Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

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

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Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: The good news has been proclaimed, but men must know about it if they are going to turn away from lesser and ineffective remedies and turn to the one thing that can bring life and peace. The good news is that God has loved us and has come in Christ to die for us, having borne the curse for sin. The Lord Jesus has made it possible that the wrath of God is stilled forever, and He is now able to take even the vilest sinner into His holy presence without fouling heaven.

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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 radio ministry, which has become known as Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible. The application of God's word as taught by Dr. Barnhouse is as relevant today as when he first taught over the radio airwaves decades ago.

The message we'll be featuring on today's edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is entitled Reaching Sinners. Years ago, AT&T used a popular advertising slogan: "Reach out and touch someone." It is true that you can brighten someone's day with an encouraging telephone call, but you can touch someone's life for eternity by reaching out to them with the good news of salvation.

Are you committed to reaching lost centers with the Gospel of Jesus Christ? The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible: Romans chapter 10 and verse 14. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with the message entitled Reaching Sinners.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto Thee, our Father and our God, and in the Holy Spirit. Once more we cry unto Thee to do what man cannot do. We can prepare a message, we can speak it into a microphone, it can come across the air to the ears of men, but Thou alone can take it to the heart and to the will.

Will Thou use Thy Word to bring unsaved people to Christ and to build believers that they may know Thee better and love Thee more? We ask it in the name and for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

We are studying in the 10th chapter of Romans and come to the 14th verse. "How shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed, and how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard, and how shall they hear without a preacher?"

The Gospel has been brought by God the Father through the Lord Jesus Christ to this earth. The good news has been proclaimed. God doesn't have anything against any man who will come and be submitted to Him through Christ.

But there are masses of people who are unaware of the good news and what it is. The problem is to get the remedy to those who need it. From time to time we read human interest stories in the newspapers of expeditions that take needed remedies to centers of epidemic.

A plane will fly to an Arctic scene to get penicillin to a marooned village. An iron lung will be flown to a remote place where an almost breathless patient awaits it. The Red Cross will press its way into a flood area to inoculate those who are in danger of typhoid.

But all of these stories pale into insignificance when compared with the need of getting the Gospel to people who are lost without it. And whose danger is not that of a momentary epidemic and physical death, but of eternal separation from God.

But how is the sinner going to call upon God for salvation if he does not believe in God and His Son? The whole process of blessing is being set before us in terms of a chain of several links. The sinner stands there in all his need. He must call on God.

But before he will call on God, he must believe in Him, and he must also believe Him. To believe in Him is to believe that He is, and that He answers when men call upon Him. We have it set forth in the Epistle to the Hebrews, "Without faith it is impossible to please Him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him."

But in addition to believing that He exists, the individual must believe God when He speaks. It's possible to believe in God without believing God. God has spoken, and His declaration is set forth in the Bible. If one believes that God exists without believing what He has spoken, there is not the reality of faith.

Now it may be well at this point to say a word about the difference between believing the Bible and believing in the Lord Jesus Christ. We're living in a day when there are a score of views about the degree of inspiration of the Bible.

I hold with those who take the very highest concept of revelation and inspiration. Yet I believe that there are many who think of themselves as fundamental believers, conservative, orthodox, who have adopted such an attitude toward the Bible that they are not in reality believers to the full in the Lord Jesus Christ.

I repeat, I take a very, very high view of inspiration. I would define inspiration as that special control that was exercised by the Holy Spirit over the hearts and minds of the writers, whereby they were directed to write down exactly what God wanted them to write down. In the terms in which He wished the truth to come to man.

Furthermore, I believe that this divine control extended both to the recording of old facts which the writers knew from personal experience, and in the recording of new facts which were received directly by revelation from God.

Sometime ago, I was talking with a young theological student who was going through the throws of thinking through his concept of inspiration. He said to me, "Many conservative Christians do not have a high enough concept of inspiration. They speak of the Bible as being without error."

"But," said he, "it is much more than this." God has given us His Word, and it stands there as the only infallible rule of faith and practice. We bring our lives and test them by its truth. We bring all thoughts and all philosophies and all theories and test them by the Word of God.

If we find a human thought that is opposed to that which is set forth in the Bible, we say that the human thought is in error. If we find that the human thought is in agreement with that which is set forth in the Bible, we say that the human thought is truth.

And every little particle of human thought must be judged by the entire revelation of God's truth. But the Word stands alone as the final court and it may not be judged by any man. And then the young man startled me by saying, "If you say that the Bible is without error, you are really saying that you stand aside from it and have made yourself its judge, judging it by something else that is outside and above it."

And he said, "This is false reasoning. The Bible has come from God and is a part of Himself given for His purposes. It stands there by itself. It is." Men may think that they are judging it, but they are really judging themselves when they attempt to do so.

Now this is indeed a very high view of inspiration and I am willing to adopt it. I add merely that God has condescended to tell us that it is impossible for Him to lie, and that the Lord Jesus prayed to the Father that we might be sanctified through the truth, adding, "Thy Word is truth."

Now let me go one step further. It is possible for men to believe that God exists and to believe that He has spoken, and to stop short of applying the truth to their own personal need. It is even possible for men to be so occupied with the mechanics of the Bible itself, that they fail to see the reason why God gave the scriptures.

This was the great error of the Pharisees in the days of Christ. They were men who had studied the Old Testament scriptures to the point of fanaticism. And their study of the mechanics of the scriptures had blinded them to the purpose and meaning of the scriptures.

God had given the Old Testament for the one purpose of foreshadowing the Lord Jesus Christ. This was what Christ said to the men who rose against Him. We read in the Fourth Gospel, "You search the scriptures," and I believe that there was a note of judgment in His remark, "You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness to me. Yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life."

Now it's this same error that exists today among many who cling very closely to the Bible. They spend so much time on the Bible itself that they fail to look through the Bible to see the Lord Jesus Christ. I am not minimizing Bible study, but I am bringing to its proper relationship the purpose of the scriptures that we may see Christ.

Sometime ago we went to Atlantic City to preach in one of the churches there for several days. It was off season, and one of the great hotels gave the church one of its loveliest suites for us to enjoy. We looked out across the Atlantic in its ever changing moods and enjoyed its beauty to the full.

Now suppose that a young friend who lived in Iowa, and who had never had the privilege of journeying to the coast to see one of the oceans, should have asked us to write him about the ocean. What would you think if we wrote as follows?

"We have a beautiful room and a picture window gives us a sweeping view of the ocean. The window is 12 feet 2 inches long and 4 feet 8 inches high. It's divided into three sections. We've taken a scraping of the glass and had it analyzed, and can tell you the chemical formula of the glass."

"We have had an expert from one of the great glass companies tell us all about the glass, and we're giving you herewith a history of the invention and development of glass. The glass is set in steel frames that are painted black and we have had the steel analyzed and the paint analyzed, and you can read the analysis in our second and third studies affixed to this letter."

"And then we have discovered that the panes of glass are kept in the frames by a putty composition, and we've scraped down some of this putty and are giving you a long addenda on the chemical composition of the putty. And finally, we've inquired from the hotel management and found their method of keeping the windows clean, and you'll be delighted to know from the subjoined study that the whole process of the window cleaning is how it's carried on and the formulas of the special detergents needed to cope with the salt spray from the ocean."

"And in closing, let us say that we hope you have enjoyed our study of the ocean." Well, we smile at such a farcical parable, but it must be admitted that there are people who can name for you the books of the Bible, and can give you the history of the Jewish people, the lists of the kings who judged in Judah and Israel, and a mass of background material about the written Word of God, and who nevertheless seem to forget that the Bible exists only to bring us to the Lord Jesus Christ.

He is the ocean beyond the window. The young man might decide that seeing the ocean was not worth the trip to the Atlantic Coast. And surely, if it were no more than a study of the window through which the ocean might be seen, he would be right.

How many people have been turned away from the road that leads to the Lord Jesus Christ by the inept way in which some, who count themselves among His most zealous followers, point not to the Lord Jesus Christ, but to some of the mechanics by which God has brought Him to us?

Now, I will not be misquoted. I am not lessening my concept of the Word of God. I believe that all Scripture is God-breathed and that it is profitable for all the things for which God gave it. But at the same time, I must insist that God gave it in order that we should look through it and beyond it to the Lord Jesus Christ.

If your concept of the Bible does not bring to your life the warm compassion of the Savior, you have not seen the Word of God aright. If your knowledge of the Bible does not give you an integrity that makes your word as good as your bond, you have not seen the Word of God aright.

