Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

Announcer: The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals presents the timeless teaching of Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Once in a while, the story of a prison concentration camp where tortures are inflicted upon the miserable victims makes the headlines. But in much of the world today, similar barbarities are the common order of the day. The Western world has even invented a term for such actions that covers up the true source of the evil. Men call such outrages inhuman.

But the Bible teaches us that there is nothing more human than for man to act according to his fallen condition.

Announcer: 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 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 "The Wrath of God."

In our justice system, a criminal cannot be declared guilty and sent to prison without first being charged with a crime. One of the crucial truths presented in the book of Romans is that all people everywhere are guilty before God and subject to his wrath. But someone might say, "Why are we guilty? What is the charge?"

In today's study, Dr. Barnhouse shows us how the Apostle Paul acts as the prosecuting attorney and begins to set forth the charges by God against mankind. The Scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is Romans chapter 1 and verse 18. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with the message entitled "The Wrath of God."

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto the our Father and our God and in the Holy Spirit. We pray that as thy word comes to us in this hour, it may come with all the force and power that only the Holy Spirit can bring. And as we see this dreadful subject, so necessary and yet so terrible, we ask that thou shall speak to the hearts of men, that they may be warned to flee from the wrath to come. Hear us we pray thee and speak to each heart in Jesus name. Amen.

Now in our study of the first chapter of Romans, we come to the 18th verse, Romans 1:18, where it is stated that in the gospel, there is also the revelation of the wrath of God.

Now it would be pleasant not to have to preach on this subject. But if one sets out to be an expositor of the word of God, it is necessary to consider all of the revelation of truth in the order in which God has seen fit to deliver it to us. The minister has no right of choice, though there are some ministers that seek to interpose their choice in priority over the divine revelation.

Suppose the case of a boy who went to the employment department of the Western Union in one of our great cities. The manager tells him he can start at once. "But," says the boy, "there is one thing I should warn you about. I am psychologically constituted so that I cannot stand any scene of unhappiness.

"I will deliver all of the telegrams that tell of fortunes being made, of congratulations for success, of acceptance for marriage. In short, all of the telegrams that are of joy and bliss. But all the telegrams concerning sickness and death and loss are alien to my nature, and I will not deliver them."

It would not take the manager long to say that there was no place for such a messenger in the company. It is the duty of the delivery boy to take all messages to the persons to whom they are addressed by the shortest route and in the quickest time. In no small sense, that is the function of the teacher of the word of God.

This is what Paul meant when he said in his farewell to the Ephesian Church in Acts 20:27, "For I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God." And this followed his calling them to witness that he was pure from the blood of all men. We must recognize the fact that we must teach the whole counsel of God.

And I assure you that if I speak today of the revelation of the wrath of God, it is because I live in the profound conviction that I have received my ministry from God and that I am fully responsible to him and must one day give answer for the way I have exercised my ministry.

Now our text in Romans 1 says, "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness." The introduction is over. The announcement of the Gospel is over. And now there is the beginning of a great argument that might be called the charge of the prosecution in the case against man.

The line of reasoning is that man, the creature of God, has a history of sin and a present condition of hopelessness. Before there can be a remedy, there must be a diagnosis. And before the diagnosis, there must be a case history. This case history starts by revealing that man, all mankind and every individual man, collective man and particular man, is necessarily under the wrath of God.

The argument is going to carry through two chapters of the book and will set forth that degenerate man, unregenerate man, are alike lost. That irreligious man and religious man are equally lost. Only after these facts are understood, can there be the universal prescription that can bring the divine remedy to all men.

The wrath of God is a phrase that should chill the blood of any individual who does not know that it has been stilled forever and that there is a way to avoid it, for our God is perfect. And everything that he does must be perfect.

Just as he was perfect in judging the world when sin entered through the heart of Lucifer where it found its origin, and just as he was perfect in wrecking the universe and bringing the world into its ruined state where we find it in the second verse of Genesis, so he must be perfect in his ultimate judgment on those who know him not and who obey not the gospel of his son.

"He that despised Moses' law," we read in Hebrews 10:28 and 9, "died without mercy under two or three witnesses." And he continues, "Of how much sorer punishment suppose ye shall he be thought worthy who hath trodden under foot the Son of God and hath counted the blood of the covenant wherewith he was sanctified as an unholy thing and hath insulted the spirit of grace."

Some people are disturbed about the idea of a God of love possessing wrath. Any God who does not have wrath is a monstrosity, a crippled God. God's attributes are balanced by his perfection. God is perfect in his love, but he is also perfect in his holiness and his justice.

It is perfectly and gloriously true that God is love. But it is just as true, and I may add, just as gloriously true that God is hate. Anyone who does not take account of the hatred of God has failed to comprehend one of the most important truths of the universe.

God is love toward the sinner, but God is hate toward sin. Could we hold in respect any God who did not hate sin? Habakkuk sets forth the truth in the great inquiry into the problem of evil. "Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil. Thou canst not look upon iniquity."

And one of the proofs of the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ, as set forth in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, is that Christ knew how to hate. We read in Hebrews 1:9, "Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity. Therefore, God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows."

One of the tragedies of modern religious life is that there has been a preaching of the love of God to the exclusion of the preaching of the hatred of God. There cannot be too much preaching of the love of God, providing it is balanced with the preaching of God's hatred for sin and God's ultimate wrath toward those that know him not and who obey not the Gospel of his son.

When you say that God is love, you must use the right tone of voice. There are those that say it today in a tone so maudlin, so mawkish, so saccharine, that it repunes those who are biblically minded. "God is love." The same three words can hold meanings so diverse as to be opposites.

It's like the other famous three little words. What does a man mean when he says, "I love you"? Now that is an enigma, an enigma which each woman has to figure out when she hears the words. There may be impudent flippancy in the words, "I love you, babe," which words may even be a cloak for seduction, and as vileness as far removed from true love as filth is removed from purity.

But the same words may be spoken by a man who is laying his life, his fortune and his name at the feet of the woman whom he wishes to be his honored wife and the mother of his children. "I love you. I love you." They're the north and the south poles of purity and emotion between "I love you" and "I love you."

The same is true with "God is love" and "God is love." When spoken by a liberal minister who is a denier of the person and work of Christ, and who does not believe in the eternal doom of the impenitent, they mean one thing. When spoken by a clear and faithful preacher of sin, repentance, salvation, and justification, they mean quite another thing.

When they are spoken by a Dwight L. Moody, they are glorious in their truth and exaltation of the being of God. In the latter case, they admit the completeness of God, his love for the sinner, and his wrath toward sin.

Now in our text, the word wrath has some interesting meanings in its original. There are two different words in Greek for wrath. One of them, meaning the hot, vehement surge of anger, and the other, the slowly rising indignation. The first word, *thumos*, which signifies a panting rage, from a root that means to breathe violently, is not used here.

But our word, *orga*, signifies an indignation that has risen gradually and become more settled. Its original meaning was connected with plants and fruits in their swelling with juice until they finally burst. When the word is applied to the wrath of God, which there defines as "that in God which stands opposed to man's disobedience, obduracy, especially in resisting the gospel, opposed to sin, and which manifests itself in punishing the same."

As a flower bud swells, cracks slowly, and then bursts into bloom, so the wrath of God will burst forth against the ungodly world. Our text says that the wrath of God is revealed. The human race has always had the indwelling sense of the justice of God and the need for the propitiation of this justice.

It is not a new revelation that God hates sin, but the coming of Christ to die is the revelation of God's wrath to the highest degree. Before the time of Christ, God occasionally burst forth at some high offense on the part of man, leaving signposts of his wrath at the crossroads of human history in order to show man the direction in which God was moving, and in which man was moving, and how God would most surely follow man in wrath.

But for the most part, the behavior of God during the centuries before the time of Christ is best described in the phrase used by Paul on Mars Hill, "And the times of this ignorance, God winked at." Man, little by little, got the idea that he could put something over on God, that he could sin with impunity, that he could get away with murder.

The Gospel of Christ dispels this illusion forever. Though some men still think that because God does not immediately blast every sin, that they are getting away with something. That illusion will vanish if we are able to think along with the sensible editor of a weekly paper in a farm area, who answered a skeptic with a single sentence.

The story goes that the godly farmers in a Western community were greatly shocked one summer Sunday morning, when they drove up to the little church in the country, to see that the man who owned the 40 acres across from the church was in the midst of plowing. That he had evidently been turning the furrows since dawn.

The people went on into church and could hear the rise and fall of the noise of the tractor as it approached and then went on to the other side of the field. The farmer who was doing this worked other fields all week and came back on the following Sunday to complete the job. So on through the spring, the summer, and the autumn, he plowed, disced, harrowed, dragged, fertilized, drilled, cultivated the field, and finally cut and stacked and husked the corn and carried it to the crib.

Then he wrote a letter to the editor of the local weekly, pointing out that he had done all this on Sunday, and yet had the highest yield per acre of any farm in the county, and he asked the editor how the Christians could explain this. The editor with great common sense printed the letter, but followed it with a simple statement, "God does not settle his accounts in the month of October."

But for those who have any eyes at all, the Gospel of Jesus Christ contains the terrible warning that God hates sin and that he is going to deal with it fully in those who refuse the gift of his son, whom he has set forth to be the mercy seat for the remission of sin.

There are some evangelists who feel led to preach on the sweet, wooing note of love. And it may well be that there are those whom the Spirit leads into Christ through this method of preaching. But Paul, like John the Baptist, was a stern and uncompromising preacher of the wrath of God.

How could they have been followers of the Savior if they had not been willing to follow him in this? It's all right to have the wooing note on occasion, and most certainly we are always to speak all the truth in love. But it must never be forgotten that today is not the day of wooing so much as it is of the sharp setting forth of the commandment of God to guilty men.

Commandment that they should leave the black habitations of unrighteousness and come to the light of the Son of God. On Mars Hill, Paul said, "God now commandeth all men everywhere to repent, because he hath appointed a day in the 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."

Yes, God has appointed a day in which he will judge the world. That is as much a part of the good news as is the promise of heaven for the believer. There are several anguished cries in the Bible from the hearts of righteous men, addressed to God, pleading to know why he does not move to put down sin.

David cries out, "Have respect unto the covenant, for the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty." It must have been the Holy Spirit who put that cry in the heart of David, for he, David, had not been able to go into the dark places of the earth as we are permitted to do with modern means of travel.

How many young Christians have left their homes and gone to the uttermost parts of the earth to be confronted with the terrific impact of the horrors of heathenism? It is almost impossible for the American mind to imagine the miserable wretchedness of the hundreds of millions of souls in these habitations of cruelty.

All of the evils of the world spring out of the corrupt heart of man. The Lord Jesus, arguing with the Pharisees over the question of religious ceremonials, the washing of hands in ceremonies, said that it was not the things that come from without that defile man, but that the things that come out of his heart.

"For from within," Christ said, "out of the heart proceed the evils that are in the human race." This is the plain teaching of our Lord. The Scotch poet has illustrated man's dilemma in his thinking about the subject. Robert Burns said, "Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn."

Many people do not realize that the title that Burns gave to that poem in which those famous lines are found is, "Man was made to mourn." Well, you see, man was really made for God. The first question of the Westminster Catechism is, "What is the chief end of man?" And the answer is, "Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever."

When the first father of the human race sinned, he brought us all into the road with our backs turned to God. The end of that road is degradation and depravity, as we shall see before we are through with this chapter.

How are we to know that righteousness will ultimately triumph? There is nothing in nature that can teach us that the processes of decay and erosion will one day be overcome, and that the deserts of the world shall be made to blossom like the rose. There is nothing in the social life of the world that leads us to believe that man can settle the vast problems of his nature and being.

There is nothing in human religion that can do more than drug the human senses for a moment, to make the road to hell less tragic. Never was there a truer word spoken than that of Karl Marx, "Religion is the opiate of the people." For it is religion, not Christianity, mind you, it is religion that provides the soporific that lulls man to sleep with impending doom hanging over all who know not God and who obey not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

How then are we to know that righteousness will ultimately triumph? There is nothing in history that would lead man to believe that he is capable of lifting himself by his own bootstraps out of the morass of sin. In fact, history is the story of greater and vaster wars being fought by larger numbers of people over wider ranges of the surface of the earth. We are now in the age of global wars, and as soon as one is finished, men begin to talk about the next one.

How then are we to know that righteousness will ultimately triumph? There is only one answer. The revelation of the wrath of God at the cross of Jesus Christ is sufficient guarantee that the Lord God will finish what he has started. He will yet manifest his glory and majesty and dominion and power and will bring all of the rebel elements to doom.

And let not any man delude himself with the idea that human righteousness will pass as valid currency when the reckoning day shall come. The argument that is now set forth in the rest of the Epistle is based on the double revelation of these verses. The righteousness of God is revealed at the cross, and the wrath of God is revealed at the cross.

The Gospel thus becomes a startling and positive warning of great danger to those who refuse the mercy of God, and at the same time it is the faithful assurance of delivery and safety to those who accept the warning. Ever since man's first disobedience, he has been a fallen creature.

The terrible early chapters of this Epistle to the Romans show man as he has always been in God's sight, but also as he is now shown to himself in the mirror of his own conscience, illuminated by the word of God. It is now declared by God himself that man is corrupt, alienated from the life of God, and dead in trespasses and sin. Mankind is depicted not in the isolated individual, but in the species and by nature as being dissolute, depraved, and corrupt, as being unholy, ungodly, and unrighteous.