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: The only type of ministry which can prove of real blessing to any human heart is the expository teaching of the word of God. Our Lord has never promised to bless man's word, but he is bound by himself to bless unto us the teaching of his word. He said, it is the spirit that makes alive. The flesh profiteth nothing. The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life. And again, it is written, the entrance of thy words, or as it is in the Hebrew, the revelation of thy words giveth light.

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'll be featuring on today's edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is entitled Man's Lost Condition. Many husbands have a quirky habit that drives their wives crazy.

They would rather drive around for miles trying to find a certain location instead of simply admitting that they are lost and asking someone for directions. But a reluctance to admit one is lost becomes deadly in the spiritual realm. Are you wandering around trying to find your way to God or have you admitted to him that you are lost and need him to guide you into the truth? The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is Romans chapter 3 and verse 12. Here again is Dr. Donald Gray Barnhouse with the message entitled Man's Lost Condition.

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 thou didst intervene when we were dead in trespasses and sins and that thou didst redeem us by the blood of thy son. May the word come in this hour in penetrating power and speak to the hearts of men that they may pass out of death and into life or grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in whose name and for whose sake we ask it. Amen. The reason why more people are not true Christians is that they are unwilling to accept God's verdict as to the sinful nature of their being.

I recently had a conversation with a man about his soul's need that was typical of scores of similar conversations. I presented the claims of Christ and in order to show this man his need, I quoted some of the verses from the word of God which described the sinner's lost condition. He turned to me and said, Doctor, I believe I would have become a Christian years ago if it had not been for that doctrine. I do not want to have to acknowledge that there is no good in myself and to stand without a shred of self-respect even before God.

I replied that if he really thought that he was a trustworthy man, he should acknowledge the truth of his position before God. He should comprehend that there is nothing in man that can satisfy God and that even though his friends and associates might find in him things that would make him acceptable on a human basis as a friend or a companion or a business partner, yet those things could not recommend him to God. He should be willing to admit his lost condition as readily as he would admit that he was a man and not a woman, 5 ft 10 in and not 6 ft 4 in, a brunette and not a blonde.

The very fact that men react against the doctrine is one more proof of the truth of it. They love the lie that they are good, better than the truth that they are sinners. Nature manifests the truth that men are sinners. History illustrates the truth that men are sinners. Our corrupted and defiled environment manifests the truth that men are sinners. And God's word plainly furnishes the divine verdict that men are sinners. In our passage in the third chapter of Romans, we saw in our last study how God declares that man is fallen in the whole of his being, following which there is a breakdown into the component parts of that being.

After dealing with the depravity of the mind and the will, he turns to the subject of man's action. In the 12th verse, we read, they are all gone out of the way. The verb is a strong one that is found only three times in the New Testament and which shows an active, willful departure from God. We have words in English that are cousins of this Greek word. We speak, for example, of incline and decline. Well, the Greek word e kline carries with it the idea of a stubborn rebellion against God. In classic Greek, Polybius uses it once for a group of soldiers who turned and fled in disorder before an enemy force.

In another place, he uses it for those who flee from the clutches of wild beasts. The Septuagint uses it 139 times and a reading of these Old Testament passages gives us the horrible picture of the human race which is summed up in our New Testament text. Mankind has willfully abandoned the way of God. Like sheep, we have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way. We have rejected the law of God, spurned his calls of love, refused his counsel, and laughed at his reproof. We have become worse than beasts in our relationship with our creator.

In our language, we speak of animal characteristics in man and call the obstinate ones mulish, dogged, or pigheaded. But God tells us that this is to insult the animal creation. As he sees it, we must read. And we in the first chapter of Isaiah, we find it. For the Lord hath spoken, I have nourished and brought up children and they have revolted against me. The ox knoweth his owner and the ass his master's crib, but my people know nothing. My people has no intelligence. And our Lord laments over us. Woe to the sinful nation, to the people laden with iniquity, to the race of evil ones, to the rotten children.

They have abandoned the Lord. They have despised the holy one of Israel. They have drawn themselves backwards. Now from Genesis where we find sinning man hiding among the trees, to Malachi where God declares, ye are turned aside out of the way. There is one long history of sin against love and rejection of grace. The position of man is even worse than that of the devil and the fallen angels and the demons. There is no record that there was ever made to them an offer of salvation. But of the human race, there is the record that the greatest love of the universe was offered to them and that they willfully rejected it.

The case of the human race therefore is worse than that of the demons. The Lord Jesus Christ stands weeping. Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, he says, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thee to my bosom even as a hen gathereth her chicks, but ye would not. As a result of this departure, the fifth indictment against the race is brought forth. They are together become unprofitable. This verse is interesting from three different points of view. The Hebrew word has one meaning in the Old Testament. The Greek quotation in the New Testament has an additional meaning.

And the English word which has been used in almost all our versions has toned down the horror of the original to give us a lesser although and also interesting meaning. In English, when a thing is said to be unprofitable, we understand most simply that there is no profit derived from it. The investment has proved unsuccessful. The adventure has met with misfortune or at least has been fruitless. At the best, the anticipated profit was not realized and by good chance the affair broke even, but nothing remained for the benefit of those who had toiled or invested.

When God tells us that the human race has become unprofitable, we must realize that we are unprofitable to him and by implication we are unprofitable to each other and unprofitable to our own selves. Certainly we are unprofitable to God. The Lord has said that at the best we are unprofitable servants. This should humble even the Christian who must come to realize that it is not what we do for God that counts, but what we let him do through us. Many Christians seem to think that our Lord said something like, without me ye cannot do very much or without me ye can do only a little.

But the word of God stands, without me ye can do nothing. It is because we are totally unprofitable to God by ourselves that we have become unprofitable to each other. We naturally we brush aside all that some people do for others in a way of charity, but we are not thinking of these gestures that people make towards each other in friendly circles. We are thinking of spiritual things. No man can profit another spiritually. Anything that comes from me that has its origin in my own being can do nothing but corrupt. Only that which comes from the Holy Spirit can be of any blessing to man.

That is why so many sermons are unprofitable. They consist of human thoughts, human philosophy, human imagination, and they are worthless. And because we are unprofitable to God and unprofitable to anyone else, we are also unprofitable to ourselves. How can I benefit my true self when by nature and by choice I have departed from the way of God? Only his ways are pleasantness, only his paths, and all of them are peace. A cancer can benefit nothing but the cancer. It can feed on itself and grow. So can my unprofitable self feed on itself and grow. But it can be of no profit to my true welfare.

All that is to be of blessing to me must come to me from the grace of God by way of the cross of Jesus Christ through the revelation of the divine word administered by the Holy Spirit. Now when we leave the English word unprofitable and go back to the Greek, there is additional light on the worthlessness of man in and of himself. The word is used much stronger meanings than the English word. The Greek uses it for worthless, useless, good for nothing, stupid, deadly, mortal, fatal. Homer uses it in the Odyssey for the senseless laughter of a moron.

And this begins to approximate God's opinion of man apart from the divine life that is communicated through the Lord Jesus Christ. We are worthless and useless and our attempts to save ourselves by human wisdom prove the nature of that wisdom. For we read, after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God to save the believers by the foolishness of the cross. Oh what fools men are to trust in the wisdom of man. When you measure the vast difference between the knowledge of man and the omniscience of God, then the difference between adult at the one end of human knowledge and an Einstein at the other end is infinitesimal.

Our text in Romans, however, is quoted from the Hebrew. And it's when we turn to the original Hebrew word in the 14th Psalm that we get the extent of the divine accusation. The New Testament follows the Septuagint and gave us the word for senseless, useless, unprofitable. The King James translation of the word in the Old Testament begins to reveal the horror of the truth. For we read in Psalm 14, the Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men to see if there were any that did understand and seek God. The result of his inquiry is given in the next verse.

They are all gone aside. They are together become filthy. Now the word filthy is not a pretty adjective and to apply it to every member of the human race as God's description of what man became in the fall is not a very pleasant task. But the word is nothing when compared to the meaning of the Hebrew. Our translators have been very frequently guilty of euphemisms, toning down the harsh language of the original to make it fit sensitive ears. The marginal reading is given as stinking. John Owen, the English scholar who has given us the great translation of Calvin's commentary on Romans, translates it, they are become putrid or corrupted like putrefied fruit or meat, therefore useless, not fit for what they were designed to serve God and to promote their own good and the good of others.

Now to be unfit for the use for which we are designed is to show what sin did for the race and how far man is estranged from God. Apart from the grace of God and the redemption that was provided in Christ Jesus, there can be no use for man in this universe. Owen further adds that the purpose for which man was designed and from which he has fallen is to serve God and to promote man's own good and the good of others. This man no longer does. The rot of idolatry has corrupted the race and the initial object of that idolatry is self.

It is the exaltation of self which has brought all these other ills in its train. The next item in the indictment is the bald statement, there is none that doeth good, no, not one, not so much as one. If we're to understand this, we must comprehend that there are two different standards of goodness. There is man's standard of goodness and there is God's standard of goodness. Now I'm delighted to be among the first to admit all of the heroic achievements of human nature, the heroism of vast numbers of people, the willingness to give to those who are less fortunate, the weight of kindness that exists towards children, the readiness of many to sacrifice to help others in their need.

All these things can be admitted with delight by the student of the word of God. They do not in any wise contradict the Christian doctrine of original sin or of total depravity. They are illustrations in fact that witness to what the original creation was. They're like the lines in the face of a corpse of a 70-year-old woman whose body lies in her coffin and testifies to the grace that was famous when she was in her 20s. The undertaker has touched up the faded cheeks and given a bit of rouge to what would have been the pallor of death.

But the very decay itself testifies to the process of death. Even as the goodness of man shows in its flaws the marks of sin that are on the race. Our Lord Jesus Christ illustrated this fact in an incident that has often been twisted and misapplied. There have even been those who have sought to use the words of the Savior against himself, seeking to prove the very thing which he was denying and seeking to deny the very thing that he was proving. One day a man came and kneeled before the Lord Jesus while he was walking along the road.

The man has become known as the rich young ruler. He said, good master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? And Jesus said unto him, why callest thou me good? There is none that doeth good. There is none good but one and that is God. There have been those who have attempted to interpret this to mean that Christ was disclaiming deity. The truth, of course, is quite the contrary. This is not only one of Christ's greatest affirmations of his deity, but an explanation of what constitutes goodness. There is not to be found here a word that is at cross purposes with what the Lord taught when he said, I and my father are one.

Or he that hath seen me hath seen the father. What Christ was teaching is that there is a vast difference between human goodness and divine goodness. The man called the Lord good master. Now master is a noun of humanity and good is an adjective of deity. There is a spiritual grammar that demands accordance just as there must be an agreement in gender in many languages between a noun and an adjective. In French, for example, you may not say for the sun and the moon. Since sun is masculine and moon is feminine in French, you must say Nothing else could be correct.

And so when the rich young ruler came to Christ and called him good master, the Lord rebuked him. It was the equivalent of saying, either call me bad master or call me good God. Do not mix the two. Goodness belongs to God alone. Now when we understand this, we can know the meaning of our text. There is none that doeth good, no, not so much as one. The reason that the Lord Jesus Christ was truly good is that he was was and is truly God. You and I are born of Adam's seed and nature. The Lord Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of a woman who had not known a man.

Herein lies the tremendous and vital importance of the truth and doctrine of the virgin birth of our Lord. There are some liberals who tell us that the doctrine of the virgin birth is not an important doctrine, but it is absolutely vital when we realize the alternative. For if Jesus Christ had been born of a human father, he would have been born with the genetic pattern of the rest of the human race. And he would be nothing but a fallen child of fallen Adam. He would not have been able to be the Savior, for he himself would have needed a Savior.

But being born of God the father by the intervention of the supernatural begetting, he brought into this world a nature that was not the nature of fallen man. He did not have that which the Bible calls the flesh in such phrases as that which is born of the flesh is flesh. And the flesh lusteth against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh. And these are contrary the one to the other. Now when the Lord Jesus Christ came into this world, he brought a righteousness, a goodness which is not of man, but which is of God.

He was able to say to men, ye are from beneath, I am from above. Ye are of this world, I am not of this world. It is when we have looked at the Lord Jesus Christ that we're able to comprehend our text and to know that there is none that doeth good, no, not so much as one. And we need not be afraid of this doctrine. Believe it truly and proclaim it boldly. It is one of the most solid supports of the truth of the Christian faith. Those who have become the most saintly are the first to acknowledge its truth.

Many years ago, the saintly Frenchman Adolphe Monod at the end of a long and holy life wrote a volume which he entitled It was his farewell to the men of earth as he realized that he had come to the end of his journey and was soon to take the road to the Lord whom he had known so long and loved so well. Monod explains how he thought that this terrible truth was nothing but a flight of rhetoric, a burst of oratory. As the years passed by, however, he became better acquainted with himself and better acquainted with God.

He learned to know his own sinfulness and God's holiness. From his deathbed, he wrote, and sure am I that when this veil of flesh shall fall, I shall recognize in that passage the truest portrait of my own natural heart. But what good does it do to recognize such a truth and to accept it? Someone may ask. And the answer is that the recognition of the fact of our lost and helpless condition is the prelude to our acceptance of the fact of God's perfect redemption provided by Christ. If you will not admit the charge that God lays against you, how are you going to feel the need of the Savior?

This is what our Lord meant when he said, they that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick do need a physician. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. Now it is a simple analogy, but one which should call you to accept God's diagnosis of your condition in order that you may have the remedy which he prescribes. If you think you are not sick, you will never call a doctor. If you think you are really sick, you will call the doctor unless you're a fool. And so says Christ, if you know you are a sinner, you will come to the Savior.

But if you refuse to admit the fact of sin, you are not going to feel your need of a Savior. And our Lord concludes by saying, I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. This does not mean even for a moment that there are some righteous people who do not need salvation. This passage shows that the gospel is available for all who will admit themselves to be sinners. But that if a man will not accept God's verdict concerning his sinful condition, he need never hope for salvation from Christ. Since Christ came to save sinners and sinners only, you cannot be saved unless you take your place as a sinner.

To attempt to climb up by any other way is to reveal yourself to be a thief and a robber. The only kind of people whom God saves are ungodly people. If you are not willing to admit that you are ungodly, you cannot find the salvation of God. The blessing of God is like a cascade which falls straight by the pull of gravity into the one channel which is prepared for it. You may stand nearby, but all you will ever experience is a bit of spray across your face. If you are to feel the weight of the water upon you, you must step into the path of its fall.

So is the grace of God. If you are to know its power and might, you must stand in the place of condemnation. Then you can understand the grace of God. Then you can know salvation. Then shall you call yourself sinful and the Lord Jesus Christ righteous. Then you shall call him Savior and he will save you from your sin. And we pray thee our God and father that thou shall give great restlessness to any who have not yet been born again. But upon all those who are willing to admit in this hour their own need of thee and thy love and accept the gift of grace that has been given through the death of our Lord Jesus Christ, may thy grace, mercy, and peace alike be upon them all.

And unto thee glory and majesty, the dominion and the power now until our Lord Jesus come again and forever. Amen.

Guest (Male): The truth may be difficult to accept. There is no one who does good in the sight of God, but you can find life by admitting this hard truth and receive the perfect righteousness of Christ. We hope you've benefited from today's message by Dr. Barnhouse entitled Man's Lost Condition. 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 Man's Lost Condition or simply request message number R3-8.

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 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 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.