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: Murder and war are but symptoms. No doctor in his senses would ever deal with symptoms. He must deal with causes and we must deal with causes, or rather with the one cause, namely the indwelling sin in the heart of men. And we cannot deal with it. God even has declared it to be incurable. He has declared that what he has to do is to take away the old heart of stone and give a new heart of flesh in its place, because the old heart is incurably wicked as we read in Jeremiah 17:9.

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 Destruction and Misery. Alcoholic beverages were declared illegal in 1920, but Americans continued to drink and bootlegging and organized crime ran amok.

Prohibition tried to reduce crime and social problems by legislation, but it actually made the situation worse. Mankind's problems cannot be fixed by regulating outward behavior. The real dilemma is our deeply ingrained sinful nature. What can change the heart of man and produce a real transformation in our world? Let's find out as Dr. Barnhouse takes us to Romans chapter 3 and verses 15 through 17. Here again is Dr. Donald Gray Barnhouse with a message entitled Destruction and Misery.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto thee, our Father and our God, and in the Holy Spirit. We praise thee that thou hast been so faithful to us in telling us without restraint the full depths of our lost condition in order that we might flee to the full depths of thy grace manifested in Jesus Christ. May the word come forth to our hearts this day in the power of the Holy Spirit and in much assurance that our faith may not stand in the wisdom of men, but in thy power, oh God. We ask it in the name and for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen. We are studying together the third chapter of the book of Romans and have come to a further sentence in God's deep appraisal and diagnosis of the ills of the human heart. In our study of this chapter, the terrible physical and spiritual examination continues. By now, we're aware that the evidence shows that God's word was terrifyingly true when he told us through Isaiah what we really are. In the first of Isaiah, we read from the sole of the foot even unto the head. There is no soundness in it, but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores.

They have not been closed, neither bandaged nor softened by ointment. Now, having considered what the Lord has said to us about the mouth as being the open sepulcher through which the heart pours the words of death, we continue with the examination and diagnosis. The next line reads, their feet are swift to shed blood. Destruction and misery are in their ways and the way of peace have they not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes. Once more, there will be those who do not think that the description is apt for each individual. There will be those who know that they have never given poison to anyone, that they have never stuck a knife between another's ribs or shot a bullet into a prostrate form, and who will think that therefore they are not guilty of the commandment against murder.

But in the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord Jesus Christ disposed of such arguments by pointing out that murder was not a matter of the fact in the sight of God, but that the fact stemmed out of the root of hatred which was in the heart of each individual. Just as the real tree is in the acorn, so it is that sin is the act that is within the thought. During the centuries between Moses and Christ, there were those who had built detours around the law and had come to imagine that because they had not taken the physical life of someone that they were not murderers.

But the Lord Jesus answered in such a way as to silence them forever. It was as though he had replied, you have gone along the straight highway of the law to the corner where the side road leads away under the sign, thou shalt not kill. This you have interpreted as meaning thou shalt not walk this road, the 100 miles to the place where you shed the blood of your victim. But said the Lord Jesus Christ, writing the matter for all time, I say unto you, he that hateth his brother is a murderer. It is not necessary for you to go the 100 miles.

Have you left the main highway of righteousness and gone even a few steps down the road toward the hatred of another? If so, God says you are guilty. Guilt does not consist in the actual taking of a life, but in the movement toward envy which leads to hatred. The first time that human blood was shed on this earth was when Cain slew his brother Abel. The motive for the murder is clearly revealed in the New Testament by God who asks and answers the question concerning the motive. We should love one another, says he, not as Cain who was of that wicked one and slew his brother and wherefore slew he him?

Because his own works were evil and his brother's righteous. Marvel not, my brethren, if the world hate you. Now, if we look at the first murder, we can understand all others and we can understand more about our own hearts. White of Edinburgh says of Cain, envy came to its full maturity all at once in Cain. Some sinful passions have taken time and environment to spring up and mature to their full fruit in the human heart and in the human life. But envy, the wickedest and deadliest and the most detestable of all our sinful passions, came to a man all at once.

Eve's firstborn son envied his brother Abel. Dr. White makes the fearful mistake of saying that the envy was because of the righteousness of Abel, but the word of God clearly shows us that it was because of the righteousness of Abel's offering. The hatred was for Christ, not Abel. True envy begins first of all in the unwillingness to submit to God in Christ and to envy those who, having submitted to God in Christ, are marked by God with acceptance and blessing. But this author well says Cain envied Abel. He envied his brother, his only brother, his trustful, confiding, affectionate brother, his brother who worshipped him and who would have given him his altar and his lamb and his fire from heaven and all that he had if Cain would but have laid aside his gloom and taken it all.

Cain will not be beholden to his younger brother. Nothing will satisfy Cain now but one thing. A coal from hell has by this time so kindled hell in Cain's heart that all the rebukes and commands of Adam and all the tears and embraces of Eve and all the soft answers and submissions of Abel could not quench the wrath in Cain's evil eye or take the fall out of his sunken countenance. Let the holy man here who has never had this same hellfire in his heart at his brother, at his dearest and best and only friend on earth, at his old playfellow, at his present fellow worshiper, let that happy man cast stones at that miserable wretch with murder in his heart, at Abel, his unsuspecting brother.

No man from that day to this has ever admitted envy. To every other wickedness, confession has often been made, but did you ever confess envy or did you ever have envy confessed to you? No, never. No. Only by the stone, only by the dagger, only by the pistol, only by the bitten back and the slandered name is envy ever found out. In his noble answer to Tilican's abominable libel, Jacob Beaman says, we, poor children of Eve, no longer walk together in the love of God, but full of passion we envy, vilify, dishonor and denounce one another, wishing to one another death and all kinds of evil.

We enjoy as we enjoy nothing else, each other's loss and pain and misery. It was an old superstition that a murdered man's body began to run warm blood again as soon and as often as its murderer was brought near it. And in this way, they used to discover who the real murderer was. Now, just suppose that that was indeed a natural or a supernatural law in the age of the world. And in the land in which we live, how many men still living would begin to be all over with blood in your presence? The man sitting next to you at this moment would be like a murdered corpse.

The preacher now standing before you, your mother's son, the very wife of your bosom, when she does not flatter and fawn upon you, your own son, your dearest friend. Yes, you would then be what Cain all his days was and all men finding you would slay you. They would not know. They would be horrified at what it meant when their throats began to run blood as they passed you on the street or as you talked with them in the field or as you sat eating and drinking with them at your table or at the Lord's table.

But you know and you know their names. Let their names then be heard of God in your prayers every day and every night, lest they be proclaimed from the housetops to your everlasting confusion and condemnation at the last day. The feet of the first baby who ever learned to walk upon this earth brought to manhood a man whose feet were swift to shed blood. It was because he had inherited the fallen nature of his father Adam and that is the blood that is in your veins and mine and that is why there is active murder in the world and that is why there is war in the world.

What folly in the hearts of the ministers whom I call the brotherhood boys, who believe that it's possible to banish war from the earth by holding up its dangers before men. What folly to think that the sons of Adam can change their natures when the Ethiopian cannot change his skin nor the leopard change his spots. Do I need to argue in the slightest the truth of the next line of my text, destruction and misery are in their ways? Whether they be ways of war or ways of peace, there is destruction and misery in the ways of man.

In former times, there were savages living on the islands of the Pacific. The inhabitants of one island would war on the inhabitants of another island. Decimation by cannibalism was the constant mark of these island paradises. Then the white man arrived. What did he bring with him? The scourge of white man's diseases. And there were islands whose populations were wiped out. Still, there were those who thought of these islands as little heavens. Though the vermin-covered population drooling at the mouth was not so photogenic when one looked behind the scenes. Then the Japanese fortified the island paradises and war came and we stepped in.

Ask the man who fought in the Pacific whether the islands are paradise. They will answer you that they are nearer hell or go to Africa. In the early centuries, the white men drifted down the coast and stole what natives he could capture from among the coastal tribes and sold them as slaves. Soon, those that remained bought their peace with the white man by agreeing to furnish slaves from the interior. So white man set black man against black man and the coastal tribes flourished by raiding the interior and stealing the young men and women of the other tribes.

And the white man colonized and enslaved the population by the millions or go to China. The people are living under the cruel hand of the mandarins. Then the British guns boom and Sir John Bowring arrives. He took Hong Kong and brought the cities of China under his fire and commanded the authorities to sign treaties allowing opium to be imported into the land. What if a few million people became enslaved to the terrible poppy? And what if misery floods the land? It makes no difference, for British planters will sell their poppies in Burma and India and the states in the tight little island will flourish.

The blood and misery is over the horizon, but it is not out of the sight of God. And let us not forget that the man who forced opium on China was a unitarian who did not believe in the deity of Christ or in his atoning blood and who determined to write a hymn that Christians would sing, putting one meaning into the words that he meant as lying words with still another meaning. For if you look in your hymn books, you will find that Sir John Bowring, who forced opium upon China, wrote in the Cross of Christ I Glory, towering o'er the wrecks of time, all the light of sacred story gather round its head sublime.

And if we Christians sometimes sing the hymn, it's because we have taken it as a goblet and have wiped away the horrible filth of the man who wrote it and have put new wine in its meaning or rather the old wine of the new covenant in the blood of the Lord shed for many for the remission of sins. But we need not go to the islands or to Africa or to China. We can walk in our own shores and know that destruction and misery are in the ways of man. Our West was one with blood and tears.

Our minds were opened with riots and bloodshed. The barons of industry fattened on the juices of their workers. Anyone who knows the history of labor difficulties knows how the poor were exploited in those times. It does not take much of an eye to see that those who will shoot one labor leader in order to gain control over a union because of the power and profit that accrue to the leaders can realize how these leaders are not above stirring man and women to mass envy that could one day be the seeds of bloodshed. For we are teaching many of our unskilled laborers that they have as much right to a good hourly wage as the skilled artisans.

And men are learning to laugh at the divine statement that he who will not work shall not eat. As much as Cain ever envied Abel, so the lazy and the unskilled today are being taught to envy the industrious and the skilled. Destruction and misery are in the ways of the nation. There are those who breed criminals for profit as really as Fagan trained pickpockets in Dickens's famous story. But it's not necessary to prolong the list of examples. We know that destruction and misery are in the ways of mankind. It can perhaps be summed up in an experience I had a short while ago.

With a friend, I had the privilege of traveling for many thousands of miles throughout Africa, visiting the mission stations and preaching to the missionaries. On one occasion, we had to drive about 100 miles in central Nigeria after dark. It was in the dark of the moon and we traveled along the gravel road at about 35 miles an hour. There was no other traffic. Occasionally, a jungle animal would be caught for a moment in our headlights. A troop of baboons swung across the road. We were in an open car and the air was clean and fresh.

Suddenly, we caught a terrible odor and one of the men named a native village and said we were passing it. We asked if that were indeed a village, for there was not the faintest flicker of light. The missionaries asked if we didn't smell the village. Well, there had been a terrible stench, but what it was we did not know. Half an hour later, the same smell came to us in the night. This time, our driver stopped, turned the car so that the headlights swept the sides of the road and there indeed were the huts of a village.

One could comprehend the thought of the early missionaries who wrote the hymn From Greenland's Icy Mountains, From India's Coral Strand, Where Afric's sunny fountains roll down their golden sand. From many an ancient river, from many a palmy plain, they call us to deliver their land from error's chain. Now, the second verse became famous as a quotation and multitudes have heard it who do not know that it comes from the hymn. What though the spicy breezes blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle, where every prospect pleases and only man is vile. Now, one of the humorous, if not sad, notes of my travels occurred in Ceylon when I found in the hymn books of that island that this hymn was published, but that it had been edited to read What though the spicy breezes blow soft o'er Java's isle, where every prospect pleases and only man is vile.

I've had the privilege of motoring the length and breadth of both Java and Ceylon and there is nothing to choose between the inhabitants for cleanliness or lack of it. But it is important to note that the human heart does not wish to accept the verdict that God has written against it. The Ceylonese put the vileness in Java and the editors of our Protestant hymn books for the most part, influenced by the modernistic school of theology which denies man's original sin and present depravity, has been at work on our hymn books, toning down the great utterances which our forebears in truth and in harmony with the Bible were willing to sing.

The great hymn Beneath the Cross of Jesus has had a wonderful couplet changed from divine truth to something much lower where our fathers once sang And from my stricken heart with tears, two wonders I confess, the wonders of redeeming love and my own worthlessness. The editors would now have us sing And from my smitten heart with tears, two wonders I confess, the wonders of his glorious love and my unworthiness. You see the heart is smitten instead of stricken and evidently it is not smitten very hard. The love is glorious, but not redeeming, for that might offend those who do not believe in the atonement and man's worthlessness is changed to unworthiness.

After all, they want to leave the congregation with a few shreds of respectability now, even though they may go to hell later because destruction and misery have been in the ways even of our ministers and the editors of our hymn books. Unfortunately, the illustration is not a lone one, but scores of our greatest hymns have been thus emasculated because Satan or the evil heart of man or a combination of both hates with unholy hatred the doctrine of man's complete ruin in sin and God's perfect remedy in Christ. The last line of our text in Romans is that the way of peace they have not known.

There may be those who object and who tell of all man's efforts for peace. I will admit immediately that the way of peace conferences is well known, but I do not think that such knowledge in any wise contradicts the statement of scripture that the way of peace they have not known. The tragedy is that there are those who have confused the way of pacifism for the way of peace. The doctrine of pacifism is not the way of peace. Gandhi had the way of pacifism and his followers rose when the British left India and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of their enemies, the Mohammedans.

The way of peace is God's way and man has never taken that way. The carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. If someone wishes to tell us that the United States has had a long history of peace, he merely shows his ignorance of history and of the meaning of the word peace. We spread out across the continent at the expense of the Indian tribes, the herds of buffalo and the mighty forests. Everything was swept before the relentless march of man, leaving destruction and misery in his way.

Point to your garden cities and I will point to crawling slums. Point to peaceful elections and I will point to race riots and repression. Point to crowds of laughing children and I will point to hundreds of new psychiatric hospitals. Point to the fact that there are no bomb explosions at the present moment and I will point to our military budget. Be not deceived. God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. Oh, I'm well aware that the primary application of that verse in its context is to the way a Christian gives to missionary causes.

But certainly this text can be adopted in its larger sense to the ripening of the harvests that must be inevitably reaped by mankind. The way of peace is the way of surrender to the claims of the Lord Jesus Christ. How can God be at peace with man when man is refusing his son? God has made all of the laws of nature and he has made the laws that govern the conditions of man's fall. The open sepulcher of the heart pours forth a miasma that cannot be cured by human means. It is not pessimism to say that man's problem is absolutely insoluble by man.

It is the most glorious optimism to say that God has announced that the problems will be solved by himself. We do not have to look into a far, distant future for some possible age of gold to be brought about by some remotely possible efforts of man. We look to the Lord and expect him who is the prince of peace. We expect him to come in crashing judgment against the ways and the works of man and to bring righteousness by the force of his all-powerful will. Then there shall be righteousness upon this earth and not until then.

Until he comes, there will be misery and destruction and ignorance of the way of peace. Until he comes, the moaning of the world will continue. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. But the creation shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. So as best we know, we turn our eyes resolutely away from man and his plans and turn them to the word of God that we may see the Lord Jesus Christ. And here is our hope and the only hope of the world.

And our God and Father, we pray thee that thou shalt take this message to the hearts of the needy in this hour. If there are those whose eyes are dry because they have cried all their tears, let them know that there is comfort and healing for the soul in the Savior God. If there are those who have not been born again, give them no rest nor peace until they come to rest in Christ. But upon all thy redeemed own, may thy grace, mercy and peace abide. And to thee be the glory, the majesty, the dominion and the power now until Jesus comes again and forever.

Amen.

Guest (Male): The Lord is calling a people to himself out from this world of misery, destruction and ignorance into the way of peace. He will build his church and return one day in a glorious triumph over evil. We hope you've benefited from today's message by Dr. Barnhouse entitled Destruction and Misery. 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 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 Destruction and Misery or simply ask for message number R3-10.

We would also like to make available to you a free copy of Dr. Barnhouse's booklet entitled From Depression to Hope. So many people, even Christians, become overwhelmed by life's problems and difficulties and fall into the pit of depression. Sadly, many people never find their way out of this black hole of hopelessness and despair. In this booklet, Dr. Barnhouse confronts depression with glorious gospel truth, that Jesus has the power to lift us from the depths of despair into the assurance of his love and the confidence certain hope that awaits all who trust in him. Ask for your free copy of From Depression to Hope when you call or write.

Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is the radio ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals 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 materials which will equip 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 this 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 or call toll free 1-800-488-1888. 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. Thanks again for being with us. Join us again next time for more classic teaching on Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible.