Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: We were created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God has before ordained that we should walk in them. We were predestined to be conformed to the image of God’s Son. Now, since we know our goal and since we know the direction we must go in order to progress toward our goal, let us forget the things which are behind and stretch forth unto the things which are before, pressing toward the mark for the high calling of God, which is in Christ Jesus. This is the path of life, for Christ is the purpose of life and the object of life.

Guest (Male): Over a half 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 ministry, 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 "Wise Unto Goodness." Unlike the Pilgrims and colonial settlers, the American Indians knew which plants and herbs were good for food and medicine and which were useless and harmful. As we grow in Christ, the Holy Spirit teaches us to discern between good and evil. We will learn to flee from wickedness and sin and pursue righteousness and godly living as we press on toward spiritual maturity. The scripture text for this edition is Romans chapter 16 and verse 19. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with a message entitled "Wise Unto Goodness."

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto the Father and our God and in the Holy Spirit. We thank Thee for Thy grace and faithfulness. Bring us closer to Thyself and cause us to realize that all good is to be found in Thee. We ask it in the name and for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

In Romans 16:19, we read, "I would have you wise as to what is good, and simple as to what is evil." Now, in order for us to understand this text, it is first necessary to establish the translation. The King James Version leads the person who does not know Greek to conclusions that are far from right. The revision brings light to the obscure place.

The problem arises out of the fact that there are two different Greek words translated by the same English word, "simple." The whole passage in the older translation says that there are perverse men who deceive the hearts of the simple. And then it says that the desirable thing is for the believer to be wise concerning that which is good and to be simple concerning that which is evil. Well, the simple who are liable to be deceived are the unsuspecting. But the simplicity which is desirable as an attitude toward evil is a pure and unmixed innocence.

You see, words change their meanings as the years go by. There is a technical sense in which simple refers to that which is unmixed, and simplicity may be a quality altogether to be admired. But there is another sense in which simple is a synonym for silly and foolish, and therefore a quality to be disapproved. I personally would translate the whole passage as follows.

There are those who by fair and flattering words deceive the hearts of the unsuspecting. For while your obedience is known to all, so that I rejoice over you, I would have you wise as to what is good and innocent as to what is evil. In our modern society, among those who count it a mark of distinction to be in the know about everything and for whom sophistication is a badge of belonging, one of the worst faults is to be unsophisticated.

But here God is saying that He wants us to be wise concerning that which is good and unsophisticated concerning that which is evil. Both good and evil exist in this world. The knowledge of good and evil came with the entrance of sin. "Ye shall be as gods," said Satan, "knowing good and evil." This was the promise of the devil, but he did not add that they would also become fallen creatures unable to avoid evil and unable to do good in the divine sense except by the entrance of divine life and power through regeneration.

But when the new life comes to us, we are to seek to develop an attitude of mind that will cause us to know and discern that which is good in order that we may build it into our lives and follow it daily. While at the same time, we shall feel through the instinctive presence of the life of God the Spirit, whose very name is the Holy Spirit, so that we shall be aware of the approach of evil in order that we may flee to the Lord for refuge from it.

Just as a Geiger counter can detect the passage through its walls of every ionizing particle, making it possible for the presence of destructive radiation particles to be known, so the Holy Spirit within the heart of the believer, if allowed to take control of the discerning faculties of our being, will teach us to discriminate between that which is good and that which is evil. Thus, we can turn our attention to that which is good in order to know it better and make every part of it our own, and thus we can turn away from that which is evil so that we do not even give it the attention necessary to know its depraving qualities.

In short summary, our text is of tremendous importance in its revelation of the desire of God that we grow in our knowledge of all that is good and that we remain naive concerning that which is evil. We must develop a Christian life which has a system of priorities which excludes the worthless and builds the worthwhile. We face life as we face a newspaper. I know a man who spends considerable time each day reading the newspaper. He can tell you the doings of all the comic strip characters and he knows the standing of all the great baseball teams.

Ask him about the nature of the tension between China and Russia or what is being done to help the rise of the emerging peoples in Africa, and you'll draw an absolute blank. He simply is not interested. He is wise to that which is ephemeral and ignorant of any of the great issues which so definitely will affect his later life and the life of his children. Now even more, we are to live our lives so that we may know not the book of the month, but the book of eternity.

This we must know, live our lives so that we will be wise concerning that which is good and innocent concerning that which is evil. The only possibility of being wise is to have the divine wisdom. Listen to the Holy Spirit speaking through James. Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good life, let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth.

This wisdom is not such as comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, without uncertainty or insincerity. And the harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. And to cap the climax, the first chapter of the same epistle says, "If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all men generously and without reproaching."

For the record, let us take a moment to define that which is good. One of the lexicons says that this word, *agathos*, from which we derive a girl's name, Agatha, is anything that is worthy of admiration, admirable, hence good, good of its kind. The original idea of the word is so broad that it denotes in general skilled either for good or evil. For example, as used of thieves, it means cunning. And then it branched in two directions. From ability, it passed to serviceableness and means good in relation to something else, that is, what is of advantage.

And then the word was transferred to the moral sphere, what is morally good. And so the New Testament meaning and its relation to righteousness. This word denotes the inner harmonious perfection which is its own standard and measure and which primarily belongs to God. Well, this then is that to which the Lord wishes us to be wise. If a man is going to avoid evil habits, he must first have some good habits in which he learns to live.

In other words, our text says you are to have an inner life. It is to be oriented in Christ and it is to be directed in constant choice. The man who has no inner life becomes the slave of his surroundings. It is this inner life which must be built in wisdom and innocence. This inner life is our true character, and it is indicated by our conduct. This is why wisdom and innocence are necessary. You can't have conduct separate from character any more than you can have an automobile whose front wheels are going north and whose rear wheels are going south.

It’s impossible for you to say that your character is just what you are and that it does not refer to what you do. That type of logic will lead to the plea of the thief who told the judge that he did not steal, but that an impulse came to his right hand and his right hand took the money and that he himself did not do the stealing. The judge quickly ended that nonsense by saying that he was sentencing the right hand to prison for five years and that the rest of the body would have to go along with it.

All of your decisions then must be made in line with this discernment between good and evil. If you say that you're not sure of the difference, you can perhaps have some good advice from the journal of Susanna Wesley, mother of the famous founders of Methodism. Susanna Wesley wrote in her diary, "Would you judge of the lawfulness or unlawfulness of pleasure or the innocence or malignity of actions? Take this rule. Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off the relish of spiritual things."

In short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself. Oh, how important it is for us to realize that the difference between the good and the evil may be determined by the fact that sometimes evil things have a very innocent look. Do you remember the incident on the island of Malta when Paul and his companions were shipwrecked?

Paul went to gather sticks to make a fire. With one of his armloads of sticks, he picked up a viper. Vipers sleep in the winter, and in their hibernation, they take on them the form of their surroundings. If you come across a hibernating serpent, you will find that it looks very much like the broken twigs and sticks that lie around it. So Paul picked up a viper with the kindling wood. Oh, it looked just like the sticks which had no sting, but it had a sting that would have been death if God had not intervened.

Oh, we must learn that often the deadliest things look the most harmless. When Satan comes as a roaring lion, he's easiest to detect. But when he comes as an angel of light, he is at his most dangerous. We must never forget that one of Satan’s most subtle devices is to try to make evil things look like good things. There are poisons which look like crystal spring water. A glass of such a poison placed by a glass of clear water will fool the eye. The two look exactly alike, but one has death in it and the other has life in it.

You have to discover by other means what is the true nature of the two liquids. Now in the same way, there are many things in life which are deadly and which have the seeming appearance of goodness. And this is why when you must make a choice about some pleasure, some amusement, some action, you must not come to your decision on the basis of appearances. How often people say, "What's the harm in this?" or "What's the harm in that?" Oh, how many young lives have been wrecked because youth often has the idea that they must try everything once.

From a lifetime of dealing with marital problems of many people, I've come to conclusion that the high incidence of divorce in our country stems in no small measure from the fact that young people are not wise to that which is good and innocent concerning that which is evil. I know a couple who were in a group one night where someone told a joke that was just slightly off-color. When some of the listeners laughed, the wife said to her husband, "I don't get it. What are they laughing at? I don't see the point."

He said, "Thank God you can't. It's dirty." And he said to me afterwards, "That dear girl has borne me three children, but she's still so pure that she can't understand any off-color jokes." Well, this is good. God says that what He values in a woman is not glamour. We read in 1 Peter 3, "Let not yours be the outward adorning with braiding of hair, decoration of gold and wearing of robes, but let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the imperishable jewel of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is in God’s sight very precious."

Oh, this is not to be interpreted as though a woman must be careless about her person and go around dowdy and disheveled, but that she shall not be the type that lives for the beauty shop, the jeweler, and the couturier. Rather, she is to cultivate the inner spiritual life even while presenting a well-groomed appearance. Now the same principle holds for a man. One cannot live in our country and go through college and the army, reading the flood of advertising that leaps at you in every national magazine, without knowing certain things about evil.

There are so many jokes about liquor that anyone can know that whiskey is made of corn, and evidently some of it is made of rye, but no man need feel backward if he could not tell the difference between the two. In fact, it might be better if he were naive concerning that which is evil and devote his thought to qualities of good which build the character. Now this principle also holds in the realm of thought.

Many times in the last few years, I have counseled with young men concerning the course of study that they’re to follow in college. I have universally steered them away from too many courses in philosophy. Oh, I myself had to go through too many such courses, all the way through a graduate seminar on Plato in the original Greek. But the Christian life is just too short to waste precious time in that which does not edify.

The word edify, by the way, comes from the same root as edifice and it means to build. We must realize that everything we do is building upon Christ and we must build with gold, silver, and precious stones and not with wood, hay, and stubble. When I was very young, I was taught the following bit of wisdom which I've never forgotten. Sow a thought and reap an action. Sow an action and reap a habit. Sow a habit and reap a character. Sow a character and reap a destiny.

Now if someone who hears these words knows that he has long been defeated by sin and that he has developed evil habits that dominate him, there’s only one way of deliverance, and that is through Jesus Christ. In almost every city in the land, we have men who were once down and out until Christ touched them and brought them up and in. They were weak as water until Christ came into their lives and put into them power which rebuilt their broken-down will and made them strong to stand and brave to conquer.

But Christ can do nothing for us unless we are prepared to let Him. And it is here that we must surrender our wills to Him in order that He may make us wise to that which is good and develop in us an innocence to that which is evil. One of the purposes of a text like this is to tell each and every one of you that Christ can and will work in your life if you will let Him. The purpose of a message such as this is to develop the sense of duty, to convince the weak and doubting that they can live straight and pure and holy lives, and to induce them to turn the control of their lives over to Christ, placing their human wills on the side of the will of God.

You may have allowed evil habits to gain a terribly strong hold upon you. But it is never too late for Christ if you will call Him in and give Him His place. Perhaps some of you are feeling a bit smug about now and saying that you have not gone down to the level of Skid Row and that this is not for you. I'm not accusing you of any sin that the world might call gross, or any crime about which a court of justice would have something to say, or even of some habit because of which you would have to blush if it were mentioned in the circle of those who know you.

But there are respectable sins: sins of selfishness, of bad temper, of evil thinking and evil speaking, sins that appear to be little but which are nonetheless sins. God wants us to have the victory in the sphere of these sins, and the victory can be ours only by knowing the difference between good and evil even in these realms and of fighting with all our force and with all our yieldedness to Christ in order that we may have the victory.

There is nothing in the universe that can harm you unless you consent. If you play with evil, if you compromise with it, it will sting you. But refuse it and determine rather to die than to give place to the devil and there is nothing that can touch you. But we must resolutely determine to set our faces toward the good and then we will have our back on evil. And vice versa, if we resolutely determine to turn our backs on evil, we will find that we are facing that which is good.

There will be great conflict because we’re born with a bent toward evil. Like a garden, our hearts will grow weeds naturally. But if they are to grow flowers, they must be plowed and harrowed and planted and cultivated and nourished and weeded. Then we can have the blossoms of the Christian life which will turn into the fruit of the Spirit. Oh, how great is the conflict, but how sure is the road to conquest, and this is illustrated by two prayers which were prayed and written down by St. Augustine in the latter part of the fourth century.

In his early struggle in the life of faith, Augustine prayed, "Lord, make me pure, but not yet." Oh, what a picture of the human heart we have here. And what an illustration of the scriptural truth that the spirit lusts against the flesh and the flesh lusts against the spirit. But God was working in the heart of this, the greatest man who ever came from Africa. Later, Augustine wrote another prayer, "Oh God, Thou hast formed us for Thyself and our souls can know no rest until they rest in Thee."

And this leads us back to our text. We must grow in that which is good and this means that we’re growing in God. And to this end, it's good to take the advice of older and more experienced people. It’s for this reason that God has given us parents whom we are to honor as they lead us into growth in the Lord. And it is for this that the Lord has raised up pastors and teachers in His church that they may instruct us in the word of God. For in this we have come to know the very fountain of all good.

I know that there are those who seek to belittle the Bible by plausibly teaching that we must go on through the Bible to Christ. And this is so true that it’s self-evident. But we must be wise concerning that which is good and simple concerning that which is evil. If we are, we'll turn away from any philosophy that lessens the place which God has given to His written word. For it is only in the written word that we are going to find the absolute of that which is good, and it should go without saying this will ever lead us on farther into Christ.

But He would ever lead us on deeper into His written word, and thus our growth is a great expanding spiral that will go on into eternity. God will begin with you as you are in this moment. He says that we’re to be wise concerning that which is good. Well, what is your concept of good? What is your ideal? Consider this carefully. Think of what you would really like to be.

If God would give you the tools to make yourself into the ideal person, in what direction would you go? If you think deeply enough, you'll discover that all you have thought about in your concept of the ideal has been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. And with astonishment, you say, why, that's true. If I painted the picture of what I would most like to be, it would be that which Christ is. Well, now after you have drawn your picture of what is good and what is ideal and what is Christ, then draw another picture of what you are now in yourself.

How far have you grown? What level have you reached in spiritual development? What victories have you won? What evils have you turned away from? What good have you achieved? When you have a candid and frank measure of yourself, then compare what you are with what you have previously set forth as your ideal. The difference between what you are and what you desire to be is the measure of your present opportunity. Go on becoming wise to that which is good and leaving evil behind you. This is the will of God for your life and He will never stop working to this end in you. And our God, we pray Thee to bless this truth to our hearts that we may be more like Christ. In Jesus' name, we ask it. Amen.

Guest (Male): As we grow in Christ and yield our lives to the Holy Spirit’s control, we will learn to become wise in that which is good and innocent towards that which is evil. We hope you have benefited from today’s message entitled "Wise Unto Goodness." To listen to additional teaching by Dr. Barnhouse, visit us online at AllianceNet.org. An audio copy of today’s teaching is also available by calling us toll-free, 1-800-488-1888. Today’s message again is entitled "Wise Unto Goodness," or simply request message number R16-5.

We would also like to make available to you a free copy of our booklet entitled "When Believers Sin." Many believers become discouraged and defeated in the ongoing struggle with sin in the Christian life. Sin can rob us of our joy, breed insecurity in our spiritual lives, and hinder our fellowship with the Lord. This free booklet will help you understand why genuine believers still struggle with sin and how to effectively and biblically deal with sin in your life. Ask for your free copy of "When Believers Sin" when you call or write.

Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is a radio ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We 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 which will equip believers to understand and meet the challenges and opportunities of our time and place.

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