real desire that nothing should arise that would be contrary to his justice.

But they did not understand the nature of his being and the consequent nature of his holy demands. They could occupy themselves with tiny details and think that they were possessors of the whole of faith. They could be busy, so busy with religion that they could lose sight of the living God. They could not see the forest for the trees. Now there are certain practical lessons which we should learn from all this.

The first lesson has to do with our own attitude and zeal. We must obey Paul's admonition to the Galatians: "It is good to be zealously affected always in a good thing." But we must act with extreme care lest we have zeal without knowledge. It was the late Justice Louis Brandeis of the United States Supreme Court who said that the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

We must see to it that our zeal is ever informed by the word of God and illuminated by the Holy Spirit, and that we have it tempered with a love that will carry it forward in great humility in every step of our Christian life. The second lesson must be in watchfulness over our attitude towards those with whom we disagree in spiritual matters. There was no compromise in Paul, but there was no intolerance.

There was not the slightest thought of yielding to the ideas of these men of zeal without knowledge. But there was a groan in the heart and a prayer on the lips for them. He knew he was right and he had a supernatural knowledge of the fact of that rightness. A few years later John would write in his first epistle: "We know that we are of God, and the whole world is in the power of the evil one. And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding to know him who is true. And we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ."

But even before the Holy Spirit had John write this in this epistle, God has Paul living it in the writing of the letter to the Romans. Paul knows, and Paul knows that he knows. And knowing Christ gives him a great love towards those who do not know Christ. And we must have this same tender love towards those amongst whom we must live, so that they in turn may see the life that is the life of Christ and know that it is being lived in us.

Men may fight against an argument, but they are silenced by compassion. Men may contend in a debate, but they cannot stand before a flood of love. Then let the urgent desire of our heart and the constant prayer of our being go forth to God, that he may yet have mercy on those who oppose themselves and that they may be brought to the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, which in turn will set them on the path to true knowledge of themselves and of the world in which we must all live while we wait for God's accomplishment of his purposes.

And our God, we pray thee that thy Holy Spirit shall take this word to the hearts of all who listen, and that thou shalt use it to thy glory in giving us a greater compassion and a greater love and a greater kindness toward those round about us. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.

Guest (Male): A fervent zeal and passion for God shaped by wisdom and knowledge from his written word will compel us to tell others about Jesus Christ with love and compassion. We hope you have benefited from today's message by Dr. Barnhouse entitled "Paul's Heart Desire". You can listen to additional Bible teaching by the late Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse via the internet by visiting 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 "Paul's Heart Desire", or simply request message number R10-1. We would also like to make available to you a free copy of our booklet entitled Led by the Spirit. In this booklet, Dr. Barnhouse discusses how the Holy Spirit works in the lives of his people.

The four chapters cover the topics: Led by the Spirit, How to Know God's Will, God's Leading, and God's Sufficiency. These biblical insights can help your understanding and grow in your walk with Christ. Ask for your free copy of Led by the Spirit 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. The Alliance also produces the radio broadcasts 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 radio stations carrying our programs, please visit our website at Alliancenet.org. Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible comes to you through the generous gifts of our listeners. If you have benefited from the broadcast and would like it to continue, please prayerfully consider a donation to help us keep this ministry on the air. For more information or to make a contribution to help further our work, contact us by calling toll-free 1-800-488-1888.

Again, that's 1-800-488-1888. You can also write to us at Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Box 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103. Or you can 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 Donald Grey Barnhouse, James Montgomery Boice, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and Dr. Philip Graham Ryken.

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