If you can rise from reading the Word of God and go on to a life of petty gossip or inane pastimes, you have not seen the Word of God aright. Now, let us sum up what we have seen and go on to examine the chain of thought which is before us.

God has done all things for us, and all things are available to all men in Jesus Christ. All that a man must do is to call upon the name of the Lord. But the call must be preceded by faith. Not only faith in the existence of God, but in the revelation of God in His Word, and this faith must bring us to the understanding of the Lord Jesus Christ in His atoning death and in His saving life and love.

The Apostle then looks out beyond the horizon to the vast numbers of men and women who have not heard about Christ, and he puts the question, "How shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard?" As we put this question, there's a problem which presents itself to us as we seek to study its meaning.

We have pointed out in various places that the Bible teaches two sides of certain truths, and that the sides seem to contradict each other until they are seen in larger perspective. We are confronted with a situation of this kind in the text that lies before us.

Back in the second chapter of this Epistle, we discussed the oft-recurring question as to the condition of those who have never heard the Gospel. What about the millions who lie in darkness, in mid-China or other parts of the world? What about those who died before Columbus discovered the New World and the first faint knowledge of Christ began to penetrate this hemisphere?

If there is any hope for these people, the basis for the hope is in the earlier passage, in the second chapter of Romans. It would seem that there were no hope here. C.S. Lewis, in his preface to Philip's paraphrase of the Epistles, writes as follows:

"A most astonishing misconception has long dominated the modern mind on the subject of Saint Paul. It is to this effect, that Jesus preached a kindly and simple religion found in the Gospels, and that Saint Paul afterward corrupted it into a cruel and complicated religion found in the Epistles."

"But," says C.S. Lewis, "this is really quite untenable. All the most terrifying texts come from the mouth of our Lord. All the texts on which we can base such warrant as we have for hoping that all men will be saved, come from Saint Paul."

"If it could be proved that Saint Paul altered the teaching of his master in any way, he altered it in exactly the opposite way to that which is popularly supposed." These hopeful texts referred to by Lewis come from some part of the writings of Saint Paul other than that which we are now studying.

For the present text clings closely to the terrifying doctrine taught by our Savior Himself. Since we have presented the hope at the moment in which we came to it in our progress through the Epistle, we are forced, in all honesty, to proclaim that which is set forth here in the 10th chapter, and which seems to be devoid of all hope.

For if we look at our texts in reverse, we find that if people have not heard the proclamation of the good news in Christ, they cannot believe it. And if they have not believed it, they are not in a position to call upon the name of the Lord for salvation. Still farther back we find that the salvation comes only from a personal commitment to the facts of Christ, that He died and rose again as the Savior for sinners.

Public confession of Jesus Christ as Lord, and belief in the heart that God raised Him from the dead, are the personal elements that lead to salvation. For it is with the heart that man believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. So it would seem that there is no hope for any man who has not been reached by the Gospel.

So, returning once more to our text, and going forward to the next link in the chain, we find it stated that men cannot hear saving faith without a preacher. Now, there's an important reason why we must analyze this word "preacher." The Greek is a verb, *kerusso*, and it is found 61 times in the New Testament.

53 times it's translated as a verb, "to preach." Five times it's translated as a verb, "to publish." Twice it is translated as a verb, "to proclaim." And the 61st time here in our text, the participial form is translated as a noun, "a preacher." And this is the only place in the New Testament where this verb is translated as a noun.

And beyond question, this verb should have been rendered as a verb. And it is a sad thing to find it as a noun. A. T. Robertson, the great Greek grammarian, rightly translates it, "How shall they hear without one preaching?"

Philip's reads, "How can they hear unless someone proclaims Him?" Now, I do not want to appear suspicious, but I cannot keep from wondering if the translators did not have in mind a special group of men, set apart by human ordination, constituted in some special way, perhaps by men, to take the responsibility of the preaching and to confine it to themselves.

Such an idea is alien to the whole of the Word of God. While it is true that there are to be ordained men, they do not have a patent and a copyright on the proclamation of the truth. That right to proclaim the truth belongs to every believer, and in fact, it is the duty of every believer to proclaim the truth of the Gospel.

In the Old Testament times, there were priests, and these men were called to a special task. Anyone who intruded into the precincts of the altar, where only the children of Levi might go, were to be killed without delay. But when the New Testament came, all this was changed.

At the moment Christ died, the veil in the Temple was torn from top to bottom. And God showed that He was through with buildings made with hands, and that He was through with priests who should minister in a sanctuary. In the great revelation concerning the order of our approach to God, which is found in the Epistle to the Hebrews, it is stated in Hebrews chapter 8 and verse 4, that if Jesus Christ were on earth, He would not be a priest.

God does not live in a building. There is no sanctuary on this earth today, except the sanctuary of the inner heart of those who have trusted in the simplicity that is to be found in Jesus Christ. And there is no class of men who hold a place as mediators between so-called laymen and God.

It is in this way that the Lord Jesus Christ speaks to all who have trusted in Him, "Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who lives in you, and that you are not the owner of your body? You have been bought, and at what a price." Now the call to proclaim the truth has been given to everyone who has trusted in Christ.

From the divine point of view, there is no such division as that which men have made between clergy and laymen. Certainly, ordination is no sacrament, and the Bible would not tolerate such an idea for a moment. That idea came hundreds of years after Christ. All believers are alike in the sight of God, and all are on the same level.

Now, it is true that God has declared that some should be set aside as elders to rule in the church. But they have no special access to God, and above all, they do not stand as mediators between men and God. The verb which we have in our text translated as a noun, is one which was used throughout ancient Greek history for the proclamation of official news by a herald.

Thayer's famous lexicon defines the word, "to be a herald, to officiate as a herald, to proclaim after the manner of a herald, always with a suggestion of formality, gravity, and an authority which must be listened to and obeyed." And specifically in the Christian sense, the word is used of the public proclamation of the Gospel and matters pertaining to it.

This proclamation is to be made by everyone who has named the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. All of us who are believers, old and young, male and female, educated or uneducated, ordained or unordained, are called upon to proclaim that which we have known and experienced through the coming of our Savior into our lives.

Ours is the proclamation in sermon and conversation, in friendly discussion around the fireside, or in open proclamation, on the street corner or within the buildings that have been set aside as auditoriums, not sanctuaries, where people may gather to hear the good news. Do you remember Bishop Bickersteth's great hymn, "For my sake and the Gospel's go, and tell redemption's story"?

His heralds answer, "Be it so," and Thine, Lord, all the glory. They preach His birth, His life, His cross, the love of His atonement, for whom they count the world but loss, His Easter, His enthronement. Hark, hark, the trump of Jubilee proclaims to every nation from pole to pole, by land and sea, glad tidings of salvation.

As nearer draws the day of doom, while still the battle rages, the heavenly day spring through the gloom breaks on the night of ages. Still on and on the anthem spread, of Hallelujah voices, in concert with the holy dead, the warrior church rejoices. Their snow-white robes are washed in blood, their golden harps are ringing.

Earth and the Paradise of God, one triumph song are singing. He comes, whose advent trumpet drowns the last of time's evangels. Emmanuel, crowned with many crowns, the Lord of saints and angels. Oh, life, light, love, the great I am, Triune, who changest never. The throne of God and of the Lamb is Thine, and Thine forever.

And it is this Christ that we preach. And we pray that God will take Him to each listening heart in this hour, and we give Thee the praise through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Guest (Male): Countless millions in our nation and throughout the world are perishing without Jesus Christ. We must seek to reach lost sinners here and abroad with the good news of salvation. You've been listening to Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible. We hope you've benefited from today's message entitled Reaching Sinners. You may hear additional teaching by Dr. Barnhouse via the internet. Visit us 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 Reaching Sinners, or simply request message number R10-14. We would also like to make available to you a free copy of our booklet entitled How to Live a Holy Life.

God commands us, saying, "Be ye holy for I am holy." But how can we live a life of true holiness and reflect His character to others? This free booklet will set you on the path of biblical holiness by helping you to find God's will in His Word. Know the power of His love, purify yourselves in the blessed hope, and experience transformation by His Spirit.

Ask for your free copy of How to Live a Holy Life 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 broadcast, The Bible Study Hour, featuring the teachings of the late Dr. James Montgomery Boice, and Every Last Word, featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. Philip Graham Ryken. For a complete list of radio stations carrying our programs, visit us online at alliancenet.org.

Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible comes to you through the generous gifts of our listeners. If you have benefited from this 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. That's 1-800-488-1888.

You may also write to us at Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Box 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103, or 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 Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse, Dr. James Montgomery Boice, Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, and Dr. Philip Graham Ryken.

Thank you for listening. Please join us again for more classic teaching on Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible.

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