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: Man had departed from the road of righteousness to walk in his own path. Thus he was lost as a sheep is lost, as a coin is lost, as a child may be lost. And his lostness was worthy of condemnation, and it has been condemned. The son of man has come to seek and to save that which was lost, Christ tells us. And there is the only way by which the lost one can be found. There is the only way whereby one who has crossed the boundary into death can be brought back across the boundary into life.

Guest (Male): Over a half a century ago, the late Dr. Donald Gray Barnhouse, then pastor at Tenth 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 All Under Sin. Imagine a child who disobeys his parents by having a snack before dinner.

He later protests that he did not do it without realizing the chocolate pudding he ate left stains on his white t-shirt. Many people reject the biblical message that they are sinners before a holy God, but they do not realize they are covered by the stains of their rebellious, disobedient life. If we are all stained with the filth of our sin, how can we ever be accepted by a holy God? The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is Romans chapter three and verse nine. Here again is Dr. Donald Gray Barnhouse with the message entitled All Under Sin.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto the our Father and our God and in the Holy Spirit. We pray thee as we meditate together the beginning of a terrible passage of scripture that it shall do its effective work in the hearts of men. Thou hast promised success to the word as it is sent forth, and it is in the confidence of thy truth that we proclaim it. Speak to the hearts of men to do thy work that the glory might be unto thee. And we ask it in the name and for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen. One of the greatest marks of an inferiority complex is to proclaim the inferiority of someone else. To create the idea of an inferior race, class, group or individual is to relieve the pressure on one's own sense of imperfection. The world must have such release because it does not have the release that comes from the miracle work of being joined to Christ through faith in the finished work of Calvary's cross. It is frequently necessary for surgeons to cut a hole in the skull of a man who has had a fracture in order to let the interior pressure find an escape.

Despising other members of the human race is a trepanation that lets pressure out of a mind that is swollen with the rage of its own insufficiency. God does not operate in such a way. He crushes the mind, the heart, the entire being to death in order to raise us to newness of eternal life by the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. The early chapters of Romans are just such a crushing by God. There is no escape left to man. There is no excuse that remains. The last vestige of his self-respect must be destroyed, and it is destroyed in order that he might stand as a naked and shameless bankrupt before God who will then move in grace, not merely to restore him to the imperfect position which he possessed before, but to the superior position of sons of God destined to be associated with the Lord Jesus Christ in the government of the universe forever.

In the ninth verse of the third chapter of Romans which we have reached in the course of our expositions, we arrive at a turning point. The whole of the epistle which we have studied up to this part is surveyed in retrospect as a traveler might turn upon reaching the top of a hill to look back over the valley from which he had come. What then? Are we better than they? Paul asks sharply. And the question cannot be understood otherwise than as meaning in spite of our positional advantage over the Gentiles. Are we Jews really any better than the godless heathen?

In the first verses where he is setting forth the great advantages and privileges of the Jews, he uses the third person. Here where he is showing that a positional advantage cannot make up for their conditional degradation, he adopts the first person, putting himself among them in order that their offense may not be a personal one of pride against Paul, but only the offense of hatred against God and his truth. The advantages spoken of in the first verses are not contradicted by the present text. Their source is separated, making the judgment all the more obvious. The advantages are all from God.

The gifts of his sovereign grace without any merit whatsoever on their part. The disadvantages are all theirs, rising out of their adamic nature, bringing them to condemnation. Thus to the question, are we, the Jews, better than they, the Gentiles? Comes the swift and devastating answer from the Holy Spirit. No, in no wise. How can mere religious observance give you a moral advantage over a man whom you are exactly like in the anatomy of your sin, even as you are exactly alike him in the anatomy of your body? In the earlier portion of the epistle, a noose had been tossed around them both, Jew and Gentile.

Now the cord is drawn tightly and the knot is made fast. There is no escaping the logic of God. He pursues us relentlessly and leaves no avenue of escape. The summary is then stated in Romans 3:9. For we have before brought a charge against both Jews and Gentiles that they are all under sin. The explanation of the word before is quickly made. In the first chapter, a horrible picture is drawn of mankind lying in the slime of depravity, dishonoring his body and worshiping even creeping things. In the second chapter, there is another horrible picture of man caught like a rat in a trap of his own making, rushing madly, seeking an escape which does not exist, dashing himself against philosophy, against ethics, against religion and its ceremonies.

In the early verses of this third chapter, there is the third picture of man in vicious sophistry, seeking to argue himself out of his predicament by defaming the righteousness of God. It is only stubborn self-pride that keeps man from that confession before God that would bring release. But that way he refuses to take. Man stands before God today like a little boy who swears with crying and tears that he has not been anywhere near the jam jar. And with an air of outraged innocence, pleads the justice of his position in total ignorance of the fact that a good spoonful of the jam has fallen on his shirt.

And if at this point in our illustration, someone who is imbued with scientific method of dealing with problems and who knows this method all the way down or all the way up to the sophomore extending, if he seeks to argue that there is after all a possibility that the jam got on the boy's shirt some other way than by his stealing it, God brings him to the place where we concluded our last study saying sharply, whose damnation is just. Thus saith the Lord, stop your arguing. You are a sinner by nature. You are a sinner by deliberate choice.

And I, the Lord God Almighty, now issue a divine proclamation declaring that you are a sinner in my sight and that I will deal with you as such without argument. You might cavil against the fact that you are born with original sin. You might even wish to argue against the fact that you have yourself made the deliberate and personal choice of sin. But what are you going to do about God's flat declaration that you are a sinner, lost, undone, cursed and under sin? And that he says there is an end of all argument. But in spite of the word of God, men seek to argue their way out of the charge of their sinfulness.

There are psychologists who know that wrong tendencies exist in children, but who will not go all the way with the Bible to admit that they were born with these tendencies. They see them in older men and say they are the result of infantilism. That's scientific. But when we say how did it get into the infant, we're accused of being obscurantists. Man will admit that there are wrongs in the human race and will go for the cause all the way back to the childhood of man. But he refuses to go back to the childhood of the race and see that it is Adams who is to be blamed.

And the way out is not merely a recognition of the fact that you have not grown up, but a recognition of the fact that you need to be born again. Men go back to childhood as Nicodemus wondered if it were necessary to go all the way back to the womb of his mother. But God takes us by another direction through his Holy Spirit, to the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. And there gives us an entirely new nature, and we are born from above. There are other men who cry out against the fact that they are sinners by choice.

They will bring anthropology to tell you of different standards in different parts of the world and thereby seek to escape the charge of God. Now we are not sinners by nature, says the preacher who believes in narcissistic infantilism. We are not sinners by choice, says the young man who believes the choices are all relative and that sin does not exist. But you cannot get away from the fact that God has issued a universal proclamation declaring that you are in his sight sinners and that he will deal with you as he pleases. And in accordance with the principles which he has set forth and declared in the word of God, you are a sinner.

Today with your words and your gestures, you may flaunt your rage at God. But he sits unmoved on the throne of the universe and in due time will deal with you by exiling you forever from his presence. And the doom will not be mitigated by the fact that he does it all in the full atmosphere of divine love. Remember this, all of you who seek to absolve yourselves from divine judgment on some ground of your own devising. And if someone ask, if I have absolved myself from divine judgment, I answer immediately that I have not.

I have accepted it as true, agreed to the justice of the verdict, have accepted my sentence to the eternal lake of fire where I belong, and have watched while God the Father took my guilt and put it upon the person of his son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and visited it with his eternal wrath in the dark hours of the cross. Then I have seen him write to my account the perfection of the divine righteousness and lift me to himself in a love that could no longer be sullied by my sin since he had removed it forever and given me his own holiness in Christ.

Our text compasses the human race and leaves no escape for those who would absolve themselves from guilt. The Jews of that day had brought themselves to the comfortable point of thinking that judgment would fall only upon the uncircumcised Gentiles. Paul, in his famous rebuke to Peter, fought as a Jew when he said, we who are Jews by nature and not sinners of the Gentiles in Galatians 2:15. The religious leaders of Israel were even more arrogant, for they had brought themselves to the place where they believed that within the chosen nation they were right. And the lesser ones as they thought of them were wrong even to the place of cursing.

To the man who had been born blind and who insisted on giving the glory to the Lord Jesus Christ for his healing, they said, thou wast altogether born in sins and dost thou teach us? And they cast him out. In an earlier chapter in the fourth gospel, the leaders had sent officers to arrest Jesus Christ and bring him before them. These came back without him and were called to task by the Pharisees. When they answered, never man spake like this man, the Pharisees replied, are ye also deceived? Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed in him?

And then with a sneer that reveals their own iniquity, but this people who knoweth not the law is accursed. Now no excuse can be accepted by God, however, even though men make excuses for themselves. And certainly the pretensions to superiority cannot be accepted. The charge has been made that all, Jew and Gentile alike, are under sin. Every member of the human race is included and the charge is about to be substantiated. The English word sin is found 49 times in the epistle to the Romans. But this is the first time. It is important therefore that we stop and analyze its meaning.

The sinful condition of man has been set forth in the preceding chapters as nowhere else in the Bible or out of the Bible. And now the word is introduced. The concordances of the original languages list 12 different Hebrew and Greek words that are translated by our noun sin. The meaning hidden in the etymology of these words is very interesting. The most familiar and frequent of these words means missing the mark. In a world that was more familiar with archery, the significance was very real. As soon as boys were able to pull a bowstring, they learned to shoot arrows in the ancient world.

As they grew toward manhood, they took part in many contests. There can hardly have been a man who did not remember pulling back on the bowstring with all his force, aiming for the distant target and releasing the arrow only to see it drop to the ground before it reached the mark. This says the word of God is the meaning of moral sin. God has placed a target which none can ever reach. And men have fallen into inferior strengths by the nature of their adamic heritage so that no man can ever satisfy the demands of God.

It is one of the most important lessons in the scripture. If God set tasks that man could perform, God would be stooping to the human level. And man would become proud. The winners would at least that they were able to meet the demands of God. Heaven would be filled with strutting roosters proud of their attainments. And any man who, for any reason, did not have strength to compete would be lost because of some special inferiority on his own part. But God has not been so cruel as to set an examination that some might pass. He has placed the target where no man can reach it.

He then comes to us in love and says, if you will admit that you cannot reach the mark, I will carry you all the way. If you will not admit it, you must be banished forever. If some man wishes to say that it is humiliating and that he will not submit, such a man will be crushed by the facts. For God will not have pride in his heaven. It is his way or no way. And it is the kind and gracious way. For all may now come freely by grace where none could reach the mark through self-effort.

Sin is falling short of the righteousness of God. And if a good man, as men count goodness, still thinks it is humiliating to be asked to abandon his goodness, I can perhaps help him by changing the figure to the sport of jumping. Suppose the best jumpers in the world were assembled at a seashore port and wished to go to a distant land across the sea. Now a man who does not know how to jump will admit at once that he cannot compete in any jumping match and will travel by boat. But if the best in the world refused to go by the boat, saying that he was a jumper and was not going to have anybody put a boat for him to cross, he'd be a fool.

For there is no loss of pride involved if all jumpers are equally powerless to reach a shore that lies a thousand miles away. And man is much farther away from the righteousness of God than the mere distance of a thousand miles for a jumper. Thus you are a sinner because you missed the mark, fall short of the target, are at sea at a distance which no man can reach by his own efforts. A sinner then is anyone who is less perfect than God. Another word that is used for sin is overstepping a boundary. While the first word was one which signified inability, this word is one which signifies rebellion.

It is the act of a child who, when told to stay in his room, is found downstairs by the radio. It is the act of the soldier who, told to stay in camp, is found out of bounds, absent without leave. In some measure, it was the sin of Adam. He was given complete control of all the earth and its products with the exception of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It makes no difference whether this is literal or symbolic. It was the sign of man's dependence upon God and the transgression of the command would mark his declaration of independence from God and would show his disobedience to the divine command.

He overstepped the boundary and brought death upon the human race. It was willful, perverted desire to have his own way. It was the overturning of the order of command and led to the usurpation of the divine prerogatives. A third word that is translated sin means falling instead of standing. It's a thought that presents to us the idea of weakness. It is interesting to note that a synonym for standing is to be upright. And the word upright comes from the same root as right and righteousness. But no man in this world has maintained a righteous position before God.

Men by God's standards are crooked. There is an interesting word in the epistle of Peter which is lost to most of our generation because it is an archaic word. Servants are told to be obedient to their masters, not only to the good and gentle, but also to what Peter calls the froward. Now what does froward mean? We know the word without knowing it. We recognize froward as being from without its last letter. Now we have kept the word toward or toward which means movement in the direction of a given point, but we have largely lost the word froward or froward which means moving away from a given point.

The froward master who is not good and gentle to his servant is froward, moving away from the will of God for him. The Greek word however is scoliosis, which has nothing to do with movement in any direction, but which is the word for crooked. And it's the word which has been adopted by our doctors for scoliosis, curvature of the spine. The patient is not upright, he's crooked, fallen. Spiritually, it speaks of failing to measure up to the righteousness of God, falling instead of standing upright. A fourth word that is translated sin means being ignorant instead of knowing.

Now in our fallen state, ignorance is not necessarily sin unless it be ignorance of the laws of God. It is interesting to remember that the first interrogation in the Bible, the first question mark in our punctuation followed Satan's doubt of the word of God. Yea hath God said? Now it's no sin for you to be ignorant of higher mathematics or of Chinese grammar or even of English grammar. But it is a sin for you to be ignorant of the fact that ignorance comes from sin. It is certainly a sin for you to be ignorant of God's way of salvation.

And you will one day be examined on your knowledge of Jesus Christ. A fifth word for sin is diminishing that which should be rendered in full. Now we have only to realize that God has commanded us to love him with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength, to realize that we have diminished that which God requires of us. We are guilty of having given a short measure of devotion. We are by nature cheats. We have short changed God and we have done it because we wished to spend on ourselves that which we held in our hands for a moment, but which was not rightfully our own until we had yielded it fully to him.

Three other ideas are expressed in the etymology of the words for sin. They overlap somewhat some of those which we have seen. The word signify disobeying a voice, disregarding a command, and being willfully careless. We have discussed the ideas of disobedience and rebellion, but it might be well to stress for a moment the idea of willful carelessness. It is incredible that men should hold their souls as of so little value that they would trifle with their eternal salvation. But they do. The world has adopted a phraseology that is not biblical and has spoken of someone who has sold his soul to the devil.

The phrase is an idea from Goethe's Faust and not from the scriptures. But even though a man cannot sell his soul to the devil, he can be so willfully careless that his soul will be lost. These are but a few of the various aspects of sinning suggested by the etymology of the terms used. In the light of all this, we can understand how strong is the statement in our text that we are all Jew and Gentile alike under sin. To be under sin is much more than missing the mark or overstepping a boundary or any of the other phases of sin which we have considered.

To be under sin means to be dominated by sin, to be under its power, under its rule, under its empire, under its sway, under its control. This is our nature by birth, our condition by choice, and our position by the divine declaration of God placing us where he sees us. What does he want you to do in the face of all this? The answer is plain. Simply admit it. Come to him singing, O Lamb of God, I come, I come. And our God and Father, we pray thee that thou shalt bless each heart that listens in this hour through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Guest (Male): Are you crushed and burdened by the weight of your sin and guilt? You can lay your sin at the foot of the cross. Trust in Christ for eternal life and receive his perfect righteousness as a gift. We hope you've benefited from today's message by Dr. Barnhouse entitled All Under Sin. 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 All Under Sin.

Or simply request message number R3-5. We would also like to make available to you a free copy of Dr. Barnhouse's booklet entitled Jesus The Great I Am. If you ask people for their opinion about Jesus, they may say he was a powerful prophet, a brilliant moral teacher or even the greatest man that ever lived. But these high opinions are woefully inadequate. In this booklet, Dr. Barnhouse examines the Bible's remarkable claims that Jesus is Jehovah God in human flesh and the significance of this glorious truth for all of us today. This biblical look at the deity of Christ can powerfully impact your spiritual life.

Ask for your free copy of Jesus The Great I Am 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 this 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. Call toll-free 1-800-488-1888 or visit us online at 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.

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