Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

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

Guest (Male): Today, when a man has acted so obnoxious that he receives a black eye or a solid poke in the jaw, the bystanders all say, "What are you whining about? You asked for it. You had it coming to you." And God speaks thus to his nation. The difference is that they had become involved with God, even with the true God, who had not been ashamed to call himself the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And when men came to sneer at them, they came also to sneer at their God. Over a half a century ago, the late Dr.

Donald Gray 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 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 Power of Faith in Life. Back in the Wild West, traveling peddlers sold elixirs that promised to give amazing health benefits.

These tonics never lived up to expectations and came to be known as snake oil. Believers tell the world about life-changing power of faith in Jesus Christ, but too often unbelievers look at our lives and suspect that we are selling spiritual snake oil. How can we back up our testimony with lives transformed by the power of faith? Let's find out as today Dr. Barnhouse takes us to Romans chapter two and verse 24. Here again is Dr. Donald Gray Barnhouse with the message entitled The Power of Faith in Life.

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 hast given us the opportunity of living for thee in the midst of the darkness of this world. We pray thee that we may so live as to glorify thee on the earth that others may see the power and reality of the life which thou dost give and in turn be led to glorify thee. Speak to our hearts in this hour. We ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and for his sake.

Amen. For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles through you, as it is written. Our text in the second chapter of Romans is a quotation from the Old Testament. In the New Testament context, it is the climax of the truths we have been studying, namely that God wants more than profession of religion. He desires possession of power in the lives of those who name his name. It is not enough to listen to truth, but truth must be espoused and followed to its logical consequences in life. In a world where comparatively few people have any convictions at all and where many who have convictions refuse to stand up and be counted, the Lord points out the dire results.

The masses come to ridicule the power of faith in the life and come insensibly to blaspheme God because he cannot be seen where he wishes to display himself in the hearts and lives of those who possess him. It is a text that can be applied across the face of history to parties of every stamp. I am digging deeper than the surface in that which I teach. The text will be applied to every heart before I am through. It has belonged in turn through the years to Jews, to Catholics, to Protestants, to fundamentalists. Lips have been curled and men have sneered because of the actions of almost all who profess a faith of any sort.

Our text then is aiming at reality. God wants a profession of truth that shall expose truth to the world, a profession of life that shall proclaim holiness, a knowledge of righteousness that shall display justice. And he wants all of these attributes in spirit and in truth and not in counterfeit. First, let us note the truth as it was set forth hundreds of years before Christ in the book of Isaiah. God is speaking to Israel and telling them why such terrible judgments had fallen upon their land and why Jerusalem had been so often sacked by the enemy.

He had been arousing their hope by telling them that the time would come when Jerusalem would be pure and there would come no defiling thing into it. It was because of their sin that they had come into bondage. They had sold themselves for naught. We're reading in Isaiah 52. It should be noted that this people which had begun in such high privilege is depicted as having sold itself into bondage. When a nation accepts immoral conditions, it is selling itself into slavery. In our day, the nations bought for themselves the First World War by their greed and selfishness.

They bought the Second World War by their unwillingness to take up the burdens of Manchuria and Ethiopia when it was time. Today, we are buying the Third World War and paying billions of dollars for it. The first two wars we had to go across the world to collect. They were FOB Europe and Asia, but the Third World War is being packaged for delivery to us and it will be delivered as surely as God created moral principles. The nation of Israel had been in slavery in Egypt and they had been in slavery in Babylon. What had they sold themselves for?

And the answer comes from God that they had sold themselves for naught. We are buying the Third World War by insisting on an outrageously high standard of living, a standard that permits our people to have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on gambling and the basest of our appetites. Now God then tells Israel that they had been oppressed by the Egyptians and the Assyrians and that they had howled under the oppression. The whining, sniveling attitude of the enslaved people caused the conquerors to blaspheme their God. For here were the people who had been conceived by God in the wilderness and brought forth to dwell in a land of milk and honey.

They had been nurtured in blessing and swaddled with joy. They had been weaned to power and fortified with divine grace and they had departed from God, forgetting that departure brings divine sanctions. And though they had ordered it and paid for it, they whined about it when it was delivered. There is still another passage in the Old Testament in Ezekiel to which our text may refer. Ezekiel says, moreover the word of the Lord came unto me saying, son of man, when the house of Israel dwelt in their own land, they defiled it by their own way and by their doings.

Their way was before me as the uncleanness of a removed woman. Wherefore I poured my fury upon them for the blood that they had shed upon the land and for their idols wherewith they had polluted it. And I scattered them among the heathen and they were dispersed through the countries. According to their way and according to their doings, I judged them. And when they entered into the heathen whither they went, they profaned my holy name. When they, the heathen, said unto them with a sneer, these are the people of Jehovah and are gone forth out of his land.

And then God continues, but I had pity for mine holy name which the house of Israel had profaned among the heathen whither they went. And then there follows the solemn statement that the great judgments that will fall come not because of a punishment of the people for what they have done, but for the honor of his holy name which they had profaned among the nations. Even if man is unaware of it, God knows that it is a monstrous thing that those who derive their glory from God should disgrace his holy name. In the days of the New Testament, the charge was brought by Christ himself against the leaders of Israel, living even then under another slavery, this time under bondage to the Roman Empire.

The fact that they sat at home in Jerusalem as slaves instead of in Egypt or weeping by the waters of Babylon did not change their spiritual situation. Christ lifted the mask from their pretensions and called them hypocrites. 14 times in the Gospel of Matthew he thus calls them. And never in the history of literature is there a record of such terrible epithets applied against men as the Lord Jesus was forced to use to describe these blind leaders of the blind, these graveyards well kept on the outside, but full of corruption and dead men's bones. They were a generation of vipers, cups that were cleaned without but filthy within.

They were men who made long prayers, but who devoured widows' houses. And yet in our context, they were shown to be boosting in the law and were declared to be confident that they were guides to the blind, a light to those who were in darkness, and an instructor of babes. Is it any wonder that the people round about them treated their religious pretensions with a loud guffaw and blasphemed the God whom they professed? The English commentator Haldane has a searching word on our text. He says, the apostles in these verses exhibits the most lively imagination of hypocrisy.

Was there ever a more beautiful veil than that under which the hypocrite, the Jew, presents himself? He is a man of confession, of praise, of thanksgiving, a man whose trust is in the law, whose boast is in God, who knows his will, who approves of things that are excellent, a man who calls himself a conductor of the blind, a light of those who are in darkness, an instructor of the ignorant, a teacher of babes, a man who directs others, who preaches against theft, against adultery, against idolatry, and to sum up the whole, a man who glories in the commandments of the Lord.

Who would not say that this is an angel arrayed in human form, a star detached from the firmament and brought nearer to enlighten the earth? But observe what is concealed under the mask. It is a man who is himself untaught. It is a thief and adulterer, a sacrilegious person, in one word, a wicked man who continually dishonors God by the transgression of his law. Is it possible to imagine a contrast more monstrous than between these fair appearances and this awful reality? No, it is impossible to imagine a contrast more monstrous and yet it is a description that continues through the ages to apply to multitudes who profess an outward form of religion without the possession of the inward reality.

And it applies of course with its fullest force to those who profess the living and true God. We expect a pagan to live like a pagan and to have the booths of prostitutes within the portals of his temples, as is the case in India. We expect the followers of Allah to take the sword and exterminate their enemies in wholesale carnage. We are not astonished when the veil is lifted on the secret rites of the devil worshippers of Africa to find the devotees in orgies of lust and blood. But the Jew of the Old Testament times, from Moses to Christ, and the Christian of the later day, from Pentecost even unto us, have standards that are divinely given and must therefore produce a type of life that is divine.

We expect a savage to live savagely. If the demon gods cannot produce men of high moral culture founded on principles of justice and truth, the lack is comprehensible. A stream cannot rise higher than its source. But the men who draw their calling from the Lord Jehovah should have lived according to his name. The men who name the name of the Lord Jesus Christ should follow him. History is full of noteworthy examples of men of highest profession and lowest practice. There has been the Pope who said, what profit this farce has brought us? There has been the Protestant king of France who followed his own will and with the lowest cynicism lost his soul for the possession of the capital city, saying Paris is well worth a mass.

And we do not have to turn far away from our own doors to find that the name of God is blasphemed because of church members in our own day. The searching radar of the word of God locates the hypocrite in Israel in the papacy, in Protestantism, under any name or sign which men have adapted. There was a true and a spiritual Israel within the ranks of the ancient nations. There have been numbers of true saints in the Roman church who have looked through to the Lord Jesus Christ and borne his name with honor. There have been multitudes of true believers who have lived faithful lives within the bounds of Protestantism.

Newel applies it well to church members when he paraphrases our passage as follows. Thou who gloriest in the gospel, through thy disobedience to the gospel, dishonorest thou God? The name of God is blasphemed among non-church members because of you. Church membership indeed profiteth if thou be an obeyor of the gospel. But if thou be a refuser of the gospel, walk, then thy church membership is become non-church membership. If therefore a non-church member obey the gospel, shall not his church membership be reckoned for church membership? And shall not non-church members, if they obey the gospel, judge thee who with the letter and church membership are a refuser of the gospel walk, that is of a holy life?

For he is not a Christian who is one outwardly, nor is that church membership which is outward in the flesh, but he is a Christian who is one inwardly. And church membership is that of the heart in the spirit, not in the letter, whose praise is not of men but of God. The problem is somewhat complicated as we look around us today by the fact that Satan has raised up a number of individuals of high character and moral attainments whose lives seem to be exemplary, but who do not have saving faith. We must never be confused by the unsaved, so-called saints who sometimes make headlines for their supposed saintliness.

Of course a counterfeit is like the original. What fool would spend his time engraving false money in the shape of a triangle and printing it in blue and gold inks? The value of false money to the counterfeiter is that it is so much like the original that he can pass it off at a profit to himself. He makes his counterfeit dollars in a rectangular shape of the same size as the original and prints them in green and black inks with a picture of Lincoln on a $5 bill and of Hamilton on a $10 bill. So when Satan produces another in the line of Antichrists, preparing the way for the ultimate Antichrist, he gives us a counterfeit saint, a false notion of a meek and lowly Jesus as a non-resisting pacifist is carefully circulated throughout humanity and then the saint is produced, whether in paganism or in the heart of Christendom.

The key to the detection of the false is that he lacks the full-hearted allegiance to the truth of salvation by redemption. There is always the denial of the divine origin of our Lord. The Lord is looked upon as a man instead of as God. The counterfeit talks about religion without redemption, character without Calvary. There is a denial of the inspiration of the Scriptures and an easy rejection of the coming judgment. In our papers and magazines, we have seen many articles concerning a noted man who became a missionary, but a missionary of social deeds without theology, one who alleviates the physical misery of a people without warning them to flee from the wrath to come through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

And when his work is done, it will be as in the days of Hosea. The men who had erected false altars went through all the form and ceremony of worship, but their work, while ostentatious, was empty. Of them God wrote in Hosea 10:8, the high places of Aven, vanity. The sin of Israel shall be destroyed. The thorn and the thistle shall come up on their altars and they shall say to the mountains, cover us, and to the hills, fall on us. The man who is not a believer in Christ must be warned against a pitfall which might be found in my message even.

He must not sit back and say, well, I must shun hypocrites on earth. Therefore I will not go among these church members who are hypocrites. Now such folly is manifest. Salvation is by Christ. If any man refuses Christ because he sees hypocrites in the church, let him realize that the hypocrites are going to spend eternity in the lake of fire and that he is going to be there with them. The excuse that there are hypocrites is all too patently an excuse. No man ever refused to join a lodge because there are hypocrites among the lodge members or to hold stock in a bank because there were hypocrites among some of the other stockholders.

After all, if you want a place to hide, you choose a tree larger than yourself. You must be smaller than an object to hide behind it effectively. Therefore if you seek cover behind the hypocrites, you condemn yourself as being smaller than the hypocrite. Finally, to you who have named the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and who seek to follow him, do not be downcast because of the failures of some believers. You are not to be critical of those who like Peter have moments when they follow after far off. It is true that men are going to judge your God by you.

They will blaspheme him if you betray his holiness and righteousness, but they will glorify him if they see your honest effort to follow after him, believing in him and giving him the glory for all of the triumphs of your life and accepting in yourself the responsibility for all the failures and defeats. It is a wonderful thing to be an ambassador, but it carries with it high responsibilities as well as great privileges. A nation that would allow a craven coward to represent it in an international assembly would be looked upon as a base nation indeed. A nation that would permit its representative to sit dumbly by when its interests were in jeopardy would become a low-ranking nation ere long.

To every Christian therefore comes the bold challenge of the word of God. The Lord tells us that he has placed his interests in our hands. Paul writes to the Corinthians, now then we are ambassadors for Christ as though God did beseech you by us. We pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God. The function of ambassador carries with it all of the honor and dignity of the homeland. If we have the smile of God, we do not need to be concerned if we have the frown of the world. But the smile of the world will be of no value to us whatsoever if we have the frown of God.

God has told us that we are to live so that men will not blaspheme him, but that they will glorify him. The Lord Jesus told his own that they were the salt of the earth. Not only does salt give flavor to food and preserve fish from rotting, but it has another function that is important. As I pointed out a few weeks ago, a Chinese girl in a Bible study discussion group that was talking about the qualities of salt brought out the fact that salt makes one thirsty. This should be the quality of the Christian as the salt of the earth.

Men should see the way that he lives, the evident joy of his being, the manifest power at work in his life and should say, there is a person who has something that I do not have. I want it. Oh, take heed lest you as a Christian so live that you become savorless salt, thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men. The Lord Jesus also told his followers that they were the light of the world. He desires us to be in the world as a city set on the hill.

He pointed out that men do not light a candle and put it under a bushel basket, but on a candlestick where its light can banish the surrounding darkness. So said Christ, let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father which is in heaven. There is the great alternative that is set before us as Christians today. We can live in such a way that men will blaspheme the name of the Lord because of us or we can live in such a way that men will see our good works and glorify our father which is in heaven.

And in this world where man stands in size about middle distance between an atom and a planet, he may count for much or little in the measurements of men. But when we see that the believer has been placed in this world as an ambassador with the possibility of bringing glory to the Lord God of hosts, then the function of being a Christian becomes more important than life itself. Living as a Christian is seen to be the chief purpose of man's existence. And if we enter into the divine purpose, he will give us himself that we may enjoy him forever.

And oh Lord our God and father, we pray thee that thou wilt forgive us where we have betrayed thine interests and strengthen us with all might by thy spirit in the inward man that we may walk worthily of the calling wherewith we have been called. We thank thee that it is a high calling, a holy calling, a heavenly calling. May we not forget that it is thou thyself who has called us. We ask it through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

Guest (Male): Do we really believe the gospel is as powerful as we say it is? Let our lives be so transformed by the power of faith in Jesus Christ that the world must stand up and take notice. We hope you've benefited from today's message by Dr. Barnhouse entitled The Power of Faith in Life. 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 Power of Faith in Life or simply request message number R 2-12. We would also like to make available to you a free copy of Dr. Barnhouse's booklet entitled Secure in Christ. The world is full of difficulties, dangers, and uncertainty and we long for a true sense of peace and security. This free booklet will point you to the true and lasting security that is ours in Christ. Dr. Barnhouse reveals the glorious truth of the gospel that Jesus is willing and able to keep you eternally, powerfully, and unshakably secure in him.

Are you discouraged by your sin and failure and are you struggling in your faith? Ask for your free copy of Secure in Christ 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 exists 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 all believers to understand and meet the challenges and opportunities of our time and place.

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