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: We are to receive those with whom we differ and not to argue about small matters of scruples. Secondly, we are not answerable to each other, but to the Lord alone, for he died and rose again in order that he might be the Lord of all in our lives. Three, why should any Christian judge another Christian in matters of practice? For we are all to appear before the judgment seat of God. And lastly, the proof that we shall all be judged is in a slender quotation from Isaiah's prophecy.

Guest (Male): Over a half 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 "Written by God." When Jesus fasted in the wilderness for 40 days, Satan tried to tempt him. But three times, the Lord thwarted the devil by declaring, "It is written," and quoting a portion of Holy Scripture.

The Bible is not a mere book. It is the living and active Word of God, sharper than any two-edged sword, and is the only authoritative rule of faith and practice for the Christian. Do you order your life by God's eternal Word and submit to its divine teachings? The Scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible, Romans chapter 14 and verse 11. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with a message entitled "Written by 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 recognize that if thou shalt use the word that is spoken in this hour, it is because of thy grace and because thou hast a plan to reach the hearts of people, to build and strengthen the church because of the preaching of the Word and to convict those who have not known Christ. So use the word we pray thee in this hour for thy dear name's sake through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

We come now in our study of the Epistle to the Romans to the 14th chapter and the 11th verse, which begins with the great phrase, "For it is written." The question of our future judgment which we have been looking at in recent studies is now related to the supreme authority of the Scriptures. This is one of the most important subjects that can confront a professing Christian in our day.

It is just as though the writer of the Epistle to the Romans cut a cross-section through the whole edifice of his thinking to show us that the absolute foundation for all his teaching is bedded in the Word of God. The Bible says, "It is written." Such flat teaching of the Scripture is the supreme court from which there is no appeal.

Now, this doctrine is not popular in our day. Ecclesiastical leaders and theologians alike discount the appeal to the Bible as final authority even while paying lip service to creedal statements concerning the Word of God. Theologians are often much worse than the administrative leaders because they exhibit positive blasphemy at times in their attitude toward the Bible.

Let me give an example. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews bases all his concepts on the Old Testament. Furthermore, he accepts and adopts the method used by Christ and all the New Testament writers, a method that consists in taking single texts from the Old Testament, linking them up with other texts from the same source, drawing the conclusion that final proof and absolute truth are to be found in such statements of single verses or mingled quotations.

Now, if this is God Almighty's method, then it stands as absolutely final. If it is fallible man scratching around in old manuscripts for arguments to buttress human theories, then the method is worthless. The true follower of Jesus Christ accepts without question that God has given us the Bible.

The liberal critic exalts himself as the supreme court, subjects the text of the Bible to his own rational processes, and comes to a decision concerning the validity of any sentence. The two attitudes can be stated in very simple terms. As a follower of Christ, I submit to the Bible. It judges me in all things, and its judgment is final. But the liberal subjects the Bible to himself.

Let us take a passage in Hebrews and see how it is treated in one of the foremost volumes of biblical interpretation of our generation. The passage is Hebrews chapter four and verses three to six. Let me read it. "For we who have believed enter that rest, as he has said, 'As I swore in my wrath, they shall never enter my rest,' although his works were finished from the foundation of the world. For he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way, 'And God rested on the seventh day from all his works.' And again in this place he said, 'They shall never enter my rest.'"

Some time ago while writing my studies on the Sabbath question which came in an earlier section of these broadcasts, I had occasion to refer to this series of texts from the Epistle to the Hebrews. When I had completed my study, I checked with the section on Hebrews in the 12-volume work *The Interpreter's Bible*. I read the exegesis without knowing the name of the author, and I found the writing so horribly blasphemous that I purposely did not look in the index to see who wrote it. Thus, I can be completely objective in dealing with the ideas without any thought of any personality.

Here is the comment upon the verses I have read: "These verses substantiate the assumption already made that we have a promise, just as had the wilderness generation. The ingenious interweaving of Genesis 2, the story of the fate of those who perished in the wilderness because of unbelief recorded in Psalm 95, and the promise of today in the same psalm, together with the application of the whole to the current situation of the church, is a type of argument thoroughly familiar in the first century and not unknown today. We will meet this kind of scriptural interpretation again, notably in the Melchizedek speculation. The fact that no responsible scholar today would juggle Scripture in this fashion must not be allowed to obscure the underlying thought of the writer."

And so the author of this exegesis states that God the Holy Spirit is no better than a juggler of Scripture instead of being the author of the Word. "Responsible scholars" evidently, according to his concept of the Bible, are those who deny its inspiration and reject its authority. A glance at the dictionary reveals that the fundamental factor of being responsible is being accountable, is being answerable. Surely the idea involved in this concept is that the scholar is answerable to himself alone. But the Bible teaches us that all of us, the scholar included, are answerable to God.

The reason I preach as I do is that I know that I am answerable to God. I am accountable. The Bible says that we shall all give an account, even for idle words. And surely it would have been better had this interpreter never been born than that he should thus deceive God's little ones over whom he has claimed the right to teach. When I read these terrible words against the Bible and the Holy Spirit, author of the book, I wondered whether the writer had not understood the end of the epistle where we read, "Our God is a consuming fire."

I turned to that verse and read his comment on the great text, and we find him saying, "The final clause, 'For our God is a consuming fire,' will seem to the modern reader a tragic misinterpretation of the gospel message of the love of God."

*The Interpreter's Bible* from which I have quoted these comments is divided into three parts on each page. At the top of the page, there is the Bible text in both the King James and the Revised Standard Versions. In the middle of the page, there is the exegesis by one author. And at the bottom, there is an exposition of the text by another author.

Interestingly enough, the expositor at this point categorically denies what the exegete says on the same page. The contrast is worth quoting. Now we have just read that the exegete said that the phrase "our God is a consuming fire" will seem a tragic misinterpretation of the gospel to the modern reader. Now at the bottom of the page, the expositor well says, "'Our God is a consuming fire.' This is a direct quotation from Deuteronomy 4:24. It is pathetic that men should turn in dread from this verse to the loving Father of the gospels, as though there ever could be a love that was not at the same time a consuming fire. If this fire were to die out, love would die with it."

"There are those who conceive of God as an easygoing old grandfather who looks down with an indulgent eye upon the faults and failings of men, lets them do as they please, and will somehow make it all right in the end. This thought of God is in part the cause and in part the effect of the careless, self-indulgent lives that many lead. No human love is worth having unless it burns like a flame of hatred for all that would destroy the one who is loved. If God were not a consuming fire, our salvation would be impossible. The consuming fire is clearly visible for all who have eyes to see."

Here then are two absolutely opposite views expressed on the same page. How are we to decide which is right? Is the solution to be found within my own brain? And if so, what about the multitudes of primitive people who do not yet have a development of theological thought that would make them capable of decision in the matter?

The answer to that dilemma is in our text: "It is written." For the complete authority of the Word of God is the answer to these problems, and the gift of discernment is the gift of measuring things by the Word of God. The quotation from *The Interpreter's Bible* I called blasphemy. Why did I use so strong a word? The dictionary defines blasphemy as "indignity to God in words, writing or signs; also, the act of claiming the attributes or prerogatives of deity."

The Bible is more important than the name of God. This is proven by the statement in Psalm 138: "I will praise thy name for thy lovingkindness and thy truth, for thou hast magnified thy word above all thy name." The average Bible scholar would not think of cursing and swearing, taking the name of the Lord in vain. And yet this verse states that God has magnified his Word above his name. Woe to that man then who calls the Holy Spirit a juggler of Scripture, making him more irresponsible than a modern scholar.

It should be realized that the full authority of the Scriptures was accepted by practically every branch of the church until about 200 years ago. There was an argument at the time of the Reformation about the relative authority of the Bible and that of the church. But at no time did the church deny the authority of the Scriptures. The difference between the Roman Catholic position and the Protestant position is not one of opposition, but rather of supplementation. Roman Catholics and Protestants have always believed equally in the divine authority of the Scriptures. The Roman branch holds that in addition to the Scriptures, the church has the exclusive and final right of interpretation.

We can sum up the historic picture as follows: all the church accepted the authority of the Scriptures as final until the time of the Reformation. The Council of Trent in 1545 added the doctrine of the authority of the church. There has been no change in the Roman church since the Council of Trent. There has been no change in evangelical Protestantism. Our position remains that of the New Testament writers and is not subject to change.

About 200 years ago, however, there arose in the churches some men who were frightened by the development of modern scientific method. They were terribly afraid that the Bible would not stand the test of modern discoveries. The first question mark in the punctuation of the Bible is after the question put by Satan when he approached Eve with his temptation to doubt the Word of God. We read it in the third chapter of Genesis: "Yea, hath God said?"

The doubt has been given many names, but it is still the same doubt and comes from the same source. Whether it is called higher criticism, liberalism, modernism, neo-orthodoxy, demythologizing, Formgeschichte, or by any other name, it is exactly the same thing. When I read my text, "It is written," I mean it is written by God. When the followers of this school of thinking in any of its branches reads this text, they mean it is written by men.

Now, we recognize, of course, that men did the actual writing. But there is a vast difference between the writing of the Bible and that of any other book that has ever been written. Peter expresses this magnificently: "For prophecy," we read in the first chapter of his second epistle, "prophecy was never sent after the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit."

The Greek word for "carried along" or "moved" is the word that is used for a ship carried along by the force of the wind. In the story of Paul's shipwreck, the same word is used twice. The storm was so bad that the mariners could do nothing about it, and so the ship was driven—it was driven. Thus, we are told through Peter that the men who wrote the Bible did not set out to write articles or prophecies. The holy wind of the Holy Spirit came upon them and blew them wherever he desired to carry them.

The whole monstrous fabrication of the idea of an original source gospel from which other writers drew with additions, interpolations, editings, and arranging is a fantastic effort on the part of man to exalt themselves above the divine Word. The idea that some editor in the centuries before Christ took a Jehovah document of the law and an Elohim document and a priestly code, cut them apart and pasted them together to form the writings that are attributed to Moses is a nightmarish invention of the so-called scholars who give the lie to Christ who flatly taught that the law was given by Moses.

Many years ago a thought came to me that I have frequently used through the years to illustrate the manner in which the Word of God came to us. I conceived the analogy of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ and the coming of the Bible. The Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary so that the holy thing which was born of her, God tells us, was called the Son of God. Christ was a Jew and not a Nordic, not Chinese, not anything other than that which he was: an Israelite. And in spite of the fact that he was recognizable and identifiable as an individual man, he was nevertheless God Almighty.

And just as the Holy Spirit came upon the Virgin Mary so that she conceived the human Jesus in her womb, so the Holy Spirit came upon the brain cells of Moses, David, the prophets, the evangelists, Paul, and the others, and brought forth from their minds the writings which form the Bible. These writings bear the marks of human personality. We can discern the individual style and vocabularies of the different writers. But these human touches do not stamp the writings with the weaknesses of humanity anymore than the Jewish characteristics of Jesus lessened his absolute deity.

The person who has not had the opportunity to devote thousands of hours to the study of these questions concerning the divine origin of the Bible may ask how we can be sure that the "assured findings" of these pseudo-scientific scholars are or are not accurate. A few years ago, almost every writer on theological subjects spoke of the "assured findings," the "certain results," the "absolute certainties," or similar boasts of supposedly final positions of modern theological science. These phrases no longer occur as often as they once were to be found. Of late, they are practically never found.

Why not? The answer is that many of these assured results, as they called them, blew up in the faces of their champions. Let's take some examples. If you go into the musty basements of our great libraries, you can find early editions of our famed encyclopedias. Read the "assured findings" of the theological science of that day and then turn to what men know for facts today. Under the name Tiglath-Pileser, the writers of 60 years ago stated that here was an imaginary figure who had never existed. The Bible spoke of him, but there was no evidence, they said, that he had ever existed. Today archaeologists have uncovered Tiglath-Pileser's capital city, and his name is pressed into a million bricks: "I, Tiglath-Pileser, King of the West Lands, King of the Earth, whose kingdom extends to the Great Sea," and so on.

You'll find in our theological libraries hundreds and hundreds of volumes which state that Moses could never have written the Pentateuch because writing had not been invented at his time. But then tablets and inscriptions were found that existed several hundred years before Moses. And to make it all the more ironical, tablets were found in the very peninsula of Sinai where Moses led the people of God for 40 years. And these tablets were there long before Moses was born.

You will find in the old libraries several hundred volumes about the Fourth Gospel which state that John could never have written it, that it dates from the third century, that it was fable and myth, and that it had nothing to do with the contemporary life of Christ. And then a mummy was found in Egypt. There was definite evidence that the funeral of the man who was thus mummified had taken place about the year 100 AD. The body was encased in a shroud made of several layers of papyrus leaves. The outer layers were broad leaves; the inner layers were scraps pasted together.

Scholars at the Rylands Library in Manchester, England, carefully dissolved the glue that held the pieces of the mummy wrapping together. Right in the middle was a large fragment from the Gospel of John. The shape of the fragment and its contents were such that scholars were able to reconstruct the page size. Most important of all, the Gospel of John existed as we have it and as early as the last decade of the first century. Since John did not die until approximately the year 90, we now have a leaf from his Gospel within 10 years of his death. "Assured results"? All those books are out of date now.

It would be possible to give scores of similar examples. I know so many that I believe that a student could write a doctoral thesis on the subject and render great value to the church at large. There will be those who will be swift to say that we should not exalt the Bible to a place of such high importance, that we must get back of the Bible to Christ himself. On the surface, this argument sounds pious and valid. But the moment we go under the surface, we find how faulty it is.

Our true bond of fellowship, we admit at once, is in Jesus Christ himself. But what do we know about Jesus Christ? Only what we find in the written Word. How do we know Jesus Christ? Only through the Bible, the Word of God. How do we know that anything we say about our experience of Jesus Christ is not self-hypnotism or to be explained under psychological rules? Only because we have the Bible by which we can check our spiritual experience.

Recently I ran across a volume of the Bible which I had used when I was little more than a boy. In its front pages, I had written several things about the very subject that we have been considering. I found the following: Scripture is from God. Scripture is throughout from God. Scripture throughout is entirely from God. The Bible is God speaking in man. It is God speaking by man. It is God speaking as man. It is God speaking for man. But always, it is God speaking. And finally, a quotation from one of the greatest of the bishops of the Church of England of the last century, Bishop Ryle of Liverpool, wrote this: "Give me the plenary verbal theory of biblical inspiration with all its difficulties rather than the doubt. I accept the difficulties and humbly wait for their solution. But while I wait, I am standing on the rock. It is written."

And we thank thee, our God, for the wonder of thy book and for the certainty that we have that thou hast given it in the terms that thou didst desire. Hear us we pray thee and use these words to thy glory in Jesus' name, Amen.

Guest (Male): The Word of God is the Christian's ultimate authority and our only rule of faith and practice. When the Lord says, "It is written," we must conform our lives to his Word. We hope you have enjoyed today's message by Dr. Barnhouse entitled "Written by God." To listen to additional teaching by Dr. Barnhouse anytime, anywhere, 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 "Written by God," or simply request message number R14-15. We would also like to make available to you a free copy of our booklet entitled *The Gospel We Like to Hear*. The Bible warns us against following teachers who will tickle our ears with false doctrines that appeal to our fleshly nature. This free booklet clearly states forth the true biblical gospel and sounds a warning against ear-tickling, people-pleasing distortions of the good news, including the false religion of signs and wonders, salvation without lordship, and the health, wealth, and prosperity gospel. Ask for your free copy of *The Gospel We Like to Hear* 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.

We also produce 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. For a full list of radio stations carrying our programs, visit our website at alliancenet.org.

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You may also write to us at Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Box 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103. Visit us online at alliancenet.org. Don't forget to request 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, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and Philip Graham Ryken. Thanks for listening. Join us again next time for more classic teaching on Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible.