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: The common error of believing in the supposed fatherhood of God and the supposed brotherhood of man is the false premise on which is built the false conclusion concerning the relationship of all men to the creator. God is the creator of all men, but God is the father only of those who have been born again through faith in the blood of Jesus Christ. There is no greater lie than that which teaches the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man.

Guest (Male): Over a half a century ago, the late Dr. Donald Grey 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 God gave them up. A teacher frustrated by his nearly deaf student called him addle brain and said he would not amount to anything.

Thomas Edison went on to prove his teacher wrong. When man gives up on someone, that person still has hope that he can turn his life around. But when man sinks into such sin, rebellion, and defilement that God gives up on him, he has no hope. How can we avoid falling into this condition? How can we find peace with God? The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is Romans 1 and verses 24 through 32. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with the message entitled God gave them up.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto the our father and our God and in the Holy Spirit. We thank thee that we may come boldly by the new and living way. And we thank thee for thine abundant provision for us in all things. And that thou hast made it possible because thou art love for us to come to thee with holy boldness and know that we shall be received. Use thy word in this hour to build and strengthen us in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen. There are some sermons that a true minister of the gospel loves to preach.

And there are other sermons which it hurts to preach. I wish that I did not have to preach the sermon that lies before me today. But when one sets out to be an expositor of the word of God and takes every verse, every line, every phrase, and every word just as they come, there are moments when the terrible things of God arrive in the narrative and they must be treated. I live halfway between New York and Philadelphia. And when one drives from New York into the country towards the west, south, there must be a momentary dive into the tunnel under the river.

Then a stretch through the Jersey industrial area where the road runs near a factory with a horrible stench. I think it's a glue factory. No one lingers there unless there's a traffic jam. The thousands of cars that pass that way whirl along towards green country, sustained by the thought of what lies beyond. Now in our Bible study today, unfortunately, our road takes us through such an area of spiritual stench. And it would not be worthwhile preaching if we did not know from the map that we are going to cross the great divide in the third chapter of Romans and descend into the pleasant valley which stems from the cross of the Savior and that therein we shall dwell forever more.

But now we're in the first chapter. Now this is the 25th sermon in the series. And we have passed by only 23 verses, which means that we've averaged not quite one study to a verse. But today, we'll take a deep breath, hold our noses, and go through several verses in one study. It's not that the text would not merit a more detailed study, but that the nature of the matter that lies before us is so terrible that it cannot be treated publicly. It's like some photographs which may not be published. When I traveled through Central Africa with my friend Harry Jager, we visited a leprosarium conducted by one of the missionary groups.

Some of the lepers were in the grip of an exceedingly advanced stage of the disease. My friend was taking moving pictures. He was about to take some close-ups of individual cases. I reached out and touched him on the arm to stop him. He was puzzled for a moment and I said Harry, you're going to show these in churches in America. Do you want the audience to vomit? He lowered his camera and looked at the pitiable specimens of humanity in all the horror of their condition and he said I guess you're right. We'll save film. Now the last nine verses in the first chapter of Romans are the most terrible in the Bible.

This is the description of man abandoned by God. And the scene is a frightful one. The cause of the abandonment was the successive departure from God by the human soul in the successive steps of desertion that began with a failure to acknowledge God in worship, a failure to thank him, and continued through the various stages of the deification of human beings and human reason to the ultimate folly of man in the most corrupt form of idolatrous practices. Having departed from God, man made a God in his own image and finally in the image of beasts and of reptiles.

Man away from God is always an idolater. The apostasy may take the form of the worship of the state or the worship of some idea of goodness as in modernistic Protestantism or of some idea of power. But there is always worship even though individuals may be reluctant to admit it. Even the atheist worships the projection of his own reason. Now since man sees himself in a body, the first step away from God was to make a God in human form. And as the course of sin is ever downward, the evolution of idolatry was rapid. The history of religion gives us ample proof.

The idols of men began to be corrupted. At first, after the beautiful idols of antiquity, there were statues of men with beastly characteristics. Finally, the human characteristics sloughed off and the image of the beast remained, birds and four-footed beings. And finally, creeping things take their place in the worship of the carnal heart, revealing its depths and mirroring its degradation. Man made gods in his own image and it was soon seen that the image had become that of a beast. David acknowledged in one of his prayers in Psalm 73, so foolish was I and ignorant I was as a beast before thee.

Now the first stroke in the fearful melody of doom is now heard. The great burden of vengeance sounds the knell. And the light motif of retribution is heard in the majestic symphony of divine judgment. For we read here in the Bible, God gave them up. And two verses farther along, God gave them up. And then after three verses, God gave them over. Three times in the paragraph, there is the sweeping announcement that the human race was abandoned by the creator God. And as he took his hands off humanity, the race descended more and more into the mire, sucked down into that quagmire which was the spew of its own doing.

Now this picture is not that of a segment of the most awful paganism. This is the human heart as it is without Christ. It is the heart of America as well as the heart of India. The restraining powers of the mass influence of many Christians is greater here than in the pagan world. But everyone in a while a corner is raised which permits us to see the formidable filth of even our own land which puts it on a par with the vilest that the lands of hell can produce. And the judgment of individuals in our land will be perhaps greater than those in India because sin here is a sin against light.

While in the other lands, it is frequently a sin within the midst of gross darkness. Now before looking at the consequences of being abandoned by God, let us examine the fact that God must abandon men when they proceed on certain paths. There have been some who have argued that because God is love, he could never abandon a human being. Such a proposition proceeds from ignorance of the relationship between man and God, ignorance of the nature of God's holiness and of God's justice. God will never abandon one who has become his child through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

But God must abandon those who are merely creatures and who have not become sons. It should be seen at once that the common error of believing in the supposed fatherhood of God and the supposed brotherhood of man is the false premise on which is built the false conclusion concerning the relationship of all men to the creator. God is the creator of all men, but God is the father only of those who have been born again through faith in the blood of Jesus Christ. There is no greater lie than that which teaches the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man.

To all mankind, God comes with the offer of salvation. If a man will receive that offer, God will place the guilt of all of the man's sin on the account of Jesus Christ and can therefore accept the sinner without violation of the divine holiness. For the holiness of God is absolute and God himself cannot look upon sin with any tolerance. He even turned away from the Lord Jesus Christ when the Savior was dying on the cross. Christ cried out, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? The answer to that great cry lies in the fact that God is so holy that he could not look with favor even upon the Savior when the latter became the sin bearer, being made sin for us.

So it necessarily follows that the God who will abandon even the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross can do nothing other than abandon mankind when it goes into hellish ways of frightful sin. Only the true believer in Jesus Christ can never be abandoned, even if he slips and falls. For we read in Psalm 37, though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down. And we read in 2 Timothy 2, though we believe not, yet he abideth faithful. He cannot deny himself. But you see, God deals with the sins of the believer in a fashion quite different from that in which he deals with the sins of an unbeliever.

In one of my books, God's Methods for Holy Living, I have a chapter on how God deals with a believer's sins. I point out that the difference is somewhat like that which occurs when a baseball comes through your window. What do you do to the boy who threw the ball? It depends on whether it's the boy next door or your own little junior. Now God must treat the sin of those who have begun by refusing to worship him and refusing to thank him and who have continued by substituting the human mind for the divine revelation and who have ended up upon the road to depravity.

And God must abandon them if they do not come to Christ. So the fact is, according to the Bible and reality as we see it, that God does abandon some men. Our text says, wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts to dishonor their own bodies between themselves, who changed the truth of God into a lie and worshiped and served the creature more than the creator who is blessed forever. Amen. Now this is a description of something much more terrible than the mere lusts of the flesh. This speaks of the lusts of the heart.

You may have heard the story of the pickpocket who held in his hand the watch of the clergyman who leaned over him to pray with him on his deathbed. You've all of you seen those old men whose eyes leer at beauty that they are incapable of possessing. It's a horrible revelation of the fact that the lusts of the heart burn on undiminished after the fires of the flesh are banked. And the tragedy is that the Bible teaches us that the unsaved shall be dominated by the lusts of the heart even after the flesh has been dissolved.

And the eternal bodies of the damned will be one crawling mass of eternal frustration, desire without the possibility of fulfillment. Sometimes people ask me if I believe in literal hell. I answer of course that I believe the Lord Jesus Christ and that he taught that there was a literal hell. If it be asked if the fire is literal fire, I reply that there are passages in the Bible that are literal and there are passages in the Bible which are figurative. I find no objection to interpreting the fire either way. We can be absolutely sure that the doom of the impenitent is to remain forever as Tantalus who was condemned to stand before the water that ebbed when he stooped to drink and beneath the fruit trees whose boughs were ever blown out of his grasp as he reached to satisfy his desire.

For those out of Christ, eternity will be desire without fulfillment, craving without satisfaction, longing without attainment, and lust without accomplishment. Man turned away from God and plunged himself toward himself. Grace pursued him. Grace called to him. Grace pleaded with him. Grace died for him. But the man continued to lunge away from the creator and finally the creator relinquished his grasp and the man fell into the bottomless pit of his own horrible being, there to remain ingrown and inbred forever. We read in the Bible, they changed the truth of God into the lie. The truth of God is that all things are in God the father.

The lie is that there is something good in man. The gospel call is that man may forsake the broken cisterns of his own being and return to the source and spring of all good in God the father, God the father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now if a man chooses the lie of human good for the truth of divine good, the man is condemned to turn back into himself. Our text continues, for this cause God gave them up unto vile affections. Or even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature.

And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman burned in their lust one toward another, men with men working that which is unseemly and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet. Now the Greek is even more brutal than the English. For the words used for men and women in the English are not the noble words that speak of the high dignity of the human race in its position as the heads of the earthly creation. The Greek words are those that are used to denote nothing more than sex in animals.

Now the Christian has two different and distinct attitudes towards this whole phenomenon, one attitude toward the thing and another attitude towards the persons involved. For not only should abnormality cause every normal being to react with stark repugnance, but the sin in such depravity should cause every Christian to react with the horror that holiness must feel in the presence of abounding iniquity. And that is what it should do to every normal human being and a thousand times over for every Christian. Now that there will be further efforts to bring our nation to a tolerant attitude towards this rebellion of sin is indicated by a line in a news study that was in Time magazine.

They wrote an article on the man who is the editor of McCall's magazine. And discussing his personality and what he had done for the magazine, Time reported that he had been the first editor in American history who had dared to publish an article of fiction in which divorce was treated with tolerance, the first to publish an article of fiction in which adultery was admitted as socially acceptable. And that he was toying with the idea, said Time, of publishing an article of fiction in which some form of homosexuality would be acknowledged as tolerable. And all of this in the face of the history of the human race.

Are men ignorant of the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah? Do men not know that along with the great lights of the literature of Greece and Rome, there were others who wrote of such filth that it has never been possible to furnish a translation in English that was not expurgated? There have been printers who have put pornographic works on the markets of the modern world and have wrestled with the authorities on the subject of censorship. But even the printers of obscenities know that the so-called classics of the ancient times cannot be translated straight for modern consumption.

Yet our civilization is on the same road. The evidences of this are overwhelming. What is to be the attitude of the church and of Christians towards these poor, depraved people? There is a great percentage for whom nothing can be done. They have reached the stage described in the last verse of this chapter who, knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same but have pleasure in them that do them. There are others, however, who are in panic at the thought of the proclivities which they have discovered within themselves.

They have run to psychiatrists for help and have often been given a stone instead of bread. Now in spite of such despicable malpractice, there is hope for many of these poor creatures. In the first place, they must be surrounded with Christian love and care on the highest plane. They must not be shunned but must be welcomed into normal Christian society and not made to feel like pariahs. We have a hymn that expresses the true Christian attitude towards these as toward all who are in the bonds of deep sin. Rescue the perishing, care for the dying, snatch them in pity from sin and the grave.

Weep o'er the erring ones, lift up the fallen, tell them of Jesus, the mighty to save. And listen to this verse, down in the human heart crushed by the tempter, feelings lie buried that grace can restore. Touched by a loving hand, wakened with kindness, chords that were broken will vibrate once more. Rescue the perishing, care for the dying, Jesus is merciful. Jesus will save. Rescue the perishing, duty demands it. Strength for thy labors the Lord will provide. Back to the narrow way, patiently win them. Tell them of Jesus, the Savior who died. For there is hope for them in the Lord Jesus Christ and there is no hope for them anywhere else in the world.

There is salvation from the penalty of sin and there is salvation from the power of sin. The Lord Jesus Christ is able to save and to keep and he's able to give you love for the unlovely and zeal for the rescue of the lost. And if some people are inclined to ask, why has God made me thus? The answer is that God has merely made divine laws and that the natural consequences of those laws are coming out in specimens of the human race. The physical is nothing more than an illustration of the spiritual. God made man to turn outward and upward towards the creator.

A man who lives in the right relationship with God is able to live in right relationship towards his one wife whom the Lord has given him. If the man turns away from God, he turns toward himself and he's kind and he begins to worship the creature rather than the creator. The immediate result is that his physical loves are thrown out of their proper channel. He fails to live within the divine human trinity of the husband, the wife, and the Lord who are in no small sense one. He breaks down the barriers of sex and as he has turned toward himself, he ultimately is reaping in his own body the rotten fruit of that inbreeding sin and is in the midst of all perversion.

Newell adds a sentence in his commentary, it will not do to hold up your hands in self-righteous dismay and say these verses do not in any particular describe me. For God will show you and me that this is exactly the race as we were born into it. All these things pertain to lost and fallen men. Now the mere recital of the abyss of iniquity into which the human race has plunged is an amazing enlargement of the love of God. For it was into the race of fallen man that God condescends to come. Like every member of the human race, the virgin Mary was born in sin and shapen in iniquity.

She is in heaven today in her spirit, not her body, not because of any stainlessness of her own but because Jesus Christ died. In the Magnificat, she sang, my soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior. She, like every other member of the human race, needed a Savior. Now it was not through merit or holiness in herself that God chose her to become the mother of the Savior. It was the sovereign grace of God that stooped all the way to take hold of a member of this fallen race and to beget by his divine spirit the life of God within the womb of the virgin.

Christ came to humanity. And through that incarnation and the death of the Savior, the way has been opened for man to rise to God, no matter how low the man may have fallen. So there is hope for you today and there is hope for me. I have laid hold upon that hope for myself and have passed out of death and into life. And God gives me the gracious privilege of offering that salvation to you in this hour. And we pray thee, our God, that thou wilt bless it to each heart in Jesus' name. Amen.

Guest (Male): God will give those who persistently reject him over to their sin, rebellion, and defilement. But Jesus gave himself over to death to save those who will trust in him for eternal life. We hope you've benefited from today's message by Dr. Barnhouse entitled God gave them up. You can listen to additional Bible teaching by the late Dr. Donald Grey 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 God gave them up or simply request message number R1-25.

We would also like to make available to you a free copy of Dr. Barnhouse's booklet entitled The Secret of Satisfaction. Cornelius Vanderbelt said the care of $200 million is enough to kill anyone. There is no pleasure in it. The quest for ultimate fulfillment in wealth, success, achievement, relationships, or anything other than God will eventually leave you dry and empty. This free booklet will teach you what true satisfaction really is and how you can enjoy it everyday, no matter what your circumstances. Are you tired of seeking satisfaction in all the wrong places? Ask for your free copy of The Secret of Satisfaction 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 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 us 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. It is important we hear from you if this ministry is to continue on the air. Also 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 Grey Barnhouse, James Montgomery Boice, Michael Horton, and Martin Lloyd Jones. Thanks for being with us.

Join us again next time for more classic teaching on Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible.