Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

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

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: The Christian is to be integrated within the whole complex of human relationships, and he must shoulder all the obligations that belong to mass citizenship. The believer is to understand the first and great commandment. He is to render unto God the things that are God’s. That is, he is to love the Lord his God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength. And then he is to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. That is, he is to love his neighbor as himself.

Guest (Male): God’s word is for our heartly gain, to teach, rebuke, correct, and train. Equipped by it, we then pursue the work our God has for us to do. God’s word is all the Christian needs to grow in grace and do good deeds.

Over a half a century ago, the late Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse, then pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, saw the need to spread God’s word beyond the hearing of his local congregation. He started the radio ministry which has become known as Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible. The application of God’s word as taught by Dr. Barnhouse is as relevant today as when he first taught over the radio airwaves decades ago.

The message we’ll be featuring on today’s edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is entitled, "Whence Comes Authority." Some of the followers of Christ expected him to fulfill their expectations as a mighty military and political Messiah, who would finally overthrow the oppressive pagan Roman government. But Jesus, without giving blanket approval to human government, nevertheless upheld its legitimate authority and the responsibility of Christians to obey and submit to the civil and governing authorities.

How can believers today obey the Lord’s commandment to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and render unto God that which is God’s? The scripture text for this edition, Romans chapter 13 and verse 1. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with a message entitled, "Whence Comes Authority."

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ we come unto thee our Father and our God, and in the Holy Spirit. We recognize clearly that man is nothing in himself and that man cannot reach the deep needs of man. Therefore we come, not with any thought of blessing men by that which might begin in our own heart, but by witnessing to that which is centered in the Lord Jesus Christ, seated at thy right hand.

He is there because he died and rose again, and through that death and resurrection we have been brought to new life. May we know what it is to enter into the fullness of that life, growing day by day into the likeness of our Lord, and living in the sphere where thou hast placed us, as the Word made flesh again, that others may see thee in us. We ask it in the name and for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

We come now to the 13th chapter of Paul’s epistle to the Romans, and we begin that epistle with the first verse: Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.

In the 12th chapter of Romans, we have considered the relationship of the believer in Christ first to God, then to fellow believers, and then to all humanity. The chapter closed with great truths concerning the attitudes of life which must be held by the believer in face of provocation. Vengeance belongs to God, and the individual believer must turn his defense over to his heavenly Father.

We read there, "Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but give place to wrath, for it is written: Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. No, if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him drink. For by so doing, you will heap burning coals upon his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."

The 13th chapter contains the divine teaching on the attitude of the believer in Christ toward governing authorities. At this point, we begin a series of studies on the relationship between the corporate church and the state, as well as the relationship of the individual believer to various phases of governing authority, such as the draft board, and therefore the Christian and war, the Christian and civil disobedience, the Christian and revolution against constituted authority. In short, we shall be examining the statement of our Lord Jesus: Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.

First, let us study the context of that famous statement. The Lord Jesus was in conflict with the religious authorities who made various attempts to trap him. His answer foiled one of these attempts. It must be remembered that Palestine was an occupied country during the lifetime of our Lord.

The armies of Rome had replaced those of Greece after the breakup of the power of the successors of Alexander the Great. If we want to get the temper of the populace during the time of Christ, we must recall the feeling of the nations in World War II that were occupied by a foreign power. Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and France furnish us with examples of the conflicts which arise in lands that are oppressed. An example of such a conflict appears in the speech of Gamaliel to the Council when the early church was beginning to make its influence felt.

Guest (Male): Men of Israel, take care what you do with these men. For before these days, Theudas arose, giving himself out to be somebody, and a number of men, about 400, joined him. But he was slain, and all who followed him were dispersed and came to nothing. After him, Judas the Galilean arose in the days of the census and drew away some of the people after him. He also perished, and all who followed him were scattered.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Now, the Romans were keenly aware of the possibility of outbreak among the people whom they governed. Jesus' enemies among the Pharisees quickly sensed that here was an area in which they might act to get rid of Christ. We read in Matthew that the Pharisees and the scribes went out and took counsel against him, how to destroy him.

It is almost possible to reconstruct the conversations which took place between these enemies of Christ. One came up with this idea: I’ve got it! Here’s a trap that can’t miss. Let’s go and ask Jesus if it’s lawful to pay taxes to the Romans. If he says that we should pay them, we will denounce him to the crowd as a collaborationist. If he says that we should not pay the tax, we’ll go quietly to the Romans and pretend that we’re shocked by his refusal to obey the state, and then the Romans will deal with him.

But when they put their question to him, Jesus answered, "Show me a denarius." When the coin was produced, Jesus asked whose image was on it and whose was the inscription. Naturally, they had to reply that it was a Roman coin, that the image was that of Caesar, and the words were in the language of Caesar. Well, in the light of this, Christ’s answer was clear and plain: Pay the tax.

But this was only the simple part of the answer. Many a time our Lord killed two errors with one parable. Jesus reminded them, first of all, that they were a subject people, having fulfilled in themselves the prophecies that were announced against them because of their refusal to have their God as Lord.

But there was far more than this skillful answer that took Christ effectively out of their trap. There was now the positive teaching of the lordship of God in every phase of life. Perhaps no verse in the whole Bible has been so twisted, so misapplied, so distorted as this one. And the distortions have had far-reaching consequences, for they have made people believe that God was not in charge of some phases of life.

In the Middle Ages, this verse was used as a basis for the theory of the two empires: the sacred and the secular. There is no such teaching in Jesus' answer. We are strong upholders of the doctrine of separation of church and state, but we must never be upholders of the doctrine of the separation of God and the state. God is Lord of the state as much as he is Lord of the church.

But his lordship over the state is not exercised through religious leaders. In the Old Testament, God strictly forbade the vesting of the religious and the secular power in any one individual. The priests came from the tribe of Levi and the kings came from the tribe of Judah. Only in Jesus Christ can the two offices be combined. No man of the offspring of Adam is capable of being both civil ruler and priest.

History teaches that the attempt to combine the two has brought tyranny worse than any other tyrannies. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s. These words do not make a split personality out of a Christian, giving him two systems of ethics and two ways of life. Rather, they bind the believer in Christ to the very highest code of living in the political realm as well as in the spiritual.

Let us examine closely the Bible doctrine of the source and channel of all authority of every kind. The matter is summed up in a single verse in the Psalms. Psalm 62:11 reads, "God has spoken once, twice have I heard this: that power belongs to God." From that one spring, all power flows.

This might be depicted as a map of a river basin in reverse. I look in a map of the Central United States, for example, and I see the flow of a thousand rivers from a thousand sources, but all ending near New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico. These waters come from Pennsylvania and flow the Ohio River. They come from Montana and Wyoming, flowing into the Missouri. From Tennessee and Alabama, they flow into the Tennessee River. All these join with the Mississippi, which rises far to the north in Minnesota.

If we could reverse this map and consider all of the flow from one source, flowing backwards from mighty rivers to creeks, from creeks to brooks, and from brooks to rivulets, we would have the perfect picture of the source and flow of power. All power comes from God. The powers that be are ordained of God. There is no power exercised by any creature in the world, even to the power of the cat to kill a mouse, or the power given to one insect to kill another, that does not derive originally from God.

How much more in the realm of men and of human affairs, where God is working out his great plan. Hear Jeremiah set this forth. God’s word came to the prophet, telling him to make thongs and yoke bars and to put them upon his own neck as he talked to the envoys from Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre, and Sidon. Then the Lord said to Jeremiah: Give them this charge for their masters. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel. This is what you shall say to your masters.

It is I who by my great power and my outstretched arm have made the earth, with the men and animals that are on the earth, and I give it to whomsoever it seems right to me. Now I have given all these lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, my servant, and I have given him also the beasts of the field to serve him. All the nations shall serve him, and his son, and his grandson, until the time of his own land comes. Then many nations and great kings shall make him their slave.

This is quoted from the 27th chapter of Jeremiah, and this is the definite teaching that political power lies in the hand of God and that he establishes whomsoever he wishes. Not merely the good kings who have reigned among the descendants of David and Solomon, but also those who are marked in history as being evil kings, have derived their power from God.

Nor should we be astonished at this when we consider that God placed all the power that Lucifer wielded in the hands of that mighty angel, saying—before his fall, of course—"Thou art the cherub that was anointed to govern, and I have set thee so." When Lucifer fell, he did not forget that God had given him much power, and he still exercised it centuries later, even reminding Christ that the kingdoms together with their power and glory had been put in his hand, and that he could give them to anyone he wished.

This is the reason why the Lord Jesus called him the prince of this world. And again, in the epistles, Paul called Satan the god of this age. Now, the gift of power, the gift of authority, is a divine gift, so precious that there is every evidence in the Bible that God will judge men very sharply for any abuse of it.

The angels that followed Lucifer in his fall became the leaders of the authority which Satan divided among them, and they hold their titles from this division. They are principalities and powers, world rulers of this present darkness, spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places, as we read in Ephesians 6:12. But we must not forget that Jesus Christ disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in the cross.

When we come to human rulers, we find much taught about them in the word of God. In addition to the teaching about God’s authority that we have cited from Jeremiah concerning God’s rule through Nebuchadnezzar, there is the revelation given through Daniel. In the second chapter of that prophecy: Blessed be the name of God forever and ever, to whom belong wisdom and might. He changes times and seasons. He removes kings and sets up kings.

It is also important to note that the passage we have cited from the Ephesian letter shows that Satanic spirits direct some human rulers. And indeed, we may say they direct all human rulers who are in darkness. With this background, we may sum up. All power derives from God, even the vast power that is wielded by Satan. There is no power but of God. There is no authority apart from God. Anything that is done by any alien power is being done within a framework of God’s permission for reasons impossible for us to understand or even imagine.

These reasons will be made clear in the future, but now we’re living in a world that is filled with all of the tensions of rebellion. The person who reads no more than the surface of the scripture might be swift to say that here is a great contradiction. God seems to be telling the believer to be in submission to Satan. This, of course, is not true, and this fact leads us to the proper understanding of the text that lies before us.

Someone has pointed out that many Bible interpreters seem to get their principles from Mark Twain, who said, "Get the facts first, then you can distort them as you wish." Generations have done just that. The words of our text have been distorted into a divine injunction to support any government, no matter how unjust, vicious, and oppressive.

In the light of what we have seen, we can state a first general principle with reference to the relationship of the believer in Christ to civil government. The believer is responsible to the Lord God Almighty, who has priority in this universe over every phase of being. Power in every domain flows from God, but it has been distorted and debased by some of its holders.

The Christian is to live in the midst of this world, primarily subject to his God, and he is also to render to the civil government what might be called a management fee, a reasonable amount for the order and protection that is furnished by a good government. The difficulties that have arisen in connection with this paragraph, if looked at closely, seem to arise from thoughts that are read into these verses rather than from what is taught in the verses themselves.

Nothing here would indicate what a believer should do when the civil government departs from the role that God has given to it. A government should maintain law and order. A Christian should be subject to a government that maintains law and order. Certain things are omitted in our text, and we shall in a further study establish them from other portions of the Bible.

One thing that is omitted here is counsel as to the attitude of a believer if the government persecutes the Christian faith. Another omission is counsel as to the attitude of a believer if his government commits moral wrong. The whole question of a believer’s allegiance in case of civil war, revolution, or rebellion must be established outside this paragraph.

In our present text, we see the divine statement of the believer’s duty to the state when the state is functioning properly within the framework of government by law. Every soul is to be subject to such a power. Not one Christian is to be a law unto himself. No individual is exempt from the duties of citizenship. It was especially necessary for Paul to teach these duties to the believers who were in Rome because of a particular situation there.

The church was formed around a central core of Jews who had brought from their Old Testament heritage the idea that they were a law unto themselves. They were not willing to give allegiance to any Gentile. They looked down upon the Gentiles and considered themselves vastly superior to the nations among whom they lived and by whom they had been conquered. There are many evidences of their lawlessness in the face of established government. Peter, addressing his first epistle directly to the Jewish believers scattered throughout the empire, wrote as follows.

Guest (Male): Beloved, I beseech you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh that wage war against your soul. Maintain good conduct among the Gentiles, so that in case they speak against you as wrongdoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God in the day of visitation. Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every institution ordained for men, whether it be the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right. For it is God’s will that by doing right you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish men.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Now, our passage in Romans is Paul’s direct teaching along the same line. The government which prevailed in the Roman Empire at that time was on the whole one of the best in history. The Pax Romana was at its height. The very good government of Augustus and Tiberius began to degenerate with Caligula and Claudius and Nero.

The persecutions of true Christians still came for the most part from the leaders of the Jewish Temple. Persecutions by Gentile sources were occurring mostly in the provinces, and Rome was quiet. Paul was still free. But now, rumors against the believers are beginning to circulate. Paul and Peter unite in telling the believers, Gentile and Jew alike, that they are to obey the magistrates.

The powers that be are ordained of God. Nobody is above the law. If the Christians act as true believers should, there will be no difficulty. Magistrates are not a terror to good citizens, but only to evil citizens. The Christian is to realize that he is not only a new creature in Christ Jesus and thus a citizen of heaven, but that he is still a human being, living in a society of human beings, and he must shoulder all the obligations that belong to mass citizenship.

The Christian is to be integrated within the whole complex of human relationships. The believer is to understand the first and great commandment. He is to render unto God the things that are God’s. That is, he is to love the Lord his God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength. And then he is to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. That is, he is to love his neighbor as himself.

And our God, we pray thee that thou shalt bless us as citizens, that we may be yielded to thee and that we may have thy lordship in every phase of life, that men may take knowledge that we have been with thee. We ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.

Guest (Male): God alone establishes human governments and governing authorities. No person or government, whether good or bad, has any authority except that which is given by God as he sees fit.

We hope you have benefited from today’s message, "Whence Comes Authority." To listen to additional Bible teaching by Dr. Barnhouse, visit us online at Alliancenet.org. An audio copy of today’s teaching is available by calling us toll-free, 1-800-488-1888. Today’s message again is entitled "Whence Comes Authority," or simply ask for message number R13-1.

We would also like to make available to you a free copy of our booklet entitled, "Daily Meditations for Family Worship." Perhaps you recognize the value of family worship and desire to introduce this vital spiritual practice into your home. The only problem is, you don’t know how to begin. This free booklet will help you establish a fruitful family worship time.

The daily scripture readings and meditations are beneficial for adults and children and for personal devotions as well. Ask for your free copy of "Daily Meditations for Family Worship" when you call or write. Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is a radio ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

We exist to promote a biblical understanding and worldview. Drawing upon the insight and wisdom of Reformation theologians from decades and even centuries gone by, we seek to provide contemporary Christian teaching which will equip believers to understand and meet the challenges and opportunities of our time and place. The Alliance also produces the radio broadcast, "The Bible Study Hour," featuring the teachings of the late Dr. James Montgomery Boice, and "Every Last Word," featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. Philip Graham Ryken.

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 further our work, contact us by calling toll-free 1-800-488-1888. That’s 1-800-488-1888. Write Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Box 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19103.

Visit us online at Alliancenet.org. Be sure to ask for a free resource catalog featuring books, audio teachings, commentaries, booklets, videos, and a wealth of other materials from outstanding reformed teachers and theologians, including Doctors Donald Grey Barnhouse, James Montgomery Boice, Martin Lloyd-Jones, and Philip Graham Ryken. Thanks for listening. Join us again next time for more classic teaching on Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible.

God’s word is for our heartly gain, to teach, rebuke, correct, and train. Equipped by it, we then pursue the work our God has for us to do. God’s word is all the Christian needs to grow in grace and do good deeds. Amazing gift, unearned, so hard, the life-imparting word of God. Amen.