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: Now please yourself by Christ and you will see that you are not righteous. A woman washed some fine linen and found it never so white. But when she placed it on the new fallen snow, it was yellowish in hue revealing its intrinsic failure. So with the heart of man when placed by the hearts of other men, we will admit that there are some who shine as bright as fine linen. But Christ alone was white as snow. Therefore our text stands true. There is none righteous now, not one.

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 The Lord looked down. From our perspective, the Great Wall of China is an extraordinary accomplishment, a monument to human ingenuity and achievement.

But from outer space, it just looks like a long thin line on the surface of the earth. From a human perspective, our lives may seem good, moral and upright. But when God looks down on mankind, he sees things quite differently. What is God's perspective on the human condition? The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is Romans chapter 3 and verses 10 through 18. Here again is Dr. Donald Gray Barnhouse with a message entitled The Lord looked down.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto thee our Father and our God and in the Holy Spirit. We pray thee for thy word which penetrates to the fastnesses of our sin and which brings light into the dark places of the heart and mind. May thy word do its revealing and curing work in many souls in this hour. We ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and for his sake. Amen. The first time that I ever rose from the earth in an airplane, I was immediately struck by the fact that the earth was flatter than when seen from the ground.

From 50,000 feet, mountains become mole hills. Mount Everest rises 5 miles above sea level. Now if you take a billiard ball 2 and 1/2 inches in diameter, you will discover that an ex crescent on the billiard ball proportionally as high as Mount Everest would be not a half inch or an eighth of an inch but less than 1 600 of an inch high. If our earth were held in fingers no more sensitive than human fingers, they could not feel Mount Everest. But when we live down in a valley or on one of the plains of our earth, the mountains rise high and we think of them as being towering and majestic.

They are high from our worm's eye view. But when we rise to the eminence of the Bible and look down upon our earth, it is flat. And all the efforts of humanity are seen to be vain imaginings. Now the paragraph in the third chapter of Romans which now occupies our attention reduces man to the point where he can be considered from the divine perspective and it is an appalling sight. Humanity lies before the creator with all the human inequalities dismissed. And each member of the human race is seen as a part of the putrefying whole.

No longer is there any consideration of men divided into religious or ethnic groups. Now they are seen as sons of Adam. And the sight is described in God's own vocabulary. Beginning with the 10th verse, there are eight quotations from the Old Testament, mostly from the Psalms, sprung together to illuminate the great theme of man's fallen nature. If we go back to the 14th Psalm, we read the introduction to these quotations. The Lord looked down from heaven on the children of men. The scene is described from the vantage point of God. And the object of his gaze is not any chosen people but the entire human race.

The children of men includes every child of this race and you are definitely in the group. Take then what is set forth as being the divine description of your own heart by the nature of your birth. There are two classes of people who listen to these words, those who have been born again and those who have not been born again. The verdict is the same for the original condition of all. Those who are saved look upon this horrible paragraph as one might look upon a pit from which one has been digged. Those who are not saved must look upon this as a description of their present state before God.

Some weeks ago, I saw a news photograph of a truck driver pinned in the cab of his truck while a gas tank flamed nearby. The caption said that he had screamed and screamed asking to be shot rather than have the flames burn him to death. The rescuers were able to cut him out in time. I would think that it is very probable that he has kept the news account of his plight and rescue and that he looks upon it occasionally and allows himself to be reminded of what he was in that hour of death. And so I read this paragraph from the word of God telling me of my state by nature before the Lord Jesus Christ intervened to die in my place and make me righteous in the sight of God.

As it is written, there is none righteous, no, not one. There is none that understandeth. There is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way. They are together become unprofitable. There is none that doeth good, no, not one. Their throat is an open sepulcher. With their tongues, they have used deceit. The poison of asps is under their lips. Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. Destruction and misery are in their ways and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes.

Now there is the news photograph of my predicament before the Lord Jesus Christ rescued me. That must be the attitude of every Christian toward this description which man wishes to consider as incredible but which is absolutely true. We were born with the fallen nature of Adam. We are sinners by nature as we have become sinners by choice. If any man were to be so foolish as to deny his guilt, the creator judge has set forth this manifesto declaring what mankind really is in his sight. It is light speaking, revealing the hidden things of darkness. It is life speaking, analyzing the corruption of death.

It is righteousness speaking, declaring the evil of unrighteousness. It is definite, detailed and final. There is not the faintest ray of hope left for the sinner apart from the one method which God is about to declare through Jesus Christ. Now I believe that most people, Christians even, live in a world where they have camouflaged the true circumstances of their lives in order to protect their old natures. They are not willing to accept the verdict which God has rendered concerning their own evil nature. The result is that they come to dwell little by little in a world of spiritual make-believe.

If the old nature is to be delivered over to the Lord for crucifixion death, it must be recognized as existing and as being just what God says it is. And on the other hand, if a man who is not born again is to come to the place where he shall receive the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal savior, he must first of all have come to the acceptance of God's verdict concerning his own lost estate. If he truly believes that there is some good within his human heart by nature, something that can be salvaged for heaven, he will trust in that thing and will never turn from it in order to trust in the cross of the Lord Christ alone.

And to accept God's verdict about the exclusive finality of the substitutionary death of the savior as God, as God's one and only method of removing the sin from the sinner and placing it upon the savior. And at the same time, depositing the very righteousness of God to the account of the one who was the sinner. If you really want to be brought to the place of spiritual growth as a Christian or to salvation as an unbeliever, accept God's verdict which adds up to the fact that there is no good in any of us which can satisfy God.

And recognize that the death of our Lord Jesus Christ was an imperious necessity imposed upon God by the very nature of his being and the very nature of our being. Someone may ask if this is the doctrine of total depravity which we are teaching. And we answer unhesitatingly that it most certainly is. But we add the total depravity does not mean that there is no good in man. But it means that there is no good in man which can satisfy God. There is a human goodness using the word in a depraved sense that shows how far man is fallen.

A spring comes forth from the side of a hill, clear, cold and limpid and with a certain metal content from the earth. As the stream flows down through the countryside, it becomes polluted. Each time man builds on its shores, the stream is more foul. If it passes through a village or town, it becomes undrinkable. And if it passes through a city, it will bear the germs of death to anyone who drinks of it. And yet, there are traces of its original state. The chemical analysis still shows the presence of the original values that were present in it.

And the stream in its depraved state still has its uses. Its flow can carry away the sewage that would mean pollution if left in the city even while itself becoming more polluted in its path. So is the goodness of mankind. Adam came fresh from the hand of God and there was no sin within him. But when he chose to follow his own will instead of remaining in creature submission to the will of God, there entered a death into the human stream which under the analysis of the great chemist is seen in all its component parts in the paragraph we are studying.

Our text is God's analysis of sin. First of all, God declares that man is fallen in his whole being. After this, there is a breakdown into the component parts and man is declared to be fallen in his mind and fallen in his will. Following this, there is the declaration that man has departed from God in his actions, both positive and negative actions. And that he is foul in the heart and in his speech. Spoiled in himself, he has also spoiled his environment. The paragraph concludes by showing that all this horrible condition of man, individually and collectively, stems from the fact that he has turned his eyes away from God and no longer considers his creator as he should.

Now we must not think that this passage is accusing every member of the human race of having committed all of these individual sins. What it is teaching is that the roots of all sin are in all men. In some men, the plant lies dormant in some of its branches. But the awful potentialities are always in the sap within the wood. There is a great illustration in the known botanical fact that when great bombs fell on London during the war and plowed up the earth to great depths, new flowers sprang up from the earth, some of which had been lost to the botanists for more than a century.

And many of which had not been known within London for scores of years. Do not draw back therefore because you know that you are not in your overt actions corrupt, deceitful, unloving, blasphemous, murderous, oppressive and warlike as our text says the heart of man is. You may have all of these things grubbed down beneath the surface of the soil. But the roots are still there. The roots are still there. God says they are there and they are there. This is why the indictment begins with the great charge. There is none righteous, no, not one. It is necessary of course to define righteousness because man has taken the word as he has many words and degraded it to his own uses.

The words of God are pure words and are like golden chalices full of meaning of truth and beauty. But man has slopped out the beauty of God's meanings and has diluted the sense in many cases with the dish waters of his own desires. The idea of righteousness is the main theme of the epistle. And it now appears in actual expression for the first time. What is the true meaning of righteousness? In English, it is interesting to note that the spelling of the word has changed. Up until the 16th century, the word was written right wise.

And the last half of the word wise must not be confused with the word which appears in wisdom. Right wise, righteous means one who is such as he ought to be. Now in the sight of God only the Lord Jesus Christ was the beloved son in whom the father was well pleased. None other is righteous or none is such as he ought to be. Understand then that we do not ask you to admit to the existence of rabid sins in your outward life. Are you less perfect than God? If you are indeed less perfect than God, then you are unrighteous in God's sight.

And you are in need of his salvation which he offers to you through his son, the savior. Now please yourself by Christ and you will see that you are not righteous. Now the first effect of the unrighteousness of man is that there is none that understandeth. Adam himself was not righteous. He was merely innocent. And even in his innocence, there was no understanding, no true comprehension because he did not seek after God but sought his own way. He was ignorant of the knowledge of good and evil and accepted the enemy's insidious questions as a means of getting something for himself that he did not have and certainly would have been better off without.

Immediately his state was manifested by his running away from the creator God to whom he should have turned. Ever since that moment, the higher nature of man, his spirit, as we have pointed out previously, fell into his soul as a third story of a building might fall into the second story in a bombed house. The debris of the two stories are mixed together and the result is that a man may understand things of the world but that he cannot, cannot is the word, he cannot understand divine things. In the Corinthian letter, this is brought out more fully.

We read in chapter 2 and verse 14, the natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit. They are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them. They are spiritually discerned. It is unfortunate that our English language does not have a true word to translate this text and that the translators were forced to the expedient of using the Latin word natura which means birth and corresponds to our Anglo-Saxon word kind. But the Greek word is an adjective formed from the word for soul. And the passage really means that the soulish man, the man dominated by his soul, his ego, receiveth not the things of the spirit.

Only the spiritual man can understand the things of God. As the context of the verse says, for what man knoweth the things of a man save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man but the spirit of God. There are great endowments in certain universities which furnish dividends to scholars, to provide series of lectures on natural religion. And men seek to find out about God by the devious means of their own minds. But God flatly states that no man understands. That is why the entire philosophical literature about religion is a worthless heap.

Anything that man has ever written that seeks to find out about God from any source apart from the divine revelation which we have in this book is not only a waste of time but is an affront to deity. When we read that the eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love him, we must remember that the next line of the text says, but God hath revealed them unto us. Here then is the declaration that just as infrared and ultraviolet light are not on the wavelengths that stimulate the rods and the cones of the retina of our eyes, even so the things of God cannot come to the spiritual eyes of the creature unless God opens up the eyes by the Holy Spirit in order for us to see that which comes only by divine revelation.

That we cannot seize or comprehend except by the work of the Holy Spirit through the illumination of these divine pages. There are men and women living around us in the whose heart not even one ray of divine truth has ever penetrated. They will not turn away from the human fountains in order to drink at the divine spring. And the Lord God will not allow his waters to be sullied by the foulness of those who would sip for human satisfaction but who would not submit to the truth as it comes from him. Other books must be known to be loved but this book must be loved to be known.

And lastly, the state of man is manifested by the fact that not one man seeks after God or ever has sought after God. Do not look upon the horizons of the pagan cities to see the foul and obscene architecture of their temples and think that they are monuments to a search after God. I have been beneath those roofs and I have seen there the signs of the most debased and perverted worship of the generative powers in nature, things so terrible that they may not even be described in print are in those habitations of cruelty and defilement.

There the palace is God and their debauchery is exalted and foulness is its sacrament. And do not think when you hear men talking about God apart from Christ that they are really seeking after God. Everybody talking about heaven ain't going there. And it is most certainly true. It is God who tells us that there is none that seeks after him. And do not be confused by the passages that show some men were told to seek God. For these are addressed to believers and not to unbelievers. Ask and it shall be given you. Seek and ye shall find is a word to disciples and not to those who walk in enmity.

Seek ye the Lord while he may be found was never addressed to Egyptians, Babylonians or Phoenicians but to the Jews who had the priesthood, the altar and the blood of the lamb by which they might approach the God who had already sought them out and provided a way of maintaining the contact with fallen men without defilement of his being and nature. When Adam sinned, he did not run toward God. He ran from God. The first question that is to be found in the lips of God in the Bible is Adam, where art thou? Man's first question in the New Testament is that on the lips of the wise men come to worship the Lord Jesus.

Where is he that is born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star when we were in the East and are come to worship him. They sought Christ however because God had intervened with a divine phenomenon and had placed the western star where they would follow it to the town of the newborn king. When the Lord Jesus Christ came into his ministry, he cried, the son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost. To men who had no righteousness in themselves, the Lord God brought righteousness that could be placed to their accounts.

I testify today that I who once fled from the Lord have been sought and found by him and that I know that I stand before him today not in the filthy rags of human righteousness but in that righteousness which is of the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ. Unto him be the glory. And our heavenly Father, we pray thee that the Holy Spirit shall convince men of sin in this hour of sin because they believe not on the Lord Jesus Christ that they may be brought to the righteousness that is in him and upon which alone thou canst look with favor.

If there are those who yet trust in human righteousness, give them restlessness that they may know no peace until they rest in Christ. And upon thy redeemed own who have been found of thee, may thy grace, thy mercy and thy peace abound now and until Jesus come again and forever. Amen.

Guest (Male): From God's perspective, we are all in a desperate, hopeless condition but all is not lost. In his love and mercy, he has provided the way of salvation through faith in the blood of Jesus Christ. We hope you've benefited from today's message by Dr. Barnhouse entitled The Lord looked down. 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 The Lord looked down or simply request message number R3 - 7. 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.