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: Today, the nation of Israel is little more than a beachhead on the Mediterranean in comparison with that which has been guaranteed to Israel by the Word of God. Before describing the limits of the lands which God has promised to Israel, it is necessary to say that if the present nation of Israel were destroyed and if the Arab peoples should push every Jew into the sea, it would not nullify the promises of God or make them of none effect. God has sworn by Himself and the promises will be fulfilled and Abraham's seed shall possess the land.

Guest (Female): God's Word is good for what we need to teach, rebuke, correct, and train, equipped by Him we then pursue the work God has for us to do. God's Word is what the Christian needs to grow in grace and do good deeds.

Guest (Male): Over a half a century ago, the late Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse, then pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 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 Restoration for Israel. Middle East peace summits have discussed the possibility of Israel surrendering territory to the Palestinians or the surrounding Arab nations in exchange for peace. But the Bible suggests something quite different. God has declared that He will expand Israel far beyond its current borders into much of today's Arab world. What does God's Word teach about Israel's restoration? The scripture text for this edition of *Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible*, Romans chapter 11, we're looking at verses 12 and 15. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with a message entitled Restoration for Israel.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto Thee, our Father and our God, and in the Holy Spirit. We pray Thee that as the Word goes forth in this hour, it may be in Thy power and in the Holy Spirit and in much assurance. And out over the world, we ask Thy blessing upon all those who fear Thy name. Thou hast told us to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, that they shall prosper that love Thy walls, and we thus pray. Hear us and make the message rich to our hearts. We ask in Jesus' name, Amen.

Now we're studying together in the Epistle to the Romans in the 11th chapter and take two clauses in the 12th and the 15th verses which speak of the restoration of the Jews to Palestine. "And if their diminishing means riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their fullness mean? For if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead?" The Holy Spirit teaches us in the Epistle to the Ephesians that before Christ came into the world, all non-Jews were godless, hopeless, and Christless. And then God acted in judgment and set aside His ancient people temporarily in order that salvation might be brought to the Gentiles.

Our text now gives us what might be called a mathematical inversion. If the setting aside of God's ancient people brought to us Gentiles the inestimable, incalculable blessings that we know in Christ, what will the restoration of this people be but life from the dead and for the whole earth? The first teaching of our passage is that God intends to restore the Jews to the place of their former blessing. He is going to do it in His way and not in theirs. Beyond any valid question, the Bible teaches that God intends to keep His promises to Israel. Now let us see what these unfulfilled promises are. I am not going to make mention of the promises which have been fulfilled at any time in history, but only of those promises which have not been fulfilled.

In the Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God and yet son of Abraham, blessings were made available for all the families of the earth. But the national blessings have not yet been fulfilled. The Lord made a covenant with Abraham recorded in the 15th of Genesis that he and his seed would possess a great portion of what we call the Near East. It was a covenant that was confirmed by God's one-sided oath. He did not have Abraham swear, for man's word is worthless even when he takes an oath. Thus it was that God alone made the figure eight circling the divided portions of the blood sacrifice, the ancient manner of confirming an oath.

And there we read, in the same day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram saying, "Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates: the Kenites, and the Kenizzites, and the Kadmonites, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Rephaims, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites." Now, there are some of these landmarks that have been lost to us, but those that we know are so certain that there can be no further doubt about them. The land that is outlined in the passage which we have quoted from Genesis borders on the river of Egypt, which is a stream south of the Negev, well south of Gaza. It has been promised by God to Israel.

The second border is the great river, the river Euphrates. This means that the promised land includes the entire nation that is presently known as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and also a portion of what is today known as Iraq. The amazing part of the promise is in the remainder of the verses, however, for these verses describe territories that were once occupied by ten ancient nations. Up until our generation, the borders of these nations were unknown, and several of them may not be known at present. But one of them has become so well-known in the last generation that there can be no doubt whatsoever. God has promised Israel that she shall possess the country formerly occupied by the Hittites.

Now, the manner in which God hid all knowledge of the Hittites for about 3,000 years is amazing, and the discoveries are almost ironic. As late as 1875, the editions of our great encyclopedias and works of ancient history practically denied the existence of any Hittite power. So-called Bible scholars laughed at the statement in Second Kings which compared the host of the Hittites with the host of the Egyptians. They said that it was not possible that the Hittites could be so great. And then suddenly, the ruins of a great city, a very great city, were discovered in the center of Asia Minor, some miles from Angora, the present capital of Turkey.

In the decades that have followed, archaeologists have uncovered the ruins of this great city, Bogazkoy, and the ruins of several others, and have found many tens of thousands of cuneiform inscriptions describing the affairs of this ancient nation. Furthermore, they have found many inscriptions in a language hitherto unknown, which has now been deciphered, giving us an amazing knowledge of this great people, the Hittites. It is not our purpose to show how the Bible critics have been discomfited, but rather to show that the lands promised to Abraham and his seed include great territories that are now under the control of Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey. In short, the promises of God guarantee practically the whole of the Near East to Israel.

But it is not the mere possession of territory that is going to make the future greatness of Israel. I have in the course of my studies collated more than 200 detailed promises in the major and minor prophets of the Bible which have been made to the children of Israel and which have not yet been fulfilled. We cannot study them here, but we may be sure that they will be fulfilled. Our unhappy world has been in the throes of sin ever since the first man rebelled against God. Ever since the gates of the Garden of Eden, man has longed wistfully for a return to times of peace in which all of the ravages of rebellion could be healed, where all of the woes of man could be blotted out, and where all the sufferings, sorrows, sighing, tears of man could be done away with, only to be replaced by comfort, consolation, joy, hope, and peace.

There have been philosophers who have dreamed of the ideal state and dreamers have described their utopias throughout man's history. Statesmen have signed innumerable treaties of peace and have thought that by leagues of nations and united nations that peace could be brought to this troubled world. Peace on earth to men of good will, that was the message of the angels at the time of the birth of the Lord Jesus. Peace on earth to men of ill will is the theme of the desire of those who wish to bring nations to peace today. Where once an uneasy peace could be maintained by the balance of power between nations, today we have peace of a sort because of the balance of terror.

How is the final peace to be brought to this world? The Bible gives us the definite answer. It is to come by the Lord Jesus Christ and His return to this earth in His second coming. It will be ultimately administered on this earth by the physical descendants of Abraham, the Jews, who by that time will have accepted Him as Jehovah the sin-bearer, wounded for their transgression and bruised for their iniquity. What must take place before the events that are described in our text as the fullness of Israel, their acceptance which will bring life from the dead? As with all the blessings of God, there can be no hope for man or the world apart from the Lord Jesus Christ.

The world will continue in its present desperate course until God intervenes and sends His Son back to this earth. When He comes again, He will not be here as the meek and lowly Jesus who once came to this earth to suffer and die. At His return, He will be the splendid, resistless Sovereign who will bring to pass by the force and power of His might all that God has planned for this world. Man must continue in his present folly until it has been thoroughly demonstrated before men, angels, and demons that there is no hope for this world collectively or individually apart from Jesus Christ.

When the extremity of man has been reached, God will show His power. The first of the chain of events of prophecy will be the supernatural removal from this earth of all those who truly believe in Christ as Savior. God tells us that the dead in Christ shall rise first. Out from the lands and seas of the earth will come the resurrection bodies of all who have died in the faith, from Abel, the first to die, unto the very last to die before the plan of God is put into execution. The rest of the dead, the bodies of all who have died without believing in Christ, will not rise for more than a thousand years after this first resurrection of the just.

Now in the same fraction of the instant which sees the souls and spirits of the righteous dead joined to their resurrected body, every believer alive on the earth at that time will be transformed to have a resurrection body like the bodies of these others who have come from the grave. And all those bodies in turn are like the body which the Lord Jesus Himself had when He rose from the dead. This we read in such verses as the following: "Behold, I reveal to you a secret. Not all our bodies shall sleep the sleep of death, but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye at the last trump, for the trumpet shall sound and the dead in Christ shall be raised incorruptible and we, the living believers, shall be transformed."

And while we wait, we look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change the body of our humiliation that it may be made like unto the glorified body which He had, according to the working whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself. At the same moment that all believers are removed from the earth, God will begin His great work of judgment on behalf of Israel. In Jerusalem, there will appear two men called in the Book of Revelation the two witnesses, but who may be identified under well-known rules of biblical interpretation as being Moses and Elijah, sent back to this earth by God for the great work which they now undertake.

Every Jew knows that the Old Testament prophecies end with the announcement that God will send Elijah back to this earth before the Messiah shall carry out His work of judgment and restoration. The last verses of the book of Malachi show this, and the Lord Jesus Christ confirmed this in His statement to the disciples as they came down from the mount of the transfiguration. "For truly Elijah comes first and shall restore all things," said the Lord Jesus. Now, it's also well-known that God told Moses that there would come a prophet like unto him, and it may well be that this prophecy will find its ultimate fulfillment when the witness of the tribulation period shall stand between God and the people to minister judgment and blessing.

It should also be recognized that God has announced in many places in the Old Testament that the marvelous things that He will do on behalf of the Jews at the time of their restoration will be so beyond anything that He has ever done in this earth that they will become a new standard by which power and wonder shall be measured. At the same moment that God gave Moses the tables of the law for the second time, God said, "Behold, I make a covenant. Before all your people, I will do marvels such as have not been wrought in all the earth or in any nation, and all the people among whom you are shall see the work of the Lord, for it is a terrible thing that I will do with you."

Now it should be noted that in all of the Jewish translations, the last clause has been toned down to say less than the Hebrew really says. For the work that God announces that He will do is not merely tremendous, but it is a tremendous or terrible work that the Lord is going to do with or by means of the Jews. We have the story of some of these marvelous works that took place in the wilderness during the years of their wanderings. We remember also the passage of the Jordan, the fall of Jericho, the wonders that were accomplished through the judges, Gideon, Samson, and the rest. But in spite of this, God announced through the later prophets that He would do works so much more wonderful that no one would even talk about the miracles that were done during the earlier history of Israel as are recorded in our scriptures.

Listen to Micah. He tells of the blessings that are to come upon the people when they are restored and says in Micah 7:15, "According to the days of thy coming out of the land of Egypt will I show unto him marvelous things," or new marvels as the Hebrew has it. On this verse, Rabbi S. Goldman in the famous Soncino edition of the Bible says, "The Exodus throughout the Bible is quoted as the example par excellence of divine intervention on Israel's behalf. Yet Jeremiah announces the overturning of this standard of comparison." In the 16th chapter of the weeping prophet, we have the announcement of this amazing reversal.

God begins there in Jeremiah 16 by describing the present centuries of Jewish dispersion throughout the world. If we are to understand the glories of Jewish restoration, we must see the sad story that precedes. First, God announces the terrible judgments that were to come upon the people and upon the land of Israel. These judgments we know have already been fulfilled to the letter. And the Lord then warns Jeremiah that the people will ask why these judgments have come upon them and upon the land and gives Jeremiah the answer.

"And it shall come to pass, when thou shalt tell this people all these words, and they shall say unto thee, 'Wherefore hath the Lord pronounced all this great evil against us? or what is our iniquity or what is our sin that we have committed against the Lord our God?' Then shalt thou say unto them, 'Because your fathers have forsaken me,' saith the Lord, 'and have walked after other gods, and have served them, and have worshipped them, and have forsaken me, and have not kept my law; and ye have done worse than your fathers; for behold, ye walk every one after the stubbornness of his evil heart, so that ye hearken not unto me: therefore will I cast you out of this land into a land that ye have not known, neither ye nor your fathers; and there shall ye serve other gods day and night; forasmuch as I will show you no favor.'"

Now, those lands are surely Russia and Germany and the United States and the other lands to which God has scattered His people. Now, if all that was prophesied in judgment in the days of Jeremiah has come true in such detail, why shall we not believe all the more that the great promises of restoration shall also come true? For the whole tone of the narrative changes and the voice of promise is now heard in this same prophet. "Therefore behold, the days come," saith the Lord, "that it shall no more be said, 'As the Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of Egypt,' but, 'As the Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the countries whither He had driven them.' And I will bring them back into their land that I gave unto their fathers."

"Behold, I will send for many fishers," saith the Lord, "and they shall fish them. And afterward I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain, and from every hill, and out of the clefts of the rocks." I never read this prophecy of Jeremiah without thinking of the Hitlers and the Stalins and the other horrible anti-Semitic leaders who have been God's fishers and hunters to take them away from the places where they've settled and to drive them back toward the holy land. And then God continues, "For mine eyes are upon all their ways. They are not hid from my face, neither is their iniquity concealed from mine eyes. And first, I will recompense their iniquity and their sin double because they have profaned my land."

Here then in Jeremiah is the outline of all that is to happen when God brings His people back into the land. He is going to do it. He is going to give them the whole land and all that He has promised unto them. He will send Moses and Elijah to preach salvation and deliverance unto them. Alas, it is necessary that we underline Jeremiah's sentence, "at first, I will recompense their iniquity and their sin double." For the time of Jacob's greatest trouble lies in those terrible months that have been limited by Daniel and by our Lord Jesus. For Daniel told of the rise of the antichrist and the restoration of the Jews and of the troubles that should come upon them until Messiah should come out of heaven to complete their deliverance.

And Jesus Christ Himself said, "For then there will be great tribulation such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be. And except those days should be shortened, no human being would be saved. But for the sake of the elect, those days will be shortened." And it is of this that the Lord spoke when He said, "He who endures to the end of this period of tribulation shall be saved from the persecution that shall be brought to an end." Now out of this preaching of Moses and Elijah after the second coming of Christ for the church, out of this preaching of Moses and Elijah comes the company of the 144,000 mentioned in the Book of Revelation, composed of 12,000 men of each of the 12 tribes of Israel.

These 144,000 are not any company living today. The 144,000 cannot arise until Moses and Elijah have come to do their preaching. and these cannot come until the Lord Jesus has taken His church out before the beginning of the great tribulation. The 144,000 are Jews. If any Jew should ask how the identity of the tribes shall be ascertained, when no Jew living today knows certainly to which of the tribes he belongs, I would remind him that when the eleven brothers came down into Egypt at the time of Joseph, they did not know him, but he knew them.

They were astonished when he pointed them to their places at the table, each according to his rank and age among the brothers. So shall it be when the greater Joseph, the Lord Jesus Christ, intervenes on behalf of the Jews. He knows them and will know them. And when this 144,000 has been chosen, they shall go out over the whole world like so many Saint Pauls, or to be more correct, like 144,000 Jonahs swallowed by the Gentile whale for these last three days and nights, these last 3,000 years, but spit out into the holy land at the time of the restoration. And like Jonah, transformed, obedient, and preaching the gospel of grace through Christ, who will then be the Messiah of Israel.

And our God and Father, we pray Thee that the Holy Spirit shall take this message to our hearts through the Lord Jesus Christ, we ask it all. Amen.

Guest (Male): There will come a time when Israel will embrace and proclaim the gospel message of eternal life by God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ, the Messiah. You have been listening to *Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible*. Today's message was entitled Restoration for Israel. To listen to additional Bible teaching by Dr. Barnhouse, visit us online at alliancenet.org. That's 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 Restoration for Israel, or simply request message number R11-6.

We would also like to make available to you a free copy of our booklet entitled *Declaration of Dependence*. The Declaration of Independence was one of the most important events in American history. But Adam's declaration of independence from God was the most tragic event in human history. This free booklet calls believers to turn away from spiritual autonomy, independence, and self-will and to reaffirm our complete dependence on the Lord. Ask for your free copy of *Declaration of Dependence* 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. We also produce the radio broadcast *The Bible Study Hour*, featuring the teachings of the late Dr. James Montgomery Boice, and *Every Last Word*, featuring the 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. That's 1-800-488-1888. You may also write 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 Donald Grey Barnhouse, Dr. James Montgomery Boice, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and Dr. Philip Graham Ryken. Thanks for listening. Join us again next time for more classic teaching on *Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible*.

Guest (Female): Your Word has commanded work to do, your saving work on earth, it draws our souls from death to life and rescues us from needless strife. Amazing gift on us bestowed, the life-imparting Word of God.