Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

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

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Do not misunderstand, we do not worship the Bible. We know that there is no value whatsoever in the leather binding or in the paper or in the ink that is impressed on the paper. The value is in the heart of the message, and that message comes from God. And as you cannot separate a man's word from the man, so you cannot separate the word of God from God.

In fact, the Bible is the only absolutely divine thing that there is upon this earth in visible, tangible form.

Announcer: Over a half a century ago, the late Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse, then pastor of 10th Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, saw the need to spread God's word beyond the hearing of his local congregation. He started the weekly radio outreach 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 Gospel of God.

Imagine you were shopping and the owner of an antique store tries to sell you an expensive Ming vase. You examine and see the words "made in Taiwan" on the bottom. You should realize you're being cheated. There are many false gospels in the world, and many people will try to cheat you by dispensing a distortion of spiritual truth. How can you tell the genuine Gospel of God from a cheap and deadly imitation? We'll find out today.

The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is Romans chapter 1 and verses 2 and 3. Here once again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with the message entitled The Gospel of God.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Our Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto Thee our Father and our God and in the Holy Spirit. We thank Thee that when we were dead in trespasses and sins, Thou didst not leave us in our misery, but that Thou didst stoop to save us. And as we tell men of this good news, may they be conscious of a voice beyond our voice and beneath the sound of our words, may there be the thunder of the caress of Thy voice. We ask it through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

At the present time our Bible study is centered in the first chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans. In the first verses of that epistle, we read that Paul was separated unto the Gospel of God which He had promised afore by His prophets in the Holy Scriptures. There are four things about the Gospel in this phrase that must be carefully considered.

One, the source of the Gospel is God. Two, the time of the promise of the Gospel was long before the coming of Christ. Three, the channel of the transmission was a group of men, and four, the communication of the Gospel is through written documents.

First, the source of the Gospel is God. The whole of the story of salvation would be nonsense were it not for the fact that the very nature of God is love. We must not be confused into thinking that God is love apart from any other attributes. In fact, if you say that God is love without realizing that God is hate of sin, you have no Gospel at all because you do not have God.

The people who teach that God is love without teaching that God is also hate of sin have in reality another God who is really Satan with a mask on. You will never understand Satan if you do not realize that he loves to masquerade as God, and that you will find him most often at church, in the pulpit, in the Bible class, preaching and praying with a mask of a saccharine God in front of his grinning face.

God so hated sin that He gave His only begotten Son. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. These two sentences are identical in real thought. They cannot be separated in our minds without distorting the nature of the Godhead. The great and dominating love of God, however, is the theme of the good news that we present to men. His name is love, His nature is love.

Wesley put it well in one of his hymns: "Whence to me this waste of love? Ask my Advocate above. See the cause in Jesus' face. Now before the throne of grace." In later studies, we will see the historical reality of the fall of man and his death in sin. Today, we find him fallen, and we find God loving him and doing something about it.

The Gospel of God in Christ is that God did something about man's predicament. It matters not what your circumstances or how far you have run away from God. He has done something about it, and there is a remedy for your sinful ill and a relief for your most desperate fears. God is love and God loves you.

Secondly, this Gospel of God concerning His Son Jesus Christ was promised long before the time of Christ. One of the commonest arguments of skeptics is that Christianity is a young religion, and that there are oriental religions that were in existence long before the time of Christ.

When anyone brings that argument to me, I ask one question: "Just when do you date the time of Christ?" That generally stops them cold for a moment, and if they try to say that the time of Christ was a mere 20 centuries ago, we can take them to the scriptures and show them that Christ was everywhere indicated long before the day when the baby Jesus was born into this world. The New Testament is utter dribble without the Old Testament, just as the Old Testament is incomprehensible without the New.

It was in the fullness of time that God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law. When the baby Jesus came into the world, it was by the supernatural act of the Godhead, so that in the womb of the Virgin Mary there was conceived a child by the Holy Spirit, that came into this life without a human father, and grew to a manhood that was to end by his own responsible decision in the act of surrender to the will of the Godhead, that He should die for the remission of our sins.

Of Jesus, it can be said, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made." And "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth."

Thirdly, the channel of the transmission of the Gospel story was a group of men. These were the prophets of the Old Testament, and every one of them looked forward to the Lord Jesus Christ. We know these prophets only through their prophecies, so we must consider the third and fourth points together, the writings and the men. After all, a man and his word are identical. You cannot separate the two.

The law recognizes this fact. If you sign your name to a check on a bank where you do not have a deposit, the law will take your body and put it in jail, for your signature is the going forth of your word, guaranteeing that you have an account in the bank, and sufficient money in the account to cover the amount of the check. Your word is yourself. Don't try to tell the judge that he should put the signature in jail. He will not be interested in your argument. He will tell you that you and your word are inseparable, and he will give the two of you a few years in prison to get the matter so straightened out in your mind that you'll keep them in order henceforward.

In like manner, the word of the prophets is identical with the prophets, and as it is the word of God, it is identical with God. "Heaven and earth shall pass away," said the Lord Jesus, "but my word shall not pass away." And the psalmist declared, "Forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven."

Now we must understand that the prophets did not sit down and decide to write books. If a man today thinks that he would like to become an author, he thinks of his theme and then sets down on paper the ideas that come to him. When he's finished his work, he reads it over, and inevitably he's disappointed with it. He knows that if he'd written it over just once more, he would have been able to improve it. But not so with the works of the prophets.

First of all, the impetus for the writing came from God himself. This is definitely set forth in the second Epistle of Peter. Let me tell you how this verse became impressed on my mind. In my student days in Europe, I left France where I was studying for several years in the university, and went down to Athens to live for several months in connection with one of my graduate courses in Greek archaeology.

At the time, I was working all day, every day in the great museum in Athens. During the day, my young wife and our baby of a year sat most of the time in the courtyard until my day's work was done, and then the three of us would go to the Acropolis with our picnic supper and walk among the great ruins and look out over the magnificent scene.

One evening, I was sitting on a stone on the western summit of the Acropolis, looking out across the bay of Salamis with the tip of Acrocorinth on the far distant horizon. I had in my hands one of the ancient Greek historians, and I was reading the account of the Battle of Salamis. For beneath us, on that blue water had been fought one of the decisive battles of the world's history. There the navy of Greece had destroyed the great Persian fleet and had ended the threat of the Orient against the West for several hundred years.

The passage told how one of the triremes was fitted with the prow of sharpened metal, and how it sheared away the oars on one of the enemy vessels. The slaves on the other side of the vessel kept rowing, so that the boat turned around in a circle, and the iron blade then sheared away the oars on the opposite side, and the ship lay helpless before the wind, carried exactly where the wind wished it to be carried.

In my memory there was a faint stirring. It seemed that I remembered those Greek words of a ship being carried by the wind wherever the wind wished to carry it. Suddenly I remembered that it was in a passage of the New Testament. I had a Greek Testament in my pocket and I opened it, searching for the phrase. Then I remembered these words of Peter and turned to them. Listen. "The prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit."

In other words, these men did not initiate the writing of the Old Testament, but like a vessel carried about by the wind at the will of the wind, so these men were carried about by the Holy Spirit, the holy wind, wherever He wished to blow them. And of course, as many of you know, the Greek word that is translated Holy Spirit is the word for wind or breath. It is the holy *pneuma*, p-n-e-u-m-a. What do you call a tire with air in it? A pneumatic tire. Why do you spell it with the letter P? And what is the disease of our lungs, the breath box, as the Greeks called it? It is pneumonia, also spelled with a P.

And this is because the common Greek noun for breath or wind is this word *pneuma*, translated several hundreds of times by our English word the Holy Spirit, or if you take it from the German, the Holy Ghost. This text in Peter then explains our text in Romans. The Holy Spirit took the men of the Old Testament and blew through them, and they set down their divinely given thoughts on paper. When they had finished their writings, some of them did not know what they'd been writing about. In fact, God told some of them that they were not to know.

If you turn to the last chapter of the book of Daniel, you read that Daniel told the Lord, when he had heard the vision, that he did not know what he'd been seeing and writing about. The Lord said to him, in Daniel 12:9, "Go thy way, Daniel, for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end." And that the prophets were earnest students of their own writings is shown by another passage in Peter's Epistle.

Speaking of the confusion that was in the minds of some because there were two lines of prophecy in the Old Testament, one which saw a suffering Savior and the other a glorified King, Peter writes, "Of which salvation the prophets have inquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you; searching what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when he testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow. Unto whom it was revealed, that not unto themselves, but unto us, they did minister the things, which are now reported unto you by them that have preached the Gospel unto you with the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven." And then the verse ends with the curious phrase, "Which things the angels desire to look into."

That thought has always intrigued me: the angels of heaven as students of the Bible. Maybe you'd like to keep yours open a little longer so that your guardian angel can look over your shoulder. But the interesting point of that passage is that the prophets wrote without knowing what they were writing about, and that they studied and searched diligently to see if they could resolve the problem. God told them that they were writing for a future time and for a future people. For God tells us in the last verse of Hebrews 11, that He had provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.

The deepest students of the word of God have always seen the interrelationship of the two Testaments. We must remember, of course, that the early Christians did not have Bibles as we have them. For the art of printing had not yet been discovered. All Bibles were copied by hand on large sheets of paper or on the skins of animals, and the process was tedious and very costly. Probably very few people had read the whole Bible for several hundred years after Christ.

But some of the great fathers of the church had the opportunity. And one of the greatest of these, Saint Augustine, has left us a little rhymed couplet in Latin to tell us how the Old Testament and the New are tied together: *In novo testament patet, quae in veteri latet*. This means that in the New Testament the things were *patet*, patent, open, clear, comprehensible, which in the Old Testament were *latet*, latent, obscure, hidden.

And in the days of the Reformation, Martin Luther wrote a couplet in German which may be translated, "Enfolded in the old, unfolded in the new." The same truth has been put in more modern form in our day. One has written, "The new is in the old concealed, the old is by the new revealed." While yet another Bible student has it, "The new is in the old contained, the old is by the new explained." That is the thought which is set forth in our text. The Gospel of God was promised before time by His prophets in the Holy Scriptures.

Now we are left to the last, the most important testimony of all, that of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. When He arose from the dead, He made Himself known to two disciples on the road to Emmaus, as is recorded in the Gospel according to Luke. Cleopas and the other disciple, probably Mary his wife, were on their way home from Jerusalem on that Sunday morning after the crucifixion.

While they were talking together as they went along, Jesus Himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were holden that they should not know him. He asked them what they were talking about that made them appear so sad. They told him about his own death and how that they had been expecting that He should have turned out to be the Messiah. This means, of course, that they had in their minds the verses of the Old Testament which described the coming of the Messiah in terms of power and earthly kingship, not realizing that the other set of prophecies had to be fulfilled first.

Jesus then answered and said unto them, "O fools and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Ought not Messiah to have suffered these things and to enter into his glory?" The rebuke from the Lord was based on the fact that they had the Old Testament and had not been willing to see that there was a whole line of prophecy which showed that the Savior had to come and suffer for sin before there could ever be any triumph in righteousness.

There could never be a time of peace for this earth until first the Lord Jesus Christ had completed His work of redemption for sin and called out of the world the people, the true church, the living group of all true believers of every denomination and outside of every denomination, who believe on Him in His atoning death as the Savior of those who put their trust in Him.

The passage then concludes, "And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, He expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning Himself." It should be noticed that this is the first teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ after He rose from the dead. In more than one respect, it is the very first sermon of the New Testament era. And what is its subject? The fact that the germ of all the New Testament is to be found in the Old Testament. There is the knowledge that makes Christian hearts glad.

These two who heard it that day on the road to Emmaus, hurried back to Jerusalem and told the disciples what had happened, and they said, "Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked with us by the way, and while He opened to us the scriptures?" And I may say to you today that if you want to have the great spiritual warmth in your heart and being, take the Bible and realize that Christ Jesus is in every part of it. There is absolutely no other means of comprehending the word of God without realizing that all of it is about the Lord Jesus Christ.

We sometimes sing, "More about Jesus in His word, holding communion with my Lord. Hearing His voice in every line, making each faithful saying mine." And if you learn to hear His voice in every line, you will soon say, "Does not our heart burn within us as He comes and talks to us by the way, and as He opens unto us the scriptures?"

There is one other passage in which the Lord Jesus Christ ties Himself and the Gospel to the Old Testament with chains that cannot be broken. One day, He healed a man at the pool of Bethesda. The man gave the praise to Jesus, and the leaders of the people were furious and sought to kill Christ merely because He had performed the miracle on the Sabbath day, Saturday. When the Lord compared Himself to the Father, they tried to kill Him because He made Himself equal with God.

In the argument that followed, the Lord Jesus appealed to the Old Testament. He said, "Ye search the scriptures," and we must understand it as the indicative and not the imperative, "Ye search the scriptures," the equivalent of saying, "You always have your nose in the Bible, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of me." In other words, Jesus said, "The Old Testament was written about me." He continues, "And ye will not come unto me that ye might have life."

A few verses farther on, He completes the argument with a devastating comparison. "Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one that accuses you, even Moses, in whom ye trust. For had ye believed Moses," that is, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, "ye would have believed me, for he, Moses, wrote of me."

Again Jesus makes the claim to be the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecy. But now He goes much further and says, "But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?" Now let us understand clearly what this means. We'll paraphrase it. "If you do not believe the writings of Moses, Genesis to Deuteronomy," says Christ, "you never will be able to believe Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the four Gospels."

It is an astounding claim and one that explains many things. The Lord says that faith cannot pick and choose within the word of God. You have to take the whole of the revelation of God or you cannot have any of it. The Lord said that failure to believe the earliest books of the Bible would make it impossible to believe the Gospel story.

It is a tremendous revelation of the nature of the evil heart of unbelief. It is also a most revealing comment on why Satan levels so many attacks on the book of Genesis. The devil knows that if he can create unbelief in the beginning of the word of God, he's made it impossible for any man to trust in the heart and center of the word of God. For Jesus Christ, the living Word, and the Bible, all of it, the written Word are one, and it is impossible to separate them.

So, the chain of testimony is complete. Our text in Romans, which claims that the Gospel of God was promised a-foretime by His prophets in the Holy Scriptures, is substantiated by the writings of Peter, by the teachings of the Fathers, the Reformers, and the Bible teachers of modern times. But above all, the claim is a part of the warp and woof of the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

The first doctrinal utterance of the Lord Jesus after He arose from the dead was to claim that all this was set forth in the Old Testament writings. The buttress of His arguments in support of His claims to deity was that He was the object of the writings of Moses. And let not anyone say that these were ideas which He developed as He went along. For the evidence is there that on the very first day of His public ministry, just after He had returned from His baptism and His temptation by the devil, He entered the synagogue of Nazareth, opened the roll of the Prophet Isaiah, and read a portion of it. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor," and so on.

And when He had finished, He declared, "This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears." His was no dawning Messianic consciousness, but the clear, positive knowledge from the beginning that He was the Messiah, the theme of the Gospel of the grace of God, and that He had come in order to fulfill that which had been set forth by Him before His incarnation, through the prophets whom He had chosen for that work, and who had written it all down in the word of God.

And that word is called the Holy Scriptures. The word Scripture is almost pure Latin and means "the writings." But they are more than mere writings, they are the holy writings. Holiness is an expression that comes from a root meaning "wholeness." In other words, there is nothing whatsoever that is lacking. It is a complete entity. You put a dissected map of the world together, and when you are through, there is not one piece too many and not one piece too few. So it is with the word of God. It is holy, it is whole. It is set apart by God for the purpose of revealing to us what we are and what He has done for us. The offer is still open. Come to Him today and believe His word about the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And now, our God, we pray Thee that if there be those who have not been born again, that Thou will give to them the stirring of restlessness. It's the kindest prayer we can pray for them. But upon all those who have put their trust in Thee, may Thy clear blessing rest in grace, mercy, and peace, and in a renewed confidence and trust in Thy word. And unto Thee be the glory and the majesty, the dominion and the power now and until the Lord Jesus come again, and forever. Amen.

Announcer: God is love. God is also holy and hates sin. Unless you believe a gospel that sets forth both of these vital truths about God, you do not have the true Gospel of salvation. We hope you have benefited from today's message entitled The Gospel of God.

Listen to additional Bible teaching by Dr. Barnhouse via the internet. Visit us at Alliancenet.org. Again our website, 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 Gospel of God. Or simply request message number R1-3.

We would also like to make available to you a free copy of our booklet entitled, "Why and How to Study the Bible." Christians have many excuses for why their Bibles never find their way off the bookshelf. "I don't have enough time." "Scripture is too hard to understand." "I just don't know where to begin." This free booklet explains why Bible study is so important and how to dig into the scriptures in a way that will make them come alive. You can enjoy a lifetime of fruitful study and application of God's word. Ask for your free copy of "Why and How to Study the Bible" when you call or write.

Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is the 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.

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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. Thanks for listening. Join us again next time for more classic teaching on Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible.