Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

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

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: To anyone who has come to know the Lord Jesus Christ in the salvation from sin which He provided on the cross, there is no difficulty in acknowledging His deity. To anyone who has received the comfort of the Holy Spirit, there is no difficulty in acknowledging that He is indeed the Divine Comforter, come to guide us into all truth.

We know these things by a supernatural understanding. We do not attempt to explain it fully. It is a fact, and there are millions of people who rise to testify to the certain fact.

Narrator: 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 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 Trinity. An agnostic once made fun of Daniel Webster for believing in the doctrine of the Trinity.

But Mr. Webster, how can a man of your mental caliber believe that three equals one? Webster humbly replied, "I do not pretend to fully understand the arithmetic of heaven." The most brilliant theological mind cannot fully comprehend the doctrine of the Triune God, and yet, accepting this scriptural truth by faith is essential to our relationship with the Lord.

The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is Romans chapter one and verses one through five. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with the message entitled The Trinity.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto Thee, our Father and our God, and in the Holy Spirit. We bow before Thee not only as creatures before the Creator, but some of us are able to bow before Thee as sons before the Father, through the faith that Thou hast given us in the Lord Jesus Christ.

We pray Thee that Thou wilt not only make us conscious of our sins, that we may confess and forsake them, but that Thou wilt make us conscious of Thy redeeming love and grace that deals with our sins and makes it possible for us to stand before Thee, to worship Thee in spirit and in truth. And this we ask through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

We have been studying for several lessons in the opening verses in the Epistle to the Romans. Now I want you to turn to those same verses, while I present to you from the word the biblical doctrine of the Trinity. It is very important that we understand the nature of our God, for there can be no real blessing upon ourselves and our work if we are slighting any of the members of the Godhead.

In the first verse of the epistle, we read of the Gospel of God. In the third verse, we read that the Gospel concerns His Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. In the fourth verse, we read in connection with the resurrection of Christ, of the Spirit of Holiness. In these verses, we have the mention of all three members of the Godhead in one context.

The biblical doctrine of the Trinity is not ours by chance. It is, quite true, that the word Trinity does not occur in the Bible. But the fact that God is in three persons is eminently true and of the utmost importance, and is found everywhere in the scriptures. It is well that we sing frequently in our churches, "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty, early in the morning our song shall rise to Thee. Holy, Holy, Holy, merciful and mighty, God in three persons, Blessed Trinity."

In order that we may understand what we mean when we sing God in three persons, let it be made clear what we mean by a person. The word has become common and has the meaning in ordinary speech of a human being. This, of course, is not the meaning of the word as we use it in theology.

The fact that we may call ourselves persons is entirely apart from the fact that we are human beings or that we have bodies. If you talk to a man who has had the misfortune to have lost an arm or a leg or his eyes or his hearing, or to one of the terribly wounded of the war who might have lost almost all of these parts of the body, he will still be aware of his personality. He thinks, he feels, he determines.

These are the marks of personality. We would define a person as any being who has knowledge, feelings and will. The true Christian believes as much as any Jew believes it, that Jehovah our God is one God. Moses proclaims it in Deuteronomy, "Hear, oh Israel, Jehovah our God is one Jehovah, and thou shalt love Jehovah thy God with all thine heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might."

It has been argued that because this verse begins, "Hear, oh Israel, Jehovah our God is one Jehovah," that this excludes the doctrine of the Trinity. The word for one is Echad, and it means not one in isolation, as much as it means one in unity. For example, the same word is used in the story of the creation of the first man and woman.

Because of the nature of the creation of the woman taken from the side of man, God says, "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh." Now no one imagines that the man and his wife become one person, but in a divine way they become one, and the Hebrew word is the same that is used to describe the Godhead. One flesh, "Hear, oh Israel, Jehovah is one God."

We Christians do not believe that there are three Gods, but that there is one true God who is in three persons. It was Saint Augustine who spoke of the fact that God is love and used this as a proof of the Trinity. Love must have an object. So there was the eternal Father, the source of all love, the eternal Son, the object of that love, and the eternal Spirit of love between them. And these three are one.

We recognize immediately that the doctrine of the Trinity is not reasonable. Even when you define the word person as carefully as language can define it, you do not make it acceptable to the intellect alone. I do not expect any listener to be intellectually convinced by a series of logical arguments and come to the rational conclusion that three equals one.

Psychologically, one certainty can be explained by an illustration that most psychologists would have to admit. When an individual is born again through faith in the blood of Jesus Christ, God plants within that individual a new life and a new spirit which enables him to lay hold of certain truths and know that they are true even when he might not be able to have the full comprehension of the reasons for these truths.

You can talk from morning till night to a man who has been born blind and you will never be able to explain to him the colors of the spectrum as seen in the rainbow. He lacks one of the senses, and there is unfortunately nothing that can be done about it. So it is to the non-Christian who attempts to understand the things that are so surely known and believed by those who have come to Christ.

In his epistle, John says, "We know that the Son of God is come and hath given us an understanding that we know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son, Jesus Christ." Shorten it to, "We know that we know." The psychologist must admit that if true Christians have become the object of a miracle work of grace, and if we have received a new set of senses that the ordinary man does not have, and which cannot be procured by a college education, but only by the miracle work of God, then the Christian is able to know and understand certain things that are not comprehensible to the unsaved man, even as light is not comprehensible to the blind.

The humble Christian need not be concerned about the attacks on the heart of the Christian faith concerning the deity of the three persons in the Godhead. The Bible specifically says that we are to expect this lack of comprehension and belief. It is almost impossible to find an analogy to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity.

To use the material to describe the spiritual, to use the finite to describe the infinite, to use the natural to describe the supernatural, imposes a burden upon the teacher that is impossible to carry. I have turned this matter over in my mind for years and have heard and discarded many supposed illustrations of the Trinity.

The nearest I can get to it is an an example that has great lacks, but which may be helpful to some. At this moment, any one of you may hold his hand before him and look at it. Between your eye and your hand, there are three things which are one and which are three. They may all be studied separately, and it is impossible to have one without the others. Between your hand and your eye at this moment are light and heat and air.

Your eye can see your hand because of the light waves that are in the visible spectrum. Even in what we call darkness, when there is no visible light, there are invisible rays. Below the red and beyond the violet, infrared and ultraviolet. Darkness is only a matter of human eyes. That which stimulates the rods and cones of our retina, we call visible light. The rest, no less real, is invisible light.

In front of you in the light that you see, there is also air. You may blow on your hand and you can feel the air that is there. You breathe it in, you breathe it out. You live by it, and there is heat between you and your hand. Take a thermometer and you can measure it and see its variations as you go from a warm room to the winter snow without.

You cannot have light or air without having them at some temperature. You cannot have heat or light without having them in some relationship to our atmosphere. And you cannot have heat or air without having them in some relationship to light. Science can use any one of them apart from the others, but can never separate them totally. To all intents and purposes, they are three, and they are one.

Now it is most interesting that the Bible speaks of these three things in their relationship to God. God calls Himself light, heat, and air. It is written in First John 1:5, "This then is the message which we have heard of Him, and declare unto you that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all."

And speaking of the judgment that must come upon ungodly men, we read in Hebrews 12:29, "For our God is a consuming fire." There are many passages which say that God is spirit, and we shall never understand this if we do not know that the common Greek word for spirit, pneuma, is related to the common Greek word for breath, and that it is at times translated wind.

One verse spoken by the Lord Jesus begins and ends with this word pneuma. "The wind, pneuma, bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth. So is everyone that is born of the pneuma, spirit." This is the common word that is used scores of times for the Holy Spirit, the breath of God.

Light, heat, and air. God is all three. Later on in this first chapter of Romans, it will be brought forth that God was in the process of revealing Himself to man. There are only two things that can be known of God by the faculty of reason. The one is His eternal power, and the other His Godhead.

This is not sufficient for the Christian heart. We must appeal to a jury of more than one of the human faculties. David said, "My heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God." If one uses no more than reason, God declares him to be inexcusable. When I pray at night, I want to know that the Heavenly Father is on the throne of the universe and that He understands me.

This truth has been revealed by God to us. First of all, He manifested Himself in His first person as the Creator and source of all things, the Creator of mankind. After man had sinned, God announced that He would come as the Redeemer. And in the fullness of time, He manifested Himself in this second person, in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Finally, He manifests Himself in His third person as the regenerating Spirit, coming to indwell the believer and to sanctify our beings, ever dwelling with us as our comforter and guide. It is evident that there have been these three modes of manifestation. We see our God in the stars and the flowers, in the soft winds and the mighty phenomena of nature.

And while we are aware of a deterioration in all of these things, we have His word that it is a part of His curse upon sin, and that He is proceeding in an orderly fashion to bring back all things under His rule, He whose right it is to reign. The sin of man made necessary the coming of the Redeemer.

There is a remarkable passage in the book of Proverbs, which has not been set forth as it should have been before men. It is from the heart of the Old Testament and it is talking about God. The oracle said, "Neither have I the knowledge of the Holy One. Who hath ascended up into heaven and descended? Who hath gathered the wind into His fists? Who hath bound the waters in His garments? Who hath established all the ends of the earth?"

I am reading in Proverbs 30:3-4. And then comes this astonishing question, all the more astonishing because it comes from the heart of the Hebrew Old Testament. "What is His name and what is His Son's name if thou knowest?" We know, of course, that His name is the Lord Jehovah of Hosts, and we know that His Son's name is the Lord Jesus Christ.

The moment that it is understood that the Father and Son were eternal, then we can understand much more about the form of the Bible, which skeptics cannot understand. Some have been misled by the fact that there are two names in the early chapters of Genesis that are used for the Godhead. There is the name Elohim and the name Jehovah, Yahweh.

Some have even imagined that there were different peoples with different ideas about God and that they both wrote them down, and then a later editor came along and hacked the two stories apart and attempted to put them together again, and that this attempt is the book of Genesis. Scholars learnedly prate about the J document and the E document, along with others.

But the moment that we understand that Elohim is the name of God as the Creator, and Jehovah is the name of God as Redeemer, not only are the accounts comprehensible, but it is indispensable that they be as they are. Take just the example of Noah when the flood was about to break upon the earth.

Some have imagined that there are traces of two accounts in the story, because in one verse Noah was told to take two of all animals into the ark, and in another that he was to take seven of some into the ark. When we look more closely, we find that it was Elohim, the creating, ordering, sustaining, maintaining God, who ordered Noah to take two of every animal for their survival.

Then it is Jehovah who told him to take seven of the animals of sacrifice into the ark, for there was to be the shedding of blood, and extra animals were thus provided. The narrative says, "And they went in as God, Elohim, commanded him, and the Lord, Jehovah, shut him in." Creator and Redeemer acting together for the preservation and redemption of the race.

And this we find to be the story throughout all of the Bible. Everywhere we see God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Sometimes the same deed is ascribed to each, sometimes the three work together. Sometimes each does his effective part in the entire planned work.

In the language of the Bible, there can be no doubt that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one. We must be careful, therefore, when we name the names of the Trinity not to fall into the common error of thinking that the Godhead is composed of God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit.

Rather, we must say that the Trinity is God, God, and God. Or, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. This does not mean, I repeat, that we believe in three Gods. Far from it. We believe that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is God.

Someone may quarrel with the grammar of that last sentence and say that I should have said that the three *are* God, instead of saying that the three *is* God. But I used the singular verb purposefully because of a remarkable fact in the Hebrew language. In Hebrew, the plural of a noun is formed by adding the sound of M, just as in English we form the plural by adding S.

We would say in English, one cherub, several cherubs. But in Hebrew you would say one cherub, and several cherubim. Thus we speak of the seraph and the seraphim. Now the name for God throughout the Old Testament is principally Elohim. It is a plural noun, from El, Eloah, Elohim. But the remarkable thing is is that it is always used with a singular verb.

It is a device used by God, as extraordinary as if we should use a plural noun or pronoun with a singular verb. We say, for example, I go, you go, he goes. And in the plural, we go, you go, they go. The Old Testament form is as though we should say, we goes downtown and we comes home again. We does our work and we makes our plans, and so on.

This is all the more remarkable when we realize that in the account of the creation, God has said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." Genesis 1:26. Some frivolous readers have objected that there is a contradiction here and that since God is spirit, God could not make man in His own image.

The difficulty disappears in a flash when we realize that the image of God in which man was made has nothing to do with his bodily form, but is rather in his moral and intellectual likeness, and especially in the fact that man is himself a Trinity. A tree has a body, but no soul and spirit. An animal has a body and a soul, if we study carefully the use of the Hebrew words nefesh and ruach. But a man has a body, a soul, and a spirit.

The Lord Jesus Christ told the woman at the well that God is spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. Men have formed their objections in two ways. One, they have objected that man is physical and that therefore the Old Testament idea of God is that of a primitive anthropomorphic God, which really means God made in the image of man.

And two, they have objected that there can be no image of a spirit. There is no doubt whatsoever that millions of people have an idea of God made in the image of man. But the Bible teaches no such thing. There are, of course, many figures of speech in the Bible, concerning God acting toward men in a way that seems to be a human way.

We read of the eye of the Lord that runs to and fro through the whole earth, of the arm of the Lord that is not shortened that He cannot save, of the ear of the Lord which is not heavy that it cannot hear, of the feet of the Lord which shall tread of the winepress of the fierce wrath of God. We read that He has cast our sins behind His back, that His heart is moved toward us, and that His mouth has spoken the eternal word.

Do we then have a God made in the image of man? Is He some strange giant form off somewhere in the universe? Of course not. The Bible has many figures of speech, and they are easily comprehended as figures of speech. In the Psalms, for example, there is a comforting figure which says that God shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shalt thou trust. Nobody dares draw from this the concept that God is a bird.

The image of God which was placed upon man and which man lost in the fall is a spiritual image. I repeat, man, like God, is a Trinity. We've set forth the gradation between a tree, an animal, and a man. Body, body and soul, but body, soul, and spirit.

Man, however, is a soul, and he has a body, and he has a spirit. Thus, we were created in the image of God. When man sinned, he lost a great deal of the image. The spirit fell into the soul, as the third floor of a bombed house may fall into the second floor, and cracks may show in the walls of the first floor.

Unregenerate man lost the divine spirit. Even his religion is of the soul, soulish, natural. If we are to be changed, it must be by the work of the third person of the Godhead, the Spirit of Holiness, the Holy Spirit, who is the agent of God for the reformation of the being of the believer.

As soon as a man becomes a believer in Christ, he has a new spirit created from above, and put upon him by the Holy Spirit. We are made partakers of the divine nature, God tells us. We have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of Him that created him, we read in Colossians 3.

It is the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness, we find in Ephesians. For the believer it is true to say, with the Corinthian epistle, "As we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly." We do not pretend to understand God. If anyone could fully understand God, he would be like God. The day is coming when we shall know even as we are known.

While we wait, we can sing that great hymn of the Trinity. "Come Thou Almighty King, come Thou incarnate word, come Holy Comforter, to the great One in Three. Eternal praises be hence evermore. His sovereign majesty, may we in glory see and to eternity, love and adore."

And our God and Father, we pray Thee that the Holy Spirit will take Thy word to each heart, if there be those who have not been born again. We pray Thee that Thou shall give them restlessness, that they may know no peace until they rest in Christ. But upon Thine own who have truly believed in Thee, may Thy grace, mercy, and peace from Thee, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, be and abide with us now until our Lord Jesus come again and forever. Amen.

Narrator: The doctrine of the Trinity is impossible to fully comprehend. Yet it is a glorious reality for those who have experienced new life in Jesus Christ and the comforting presence of the Holy Spirit. We hope you have benefited from today's message entitled The Trinity.

Listen to additional Bible teaching by Dr. Barnhouse via the internet, visit us at AllianceNet.org. An audio copy of today's teaching is also available by calling us toll-free. 1-800-488-1888. Today's message again is entitled The Trinity, or simply request message number R1-6.

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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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