Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

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

Dr. Barnhouse: If there is suffering within your own life, flee to the cross, and cry out, "Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me, and know my thoughts, and see if there be any wicked way in me."

If you're honest in that prayer, the Lord will reveal to you the state of your heart before him, and will bring you immediately back into full fellowship, and he will not continue in the operation of pressure upon you that must end in the most terrible judgment if you resist the pressure and continue in your own willful way.

Narrator: 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 will be featuring on today's edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is entitled The Chastening of the Lord.

Effective parenting requires tough love, giving consistent firm correction and discipline to disobedient children. This may seem harsh from a child's point of view, but wise parents know it is necessary to develop character and train children in the way of righteousness. The Lord's chastening often seems harsh and unpleasant to us, but his tough love is intended to develop Christ-like character as we press on toward spiritual maturity.

The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible, Romans chapter 14, and verse 11. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with a message entitled The Chastening of the Lord.

Dr. Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto thee, our Father and our God, and in the Holy Spirit. We pray thee to search our hearts in this hour, that we may have a fresh vision of thine holiness, and a fresh awareness of our sinfulness.

Then bring us to know thy love and thy forgiveness, that we may stand boldly before thee, cleansed and strengthened for our task of showing forth thy light in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation that does not know thee. Bless each listening heart in this hour. We ask it in the name and for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Our text is in Romans 14:11. "As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall give praise to God." At this point in our study, it's necessary to bring in a phase of truth that is emphasized elsewhere in order to give a rounded picture of the judgment that is to come.

We have seen from the context that Christians, in the Bible sense of that term, are not to judge one another, because we are God's children through faith in Christ and must one day stand before the judgment seat of Christ and answer to him. The whole matter of judgment then came under discussion, and we saw that the unbeliever will be judged and condemned to be separated from God forever.

But before his banishment, he will be forced to acknowledge every wrong that he has ever done to a believer. We next considered the fact that the believer's sins have been completely dealt with and erased forever as sins, because of the atonement provided by the death of the Savior.

However, he must face those acts as works which will affect his position in heaven, though they cannot hinder his entrance into heaven. The only thing that a believer can do now is to face the sin squarely. Acknowledge it as an act of sin, judge it, confess it to God, and make every honest effort to forsake it.

Now we must seek the biblical answer to this question. How does God deal with a believer now, who like a horse, takes the bit in his mouth and willfully runs his own way? To come back to our text, we must understand that the believer who has bowed the knee to the Lord and then tries to take back control of his own life must be dealt with by God in no uncertain manner.

One of the most solemn texts in all the Bible is found near the close of the first Epistle of John. It has given pause to believers of all ages and calls forth as many questions today as almost any other passage in the Bible. We read in 1 John 5:16 and 17, "If any man see his brother sin a sin which is not unto death, he shall ask, and he shall give him life for them that sin not unto death.

There is a sin unto death. I do not say that he shall pray for it. All unrighteousness is sin, and there is a sin not unto death." One of the most unfortunate modern translations of this passage is that of the Revised Standard Version. The revisers eliminated the phrase sin unto death and replaced it by the phrase mortal sin.

Thus they have given support to one of the great theological errors of history. Almost all errors spring from a misunderstanding of some biblical text. The misunderstanding was further perverted until a dogma was created that directly contradicted revealed truth.

Many of these errors did not exist in the early church and did not come into being for hundreds of years after Christ. Others did not originate until the 16th century or later. For example, some theologians have created the difference between what they call venial sins, or sins capable of being forgiven, and mortal sins, which supposedly cannot be forgiven.

Christ specifically stated that every sin could be forgiven, except blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. If we read the story of the incident that produced this statement, we find that after Christ had cast a demon out of a possessed man, the Pharisees claimed that he did it by the power of the devil.

Christ flamed against them in godly righteousness, saying in effect that any man who was so far from God and so depraved in his spiritual thinking that he could look at the Savior Christ and call him the devil, or think that he did his work by the power of Satan, was beyond forgiveness. Nothing else is the unpardonable sin.

Frequently, I've met people who were afraid that they had committed such a sin. I always answered that their concern about the matter proved that they had not done any such thing. Concern and conviction come from the Holy Spirit, and he certainly does not work in the heart of one whom he has abandoned to eternal judgment.

No other sin is unforgivable. And anyone who tries to divide sins into two categories of forgivable and unforgivable, goes beyond the word of God. This is further proved by God's statement through John in that same epistle. "If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin."

Think of it, from all sin. There is therefore no possible distinction between sins as mortal and venial. Perhaps the confusion arose from this verse in the last chapter of John's epistle, which speaks of a sin that is unto death and a sin that is not unto death. If we're to comprehend this text, we must pay attention first of all to the immediate context, and then to the larger context of the whole epistle.

This epistle of John is addressed to believers only. It is not written to Mohammedans, Buddhists, or unregenerate professing Christians who do not have life in Christ, or to the unsaved of whatever description. This epistle has an address on it, as definitely as any letter is ever addressed.

I once led a mailman to Christ with the 13th verse of this same chapter, pointing out that he gave his life to reading addresses and seeing that the communications were delivered to the proper parties. And here in the 13th verse, God says, "I write this to you who believe in the name of the Son of God."

We start our study therefore, with the certain knowledge that God is speaking to true believers. Furthermore, the verse which we have just quoted contains the purpose of the epistle: that you may know that you have eternal life. God himself states that this epistle was written for the purpose of assuring one who has put his trust in Christ that he is the present possessor of eternal life.

In one of his works, Luther spoke of those who believed certain doctrines without understanding the nature of what they thought they believed. He wrote of one of the founders of an ancient heresy, who contradicted himself strangely, and who most certainly did not believe in the logical implications of the premises which he set forth.

Luther said that there was much of such muddy thinking, and that we must not take all men who called themselves theologians as seriously as they might think they should be taken. This is certainly true of those who deny the doctrine of the final perseverance of the saints, the doctrine of the safety and the security of the believer.

The purpose of the Epistle of John is to assure believers that they are now possessors of eternal life. The purpose of our text, as we shall see, is to warn them of the consequences of certain sins after they are saved, and to explain to them that they risk severe chastisement at the hand of the Lord.

If one possesses eternal life, it is impossible for him to lose it. If it can be lost, then it cannot be eternal. Nowhere does God say that whosoever believes in him will not perish but have six months life. Such a verse would mean that the soul was in absolute security until six full months had passed, and that he could not be lost at the end of five months, or even during the sixth month, even down to the very last seconds of the period.

If the promise read that God would give ten-year life to the believer, then he would be secure for ten full years. If God gives eternal life to the believer, and eternal life is the only spiritual life mentioned in the Bible, then the conclusion of the Lord Jesus Christ himself follows logically.

"I give them eternal life and they shall never perish. And no one shall snatch them out of my hand. My Father who has given them to me is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of my Father's hand." I've been told by woolly-thinking people that they believed that no one could snatch them out of the Father's hand, but that they could snatch themselves out of his hand.

Such an error can arise only in the mind of one who has accepted the prior error of thinking that he originally put himself into the Lord's hand. But when we know that only the Lord made the believer alive, and enabled him to believe and be saved, then we know that only he could take a man out of Christ.

And since, as we read in Colossians 3:3, "your life is hid with Christ in God," it could never be removed from Christ until Christ were removed from God. This, of course, is an impossibility. So we're not only saved if we trust in Christ, but we are safe. To deny the doctrine of the eternal security of the believer is to deny the doctrine of justification by faith.

Some may cry out that they believe in justification by faith, but not in eternal security. They are the muddy thinkers of the type described by Luther. For if a man is justified, he is seen in the eternal righteousness of God in Christ and has been accepted in the beloved. This is an eternal transaction that was first made in the heart of the Godhead before the creation of the universe.

It was then that we were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world according to his eternal purpose. The context in 1 John further states in plain words that the person who denies the doctrine of eternal security makes God a liar. For it is of this denial that the 10th verse speaks.

The ninth verse states that if we receive the testimony of men, for example, if we believe information clerks, telephone operators, or any human being, the testimony of God is greater. God cannot lie. While the people around us, whom we believe in all the routine matters of life, are at least subject to error.

The 10th verse then states, "He who believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself." He who does not believe God, and the whole passage shows that it refers to the Christian who does not believe God concerning the possession of eternal life, or the Christian does not believe the testimony of the Holy Spirit concerning the possession of eternal life, such a Christian who does not believe God in this matter has made him a liar because he has not believed in the testimony that God has borne to his Son.

A true Christian must believe the record. And what is the record? The next verse tells us, "And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son." Unless a believer is ready to accept the fact of the present possession of eternal life, he is making God a liar.

With this background, we now come to our text concerning the sin unto death. People who object to eternal security frequently argue that such a doctrine will lead to a low-level Christian life. We deny that those who believe this truth have a lower spiritual life than those who do not.

The whole army of followers of Reformed theology have held to the doctrine of the final perseverance of the saints. Almost all Baptists have held this truth. Moody, Spurgeon, Torrey, Chapman, Billy Sunday, and the tens of thousands of students of the Bible Institutes and the armies of missionaries under the faith missions have believed that the justified soul can never be unjustified.

We are not quoting men or their beliefs to establish the truth of a biblical doctrine, for appeal must be made to scripture alone. We present this vast company of faithful believers, however, to demonstrate that those who do hold this precious truth of security through justification are noted rather for holiness, zeal, and devotion to the Lord.

But if, and we will write it in capital letters, IF, IF any believer should be guilty of the great sin of presuming on the grace of God to justify some act of sin, there is set in motion the whole corrective operation of the grace of God. This chastening work may proceed through various degrees of severity and even end in the death, the physical death of the guilty Christian.

The sin unto death is not a sin unto the second death, a sin that would take the believer to hell. The sin unto death is a sin unto physical death. It is not and could not be otherwise. The person who has been born again has been declared righteous by God. Since this has been done in grace, it is impossible for the declaration to be reversed.

We should realize, just as the verdict of condemnation does not make a sinner more evil, so the verdict of justification does not make the believer more righteous. It is the work of sanctification by the Holy Spirit, growing out of our justification through the use of the word of God, that causes spiritual growth in the life of the believer.

Christ said, "Sanctify them in the truth. Thy word is truth." As newborn babes desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby. Justification is a judicial declaration that the believer is righteous, while he is still ungodly. We read in Romans 4:5, "to one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned as righteousness."

His spiritual death has been carried by the Savior. Now nothing but physical death can ever touch him, for the Lord has declared him righteous with divine righteousness. The Bible presents abundant evidence that the old nature, the nature of fallen Adam, which is the nature of every human being by birth, is totally evil, and that it will seize every opportunity to exalt itself.

It is the flesh. And the desires of the flesh are against the spirit, and the desires of the spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other. Here, the word Spirit should have a capital initial. For I hold that only the Holy Spirit furnishes us with power to overcome the flesh, and that it is against the Holy Spirit that the flesh lusts with all its power.

It is true that his Spirit bears witness with our spirit, his Spirit with a capital S, bears witness with our spirit with a small S. But it is with our renewed spirit, and thus we have been made partakers of the divine nature. But suppose the old Adam nature within a redeemed individual takes the upper hand, presumes upon the grace of God, and commits some sin that is a public denial of the faith.

Weak brothers stumble because of this. Unbelievers look askance, even blaspheming God because of the act of the Christian. Or suppose within the heart, unknown to anyone else, the rights of God over that redeemed life are stubbornly violated. In such cases, God must operate within the believer.

If the very same acts are committed by an unbeliever, God may pass them by without notice, for any number of sins may cause no change in the position of the unregenerate man, because he is already under the wrath of God. But God must work in the life of his own child, as he himself has said.

"For the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives. It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons."

It must be said at this point that not all of the sufferings that come in a believer's life are the chastening of the Lord. Some sufferings are indeed corrective. Others are constructive, and a third classification of sufferings must be called exemplary. We shall deal at length with the first phase of suffering.

We merely mention in passing that constructive sufferings are described in the case of Paul, who besought the Lord thrice that some thorn in the flesh should depart from him, but who was told, "My grace is sufficient for thee, for my strength is made perfect in weakness." The third type of sufferings, that which was for the glory of God, is to be found in the experience of Job, as well as in the experience of the man who was blind from birth.

In the latter case, when the disciples asked, "Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus answered, "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him." And this is one more reason why no believer may ever judge another believer.

It is impossible for any man to know the inward workings of another's heart. Is God doing the individual the greatest honor of permitting him to be a battleground in the invisible war that is going on between the great rebel and God? Is God rubbing down rough spots with the sandpaper of suffering? Has the individual forced himself out of the will of God in such a way that he can be brought back only by the force of God's power?

"Judge not, that ye be not judged." But if there is suffering within your own life, flee to the cross, and cry out, "Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me, and know my thoughts, and see if there be any wicked way in me." If you're honest in that prayer, the Lord will reveal to you the state of your heart before him, and will bring you immediately back into full fellowship, and he will not continue in the operation of pressure upon you that must end in the most terrible judgment if you resist the pressure and continue in your own willful way.

And you must never forget that the Lord loves you, loves you, loves you with an intense love beyond any human comparison. This is why when you get out of his will, he will begin to work on you with a process that is as light as the wing of a moth, as we read in Hosea 5:12. And only when you resist that first gentle brush of love will he come upon you as a lion.

And it is only when you resist the crushing of the lion judgment that he will return to his own place, abandoning you to the sin that is unto death, and finally, taking you home to heaven to an eternity that will be crownless for you, and with all your works burned away. Now in our next study, we'll see some examples of this judgment of God that may lead even to physical death.

And in the meantime, may we search our hearts and ask the Lord to bless the truth to us. Our God and Father, now thou knowest the hearts of thy people, the needs of all who listen in this hour. In thine marvelous way, take the truth and minister it into each heart as thou seest the need. We ask it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Narrator: The Lord's hand of chastening and discipline seems painful and unpleasant, but it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who receive his correction and training. We hope you have benefited from today's message entitled The Chastening of the Lord.

To listen to additional Bible teaching by Dr. Barnhouse, visit us online 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 The Chastening of the Lord, or simply request message number R14-23.

We would also like to place in your hands our free booklet entitled How the Holy Spirit Relates to You. For many Christians, the Holy Spirit remains the most mysterious and misunderstood member of the Trinity. Controversial and contradictory teachings about his person and work further cloud the issue. This free booklet cuts through the confusion with clear biblical truth.

You will take a significant leap toward spiritual maturity when you understand who the Holy Spirit is and how he works in the life of a believer. Ask for your free copy of How the Holy Spirit Relates to You 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 Bible teaching of Dr. Philip Graham Ryken.

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For more information or to make a contribution to help further our work, contact us by calling toll free, 1-800-488-1888. Write to us at Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Box 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103. Visit us online at Alliancenet.org. Remember to request 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, Martin Lloyd-Jones, and Philip Graham Ryken.

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