Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

Guest (Male): The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals presents the timeless teaching of Dr. Donald Gray Barnhouse.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Israel was producing the heads of the 12 tribes and such men as Moses, Aaron, Elijah, Elisha, David, Solomon, and the prophets. And these when they had finished their work on earth were going to heaven. And these are the men who are to people heaven. Around them there was a multitude of godless nations producing the Pharaohs, the Belshazzars, the heathen poets and philosophers who worshipped demons and plunged from their earthly death into the second death.

Guest (Male): Over a half a century ago, the late Dr. Donald Gray Barnhouse, then pastor at 10th Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, saw the need to spread God's word beyond the hearing of his local congregation. He started the 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 Oracles of God. In ancient times, people would seek wisdom and guidance by cutting open birds and examining their entrails or by observing their flight patterns.

Modern man may laugh at these primitive practices, but thinks nothing of consulting his horoscope, calling a telephone psychic, or seeking direction from a fortune cookie. In any era of history, what is the antidote to the spiritual poison of superstition and false religion? The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is Romans chapter three and verses one and two. Here again is Dr. Donald Gray Barnhouse with the message entitled The Oracles of God.

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 for thy word. Give us submission to it and in this hour may it enter into our hearts and bring light and life that we may walk in the light and live of thy life. It shall not return unto thee void. Use thy word then in this hour to thy purposes. We ask it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and for his sake. Amen. What advantage then hath the Jew or what profit is there in circumcision?

Much every way, chiefly because that unto them were committed the oracles of God. This is the third chapter of Romans and the first verse and our text for today. Undoubtedly there was a distinction between the Jew and the non-Jew and God himself had made that distinction from the moment that he called Abraham. Paul could not stand up and say that there was no difference for there always had been a difference. And if then the life of the heart is more important than the circumcision of the flesh, what has the choice of the Jew as a nation really amounted to anyway?

By the very command of God, they had held themselves in a place of superiority to other men less favored. God himself laid down rules concerning prayer to himself in the Old Testament time. Jews could approach him. No other member of the human race could do so without first changing his human nationality. Ruth the Moabitess had to say, Thy people shall be my people before she could say and thy God shall be my God. Naaman the Syrian became a Jew in order to pray acceptably. He took back to Syria two mules burden of earth in order that he might spread it out in his house and step upon it when he prayed and offered an offering to the Lord.

He was stepping onto the soil of Palestine and claiming access to God on the grounds of God's promises. In the book of Esther, we have the record that when Haman was hung and the Jews instituted the feast of Purim, that many of the people of the land became Jews as we read in Esther 8:17. Now if there was some definite advantage to be found in the nationhood of Israel and in the fact that the Jew was marked off by the command of God with a cutting of his flesh to symbolize the covenant, why then was Paul now saying that circumcision had brought nothing to the Jews unless there was the spiritual cutting of the heart that men might live in righteousness.

And the answer is then given by the Holy Spirit in the next verse. There was a great advantage in being a Jew, much advantage, much every way. Not merely in a single point was there an advantage for the Jew, but in every way. Now before we proceed further in the explanation of that advantage, it may be necessary to clear up one difficulty that has been raised in modern times in the minds of some. The devil hates the promises that have been given to the Jews and he hates the Jews because they are the objects of so many wonderful promises.

We shall see later what some of these promises are, but at this point we wish to emphasize that the promises are for the Jews. They have what the Vulgate calls the prerogatives. They have a preeminence, a superiority, an advantage. There have been many attacks on them because of the promises of God. One such attack is from a group that calls itself British Israel and which attempts to teach the Jews have been abandoned by God and that all of the Bible promises are for Israel which they separate from the Jews and which they identify as the Anglo-Saxon nations.

Now the teaching is filled with absurdities and we're not astonished to find that the originator of the idea brought it forth between two long periods as an inmate in a British insane asylum according to the encyclopedia account of the cult. But the biblical refutation is found in second Chronicles chapter 11 where it is stated that the faithful of all the northern tribes moved down to the south in order to obey the word of God and worship at Jerusalem, the only place in which a sacrifice could be offered acceptably to God according to the book of Leviticus.

And when God gave his council to the nation, he stated in second Chronicles, speak to all Israel in Judah and Benjamin because out of all the tribes of Israel such as set their hearts to seek the Lord God of Israel came to Jerusalem to sacrifice unto the Lord God of their fathers. So they strengthened the kingdom of Judah. And here in our text in Romans, all of the promises of the Old Testament are certified to the Jews, even to the Jews who live today as we shall see. Calvin has a very beautiful sentence on why the 12 tribes chose the name of one tribe, Judah, the Jew to cover them all.

Whether then they meant to provide for the future or remedy an evil already received, they all, I think, assumed the name of that tribe in which the purity of religion remained the longest and which by a peculiar privilege excelled all the rest as from it the redeemer was expected to come. For it was their refuge in all extremities to console themselves with the expectation of the Messiah. However this may be, by the name of Jews, they have vowed themselves to be the heirs of the covenant which the Lord had made with Abraham and his seed.

And to this I would add that if the name Jew has ever been given a bad sense on the lips of any man, it is because Satan hates the name since God Almighty has forever ennobled it by writing over the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ that he was Jesus of Nazareth, Rex Judaeorum, king of the Jews. And the hope of heaven that every Christian may possess, my own salvation even, my hope of heaven is inextricably bound up with the Jews and the glorious promises which God made through Abraham. In the second verse of this third chapter of Romans, the Holy Spirit now sets forth the chiefest of the reasons why there was much advantage in being a Jew, not only nationally, but naturally.

Later in the epistle, there will be a return to the subject and a whole list of Jewish advantages will be given, but now the most important is declared that unto them were committed the oracles of God. Now it's unfortunate in a in a way that the English version translates this by the word oracles, for there is a bad connotation in that word that comes from pagan times. Men have always wanted to know about their future and how to make choices. Ancient authors have recorded that some people consulted the movements of fish in a tank and the movements of snakes in a pit.

Pausanias tells how people left a coin by a certain altar of Hermes, stopped up their ears and walked through a crowd until suddenly they unstopped their ears and took guidance from the first words which they heard uttered by some chance passerby. In one temple, there was a priest who interpreted the whispers of the branches of an oak tree moving in the wind. The commonest form of divination had to do with birds. In Rome, it was an organized system of state ceremonies. Public officials called augurs listened to the talk of birds. The word augur comes from the Latin word for bird, avis, and talk which has given us the word garrulous, augur.

Now when the augur said that all was well, the official ceremonies then proceeded. We talk today of the inauguration of a president without realizing that the Latin for bird talk is in the middle of the word. Others watch the flight of the birds. People watch the birds very carefully and the bird watchers have given us another word in our language. For our word auspices and auspicious are made up of two Latin words, bird and watch. When we say that a meeting will be held under the auspices of some society, we go back to the time in the life of our race when men looked at birds to see if they could find out from the whim of their flight some pattern that would prophesy a good day.

And the priests of Rome opened the bodies of birds to see how the entrails were marked and gave clearance for projects or halted their progress depending on what they had seen in the markings there. And if you are prone to laugh at them for such doings, let us not forget that in our country today there are those who decide their movements by the cut of cards, the toss of a coin, the fall of dice, the reading of tea leaves, the lines in the palm of a hand, the horoscope read by some astrologer, the meaning of dreams, or some other fantasies of the same kind.

Now this is a pitiful lesson which shows the depths of folly to which men are plunged when they abandon the truth of God. For it is only when men have abandoned the truth of God that they will stoop to such vagaries as those we have described in ancient or modern times to which men give themselves in their attempt to outwit God and to know something of the immediate future. The Christian walks by faith and not by sight. When the Greeks spoke of oracles, they used two other words quite different from the Greek word in our text in Romans.

For here we do not find manteion or chreoterion, the commonly used words for the ancient pagan oracles, but logia which derives from logos used in the Gospel of John for the word where we read in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God and the word was made flesh and dwelt among us. The word logia is found four times in the New Testament. The first is in the speech of Stephen made just before he became the first Christian martyr. Speaking to the council in answer to the question of the high priest concerning his teaching, Stephen recounted the history of the Jewish people.

When he came to the section about Moses, he included the phrase, this is he who received the living oracles to give unto us. Again this word is found in the epistle to the Hebrews where the author chides the chosen people for their failure to grasp spiritual teachings saying, for when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God. And finally Peter is talking to Christian teachers and tells them that when they teach they are to speak as the oracles of God.

1 Peter 4:11 and this last usage gives to our word the tone of supreme authority of the finality of the utterance of God. Our Lord has spoken and there is the end of the discussion. This is the word of God. This is that which was committed to Israel. Now in our passage in Romans then it is declared that the chiefest of the advantages of the Jewish people was that they had been the ones to whom had been entrusted the revelation of God. If we look at the circumstances of their choosing and trace their history, we can see how indeed this was a magnificent advantage, though it brought with it certain responsibilities, certain dangers, and certain triumphs.

The human race like a slowly flowing stream spread out over the plains of earth from the time of the original creation. Man exhibited in himself the fact of the truth of God's statement to Adam to whom it had been said, in the day that thou eatest of the forbidden fruit, thou shalt surely die. Slowly the centuries rolled on and it became evident that man was a failure under conscience as he had been in the garden of Eden in innocence. The flood came and carried away the rebellious race with the exception of Noah and his family.

In the conditions that prevailed on the earth after the flood, man had the power to govern mankind. The penalty of capital punishment was instituted by God and the race possessed all of the advantages of the earth with one language and one speech. They lay upon the land what we might call as United Nations, but they had in them the seeds of individual sins and of hatred towards one another. Finally at Babel, they demonstrated their contempt of the promises of God and instituted the worship of the stars of heaven. God picked out one man after the confusion of tongues, one man, Abraham, and made certain promises to him.

God said, in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed. Here were two promises. The families of the earth and the nations of the earth were to be blessed. There was to be an individual blessing and a governmental blessing through the Jews. The first of these promises has been fulfilled. The Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah, has come to the earth bringing salvation to the race so that today whosoever will may come to him and find pardon for sin and peace with the creator God.

The blessing of the nations has not yet taken place, though the fulfillment of that promise is as sure and certain as is the accomplishment of the first promise. The choosing of Abraham involved the setting up of the divine way of access to God. A priesthood was chosen and while it was to be a temporary priesthood working in shifts and being replaced at the end of the day by other men and at the end of life by another generation, yet it maintained the altar by which men could approach God. These priests shed the blood which made it possible for the sins of Israel to be forgiven.

There was no other way of salvation. Therefore the children of Israel by multitudes went to heaven while the the multitudes of the nations were lost souls with the exception of the few who embraced the truth, accepted circumcision and entered one of the tribes of Israel. But the vast majority of the saved were from among the tribes of Israel. This was indeed an inestimable advantage. It made the difference between heaven and hell. Truly Israel had a great advantage. But that was not all. The Messiah was to be born and when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his son made of a woman, made under the law to redeem them that were under the law.

The Messiah came and shed his blood thus taking up the promissory notes of salvation issued to those of Israel who had believed God's word about the blood sacrifices which never in themselves could take away sin. We must never forget that the one basis of salvation was always the shedding of the blood of the son of God. Moses himself is in heaven today, not because he kept the law, but because his brother Aaron killed a lamb for the remission of his sins which was a picture of the fulfillment of the atonement in the death of the savior by whom Moses is saved.

But that is not all. The chiefest of the priorities of the Jews was that they were the people chosen by God not only to produce the Messiah who was to bring individual redemption to individual sinners, but they are the people who have been chosen by God to be the ultimate colonial administrators of this earth at the time of the return of the Lord Jesus Christ. There is much confusion about this matter because naturally Satan does not want people to understand that he has been thoroughly and soundly defeated by the death of the Jewish son of God on the cross of Calvary and that while he is still free, the sentence has been pronounced and the judgment shall soon be put into execution.

One confusion which is prevalent today arises out of the false doctrine which looks upon the church as a kingdom and which therefore sees no place for the fulfillment of the oracles which God gave to the Jews. One of Satan's subtlest inventions through the ages has been that of getting men to look upon the church as a kingdom to be established upon the earth for the purpose of ruling instead of a group of people to be martyred because of a witness. The error rose after the fall of the Roman Empire. People could hardly conceive of a world that could exist in normal life without a central power at Rome.

Feudalism developed simply because there was need for some power on every level where all power had been destroyed by the barbarian hordes. The bishops of Rome were strong enough to take over government of that city and little by little there developed the idea that they should take control of everything. The Bible had to be twisted to justify such a position and naturally the promises to the Jews had to be destroyed first of all before they could build the edifice of error. And so the promises were demonized, though they called the process spiritualizing. And when the reformation came, the error was brought out of Rome into some parts of Protestantism even as the grave clothes were brought out of the tomb on the shoulders of the living Lazarus.

Only by the study of the word of God can we obey the Lord Jesus, loose him and let him go. Now from this error of confusing the church and the kingdom has grown almost all the modern manifestations of anti-semitism. It is comprehensible in the light of Satan's hatred of the Jews and his desire to have them replaced in the minds of men by any group which can hold the spotlight away from the Bible promises of his ultimate replacement in government by the Jewish people whom God has chosen for this process. Another confusion is caused by good friends of the Jews who persist in calling them God's chosen people.

A group of newspaper men once asked me why God did not take better care of his chosen people. This was in the days of Hitler's advances into Prague and Vienna. I answered that the Lord was taking wonderful care of us and that we were lacking for nothing, but one of the men expostulated, oh I mean the Jews. I replied that I would give any one of them $50 if they could show me a single verse in the Bible which said that the Jews were now at present in our century the chosen people of God. I then had to explain to them that the Jews had been chosen God's people and that they were being preserved in the world in order to function in the future as God's chosen people, but that today God has but one chosen people made up out of every kingdom, tongue, tribe, and nation of Jews and Gentiles composed of every individual who is born again through faith in the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.

God's chosen people today is the true church, the invisible church, not the organization, but the organism, not the Protestant church, nor the Roman Catholic church, nor any other church, not those who are distinguished by any outward name or sign, but those who have been circumcised in the heart through faith in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, not those who have been baptized this way or that way with this form or ceremony of water, but those whose sins have been washed away by the sacrifice of Christ. The chosen people of God is the totality of all who have made the life choice of righteousness through the redemption provided by the grace of God which has come to us through the Jewish Messiah.

Today his mercy is open. Our God and Father take the words of thy book to the hearts of men today and may they see clearly the wonder of the divine oracles, the word of God with the promises through the Jews which have brought to us our personal salvation and which will bring to this poor dying world the peace that it so desperately needs. May men turn to the savior while it is yet the day of grace. We ask it through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Guest (Male): Salvation is of the Jews by faith in the Jewish Messiah as revealed in the pages of scripture. God offers eternal life to people of every nation who come to him in his way on his terms. We hope you've benefited from today's message by Dr. Barnhouse entitled The Oracles of God. You can listen to additional Bible teaching by the late Dr. Donald Gray Barnhouse anytime, anywhere around the globe via the internet by visiting the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals website at alliancenet.org. An audio copy of today's teaching is available by calling us toll-free at 1-800-488-1888. Today's message again is entitled The Oracles of God or simply request message number R3-1.

We would also like to make available to you a free copy of Dr. Barnhouse's booklet entitled Jesus the Great I Am. If you ask people for their opinion about Jesus, they may say he was a powerful prophet, a brilliant moral teacher, or even the greatest man that ever lived. But these high opinions are woefully inadequate. In this booklet, Dr. Barnhouse examines the Bible's remarkable claims that Jesus is Jehovah God in human flesh and the significance of this glorious truth for all of us today. This biblical look at the deity of Christ can powerfully impact your spiritual life.

Ask for your free copy of Jesus the Great I Am when you call or write. Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is a radio ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals 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 materials which will equip believers to understand and meet the challenges and opportunities of our time and place. Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible comes to you through the generous gifts of our listeners.

If you have benefited from this 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 support and further our work, please contact us by writing Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Box 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103. Call toll-free 1-800-488-1888 or visit us online at alliancenet.org. Be sure and ask for a free updated resource catalog featuring books, audio teachings, commentaries, booklets, daily devotionals, videos, and a wealth of other materials from outstanding reform teachers and theologians including Donald Gray Barnhouse, James Montgomery Boice, Michael Horton, and Martin Lloyd Jones.

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