Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

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

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: You do not worship a blind force or give thanks to a mathematical something as Sir James Jeans described God. Pascal has well said that the God of Christians is not a God who is simply the author of mathematical truths, that is believed only by Epicureans and pagans. Man has been created by a personal God of all love, holiness, justice, truth, righteousness, power, grace, mercy, peace, and an infinite number of other wonders. What a sin, what a crime then, for man to refuse to worship him.

Announcer: 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 Path of Degradation. Have you ever driven somewhere and taken a wrong turn? When this happens, you can't keep driving on the wrong road and expect to arrive at your destination. You have to turn around and get on the right road as quickly as possible.

People believe that the path of religion, achievement and self-effort, is the right way. But we have all taken a wrong turn and are headed for disaster. How can we find the path that will lead us to the right eternal destination? The Scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible: Romans chapter 1 and verses 21 through 24. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse, with the message entitled Path of Degradation.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto Thee, our Father and our God, and in the Holy Spirit. We thank Thee for Thy great faithfulness, Thy loving kindness, the way that Thou hast opened for us to come to Thee directly through Jesus Christ.

And we pray Thee that as we come, the Holy Spirit may take Thy word to our hearts, to build us, to draw us to Thee through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

We are studying in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. It has been said that man is a religious animal. Most certainly it is true, and the study of anthropology, as well as the study of the Bible, attests this to the highest degree. There is in every man an imperious necessity to have a God in some form or shape or idea.

When Charles Darwin took his famous trip in the Beagle, he came back to England, saying that he had found a tribe of savages on the island of Tierra del Fuego, who had no religion whatsoever. Immediately the Christians in England formed a society to live among this people and learn their ways and bring the Gospel to them. It was not long before the missionaries had learned the language and the customs of this people and were able to furnish such accurate information about their religious concepts and ideas and practices, that even the non-Christian anthropologists were convinced that the people had had their religion, though it remained undetected to the eyes of Darwin. In fact, Darwin himself was so convinced of the matter that he had a great admiration for the missionary society and as long as he lived sent a check to them every year for taking the gospel out to the uttermost parts of the Earth.

No man, be he ever so low in the scale of human life, has ever failed to make some gesture towards the powers that are outside and around him, and of which he has the consciousness written on his being by nature. We are studying together the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, and we have before us at this time the passage which shows how man became debased in his religious ideas, and left the high knowledge of the true religion revealed by God to Adam and the rest of the early members of the human race, and degenerated to the horrible practices of paganism and the cruelty and debauchery that accompanies one phase of departure from God, and how many degenerated to the devitalizing philosophies that have a form of goodness, but which deny the divine righteousness which comes only through the Lord Jesus Christ.

We read in Romans 1, beginning with the 21st verse, because that when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things, wherefore God also gave them up.

Now, the first point in this divine revelation is that man began high, knowing God. There have been those who have looked only at the illusions of visible things and have imagined that man is rising out of the beast, and the beast is rising out of the protoplasm, out of the primordial ooze. There have been those who have looked at man's body and failed to see that it is a wreckage of something great, instead of the rising of something inferior.

Darwin said, "Man is developed from an ovule of about 1/125th of an inch in diameter, which differs in no respect from the ovules of other animals." Now this is a statement as foolish as to say that the California redwood tree develops from a tiny seed that differs in no respect from the seed that produces the ragweed. Darwin knew nothing about genes and chromosomes. The result is that today there is no authentic scientist in the world, Christian or non-Christian, who believes in Darwin's guesses.

The horrible thing is that they still hold to the results of the theory without believing in his method of the development of the results. This writer also said, "Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men, but to the humblest living creature, with his God-like intellect, which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system, with all these exalted powers, man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."

Now, here is perhaps as great an illustration of the truth of our text as any that could be found. The African savage might walk over a mountain side, upon which he would find littered the wreckage of a giant airplane. He would then lift his eyes to the skies and see the great stratoliner, rising from the airport, and think to himself, "How wonderful. That noble machine with its ability to fly, and to bear men quickly from one place to another, yet still bears on its bodily frame the indelible stamp of its lowly origin. It has come from bits of wreckage like these I see. I have compared the nuts and bolts and rivets of the great plane with these bits that I have picked up from the mountain side. I have found a piston in the great engine that is undoubtedly of the same origin of the piston I hold in my hand. I am forced to conclude that the stratoliner is the development of these lowly pieces."

What fools not to see that man is wreckage? What fools not to comprehend that Plato and Aristotle are but the rubbish of Adam, and that Athens is but the degeneration of the Garden of Eden? There have been those who have conceived the idea that man's religious concepts are in evolution, and that little by little man has thought up whatever ideas of God that there are in the human race.

Frederick W. Nietzsche asked the question, "Is man only a blunder of God or God only a blunder of man?" This concept is not only from the brain of an atheistic philosopher like Nietzsche, but is to be found in modern writers who have taken money for preaching in Christian pulpits. Four times I read the opening chapter of the book with the terribly misleading title, A Guide to the Understanding of the Bible, written by one of the most famous preachers of the past generation. That chapter discusses the supposed evolution of God in the Bible.

If I may reduce fourscore pages of argument to a paragraph of boiled down essential ideas, the reasoning, if we may call it that, is as follows: Primitive man had a devilish concept of God. Noah's God destroyed the earth with a flood. Abraham's God was a bloodthirsty God who wanted a human sacrifice. The God of Moses was the horrible God of volcanic fire, speaking to him from Mount Sinai. Little by little man has advanced as the centuries rolled on. David began to have high ethical thoughts of God, but they were mixed with the terrible imprecatory Psalms that called down wrath upon the enemy.

By the time of the prophets, God was really improving. He now hated unrighteousness and spoke out against the crimes committed by men. When Jesus came along, the idea of God really took on marvelous concepts of fatherhood and brotherhood, and that was the greatest idea up to that time. But Jesus had the repugnant idea of Hell of which He spoke so much. This must be abandoned, for continuing the upward curve of development, the modern idea is all sugar and spice and everything that is nice. God has no Hell for the wicked to the modern preacher, but little by little, He has become so respectable that He can be worshiped in good taste by the people of Park Avenue and Morningside Heights.

Yes, that's the idea that comes from the first chapter of the Guide to the Understanding the Bible. Yet it is a scientific fact that if such a writer had been acquainted with even the rudimentary findings of the greatest ethnologists and anthropologists, he could never have fallen into such an error. Perhaps this writer had not read anything more up to date than Fraser's Golden Bough. Great as that work is as a collection of the follies of the human race in the field of religious thought, its conclusions have been completely nullified by the work of Schmidt of Vienna. In a great four-volume work, Schmidt has demonstrated that the idea of one God is much older in the human race than the idea of many gods. Polytheism is the degradation of monotheism.

To hold the opposite view and think that man has come to a belief in one God by rising, is nothing more than an escape mechanism to avoid the implications of the existence of the Creator, to whom the creature must be absolutely responsible. The Bible gives us the evidence that man knew God from the beginning, and knew Him in His perfection. When man was first created, the Lord God gave him certain specific instructions concerning his duties and his responsibilities. Man was willing to have the privileges, but he did not want the limitations of his position. He rebelled and disobeyed God in a deliberate and comprehending fashion.

The woman was deceived, we read in the New Testament in 1 Timothy 2:14, but the man, Adam, was not deceived. He knew what he was doing, and he turned away from God on purpose because he wanted to be God himself. Even after the Fall, man had the true knowledge of God. Man's condition was changed, and he began by running away from God and hiding. But God speedily overtook him in love and mercy, and made the way whereby man could approach Him through the shedding of the blood of the sacrifice, which was given to man as an object lesson in order to condition his reflexes to the understanding of the great truth that sin means death. Sin means death. Every time the lamb was killed on the altars of those who obeyed God, the thought liaison should have been made. Sin means death. Sin means death. The wages of sin is death.

If you will not bring the substitute which I have commanded, it will mean your own death. The Bible reveals to us that the great central truths of the Gospel were known to the early generations of the human race. We read in Hebrews 11, "By faith, Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain." Now if it was by faith, it was, of course, by obedience. And therefore, we must conclude that God had commanded the blood sacrifice from the moment that He Himself had shed the blood of animals, the first blood ever shed on this planet, to provide the covering of skins for the man and woman, Adam and his wife, just after they had evinced their belief in His promise of redemption that would come through the seed of the woman, Jesus Christ, who would bruise the heel of the serpent. And the woman, by the way, who was promised the seed of the woman was not the Virgin Mary, but Israel, the race of Israel that was to bring forth Christ.

Not only did man know the fact of the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ from this earliest time, but we read in Jude that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied even of the second coming of Christ in which judgment would be brought upon the ungodly men. We read further that Moses esteemed the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt. Yes, our text is sure, supported not only by the revelation of Scripture, but by the confessions of men.

Men knew God. If they had not known Him, their condemnation would not be so great. If they were creatures groping after the unknown, then there might be some excuse. But God reveals to us that He has given not only the Bible, the universe of His will for us, but has left the unmistakable traces in nature around man and within the heart of man itself. Man is condemned because the Bible reveals the Lord Jesus Christ and offers Him to man as Savior. If for some degraded reason, man says that he cannot accept the revelation in the book, God says that man is inexcusable because of the revelation in nature. And if man seeks to turn away from the revelation in nature, there is still the condemnation of man written in his own conscience, and that can never be eradicated.

The next clause in our text shows the departure from God. We read that when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful. The reason for the failure to worship God is evident. The conscience of man is a goad. A man must move in the direction in which his conscience calls him, or else he must deaden the pain with some opiate so that he can go his own way, even when the goad is prodding him in the opposite direction.

Thomas Hobbes has pointed out that by denying the existence or the providence of God, men may shake off their ease, but not their yoke. The fact that God charges men with failure to worship Him and failure to be thankful to Him, is evidence enough that He is a personal God. Kepler said, "The undevout astronomer is mad." But unfortunately, the madness is not of the mind. For then the grace of God would be able to take care of the irresponsible being, where reason had been dethroned and madness had ascended the throne. But man, with all his faculties, consciously turned away from his Creator. Man, with all of the God-like qualities with which he had been endowed from creation and birth, turned those qualities away from the Creator.

Like the sailors in Jonah's ship, each man calls upon his God in his own way. This is the most terrible of sins, to pray to or acknowledge a God who is not the true God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. You are called upon not to worship God in your way, but to worship God in His way, in spirit and in truth. When you fail to do so, you follow in the trail of the human race which departed from God at a time when He was well known.

Furthermore, our text states that the race ceased to be thankful. Base ingratitude, the marble-hearted fiend, worse than any production of nature, stamps man for what he is. Shakespeare says, "I hate ingratitude more in a man than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness, or any taint of vice." The reason for this is that ingratitude is one of the parent sins. The farmer in the field will take a stick to beat the branches of an oak tree so that the acorns will fall down on the ground for the hogs. The hogs will eat the acorns, but will never look up at the master who threshes them down for him. God weeps through Isaiah when he says, "I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against Me. The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib, but Israel doth not know, My people doth not consider." There are people who pride themselves on their culture, and who pay slavish tribute to etiquette and protocol, and who fail utterly to acknowledge God and to give thanks to Him, first for all that He is, and then for all that He has done for them.

How can any man call himself a gentleman if he fails to thank the Lord for life and breath, and redemption from the pit of evil through the blood of Christ? How can any woman consider herself as worthy of ultimate respect if she has withdrawn herself from the Lord and is not on speaking terms with Him? The truth of our text sets forth unmistakably that such people differ in degree, but not in kind, from the savage who worships a reptile. The degradation is not only in the religious and social realms, but also in the intellectual. Those who leave God in religion and manners, soon leave Him in their mind.

Dean Alfred translates the last part of verse 21, "Their heart became dark, and they wandered blindly in the mazes of folly." Vanity in reasoning and darkness in senseless hearts are the fruits of failure to worship God in His way, and to be grateful to Him for all that He is and all that He has done. It is a terrible charge against the learning and wisdom of men, but God everywhere makes the charge. He says that the thoughts of men are vanity. He reminds us that the preaching of the Cross is to them that perish foolishness, but unto us which are saved, it is the power of God. For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of the thing preached to save them that believe."

All this is the darkness of the heart that is estranged from God. It is the heart of every man when untouched by the grace of the Redeemer. Man was originally clothed in the light of God's holiness and wisdom. When man rebelled against God, the light went out, leaving but a dim glow on a smoking stick. Then by man's failure to worship God and to thank Him, even that glow went out, so that the man now must be looked upon as dead in trespasses and sin, alienated from the life of God with the understanding darkened. The carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed