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: Let this thought possess your soul. God hath appointed the day and God hath raised the judge from the dead. In the light of this, God has commanded you to repent. He calls you to turn away from the road to hell and to pass through the cross of Jesus Christ. He calls you who say you have done this thing to live a life of holiness and walk in the way that he has set before you, in the power that he has promised for you and provided for you as a proof of the fact that you have truly believed in the Savior, the son of God.

Guest (Male): 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 Judgment Coming. A person might look healthy and normal on the outside, but a cat scan can reveal a deadly tumor in their body that threatens their life.

People may look good and morally upright on the outside, but we are all infected with the spiritual cancer of sin and God will one day judge all the secrets of the hearts of men. Like a cat scan, the Bible reveals that we are in dangerous spiritual shape. What is the cure for our eternal terminal condition? The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is Romans chapter two and verse 16. Here again is Dr. Donald Gray Barnhouse with a message entitled Judgment Coming.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto the our Father and our God and in the Holy Spirit. Even the heaven of the heavens cannot contain thee. Thou art everywhere and thou knowest all things. Thou dost search the hearts of men and there is no thought that is hidden from thee. Help us to understand in this day that the only hope for men of unclean heart is to plead to thee to take hold of the grace that thou hast provided, that we may enter into the refuge that is Christ Jesus. These things we ask in the name of our Lord and for his sake.

Amen. In our study of the second chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, we come now to the 16th verse where God has set forth one more of the principles of the judgment to which the souls of men will be subjected. The text reads, in the day when God shall judge the hearts of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel. It must be realized that the three preceding verses are in parentheses. In order to understand our text, it's necessary to go back and read the whole passage omitting the three explanatory verses and bringing our text into connection with its antecedent.

For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel. We shall see then first that God is going to judge the secrets of men. Secondly, that the judgment will be by Christ. Thirdly, that it is to take place on a certain day. And lastly, that it is to be in accordance with what is called here the gospel of Paul. Reputation is what men think you are.

Character is what you are. Men know your reputation, but God knows what you are, your character. Man look at upon the outward appearance, God look at upon the heart. Psychologically, it's possible for men to erect barriers within themselves behind which they hide thoughts that they do not wish to bring to the surface. They can even bring themselves to the place where they have forgotten things that are uncomfortable, things which they do not wish to remember. What it may take a psychiatrist weeks or months of questionings to find or what he may be incapable of finding, the judgment of God will bring out into the clearest light in the flash of a second.

Things that you have forgotten shall be brought to light. The Bible teaches everywhere that God knows the hearts of men. In the Psalms, we read if we have forgotten the name of our God or stretched out our hands to a strange God, shall not God search this out? For he knoweth the secrets of the heart. The story of Daniel illustrates the fact that God knows the hearts of men. Nebuchadnezzar had a dream that even he could not remember. When Daniel came, he was able to tell the dream which the king had had and to give the meaning of the dream.

He told Nebuchadnezzar that this had been done so that he might know that there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets. And the Almighty is later called the Lord of Kings and the revealer of secrets. How is it possible for men to think that God is not able to know all? An airplane that is totally invisible to the senses of man can be picked out by the radar and its course followed through the pathless skies. Geiger counters can find minerals beneath the surface of the ground. X-rays can find broken bones and can reveal the presence of tuberculosis and other diseases.

And with the machine that is popularly known as a lie detector, it is possible to see in the inked graphs on a recorder the physical marks of truth and the distortion when a lie is told. If puny man can do all this, then cannot the creator of man penetrate into the secrets of his being? Time and again, the Lord Jesus said, there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed and hid that shall not be known. It is a most serious and solemn thought, but a true one, that the innermost secrets of our being are known to God and that one day they shall be revealed in the white clarity of the judgment seat when the Lord Jesus Christ shall take his appointed place to do the work which the Father has committed unto him.

For the secrets of men are to be tried by Christ and judged by him. When he was here on earth, he announced this great fact. For as the Father raiseth up the dead and quickeneth them, even so the son quickeneth whom he will. For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the son, that all men should honor the son even as they honor the Father. He that honoreth not the son honoreth not the Father which hath sent him. Now the importance of the fact that the judgment is to be in the hands of the Lord Jesus Christ lies in the nature of his being.

He did not remain in heaven, but he came and took upon him the form and nature of man. He lived his life here on earth among men. We read in John, Jesus did not commit himself unto men because he knew all men and needed not that any testify of man for he knew what was in man. And the final basis of judgment will be that of man's attitude towards the Lord Jesus Christ. In order to connect this up, let us go back for a moment and summarize the first half of our chapter. The whole section deals with the principles of judgment.

The question of salvation is not in view. That will come later. What is set forth here is that in the final analysis, righteousness leads to life and unrighteousness leads to death. Dr. Griffith Thomas puts it as follows. Paul is dealing with the result and not the process, with the goal and not the way. And in our text in verse 16, the whole matter of judgment is related to the gospel. Campbell Morgan puts it as follows. Thus, at the very beginning of this letter, the master theme of which is salvation by faith, we have an overwhelming and unanswerable indictment of that particular heresy to which an improper emphasis of the doctrine is liable to give rise.

Nothing can be clearer than the apostle's teaching that works will be the final test of judgment. Faith which does not produce works is declared to be useless. Godliness as privileged relationship is of no value except it produce actual righteousness. The basis of judgment is to be the actual condition of man, whether he has lived without the law or under the law. But he is to be judged finally by Jesus Christ. That is to say the final test of character and of conduct is to be that of man's attitude to the Savior. The great Swiss commentator Godet also makes some phases of the subject very clear.

He writes, justification by faith alone applies to the time of entrance into salvation through the free pardon of sin, but not to the time of judgment. When the God of free grace receives the sinner at the time of his conversion, he asks nothing of him except faith. But from that moment, the believers enter on a whole new responsibility. God demands from him as the recipient of grace the fruits of grace. The reason is that faith is not the dismal prerogative of being able to sin with impunity. It is on the contrary the means of overcoming sin and acting wholly.

And if the life fruit is not produced, it is dead and it will be declared vain. Perhaps I can put it yet another way. You walk down the road of life and that road, the word of God declares, is a path of sin that leads to ultimate separation from God. Suddenly, God brings you face to face with the cross of Jesus Christ. He declares that he is satisfied with what the Lord Jesus Christ has done and will count all of your sin upon the Savior if you will put your trust in him. If you agree with God that you have nothing in yourself and that you come to the cross alone for salvation, then you pass out of death and into life.

You pass through the gate of salvation to enter upon the road of the Christian life. If any man thinks that he can pass through a gate which he calls Christ and find himself still in a swamp of sin, we say flatly that he has missed the gate and that he has not passed through Christ. The man who passes truly through Christ is on a good, solid highway of good works. The works do not save him, but they are the paving blocks on the road between justification by faith and the heavenly portal. The Bible teaches indeed that the road of the Christian life passes through swampy country and it is possible for a man to step off onto the muddy shoulders of the road, but he will soon be brought back by the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus to walk in the life that is Christ.

The perils that are to be avoided then in looking at life are two perils. The first to avoid is that of thinking that the man of refined nature who picks out the dry spots along the swampy road to hell is really on the road to heaven because his life is so much better than that of the man who goes in all of the wallowing spots to hell. The second peril is to think that the man who professes to believe and who turns aside at one of Satan's many imitation gates, but yet goes on his life way and the wallowing in sin has really passed through the real gate of Christ.

In other words, there is a counterfeit road for the one who refuses Christ and there is a counterfeit gate for the mere religious professor who does not truly possess new life in Christ. The one way of truth is entrance through the true gate of redemption through the blood of Jesus Christ and continuance on the path of righteousness which leads from the day of our first salvation to the day of our ultimate salvation. I've been reading the biography of a Scotch preacher of the last generation, the Reverend J. P. Struthers. He carried on a long correspondence with his fiancee in which the two revealed their innermost secrets to each other.

He wrote to her one day as follows. You asked me when my life in Christ began. I could not tell. Sometimes I have thought it was long, long ago when I was 13 or so. One Sabbath night after Mr. Dunlop of Paisley preached, I prayed very earnestly and felt differently in prayer from what I had ever done before. But many a time before that, I had asked God to save me. And when I was a boy of eight or nine, my brother and I wrote out a covenant and signed it. And I at least felt very proud of myself.

It can't have been then and yet was I not seeking after him? And sometimes I hoped God had saved me and called me to be his even from the time I was a baby, for my mother prayed very much for me. All I can say is that I do wish to be God's child and I honestly think I have cast myself on his mercy in Christ. I do agree with you that those who are brought up in God's sphere are brought to him imperceptibly. At any rate, I would rather trust a constant crying after him than any past sensation.

Our best way is to throw ourselves afresh on him. William Penn said, a minister of the gospel ought to be one of Christ's making if he would pass for one of Christ's ministers. That minister who is not the model of his doctrine is a babbler rather than a preacher, a quack rather than the physician. If the love of Christ does not constrain us to a life of yieldedness to him, it is certain that we have not entered into that love. And we turn now to the third of the points of this text, namely that the judgment of the secrets of men shall be by Christ on a certain day.

That day is eternally fixed in the plan of God. It is not a 24-hour day, for it includes several judgment scenes that are to be distinguished as to time, place, subject of the judgment, basis of the judgment, and the sentence that is to be passed. Since our chapter has to do with the judgment of the unbelievers, as the context clearly shows, we shall limit ourselves to that phase of the judgment. A careful study of the word day in the concordance will reveal that there is a great difference between what is called the day of Christ and what is called the day of the Lord.

The day of Christ will be his meeting with all those who have put their trust in him, believers only. By the very nature of the constitution of God's being, no one who appears at that judgment seat of Christ can be condemned to eternal separation from him. Heaven is mandatory for those who have been truly born again. But the day of the Lord is a fearsome thing. It is the day of condemnation of all who have not fled to the cross for refuge from the wrath of God. Separation from God forever is mandatory for all who appear before this judgment throne.

On Mars Hill in Athens, Paul set forth the certainty of this coming judgment for sinners. The fact that they have not become the sons of God through faith in Christ leaves them in the position of the offspring of God, his creatures subject to him, but who have refused his mercy and lived as they pleased away from him, even while their conscious moments were filled with the conflict between their conscience and their memory as they accused or excused themselves. Before the time of the cross, Paul says men were ignorant of God and the times of this ignorance God winked at.

But now commands all men everywhere to repent because he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained, whereof he hath given assurance unto all men in that he hath raised him from the dead. The day of judgment is a day in which the mouths of men will be stopped. No man will have any excuse to offer. There is a verse in the Old Testament in the little prophecy of Habakkuk which sets this forth in a remarkable way. Habakkuk had asked the Lord in the first chapter of his book why the Lord made him live on earth in the midst of a world of sinners.

God had answered by pointing him to the cross of Christ and telling him that judgment would come. Habakkuk had then been so bold as to ask God how he, the holy one who could not look upon iniquity, could tolerate to look upon this world and to keep still about it. Suddenly, in the opening verse of the second chapter, Habakkuk sees how bold he has been in thus speaking to God. But the Lord patiently answers him and points out that he has not abandoned his holiness because he permits a world of iniquity and misery. It is necessary for it to be revealed to the universe just what mankind is.

The purpose of history is to bring the evidence to its fullness that man can do nothing for man. But that left to himself, having abandoned the true God, man will bring his civilization to corruption and destruction. Several woes are pronounced upon the doers of evil in that second chapter of Habakkuk. There is woe upon the man who wishes Laban's realm living room for himself and his nation at the expense of others. There is woe upon the man who seeks position and prominence so that he can do as he pleases. There is woe upon the man that builds a community on blood or iniquity.

There is a woe pronounced upon the liquor traffic. There is woe pronounced upon the idolater. And then the chapter ends with a terrible verse. The Lord is in his holy temple. Let all the earth keep silence before him. Now I do not know what musician went through the Bible until he found this verse and put it to music for people to sing at the opening of a church service. They have made it as though the prophet were giving the antiphonary answer to the church bells, as though he were saying, let everybody quiet down. The church service is about to begin.

It means nothing of the kind. If we wish to know the meaning of this text, the Lord is in his holy temple. Let all the earth keep silence before him. Let us think rather of the courtroom where the jury has brought in a verdict of guilt, of murder in the first degree, where such a verdict carries with it the mandatory sentence of death. The criminal is now brought into the courtroom for sentence to hear his doom. There is the low murmur of confused sound as a hundred conversations are being carried on. And then suddenly the voice of the court crier is heard.

Oh yes, oh yes, this court is now in session. There is quiet and the judge appears, rapping his gavel and bringing the court to complete order so that he may proceed to the business which is predetermined by the nature of the case. That is what is meant by the Lord is in his holy temple. It is not a call to worship. It is the thunderous call of an outraged God against a world that has too long mocked him. Now comes the appointed day. Now the principles of judgment shall be executed in the sight of all.

There is a parallel passage in the Psalms that gives us the same truth. In the 11th Psalm, we read, the Lord is in his holy temple. The Lord's throne is in heaven. His eyes behold. His eyelids try the children of men. Just as a judge may turn to look at a witness, half closing his eyelids as though in contempt of the some proposed defense of that which admits no defense, so the Lord looks upon the evil ones. The next verse continues, the Lord trieth the righteous and him that loveth violence his soul hateth. Upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone and an horrible tempest.

This shall be the portion of their cup. Let not any man think that he can escape. In the first chapter of this book, Romans, we have seen that men are without excuse because the truth is written across nature. In the first verse of our chapter, we have seen that men are without excuse because the truth is written across their conscience. In the third verse, we have seen that there is no escape. Will you not then flee to Christ? If there is no excuse and no escape, then why will you die? If there is no answer and no way out by yourself, then why will you not take the way out that God has set forth before you?

The judgment shall be according to Paul's gospel. It is an amazing phrase because it is such a bold phrase. But it is true. God can take men and so identify them with his truth that the truth becomes in no small way their own truth. In the Old Testament, it was God's law and yet it was the law of Moses. In the New Testament, it is the gospel of Jesus Christ and yet it is Paul's gospel. Eternal truth may become associated with our names even in this day. Yes, it is Paul's gospel and it was the gospel of Augustine, of Savonarola, of Tyndale and Huss, of Wycliffe and Peter Waldo.

It was the gospel of Luther and Calvin, of Wesley and Whitefield, of Moody and Torrey. It is my gospel, thank God, and I trust by the grace of the Lord that you can bow your head and say, Lord Jesus, it is also my gospel. By it I am saved, by it I shall live and by it I shall escape the terrible judgment of that day when the secrets of the unregenerate shall be brought to light. And our God, as we pray thee, we ask that thou shalt take this truth to many hearts in this hour and shalt use it to convict lost men of their lost position.

And we pray thee to search the hearts of all professing Christians that no man shall have run in vain or shall have believed in vain in some unclean gospel that is not the gospel of salvation unto holiness. May we walk in thy light as we advance to the eternal light. We ask it through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

Guest (Male): God will one day judge all the secrets of man, but if we trust him to search our hearts by his word and spirit, he will lead us to deeper repentance and stronger faith in Christ. We hope you've benefited from today's message by Dr. Barnhouse entitled Judgment Coming. 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 www.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 Judgment Coming or simply request message number R 2-10.

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. Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible comes to you through the generous gifts of our listeners. If you have benefited from the broadcast and would like it to continue, please prayerfully consider a donation to help 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 www.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. Then join us again next time for more classic teaching on Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible.