Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: So long as I erect barriers of segregation that put me on one side of any decision in this world and the Lord Jesus Christ on the other side, I can have no satisfaction in my understanding, no peace in my heart, no joy in my soul, and no fellowship with those for whom Christ died. When I ask God to take me out of the barren fields of selfishness, then I can be at one with all men because I am at one with God.

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 Church and Race Relations. Racism is a societal cancer that has caused incalculable harm and suffering throughout the world and in our nation. Its countless manifestations throughout history include slavery and segregationism in America, apartheid in South Africa, concentration camps in Nazi Germany, and ongoing hostilities between Israelis and Arabs in the Middle East.

How can the church bring God's grace, forgiveness, and healing to racial relations in our country and across the globe? Today's message by Dr. Barnhouse was originally given in 1957. Many of his illustrations concern the status of race relations at that time. But the principles illustrated are helpful to us today, and we recommend this teaching to you despite the somewhat dated illustrations. The Scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible: Romans chapter 13 and verse 5. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with a message entitled The Church and Race Relations.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto Thee, our Father and our God, and in the Holy Spirit. We thank Thee that Thou art our God and that Thou hast made us alive in Jesus Christ and given us Thyself, that Thou mayest become our life. Help us to realize that this is the purpose of redemption, and that Thou dost desire us in our daily living to show forth Jesus Christ, that men around us may take knowledge that we possess that which is not our own, but that we walk and move and live in the power of the redemption that Thou hast given us in Christ.

So speak to Thy children this day, that they may understand the importance of their position as witnesses in this world and against this world. Hear us, our Father, that we may give Thee all the praise and the glory, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

We are studying in the 13th chapter of Romans in the great passage that deals with the Christian and his relationship to civil government. And we come to the fifth verse, where it says, "You must needs be subject." How can we speak strongly enough to reach through to the Christian conscience? How can we point out evils that exist in our day, and how can we help Christians to realize that they must stand up and be counted on the great ethical problems that confront our civilization?

Wherever Christians have remained silent on these issues, great evils have arisen. Whenever Christians have adopted a limp attitude in the face of moral evil, their spiritual life has suffered. Instead of obeying the great injunctions for strength of heart and firmness of decision, they show soft sponginess that weakens the very fiber of their being.

What a travesty on New Testament Christianity that the followers of the apostles and martyrs have become shifty, unstable, weak, and yielding in the face of pressures. If the strong muscle of the church of Jesus Christ is not exerted, the effort is spasmodic, the course unsteady, the goal unreached. Paul says to the Corinthians, "Be watchful, stand fast in the faith, act like men, be strong."

For an illustration of one of the greatest problems of our century, I will take you to South Africa. Perhaps if we look closely at the problem there, we shall be able to see our own problem in this country a little better. But I would issue a word of sharp warning. We must consider the application of our Lord's words to us: "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when there is the log in your own eye? You fraud! First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye."

In South Africa, for more than a generation, the Church of Jesus Christ sat back placidly and allowed the forces of bigotry and fear to chain the country to the Middle Ages. Ministers and congregations went along together in the creation of the monster that is rising to turn the Black continent into a Red continent of blood. How did this horrible thing come about? Why did the ministers remain silent for a century while the thing that is rising to destroy the dark continent grew with the frightening rapidity of a malignant cancer?

Perhaps the ministers thought that it was their duty to represent their congregations instead of representing God. Perhaps they thought that their primary responsibility was to the people to whom they ministered, instead of to God and the heritage of truth which He has given to us. At all events, the church allowed the thing to grow. They called it "apartheid", a Dutch word that means separation, apartness, segregation.

They allowed their government to pursue a relentless purpose of complete racial segregation. To make it worse, the leaders of this government were men who had a form of godliness but who utterly denied the power of that godliness. The former prime minister of South Africa had, in his earlier years, been an ordained minister in the Dutch Reformed Church.

It's interesting also to remember that Joseph Stalin, in his early years, had been a candidate for the priesthood. When men cram theological knowledge into their heads without having the Lord Jesus Christ in their hearts, there is the making of an explosion. At last, now in South Africa, the Church of Jesus Christ has dared to stand up against the government which it allowed to rise to power.

If anyone asks if this is not a contradiction of the text we are studying, we must reply that in a true democracy, the people are the ultimate source of authority, and they have the right to have that authority administered as they wish. Therefore, the whole people is answerable to God. In South Africa, there is now great division, a division of fear. It is the division between those who are terrified because they do not know God, and those who are coming back to God.

Others are beginning to walk the true Christian road, not fearing what man can do to them, if only they can stand for God and truth. As the climax of its selfish policy, the government passed a law recently that forbids any interracial association in a church meeting. Satan, working through the constitutional government, was trying to tell the church what to do.

But finally, the church has begun to exercise its true function and is telling its members that they are to disobey such evil laws. The president of the Methodist Church in South Africa stated that the churches have tried anxiously to avoid a head-on clash with the state, but the series of apartheid laws has made the present clash inevitable. The Congregational Union of South Africa passed a resolution setting forth its sincere conviction that the government's apartheid policy has no sanction in the New Testament and is diametrically opposed to the teaching of Christ.

The Baptist Union followed with a resolution condemning social and economic injustice and the breaking of solemn pledges given to non-Whites. The Presbyterian Church of South Africa now says that the actions of the government are morally indefensible. The Christian Council of Churches, representing some 23 Protestant denominations, has stated that denial of freedom of association and enforcement of compulsory apartheid in any sphere of our life is denial of the law of God.

The Roman Catholics have come out just as strongly, characterizing apartheid as blasphemous, a purpose dwarfing every other purpose and an end justifying any means. But the most startling thing of all, perhaps, in the declaration of the Roman bishops is their call to the people to consider the inner nature of apartheid: its evil and anti-Christian character, the injustices that flow from it, the resentment and bitterness it arouses, the harvest of disaster it must produce.

And then the bishops demanded an immediate change in the government's racial policy before the whole country faces a holocaust, a wholesale burning, a bloodbath. One writer says of this, "Things are far gone in South Africa when Whites say such dread things out loud to other Whites. Terror of the great mob is a maddening, lashing fear that the small White minority usually keeps caged in the deepest subcellars of the unutterable."

But the bishops rubbed in their warning. The victims of apartheid now find it hard to accept counsels of moderation. Embittered by insult and frustration, they distrust any policy that involves a gradual change. Their slogan has become "Revolution, not evolution." The bishops concluded that a change must come, otherwise our country faces a disastrous future. The time is short, they say, and the need is urgent. Those penalized by apartheid must be given concrete evidence of the change before it is too late.

The Anglican Church of South Africa caused a letter to be read from all Anglican pulpits there, advising all communicants to defy the law of the state. Interpreting the action, one editor wrote, "Certain provisions of the new Native Laws Amendment Act bar Negroes from attending services at churches in White communities without specific permission from the minister of Native Affairs. Under no defensible understanding of the church could such legislation be binding on Christians."

"No matter what our disputes on no matter how many theological and ecclesiastical questions, there must be unanimity on this: no state can tell any church who can worship in or join that church. No matter what else a church puts up with from an obstreperous government, here the church cannot acquiesce and remain the church. Here the state invades the church, tries to be the church, and even the most docile church retains its character in Christendom only by repelling the invasion."

"We believe," said the Anglican bishops, "that it is morally wrong to follow a policy which has as its object the keeping of any particular racial group in a permanent position of inferiority, and we believe that racial discrimination practiced in this country, South Africa, is directed to this end."

Now, let us sum up the situation in South Africa before we move across the world in a return to our own situation in the United States of America. In South Africa, a tiny White minority, moved by great fear on the part of the fearful, and by great laziness on the part of people who should have been the moral leaders of the past generations, allowed a situation to develop in which the common rights of man were trampled into the mud to allow greed, pride, and arrogance to be enthroned as the leaders of an age.

Slowly, the powers of darkness moved to take such complete control that finally the churches were forced to cry out, indeed, to shout, that there was evil, evil, evil, and that it must cease. I am afraid that the evil has gotten out of hand and that it is now too late in South Africa and that the avalanche has already begun its swift slide towards the precipice. The rest of the world can only stand aside and pray as we see the sins of the fathers being visited upon the children and the innocent suffering with the guilty.

But let us now have the courage to face the situation as it has grown up quite differently in our own country. It will do no harm for those whose inheritance is from the North to recognize that they are the children of the slave traders who built up some of the great fortunes of New England and the East through their traffic in human flesh. It will do no harm for those whose inheritance is from the South to recognize that early Southern culture was based on the toil and washed in the tears of the kidnapped children of Africa.

Slavery today exists mainly in the Muslim world and under Communism. It was a true believer in Christ who started the movement that ended slavery in the Western world. It was the little hunchback William Wilberforce who furnished the leadership that eventually changed the face of the world for the slaves. Wilberforce was a misshapen child of wealthy parents. They employed Isaac Milner to tutor the boy, and Milner led him to Christ.

Alone at first and then with others to help him, he hammered on the conscience of England until he succeeded in ending the slave trade in 1807 and in freeing those who were already slaves by 1833. Incidentally, it was this same Wilberforce who gave the Roman Catholics in England the right to worship in their own way after 200 years of suppression.

Many Americans do not know that our own abolitionist cause sprang from the work of this Wilberforce. The power of Jesus Christ working in many directions and through many people freed the slaves in the United States. One has only to read the history of the abolitionist movement to know with what force the Gospel of Jesus Christ can explode in an ethical situation and stir men to true thinking that leads to dynamic action.

The war between the states gave titular freedom to the slaves of this country, but greed and lust of the carpetbaggers lessened its scope and depth. The disintegration of race relationships began, and in large measure, the voice of the church was silent. The politicians, nudged by their minorities, began to push laws through Northern state legislatures and the civil rights program began to move again under the pressure of liberals. But for many years, the Church of Jesus Christ was silent.

11:00 on Sunday morning was still the most segregated hour in America. Some even preached against the direction of racial problems in India and Africa but were silent about such problems in the shadows of their own steeples. Sometimes this segregation was two-sided. I approached the Negro pastors in Philadelphia many years ago and asked them if they could introduce us to an interested couple who might join our church and show the way for oneness in the body of Christ.

The pastors were profuse in their expressions of appreciation, but there were no candidates forthcoming. After a lapse of almost two years, and in spite of many proddings, the situation was unchanged. Finally, one young Negro pastor said to me, "Doctor, you must realize that if any one of us had a couple like you want, we would do everything in our power to keep them supporting our own work and attending our churches."

I turned the matter over to the Lord as I should have done in the first place, and it wasn't long before He settled it in His own way. But the churches have lagged in the great social problems of our day. Entire denominations talk about the witness of the Spirit and hold long discussions over minute theological differences but are unwilling to open their pews to people of other races. The irony was all the keener when these churches became highly emotional over the plight of the benighted heathen and eased their conscience by paying hush money to a large missionary budget.

Now, let us sum up by contrasting the role of church and government in South Africa and in the United States. The two nations face problems that are similar and yet very different. There is a White minority on a Black continent and a Black minority on a continent that is White because of the murder of hundreds of thousands of its original Indian inhabitants. Our forefathers murdered approximately four million American Indians.

In South Africa and in the United States, there are strong bodies of Christian people. In both nations, prosperity and wealth have washed a scum of laziness over the Christians. In South Africa, an evil government aroused the church to the need of cleansing that she might be faithful to her high mission in this world. In the United States, the situation is quite different. We have been just as prosperous and just as morally lazy as the South Africans.

But it has taken a government more righteous than the church to arouse Christians to their need of cleansing that we might be faithful to our mission in the world. Our Supreme Court has aroused the church to look at itself in the light of a clear conscience. In South Africa, the churches are now saying to their people, "Do not obey the government in this matter, for it is not Christian." The churches in the United States must, on the contrary, give to their people the words of our text: "You must needs be subject."

We thank God that we do not have to contend with an arbitrary, Christ-denying government. We thank God that our nation has men of high principle and of Christian conviction in many places of leadership. God has so arranged life that difficulties occur, but these difficulties are frequently great aids to spiritual growth. The godlessness of many of our national attitudes is no better than the godlessness of Moscow. How can anyone think that godlessness in racial matters is any different from godlessness in a class warfare between proletariat and bourgeois?

The Christian must walk very close to his Lord. Every decision must be made in the light of the Holy Spirit's presence illuminating the Word of God. I must be sure that integration has taken place in my heart through the Lord Jesus Christ. So long as I erect barriers of segregation that put me on one side of any decision in this world and the Lord Jesus Christ on the other side, I can have no satisfaction in my understanding, no peace in my heart, no joy in my soul, and no fellowship with those for whom Christ died.

When I ask God to take me out of the barren fields of selfishness, then I can be at one with all men because I am at one with God. This oneness with God comes in what I have called wholesale and retail fashion. There must be the once-for-all yieldedness of my soul to His lordship, and then there must be the moment-by-moment walking before Him in even the smallest choices of life. Our consciences must be subjected to authority because they have been subjected to God. The Lord willing, we will continue this study of conscience in our next hour together.

And we ask our God that Thou shalt bless as we study the Bible together, that we may know Thee better, that we may love Thee more, that we may be yielded to Thee and stand wherever Thou hast placed us to do the work that Thou hast given us to do. We ask it in the name and for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Guest (Male): Salvation is not a matter of race, but a matter of grace. The Lord is building his church throughout the world and calling to himself a people from every nation, tribe, and tongue. We hope you have benefited from today's message entitled The Church and Race Relations. To listen to additional Bible 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 Church and Race Relations, or simply ask for message number R13-5. We would also like to make available to you a free copy of our booklet entitled Abounding Grace. In his book, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, John Bunyan described his despair over the weight of his sin before finally finding peace in Jesus Christ.

Perhaps like Bunyan, you feel the burden of your sin pressing in on you. You may feel that you have fallen so often and sinned so badly that you may have given up any hope of salvation. This free booklet will convince you that the superabundant flood of God's grace is available to cleanse you and give you peace. Ask for your free copy of Abounding Grace when you call or write.

Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is a radio ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We exist to promote a biblical understanding and worldview. Drawing upon the insight and wisdom of Reformation theologians from decades and even centuries gone by, we seek to provide contemporary Christian teaching which will equip believers to understand and meet the challenges and opportunities of our time and place.

The Alliance also produces the radio broadcasts The Bible Study Hour featuring the teachings of the late Dr. James Montgomery Boice and Every Last Word featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. Philip Graham Ryken. For a 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 listeners like you. If you have benefited from this program 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 us toll-free: 1-800-488-1888. That's 1-800-488-1888. Write to 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.