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: Remember this verse. We find it in Hebrews 2. "Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, Christ himself likewise partook of the same nature, so that through death he might destroy the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage."

Lifelong bondage. What a term. Deliverance. What a hope.

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 The Christian's Hope. The English writer William Hazlitt wrote, "Hope is the best possession. None are completely wretched but those who are without hope."

As we look across our world today, we can see overwhelming despair, hopelessness, and misery in the lives of those who do not know Jesus Christ. But God has reconciled us to himself through the death and resurrection of his son and given us the priceless possession of confident, certain hope. Do you rejoice in the hope that is yours in Jesus Christ?

The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible, Romans chapter 12 and verse 12. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with a message entitled The Christian's Hope.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ we come unto thee, O our Father and our God, and in the Holy Spirit. Thou alone art God, and there is none like unto thee. We worship thee and acknowledge that thou art our God.

Be gracious to us in this hour and use thy truth to bring life to the dead and spiritual growth to those who know thee as Savior. We ask thy blessing upon this work, provide for its needs, and give wisdom to the speaker and communicate truth to all listeners that we may grow in Christ and through him give thee all praise. We ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Our text today in Romans 12:12 takes us on to the next clause in this study: rejoice in your hope. Now it's very difficult for those who have always lived in lands where Christianity is the principal religion to understand the hopelessness of those who have never heard of Christ.

Christianity came into the midst of the Roman world, and it was a pagan world. The people had a philosophy of stoicism which recognized that life brought trials and death, and they determined to keep a stiff upper lip and make a bold show against life as though they were sufficient in themselves. But they knew that they were not sufficient, and their religion showed itself to be a religion of fear.

There were others who shrugged their shoulders and decided that the best thing to do was to drift with the stream of life, taking everything as it came and to live wholly for self, sucking every possible pleasure from day to day and closing the eyes to the inevitable misfortunes and death which were the lot of all.

I do not think that I could have understood the real difference that Christianity has made if I had not been permitted to visit the uttermost parts of the earth and to have seen with my own eyes the difference that Christ has made. Let me tell you one or two instances out of my own experience, and you will be better able to understand what it is to rejoice in hope as our text commands us.

A few years ago I crisscrossed Africa. In the center of Nigeria, I visited a mission station where I met a pastor who was ministering to his flock in great faithfulness. His skin was very black, but his facial features were sharp-cut, and there was nobility about his head. His eyes, those windows of the soul, his eyes especially impressed me by the gentleness of their regard. He accompanied the missionary and me to visit the chief of the tribe. The chief was full brother to the pastor.

We went into the compound where the chief lived, and the layout was explained to me. The several houses for the various wives of the chief were grouped about the threshing floor, and the storehouses for grain were in another part of the compound. We were brought finally to the large area where the chief himself lived. He, like his brother, was of commanding physique. I had the two of them stand together while I took some motion pictures of the scene, finally focusing in a close-up of these two figures.

I have looked at these pictures many times since that day, and they speak to me of the darkness of Africa without Christ and the light and joy of the heart that knows Christ. The difference between these two brothers lies not in the gaily colored garments of the chief and the white robe of the pastor, but rather in the two faces and above all in the eyes of the two men. For the eyes of the chief are eyes of great cruelty.

The features of the face are hard and pitiless. One would never seek mercy from one with such a formidable aspect of wanton savagery. The face of the pagan chief was even more revealing as he stood by his brother who was a Christian, the brother with a face of such calm nobility and gentle goodness. The missionary told me that while we cannot always judge character by the countenance, these two men in a remarkable fashion exhibited the inwardness of their natures. It was the life of Christ which had made the difference. The child of cruelty had become a child of hope.

In another picture that I took in another tribe in Africa, two young women stand smiling. One has a small child standing beside her, and the other is holding a babe in her arms. Both of the women were beautiful, standing in the sunlight with flowers in their hair and smiles on their faces. It was obvious that they were identical twins. Examine them carefully and no difference could be seen.

The reason that they were brought before us for special attention was that they were twins, and they were the very first twins that had ever been allowed to grow up in this part of Africa. In the darkened minds of African savagery, the idea of twins was horrible. In many of Africa's tribes even today, twins are killed at birth. Somewhere in the somber caverns of their hopeless religious thought, there was a great fear bound up with the idea of twins.

Perhaps they themselves would find difficulty in explaining it, but in this instance, the gospel of Jesus Christ had come into the tribe some thirty years before. And shortly after their parents had been saved, the Lord gave them twin daughters. The newfound faith was strong enough to resist the public outcry against the children, and they were allowed to live. They grew through childhood to young womanhood and had been married to two fine young men of the tribe who were also Christians.

There they stood before us, living reminders of the hope that is in Christ, and I rejoiced in this hope that so transforms individuals and even tribes and nations. For the third illustration, come across the world with me to Tokyo, Japan. I was in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel and I went to one of the dozen little stalls of the various airlines that serve Japan. The girl who was at the desk spoke Chinese, Japanese, and English at least. She was obviously from a cultured background and of high education.

I made my arrangements for airplane reservations, and it was necessary for me to go back on two or three different occasions to speak with her. After I had talked with her several different times, I asked her if she were a Christian. She replied that she was a Buddhist. Further questions brought forth the information that she had heard a little about Christ, that she had heard that there was a sacred book, the Bible, but that she had never seen it and knew nothing of Christian truth.

I then asked her a most penetrating question. Looking her deeply in the eye, I said, "Do you love Buddha?" She was startled. A look of great fear came across her face. It was obvious that the idea of loving Buddha had never come to her mind. She said at once, "Love?" and in a tone of voice that implied that the question had never been thought of. She then continued, "I never thought about love in connection with religion."

And then I said to her something like this: Do you know that in the whole world, there is no God who is truly loved except the Lord Jesus Christ? Other gods are hated and feared. You have statues of fierce monsters that guard the gates of your temples, and the people stand afar off and try to wake their gods by clapping their hands. They burn incense and offer sacrifices to them as though they were gods who had to be appeased.

But Jesus Christ loves us, and he came to die for us, and those of us who truly know him have learned to love him in return. We love him because he first loved us. On the other hand, Mohammedans do not love their Allah, and Hindus do not love any of their gods, just as you do not love your god. But we love the Lord Jesus because he died for us.

I then went on to tell her that she was not to judge Christianity by the great number of GIs and other Americans who made their drunken, lustful way through her land. She had to realize that only a percentage of Americans were true Christians and really loved the Lord. Then I made arrangements for a missionary to take a Bible to her and to continue our talk that she might be brought to know the true Christ of God and to enter into his love.

Now it's when you have seen the savage chiefs, grown-up twins who would have been killed at birth, and the sadness of a pagan Japanese who fears her god so desperately, that you can enter into the meaning of our text: rejoice in your hope. But if we look closely around about us, we can see the same hopelessness in many American lives. We can shudder as we see it. We can love the poor hopeless creatures who refuse our Christ and can rejoice in our hope even more clearly.

Some time ago, the news announcements carried the story of the sudden death of a famous bandleader. He had died in his sleep and in what should have been the prime of life. The story of his funeral was appalling. I read the account in two different papers. Someone said at the funeral that this man would be capable of blowing Gabriel's trumpet in the band of heaven. Someone else spoke in terms of his supposed participation in the music of heaven.

Now because the news reports had reported certain symptoms in connection with this man's death, I questioned a famous surgeon who happened to know the case more closely. The surgeon said he was either dead drunk or unconscious through narcotics, and he had no reactions to help him, so he literally choked to death on his own vomit. I looked again at the newspaper accounts of his funeral. I read the stupid remarks of his friends who were trying to be loyal in a dark and terrifying moment.

And I had a hard moment myself as I was torn between a great rejoicing in my own hope that is in Christ and in my love for all such people who are in such misery because they will not come to Christ. Oh, remember this verse in the Word of God. Remember this verse. We find it in Hebrews 2. "Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, Christ himself likewise partook of the same nature, so that through death he might destroy the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage." Lifelong bondage. What a term. Deliverance. What a hope.

Not long ago my wife and I had occasion to drive from Philadelphia to San Francisco in the dead of winter over the New Year's weekend. We had about a hundred miles of ice near the Pennsylvania-Ohio border, another hundred miles of icy roads in Central Colorado, and a similar stretch in Central Nevada. We passed the scene of an accident.

Shortly afterwards we heard on our car radio the statistics of the number of road deaths over the New Year's weekend. We knew that we had a heavy car, good tires, and much experience in driving on snow and ice. We had committed ourselves to the Lord, and we were driving below the legal speed because of road conditions. Suddenly, there was a sickening moment when we felt the car skid.

A great truck, going much too fast, had passed us, covering us with spray and making the road invisible just as we skidded. A moment later the car had righted itself and we were going along in safety, and our vision was once more clear. One of us chuckled, and the other said, "I had exactly the same thought." And then we both laughed out loud, for we knew that we had been thinking the same thing.

When we expressed it, we had the confirmation that we had both thought at the same time: It's all right, Lord. If you want to take us to heaven from the wreck of a car on a highway across the Rockies, that's all right with us. We were there because we were sure that the Lord had led us to come by this route. There were factors which made any other route impractical. We were in his will and on his tasks, and there was not even a remote trace of fear. No wonder we laughed.

We continued our prayer, which is so often interlarded with general conversation, prayer, bits of humor, prayer, interruptions to look at some passing scene of curiosity or beauty, prayer, discussion, prayer, driving indications, and so on. There are three of us in the car, and it is so definitely felt and known that He is the third there with us, that there must be constant rejoicing. He can have things anyway he wants them. How then can there be any fear? This word in the Bible is true. We have been delivered, completely and utterly delivered from the fear of death. And consequently, we are delivered from the bondage which chains those who do not have our hope. We rejoice in hope.

There is another aspect of our hope that must be considered, since we're told that our hope goes beyond the world in which we live to that which lies before us. God tells us in 1 Corinthians 15, "If the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most to be pitied."

But Christ is risen. So our faith looks forward beyond this life to that which is to come. It not only removes us from our lifelong fear of bondage, but it gives us comfort and consolation when our loved ones leave us for the life that is to come. God has told us to comfort one another with these words, these very words of hope which indeed give us grounds for rejoicing.

We read in 1 Thessalonians 4, "We would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope." Following this, there is the brief assertion of our basic foundation of faith and hope in the fact that Christ Jesus died and rose again from the dead. And then because of this fact, we can go on to know the truth that God has given us, that we too shall be raised from the dead at the second coming of Christ.

All believers who have gone before will come out of their graves at the time of our Lord's return, and the generation of living believers will be transformed in the same dynamic instance. Then altogether, those who have gone on through the door of death and those who are alive at the time of the end, both made like the Lord Jesus, shall be caught up together with each other to meet the Lord at his coming, to dwell together forever. This is indeed hope and robs death of all its terror and all its sting. We shall know our loved ones in heaven and shall be resurrected together with them.

Certainly there is every grounds for rejoicing in our hope. This life is controlled by our Lord. The future is also in His hands. All things work together for our good, and we go on in His way, at His speed, to our eternal life together. Rejoice in this hope.

Finally, we must understand that the Christian hope not only delivers us from the bondage of fear while we are in life and carries us on through death to eternity, but it is also the basis of our confidence for all things around us. We live in a world of suffering, sorrow, sighing, tears, anguish. There is war, famine, calamity, catastrophe, tragedy, disease, death. None of these things are errors of mortal mind. They are real, as real as man's sin that caused them all and brought man to the doom from which Christ rescued him.

But even this world shall come to a new day. The Christian hope gives a certain picture of the future, and no less certain because it is so rosy. The present heavens and this present earth shall dissolve, roll up like a scroll, melt with fervent heat. Just as the energy of God became the mass that we can see and touch in material things, became so by the word of his creative force, so the mass shall return to energy by the word of God's destructive force in the judgment.

He who once breathed the power to make material things shall draw them back into himself, and then shall speak the creative word again so that there shall be a new heavens and a new earth. In these, there shall be nothing but righteousness. Thus it is that we rejoice in hope as we consider the world around us. We may grieve when we see people who go on to their own doom regardless of the love that Christ offers them.

Our hearts are heavy for those who are in need. But there's a strange paradox of joy in the midst of it all. This is what Paul knew when he said that he was sorrowful, yet always rejoicing. This is why the Lord Jesus Christ was able to tell his own that they were not to be alarmed by the news of wars and rumors of wars. It is possible for the believer to remain untroubled in the face of news that otherwise would bring the greatest distress. This is a supernatural work of God within us.

It is the application of our text to the extreme degree within us. It is the overcoming of all that we are by nature to bring us to the rejoicing that is ours through grace. Then let us turn to God, and to Him alone. Rejoice in our hope. Since God is God and we are His, this is the only logical way to live. Rejoice in hope. Praise Him.

And our God and Father, we pray thee that the Holy Spirit shall take these eternal truths to many hearts and that thy children shall know the great uplift of rejoicing in that which is ours in Christ. And it is through him that we give thee all of our praise in Jesus' name. Amen.

Guest (Male): When we consider the abundant love, grace, and power God has shown in redeeming us, how can we fail to rejoice in the confident hope that is ours in Jesus Christ? We hope you've benefited from today's message, The Christian's Hope. To listen to additional teaching by Dr. Barnhouse, visit 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 The Christian's Hope, or simply request message number R12-24. We would also like to make available to you a free copy of our booklet entitled Becoming a Christian.

If someone asked you, how can I become a Christian, would you be able to give a clear, biblically accurate response? Too often the answer to this question is not clearly stated from our pulpits, and the average believer is not always able to give a correct explanation. This free booklet clearly outlines the biblical path to becoming a Christian and experiencing the wonderful gift of salvation in Jesus Christ.

Ask for your free copy of Becoming a Christian 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 with the late 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 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 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 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 Doctors Donald Grey Barnhouse, James Montgomery Boice, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and Philip Graham Ryken. Thanks for listening. Join us again next time for more classic teaching on Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible.