Who Jesus Is — Rolfe Barnard

I want to attempt this morning to enter into the agony and the conflict, if I may, between Jesus Christ and the folks who did him to death on religious principles. I'm asking you to turn, if you will, those of you who like to follow the scripture, to the gospel of John.

There is nowhere in the gospel of John to begin reading. If you start at verse 12, you wish you had started at verse 11. It is a tremendous book, for as I understand it, in the 20th chapter of John, the Holy Spirit directed a man by the name of John to say something like this.

The Gospel of John Calls Us to Believe

Now, the Lord did a lot of other things, said a lot of other things, but I haven't recorded them in this book too many. But he said, what's in this little book called the gospel of John, these things are written that you might believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and believing might have life in his name.

One thinks of Pilgrim, in Pilgrim's Progress, who puts his fingers in his ears and runs away from his companions, screaming as he runs, life, give me life. And he felt that he had to stop up his ears so he couldn't hear the rumblings of the Spirit of his day, and run to him who gives life, that men and women can be brought to a life long believing that he is the Son of God.

Jesus and the Leaders of Israel in John 8

There in the 8th chapter, the controversy between this one Jesus and the leaders of the most religious nation on earth is rapidly coming to a head. We just have a few more verses to read until we get to the 11th chapter.

You're familiar, those of you who study your Bibles, with the fact that it was the raising of Lazarus from the dead that sealed the death of Jesus Christ. The high priest of their religion, unable to deny this, said it is convenient that one man die for a nation.

That just brings up the focus of the controversy of my Lord when he was here in the days of flesh with the religious leaders of his day. It is a solemn thought to remember that the people who did the Lord Jesus to death were the most devout religious people of his day.

If you read the Gospel of John, you can almost hear the groans of the people who finally found out what the score was, and the score was this. We've got to get rid of this man. We've just got to. We've got to get rid of him.

The whole nation is going down the drain if we don't set the high priest. And they did, leaving God out. They nailed him to a tree. They thought they had accomplished the one thing that had to be done to enable them to continue in their religious forms and doctrines and creeds, and at the same time live by devouring the widows in the first part of this 8th chapter.

When these religious people bring the woman taken in adultery, all the Lord has got to do to get rid of them is to point to the fact that a bunch of adulterers are pointing the finger at adulterers, and they skeed at them.

When he said, which of you is without sin, he wasn't talking about going to the movies, he was talking about the same sin they wanted him to condemn this poor woman for. I believe with all my heart and with so not that the cycle has come full circle now.

The Modern Rejection of Christ

I believe it's your privilege or your misfortune to live in a generation exactly like the one that, with wicked hands, nailed Jesus Christ to the cross. They didn't do it just as an afterthought, they did it out of stark necessity, it's Jesus or us.

Somebody has got to die. If we don't get rid of him, we will, and that's the issue of this hour. When it comes to a focus share, I believe I'll read verse 20. These words of John's 8th chapter, these words speak Jesus in the treasury, as he taught in the temple.

And no man laid hands on him, yet they wanted to. 7th chapter of John, they already got signs all over the country, so much money for information leading to the apprehension of one Jesus of Nazareth. But they don't lay hands on him yet, for there's somebody else on the scene, Almighty God, for his hour was not yet come.

Then said Jesus again unto them, he'd said it before, he said, I go my way and ye shall seek me and shall die in your sin. And whither I go, ye are not able to come. Then said these Jews, the leaders of the Jews, what he's talking about?

Will he kill himself? Because he saith, Whither I go, ye are not able to come. And so he pressed it a little closer and said unto them, don't run out of the building now, ye are from the need. Isn't that a compliment?

I tell you, the Lord was a diplomat, forever was one. This is a good way to win friends and influence people. Remember in the book of John, there are two classes of unsaved people all through that chapter.

There are children of wrath, they are not God's children yet, but the door hadn't been closed on them. But these folks that the Lord is talking about are not children of wrath, but they are sons of hell.

Their character is crystallized. The die has been cast. My Lord will say in this chapter, ye are of your father the dead. When I say that the circle has turned full circle, I know it's true or not, I think I've got a good deal of evidence for it is.

Dying in Sin Without Faith in Christ

I'm going to plead with men and women this morning, face the fact, I'm pretty certain you're going to go to hell, brother. You're living in a day, you're living in a day, not of child's play, but of bitter hostility to God's Son.

You're living in a day when in the name of Christianity, Jesus Christ is being crucified at first. And you're living in a day when there's a spirit back of all of the manifestations and crack-ups everywhere.

That spirit is diabolical and satanically inspired, and under God there's a war going on now to get rid utterly of Jesus Christ. And I think with your little namby-pamby experience that most any kind of preacher could shave with a little lollipop.

I think in this day of the pampering of the flesh, until our religious flesh, s-t-i-n-k, stinks in the nostrils of the Holy Ghost. I think, chances are, most of us have been crystallized in our character.

Sonship has to do with character and impurity. Sons of hell, ye are from beneath. The crack-up of everything that's high and holy in church and home and nation, in politics and economics, in the economical world, in the social world, if a man is living on the moon now, and we establish contact and they pay us a visit, and he'd come and go over to the place where I'm being entertained at an intersection in the Globe Store in the First National Bank of Pasadena, in the highways and the stores, and take a look!

He'd think he was living in an absolute, and to dare to tell him that there was a grain of Christianity in America, he'd laugh at us. Ye are from beneath, and there's no parocity in Jesus Christ, I'm from above.

I'm from above, ye crazy liberals on that doctrine of evolution that are turning our schools into incubators for eternal hell! Dare to say my Lord never claimed to be God. He does here, I'm from above.

The year of this cosmos, you're breath-territed with the God-hating, Christ-denying, Holy Spirit-despising spirit and atmosphere of this age, and I'm not of this world. He says, I'm just going to put the cards on the table for you now, here it is.

I said therefore unto you, that ye shall die in your sins, for if ye believe, and the word if here, I'm pretty certain means since, because these folks he's talking to, but they've already cast their vote, since ye believe not that I am he.

Ye shall die in your sins! In our homes, in our society, it looks like this generation is made up in my Jesus Christ ears! He's dead sure not going to be my Lord, and I say, I'm going to stick to my little namby-pamby stuff they call experience, that knows nothing of the crucifixion of the sinner on that cross of shame, and the resurrection into an entirely new way of living.

I'm going to stick to the spirit of this age that crucified the Son of God one time over just one issue. It is amazing that they killed him because of their perverted view of the doctrine of election.

A fellow told me the other day that this Church don't cede on election. I think it has. And I asked the pastor him, and at times he preached on his line, and he said twice, struck out both times. But I think just about all of us don't cede on it when we look at this awful truth, that the reason those people with wicked hands, in spite of warning, in spite of plain talk, in spite of being faced with the alternative that we've read here in the scripture, the reason they did him unto death and made fun of him in his agony and congratulated themselves on their wonderful achievement is because they wanted to be claimed to claim that they were children of Abraham and live with our holiness and godliness and surrender.

That's why they killed him. Why, they'll say to the Lord, what's he talking about? You could do something for us! When he said, if the Son shall make you free, they said, what in the name of heaven are you talking about?

You mean to tell me we need anything? No, sir, we need children of Abraham. If you read the book of John, that was the issue. This has got to go! We're going to have to prove that we're children of Abraham.

But two things that we ain't got. My Lord said, if you were children of Abraham, you'd have his faith. And my Lord said, if you were children of Abraham, you'd have his what? His words. They both died out some time while we've been asleep in our generation.

Jesus Christ as the Only Remedy

And in order to continue to have a religion that would leave men in control of the reigns of their own lives, the religions of that generation did not stop until they saw that Jesus stretched out on a golden tree and carefully watched as his body was placed six feet under the ground and went home to a state dinner.

Thanking God they got rid of him. This is about how serious it is now. We're going to have to quit sitting on the fence. The issue my Lord made was this, am he? I am he. And unless men and women can come to the place in the Bible meaning of the word that they believe, that's it, one of God, the Son of God, and God the Son, the only remedy.

They're going to die in their sins, too. My Lord says three terrible things here. He said, you're going to die in your sins. That's physical death. He says a second thing, you're not going where I'm going.

That's the second death. In language that all of us youngsters and all can understand, he said, you're going to die in such a fashion, physically, that we are going to be forever separated from what's ever out yonder.

You're from beneath, like Judas, you're going to your own place. I'm from above, going to the bosom of the Father, and you're not going to be able to make it. My soul, how strict this is, you're not able to enter.

Sin, Judgment, and the Holiness of God

He calls your attention to the only way of escape. I wish I knew how to meditate with you in this awful day. I wish I could come down and sit down beside you and stick a knife in your spirit and your soul and your heart and get you in this fat day.

An awful Christianity that's putting Christ to an open shame and crucifying him afresh. I wish you'd just face what an awful price man has to pay if he dies in his sin. I wish I knew how to proclaim it until somebody would believe it, that there are some things God hates a whole lot worse than he does death.

I know none of us can believe it, I guess, in this soft age in which we live. I wish we had somebody that actually had a conviction, before I'll succumb, before I'll go the way of this age, before I'll let down the standards, before I'll say, Comrade, before I'll join the movement, I'll die!

Because there are some things that are worse than death. In the catalog of God's book of remembrance, S-I-M, sin is more intolerable to Almighty God than H-E-double-L, hell. In the Bible, it sure will tell us about a God who hates hell, but he hates sin more than he hates hell.

But God be thrown into the trash can and got us a God with whom we can live like hogs and still be comfortable. That God will tell us that thistles and thorns and sweat are better than sin, that sorrow is better than sin, that suffering is better than sin, that pain and poverty and affliction are better than sin, that wars and plagues and famines and disease and destruction and death are better than sin.

Oh, my soul, this is the language of the God of the Bible. The one thing that provokes his anger and his destruction is S-I-M, sin. How terrible, endless tyranny, impenitent tears, broken hearts are better than sin.

And that God today, when we've been told on every head that whatever Lord wants, he's got a right to, that any impulse of my mind or my spirit or my body dissatisfies the consciousness of what it means to live in sin.

Do you know what it means? It means to die there. It means as the tree falls, so it lies. How terrible to die and face God, the God of whom the psalmist said, If thou shouldst mark iniquity, write it down, who should be able to stand?

That's the only story in spite of the fact that I don't think anybody believes it. Nobody can stand. If God marks down H. G. Wells, the godless writer of our day, he paints such a picture of what's going to happen, utter despair.

He said when he was a little boy, he came to H-A-T-E, hate, the God they told him about. He said, My mother and father told me that God sees what's going on. He said, My mother and father told me that God takes note of what's going on.

He said, My mother and father told me that God records what's going on. And he said, I came to H-A-T-E, hate, the God who watched me, put a record on me. But under God, that's exactly what God does.

Human Sinfulness and the Deception of Self-Reliance

And we desperately need to face that enough to where we join Mr. H. G. Wells and hate our theory. It's awful to die guilty of sins, unforgiven, and face a God who keeps books. But I must call your attention to the fact, chances are, you will die in your sins.

Because you've got a nature, the Bible says, you hate righteousness, and you lap iniquity like water. That's the kind of folks you are. You've got a heart that's a cesspool of hostility to God's holy law.

You've got a nature, and you can improve it and dress it up, but you can't change it, that actually hates any kind of authority. You've got a will that's a cripple and perverted. I wouldn't brag on what you're going to do too much.

You are living in a generation whose God is at its belly, and even now we churches and preachers are being pressured on every hand to turn the meeting of the Saints into an entertainment. I think there's just one thing worth living for now, and that's to gratify the desires of my body.

Do you know anything else worth living for? Do you know anything else worth working 8 hours a day for, watching the time clock hurry home so you can pamper the flesh? Oh, that which I want, I've got a right to.

That which I want, God almighty, just get out of the way, I'm going to have it. That spirit that has turned God's holy day into a Roman holiday spirit, I was reading this morning where 77 percent of the Church-related college students in America say that sex relationships are desirable before marriage and the right before it.

That spirit that enables a college professor to say that in another few years our society will be almost 100 percent utterly un-moral. You are living in that day when nothing under God's shining sun is going to be allowed to get in the way of Ralph Barnard's God-hating, God-hating Ralph Barnard with a corrupt, foul, evil, filthy nature that makes me just laugh for niquity, that's rebellion like a dull, thirsty laugh.

Ralph Barnard that the Old Testament calls a wriggling maggot, just a cesspool of worms. And if your religion gets in my way, out you go. You are living in a generation, more and more, finding ways to beat Almighty God.

The Consequences of Sin and False Assurance

I remember when girls were afraid to lose their virginity. Not now. Birth control, contraception. I remember reading in a book, it seemed to me like it was the Bible, whatever you sow, that you have to reap.

That's one verse of scripture. Anybody who has got their sense on earth knows it ain't so. We've just found ways to beat God, brother. We've found ways to raise hell and not have to pay the bill. Yes, old crazy brother Barnard going up and down this land said all hell is going to burst on this generation.

That is it. God in the cart of the Lord, we don't need him. That old book is a bunch of fairy tales you need to tell me. The wages of sin is death. I'm getting by all right. We'll forget when the biggest drunk in the city, my last pastor many, many years ago, they caught me out of town and they had a business meeting and the doctor put a shot in his arm, the old drunk, he was chairman of the board of deacons, and they sobered him up in an hour's time so he could stand up and pass a motion to fire the preacher.

You mean to tell me that booze will kill you? Well, they've got a high post sobering you up in 30 minutes. My old army colonel in the first camp I was in as an army chaplain, he'd get as drunk as a boiled owl ever sun-tattered a night, and he'd sit on the front seat every Sunday morning in chapel just sober as an owl.

The doctor gave him some medicine to sober him up. And immorality, well, they know it's just whatever I want I'm going to get. And that Rothbard is wrong, that's wrong. That's right. This is the atmosphere.

Now, this is the kind of thing you're living in, in which a gospel has been invented and preached in most of our churches that allow you to be a Christian who never forsakes. I expect you'll go to a church that allows anything under this wonderful term that we're not under law, we're under grace.

That's all. We can't be perfect, and so let's go to church on Sunday and raise hell the rest of the time, and we'll go to heaven when we die. That's Christianity. My Lord said, you know, there's just one escape.

Coming to Christ Through Self-Denial

If you believe that I am he. I suspect there's more dynamite crowded in that word there in the context. If you believe that I am he, that's the only way of escape. If you could get to where you could actually believe that I am the sent one of God.

Mr. McShane, the last year of his whole ministry, said, Mr. McShane, the man who made such a contribution to the cause of Christ in Scotland, Mr. McShane said, I had this evening a more complete understanding of that self-emptying and self-abasement with which it is necessary to come to Christ.

A denying of self, trampling it underfoot, a recognition of the complete righteousness and justice of God that could do nothing else condemn us utterly and thrust us down to the lowest, a feeling that even in hell we should rejoice in his sovereignty and say all was rightly done.

He was a man, Brother Pastor, the holiest man maybe Scotland ever knew, almost a saint of God. His conception of the character of Almighty God was so high. His experience with himself so deep. He never got to that nice little something that we call Christianity.

He never got to the place where he wasn't constantly trying to find something he could let hold of that would give him a little assurance. Such a word to claim an interest in the merits and benefits of the shed blood of Jesus Christ.

It looks to me like there is a man that is trying to come to terms on the most tremendous proposition any of us have ever faced with, come to believe that Jesus Christ is the only way of escape. Not a convenience but an utter necessity.

If I'm on that path that had to be done, R-A-T-L-L-A-O, then I can't do for myself some conception of the fact that this agonizing, with the Christ of the gospel on his tongue for eternity. If you could just come to where you believed in, actually believe.

The Only Door to the Cross

These folks never did. These folks died in their sin. These folks didn't hear the warning. They became too late for it. I don't have anything else except to say, just to get in contact with this, you'd make it the all-out effort of your life to get in the only door, the only door, to get in the only door to the cross, until you touch it with hands like a beggar, laying hold never to let him go.

I wish the Spirit of God, he's been absent from this generation so long, I wish the windows of heaven would be open and he could take this truth, who Jesus is. Is he what he claimed to be? Is he a necessity or an option?

God put all of his eggs in that basket. Is it Jesus or hell? I wish he'd set us crawling on our knees, if that's what it takes to get under the blood. Find a shelter, find a hiding place underneath his wings.

I wish these next few minutes would be a time of seeking the Lord Jesus Christ. I'm going to ask the congregation if you'll be so kind. If you will not, please nobody leave, nobody make any disturbance, I'll not hold you long.

Will you stand quietly to your feet?