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 have no confidence in the flesh, and we are to remember that the man who thinks that he is standing must take heed lest he fall. We must offer the prayer of Psalm 19, as it is in the original Hebrew.

Who knows one's own wanderings? Pardon me those I do not know. Keep back thy servant from the sin of presuming on thy grace. Let such sins not have dominion over me. Then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression.

Guest (Male): 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 "Deliberate Disobedience."

A low view of God's holiness pervades much of the modern evangelical church. Sin at will, repent at leisure, seems to be the prevailing attitude among many professing Christians. But the Bible makes it quite clear that while it is necessary for us to rest upon the grace of God in Jesus Christ, it is dangerous to presume upon it. Do you live carelessly before the Lord, or do you doggedly pursue a life of repentance, faith, and godliness?

The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible, Romans chapter 14, where we're looking at verse 11. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with a message entitled "Deliberate Disobedience."

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto thee, our Father and our God, and in the Holy Spirit. Once more, we worship thee for thy faithfulness and thank thee because thou doest always well and dost deal with us as with beloved children and not as we deserve. How kind thou art. How tender, how loving and faithful. We are glad to acknowledge that thou art our God and that there is none like thee. Bless the word to each listening heart in this hour. We ask it in the name and for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

We come now to Romans chapter 14 and verse 11. For it is written, "As I live," says the Lord, "Every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall give praise to God." In considering our general subject of the accountability of every lost soul at the final judgment and of every believer at the judgment seat of Christ, we have entered into the problem of the believer who willfully moves out of the will of God. We have seen that for such a man, there may be the punishment of physical death, followed by a sudden entrance into the presence of God with unconfessed sin upon the soul.

We must realize that God is constantly working in the life of each believer. We can say with the utmost confidence that both the ancient and the modern translations of one of Paul's great texts are true. "He that hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ." And the later translation, "He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ."

The Greek could be paraphrased: "He which hath begun a good work in you will keep on perfecting it until he brings it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ." An artist who plans to exhibit a painting will keep looking at it, inspecting every brushstroke, adding a slight touch here, deftly changing a shade there, until the day of the exhibition. The Lord God is working that way with us now. The difference between him and the human artist is that he will make us like the Lord Jesus Christ when he finishes, and there is no doubt about it.

We should not forget that the whole earth life of the Christian is planned for a definite purpose. After we are saved, we do not prepare ourselves for heaven. I was just as ready for heaven when I had been saved one second as I shall be when I've been saved 80 years or 80 million years. My readiness for heaven depends upon the justifying work of God, performed by virtue of the death of the Lord Jesus Christ.

God declares a sinner justified while that individual is still ungodly. There is no change whatsoever in the individual in the instant of his justification except the all-important change of the implanting of an absolutely new life. First, there is the new creation. Then begins the slow process of sanctification which continues through the whole of life. One of the main instruments which God has planned for spiritual development of the believer is the communion service.

Failure to understand the communion service and to take of it in the proper manner is the cause of much sickness, feebleness, and premature death in Christian circles. God flatly states that is why many of you are weak and ill and why some of you have died. Here is the further development of the text in John's first epistle, which we began to consider in our last study. It should be understood that the communion service is not called the savior's table, but the Lord's table. He does not meet us there in his capacity as savior, but as Lord.

When I was a young minister, I announced the communion service in terms somewhat like this: "We're now going to partake of the Lord's supper. If you're sure that you have been born again, your place is here. The invitation is as broad as the gospel. This is not the table of this congregation or of this denomination. There are no barriers of closed communion. The decision to partake must be in your own heart, and you must come freely because you know that you are the possessor of eternal life."

As the years advanced and I learned more of the word of God and the ways of God, I changed this invitation sharply. Most certainly I did not advance in the direction of closed communion, for such an attitude is the height of disobedience to the Lord's command not to judge others. It is totally impossible for a human being to judge another's spiritual state. I am sure that I would have passed as eligible to partake some men and women who were greatly out of the will of the Lord at the time. I might have refused communion to some who seemed to be out of the will of God because of the visible bruises of their previous willful walk, while the tenderness of their heart toward God would not show.

Now, the church is to judge, of course. If there is someone who is publicly and blatantly a sinner, he is not to be received at the communion table. You would never give the bread and the wine of the communion to a man who is staggering drunk, nor should you give it to someone who is publicly known to have defaulted at the bank and so on. But there are many, many instances where only the heart of the individual can tell, and God has imposed his sanctions in such cases.

Now, the communion service is, in effect, a public testimony by believers that they have accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, and in addition, have surrendered to him as their Lord, and that in the moment of their participation, they have absolutely no planned sin in their hearts. The word "planned" must be underlined and emphasized as of the highest importance.

A person may have committed sin, even gross sin, as man evaluates sins, and be so repentant, so tender before God, that the Father is in great delight to find a true worshiper coming to him in spirit and in truth. Another person may be contemplating a willful act that is outside the desire of God for him and, knowing that he is being willful, may determine to continue in his course of action. If at this moment, in this frame of mind, he partakes of the communion, he has performed a public lie and must be dealt with by God.

A man, for example, is working on his income tax forms and does not get the job finished on a Saturday evening. He plans to complete his work on Sunday afternoon after the communion service. He's juggling figures and plans to cheat the government. When he takes the bread and the cup, he's announcing to the world that there is no course of action in his life that is wrong and that he wholly surrendered to the Lord.

This is a public lie. The proper state of mind must be that as far as a man knows, Christ is Lord of every area in his life. God will continue throughout life to reveal new areas for expanding the Lordship of Christ, but at the moment, the man who takes communion properly has surrendered every area in which he is aware of conflict.

Or perhaps a woman has received a telephone call on a Sunday morning telling her a bit of scandal concerning one of her friends. She's very eager to communicate the news to another close friend. She tries to reach her on the telephone. The line is busy, and she cannot get the call through. Again and again she tries, but without success. Her impatient husband is waiting to take her to communion service.

She goes, but with the tremendous hope that no one else will reach her friend with the juicy morsel of scandal before she gets home to the telephone. She reaches for the bread and the cup while definitely planning to commit sin, the sin of gossip, as soon as the church service is over. She thus eats and drinks unworthily and is eating and drinking condemnation to herself, not discerning the Lord's body. "For this cause," God says, "many are weak and ill among you, and many of you have died."

Peter and Judas both took communion with the Lord. I'm aware of all the efforts that have been made to explain away the clear statements of the Word of God, but the arguments are specious, and there can be no doubt whatsoever to an honest mind that Jesus Christ permitted Judas to take the communion elements. I have read all the arguments that have been brought forth to show that Judas left the room before the bread and the wine were passed, but Luke's account simply will not permit any such argument.

For the passage links the giving of the bread and wine with the presence of Judas in a most startling manner. We read in Luke 22:19-21: "And Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them saying, 'This is my body which is given for you.' And likewise the cup after supper saying, 'This cup, which is poured out for you, is the new covenant in my blood. But behold, the hand of him who betrays me is with me on the table.'"

Now, that should settle the argument forever. Judas rose from the table, lost soul that he always had been, and went out to betray the Lord, to commit suicide, and to go to his own place, which will ultimately be the lake of fire. That he was never saved is indicated in 1 John 2:19, where the conduct of such apostates is described and explained. There we read, "They went out from us, but they were not of us. For if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out that it might be plain that they all are not of us."

Peter, on the other hand, took communion and then went out and denied Christ with oaths and cursings. Why was he not struck down by sickness or death? The answer is that he was intensely honest at the moment he took communion. When he told the Lord that he would stand by him though all others should betray him, he really meant it. He thought it was true. He had no planned sin in his heart. He was just ignorant of the weakness of his own being, and it took a sharp fall to reveal to him his own nothingness and to bring him to the greater surrender and growth which marked his subsequent path.

Judas was a lost soul before taking communion. Peter was an honest but deluded believer taking communion. The Lord restored Peter to full fellowship and usefulness. Perhaps the most outstanding illustrations of the sin unto death are three New Testament characters, two in the Book of Acts and one in the first epistle to the Corinthians.

The first example is that of Ananias and Sapphira. If we read the last half-dozen verses of the fourth of Acts before reading the first verses of the fifth chapter, we will get the whole picture. In the early church, some people gave their entire possessions to the cause of the gospel. Barnabas, the Levite of Cyprus, sold a property and brought the money and laid it at the disciples' feet. It was a beautiful gesture and undoubtedly excited the praise of the entire assembly of believers.

In the audience, there was a couple, Ananias and Sapphira, who then sold a possession. But they conceived the idea of giving only part of the price while pretending that they were giving it all. It should be noted that they were not punished for not giving all, but for pretending that they were giving all.

Some have attempted to teach communism of property from this part of scripture, but twice in this passage, the Holy Spirit definitely teaches the right of private property, saying that the land belonged to Ananias and that it was his to dispose of as he liked. Further, after it was sold, the money belonged to him to do with as he pleased. But the sin was that they came with the attitude of full surrender when it was a partial surrender.

They did what is done in our churches a million-million times over each year. They sang, "I surrender all," but they did not mean it, and God struck them dead. They had committed the sin unto death, physical death, and they paid the penalty before all the church. Someone has remarked that if God continued to act in this way, there would have to be a morgue in the basement of every church to take care of the bodies. Innumerable people make a pretense of full surrender but are living in known sin, in planned sin. God knows their hearts, and we must simply leave all judgment to him, even as he has commanded us.

We can now see the gradation in teaching by a comparison of these various stories. Judas, the lost soul, takes communion and then goes his own way to his own doom. Peter, the sincere believer, takes communion and then goes out thinking that he is standing, only to find out as he stumbles and falls that he is really nothing in himself. He profits by the experience and grows in the grace of Christ. Ananias and Sapphira, true believers in the Savior, make the public profession of full surrender to the Lord when actually they are lying, and they become terrible object lessons to the whole church of all history. They were stricken with physical death because they had committed planned sin, a sin unto death, and they were judged for it with physical death.

Someone may remark that God surely does not work in this way in our churches today. We must answer that we do not know the workings of God. Undoubtedly, there are many deaths from this cause, but I repeat, we are never to judge in these matters. Such judgment would be in itself a sin against God.

There is one more instance of a man who committed a sin unto death, but the full truth of our text in 1 John is manifested by the fact that the church prayed for him. He repented and was delivered from the penalty. I refer to the fornicator in the fifth of 1 Corinthians. We are not permitted to argue about this man. God says flatly that the man was saved and that if he died, he would be saved.

We must not forget that Corinth was a pagan city and that the gospel had just come into its life. Polygamy was common in the unsaved world, and when an older man died, he would perhaps leave several wives. Evidently, a young Christian fresh out of paganism, child of his father's first wife, had coveted one of his father's other wives. When the father died, the young man took one of the father's younger wives. This just was not done among the high-class pagans, though the oldest son always inherits the father's harem in most African tribes today, which shows how even pagan morals disintegrate.

The Corinthian group to whom the epistle was addressed had been called saints, and it was said of them that they came behind in no gift. The church had adopted an easy tolerance toward the behavior of this member and did not discipline him when he thus brought dishonor on the name of Christ. This man committed a sin unto death, and the church should have prayed to God to remove him from their midst. The actual words of the text proclaim that the church should have delivered the man to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that the spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

There's no room for argument. The first verse in the chapter says that the fornicator was among you, the believers. Paul rebuked the proud church because they had not prayed that this man might be removed from among them. Clearly, here was a manifestation of sin so public that the church, acting according to holiness, must pray that an amputation take place, that the man be removed at any cost.

The church did not do this. They should have asked the Lord to permit the man to die, his spirit departing to the presence of the Lord, to be judged, all works burned away and his soul saved, but without any reward or any crown in the government of God. It should be remembered that this epistle was read in the church at Corinth on a Sunday morning, shortly after Paul wrote it, and that the fornicator was probably sitting in the audience.

The epistle exploded in that assembly like a bomb. The church immediately began to deal with the man. He, on the other hand, immediately cried to God in true repentance and undoubted forsaking of his sin. In 2 Corinthians, we are forced to conclude that the man immediately put away the woman in question, submitted to the discipline of the church, and utterly repented before God.

So Paul writes: "But if anyone has caused pain, he has caused it not to me, but in some measure, not to put it too severely, to you all. For such a one, this punishment by the majority is enough. So you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. So I beg you to reaffirm your love for him." We can see therefore that when one has committed a sin that deserves the strongest chastasement from God, he can flee to the grace of God, and the chastasement will be removed by God's same grace.

One more phase of the question needs treatment. Some may argue that all sin is just plain sin and that we have no right to consider some sins worse than others. The fact is that God himself does so differentiate between sins. Here in John's epistle, he states that there is a sin worthy of the death penalty and there is a sin that is not worthy of the death penalty. If we are to classify such sins, we shall have to consider the entire Bible in microscopic detail. Suffice it to say that in the Old Testament, certain sins were subject to the death penalty and other sins were not. In some cases, the guilty ones could buy off their penalty with a sacrifice or with the price of such a sacrifice, the price of a lamb, for example.

The two instances that we have cited from the New Testament, Ananias and the fornicator, are marked by the public quality of their transgression. In the first case, the young church needed a clear knowledge of the presence of the Holy Spirit, his hatred of sin, and the necessity of living in truth before him who is the Spirit of Truth. In the second case, the fornicator had sinned in the sight of a pagan city, and the name of Christ would be blasphemed by the Gentiles because his act was offensive even to their sense of moral standards.

For the believer today, there is a well-defined attitude set forth in the New Testament. We are to keep short accounts with God, confessing our sins to him moment by moment, in order that our fellowship may be maintained step-by-step as we walk in the light. We are to have no confidence in the flesh, and we are to remember that the man who thinks that he is standing must take heed lest he fall.

We must offer the prayer of Psalm 19, as it is in the original Hebrew. The passage is somewhat obscured in our translations and should read: "Who knows one's own wanderings? Pardon me those I do not know. Keep back thy servant from the sin of presuming on thy grace. Let such sins not have dominion over me. Then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression."

And our God and Father, speak today's lesson to many hearts, that we may go deeply with thee, that there may be no sin that is not confessed and forsaken. We want thy will. Thus we pray thee to take our hearts and to speak to us and to bring us on that we may become more like Christ day by day and walk before thee in love. We ask it in the name and for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Guest (Male): We must never be casual and permissive about our sin and live carelessly before the Lord. We must yield ourselves to him in trust and obedience and pursue lives of authentic holiness. We hope you have benefited from today's message entitled "Deliberate Disobedience."

To listen to additional 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 "Deliberate Disobedience," or simply request message number R14-24.

We would also like to place in your hands our free booklet entitled How the Holy Spirit Relates to You. For many Christians, the Holy Spirit remains the most mysterious and misunderstood member of the Trinity. Controversial and contradictory teachings about his person and work further cloud the issue. This free booklet cuts through the confusion with clear biblical truth. You will take a significant leap toward spiritual maturity when you understand who the Holy Spirit is and how he works in the life of a believer. Ask for your free copy of How the Holy Spirit Relates to You 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. Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is able to remain on the air through generous gifts of listeners like you.

If you have benefited from the 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 help further our work, contact us by calling toll-free 1-800-488-1888. Write to us at Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Box 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103. Visit us online at alliancenet.org.

Remember 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, Martin Lloyd-Jones, and Philip Graham Ryken. Thanks for listening. Join us again for more classic teaching on Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible.