The Ways of God

Guest (Male): The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals presents the timeless teaching of Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse.
Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Our text says that professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. It is not harsh because it is true, and because it is true in a tenderness that longs for men to see their folly and to turn from it that they might have the life of abundance through the love of God in Christ. Fools. This is God's estimate of the human race, both of its philosophers and its religious leaders.
Guest (Male): God's Word is good for what he gave to teach, rebuke, correct, and train. Equipped by him, we then pursue the work God has for us to do. God's Word is all the Christian needs to grow in grace and do good deeds. 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 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, "The Ways of God." Parents often imagine their toddlers growing up to become brilliant, successful, and influential. After all, geniuses like Einstein and Aristotle once babbled and gurgled like any other baby. But the words and thoughts of the most brilliant philosophers, scientists, and thinkers in history still seem like baby talk compared to the infinite wisdom of God. How different are the ways of God from the ways of men, and how can we begin to understand them? The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is Romans chapter 1 and verses 22 through 24. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with the message entitled, "The Ways of God."
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 that Thou hast made it possible for us who were sinners dead in trespasses and sin to be made alive in Christ and to stand before Thee in the righteousness of the Savior. In this hour we pray Thee that Thou shalt convict of sin and bring men to the knowledge of the cross and use Thy Word to build in truth all those who are Thine own. We ask it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Although we are studying the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, we shall introduce our message with a story that's taken out of the book of the prophecy of Isaiah. God had been speaking to the prophet concerning the nature of His, God's, being. Thus saith the Lord, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of Hosts: I am the first and I am the last, and beside Me there is no God. And going on from this, God takes up the case against those who believe in any other God than Himself. They that make a graven image are all of them vanity, and their delectable things shall not profit. And they are their own witnesses. They see not nor know, that they may be ashamed. Then speaking of different kinds of idols, he describes the man who cuts down a tree and uses part of the wood for one purpose and another part from which to carve an idol. He heweth down cedars and taketh the cypress and the oak. He planteth an ash and the rain doth nourish it. Then shall it be for a man to burn, for he will take thereof and warm himself. Yea, he kindleth it and baketh bread. Yea, he maketh a god and worshippeth it. He maketh a graven image and falleth down thereto. He burneth part thereof in the fire. With part thereof he eateth flesh. He roasteth roast and is satisfied. Yea, he warmeth himself and saith, "Aha, I am warm. I have seen the fire." And of the residue thereof he maketh a god, even his graven image. He falleth down unto it and worshippeth it and prayeth unto it and saith unto it, "Deliver me, for thou art my god." And then God goes on to express through the prophet the great pity of a man who would have so little sense that he could take a branch of a tree and watch half of it go up in flames as he warms himself, and then worship the other half carved into some horrible form. God says such a man feeds on ashes. A deceived heart hath turned him aside that he cannot deliver his soul nor say, "Is there not a lie in my right hand?" Now when we see people refuse to bow down before God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we wonder at the depth of sin that blocks them from such submission. When we see these unbelievers go on to even greater depths of idolatry and evil, we wonder at the state of mind that will allow men to wander so far into self-deception. And then we come to a passage like the first chapter of Romans and all becomes clear. For in the 22nd to 24th verses we read: Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like unto corruptible man, and to birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up. Now the first steps to idolatry, we saw in our last study, consisted of the failure to worship God when He was known, the failure to thank Him for all that He has given to man, and the vanity of the imagination. Following this, the Lord God allows the judicial blindness and darkness of soul to settle down upon man. They have taken a position and they will follow it in order to justify themselves, even if it means their own condemnation in the end. There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. The way began in the glorification of man. When man gives a wrong place to man, God is always dragged down in man's thinking. I revert to an illustration I frequently use: it's that of the seesaw. If one end is up, the other end must be down. And if the first end goes down, the other end goes up. Now it's very important to use the seesaw principle theologically. If you exalt man in any way, God is thereby debased. But if you exalt God as He should be exalted, man thereby takes his true position of utter nothingness. And only then can he find his real exaltation, for it will come to him through the grace of God in Christ. Man can thus reach the heights by taking the proper place of depth. It's once more the divine principle: that everyone that exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. When man departed from God, there was an immediate way opened back into the presence of God, a way that was guarded by a cherubim sent from heaven with flaming swords to keep that way open for man. It was the way of the altar, the way of the blood. It was the picture of the cross of Jesus Christ. It was not long before Cain took the way of opposition. He did not want to submit himself to God and recognize his own sinfulness. He killed his brother Abel, who was obeying God by faith, bringing the sin offering of the lamb as God had told them. That murder was a great picture of human brotherhood. It showed that the brotherhood of man is what it really is: a man killed another man who was from the same father and out of the same womb. There is the brotherhood of man untouched by Christ. Oh, do not prate about the brotherhood of man. God has condemned all possibility of attaining any solution of the human problem apart from Himself. We may be able to project ourselves into the mind of Cain and understand why he did the horrible thing. He was the forerunner of the aesthetic of our day, who turns away from the sacrifice of the blood substitute. Cain must have thought: why should I go to the field and take a lamb? Why should I have to deal with such a distasteful thing as a blood sacrifice? Here are the fruits of the field, they're beautiful. Can I not make something that appeals to my senses as being beautiful and lovely? This satisfies my senses and does not offend me in any way. Surely God should be satisfied with something that satisfies me, and He should be repugned with that which disgusts me. In other words, Cain was pitting the human reason against the divine reason. He knew God, but he would not worship Him in God's way. He was not thankful. He became vain in his imagination. His foolish heart was darkened. Professing himself to be wise, he had become a fool. He was attempting to substitute a basket of fruit for the blood sacrifice, without which there is no remission of sin. We are told that there are more Smiths in the directory than any other name. If it were possible to read the invisible spiritual names of men, you would discover there were more men who bore the brand of Cain than those who lived under any other mark. We fail to see that we have elevated Cain to high rank among us in our civilization. Cain leads many of our institutions of thought. Cain edits many of our papers and magazines. Cain teaches in many of our classes, is president of many of our institutions of learning. Cain has been ordained to the ministry in many a denomination. Cain prays. And someday, Cain will be sent to the lake of fire. Is it for naught that the Holy Spirit speaks of those who depart from the faith as those who have gone in the way of Cain, as we read in Jude 11? Our American life is filled with the doctrine and the doing of Cain, if you have eyes to see. Those who tell you that because God is love He will demand no punishment for sin have gone in the way of Cain. Those who have wished to substitute a religion of form and ceremony for the religion of the substitutionary death of the Savior have gone in the way of Cain. Our text says that professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. I can well remember one of my professors, Dr. R. A. Torrey, turning this verse to read: professing themselves to be wise, they became philosophers. And then he answered his question with the scorn of a single word: "fools-osophers." Now the Christian has no argument whatsoever with the philosophy which takes its humble place in the shadow of the revelation of God and which seeks to convince the unstable of the folly of their ways in resisting the truth of the divine revelation. But the philosophy which is the counterfeit of divine revelation and which is the substitute for it is characterized by God in the most scornful terms. The Lord knoweth the thoughts of man, that they are vanity. Certainly God has said it, for we read in Isaiah 55:8: For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts. We recognize this principle in common physics, but we are unwilling to recognize it in spiritual matters. If the whole distance to be measured is 10,000 miles, anyone can see that it's absurd to argue over a quarter of an inch and three-sixteenths of an inch. But the difference between a low-grade moron and Einstein is less than the fraction of an inch if you measure the difference from either of them all the way to God. Infinite omniscience is in our God, and any man who puts his feeble thoughts up against the all-wisdom of God is a simple fool. That is what our text says: professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. God Himself has revealed to us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. If we understand that, we're a long way on the road to truth. We must be careful to understand that when the Bible speaks of the fear of the Lord, it's not talking about the fright of the Lord. The devil is always at war with words, and he won a victory when he transferred the meaning of fright over to our word fear. There are even some Christians who do not understand the difference between the fear of the Lord and the fright of the Lord. If you have bowed before God and accepted the gift of His love and mercy through the Lord Jesus Christ, you need have no fright. Fear in the Bible sense is a godly thing, a wonderful thing, a lovely thing. The devil has adulterated the word until it is a terrible mixture. I can illustrate this by an anecdote from my ministry. Several years ago I married a young couple who were and still are very much in love with each other. They had met when they were thirteen and fourteen and had never looked at anyone else, and wouldn't today after all these years. They went away on their honeymoon, and after a few weeks came home again. I saw them in church the next Sunday and I greeted them with a little pleasantry. I asked the bridegroom if she had burned the roast for the first dinner. They laughed and she said, "Oh, I was afraid that I was going to do it. I'd read so much about the bride being unable to cook that I decided that John was going to have the very best meal a bride could prepare for her husband. So I began about three o'clock. I got everything out and started to work. When I finally put things on to cook, I wanted everything to turn out well, and I was afraid they wouldn't. And of course, he had to be a little late, and I was so afraid things would be spoiled." I interrupted her and I said, "You've said three times that you're afraid. Did you think that he was going to beat you?" She pouted and said of course not. Then she looked at him with all of the love of her heart in her eyes. But I persisted, "You said that you were afraid." She broke in, "You know what I mean." And of course I knew what she meant. Her fear was not fright. Her fear was a great desire to serve the one to whom she had given herself entirely. In this case, the fear of John was the beginning of good cooking. And perhaps that will enable you to understand how the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. If you will surrender yourself utterly to Him in an abandon of love, He will so fill your being that your desire will be to serve Him. Then you will bend your every effort to please Him, and He will reveal Himself to you daily. True wisdom will then become your portion, and you shall daily grow in His knowledge. But if you refuse the love that is offered to you in the Savior, you will inevitably depart on the road to abandon, the terrible road where ultimately you yourself will be abandoned by God. Stifler says Paul knew the boasted wisdom of the Euphrates and the Nile, the learning of Hellas and of Rome. We know it today. But there is this difference: there are those in our time who see no generic difference between those ethnic sages and the prophets of God, while Paul declares the former to be but fools. And we must not limit the folly to those who are professional philosophers. The greatest departure comes first in the field of religion. Then false philosophy rushes into the vacuum. I believe that it's impossible to understand Hitler and Hitlerism without understanding the reality of German philosophy. And I believe that it is impossible to understand German philosophy without realizing that the German pastors first became modernists, denying the inspiration of the Bible and the person and work of the Lord Jesus. In his book "The Antichrist," Nietzsche, the hellish philosopher that preceded Nazism, has said, "The Protestant pastor is the grandfather of German philosophy." How true this is. Before I had ever found this line in Nietzsche, I had said something similar a good many years ago. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had created the phrase "public enemy number one." They were talking about a Chicago gangster who had become the king of the bootleggers. I said that they were mistaken. Public enemy number one was not to be found in the haunts of vice and crime. Public enemy number one was to be sought in the pulpits of the land, where men were accepting Christian money and living off Christian endowments to deny the truths that they had vowed to uphold and to spread lies which they had vowed to oppose. It is just as true today as it was then. How can we explain the whole of juvenile delinquency? The answer is to be found in the teaching of those who have denied the verbal inspiration of the Bible and have taught the young people of our land that standards of right and wrong are not absolute. If you tell young people that the story of Genesis is a myth and that they were not originally created in the image of God, they will believe you and will go out and act like beasts. If you tell them that the moral law is a code of man's devising and not written with the finger of God and given direct from heaven to Moses on Mount Sinai, they will begin to laugh at it, and they will flout it as they flout a speed limit on a four-lane highway. In many of our denominations, the emphasis has been placed on human reasoning rather than on divine revelation. I had rather send a child to a Sunday school to be taught by a blacksmith who had quit school in the sixth grade but who had been to the cross of Calvary and learned to know the Lord Jesus Christ than I would to send the child to a Sunday school where he would be taught by a PhD in religious education who had been nowhere spiritually with the Savior. The path of degradation descends by an easy slope for the first few hundred yards, and then the descent becomes much more rapid until a precipice is reached. The text now goes on to recount the origin of idolatry. Men who had abandoned the spiritual invisible God in their minds had to have something on which their senses could take hold. God has told us that He is spirit and that they who worship Him must, note that categorical imperative, must worship Him in spirit and in truth. When men abandoned the religion of the spirit, they were forced to look for something for their senses. They burn incense which satisfies their own nostrils, but which never reaches God. They have strings of beads made of scented woods which they pass through their fingers as they say their prayers, but which are really a device to let the mind wander at will while going through the form of a religious exercise. The hearing is lulled by soft and sensual music. The eye is satisfied with stately architecture and colored windows, with religious trappings of various sorts. And finally, in some religions, something is given to satisfy the taste. Smelling, touching, hearing, seeing, and tasting: all are accounted for. Calvin was a wise man when he acted in one of his first gestures for the truth in tearing down the altar and in replacing it with the pulpit. The whole of the architectural line was henceforth to take the whole of the mind to the sacred desk on which should be placed a copy of the Word of God. The function of the minister was to be hidden behind that desk and to keep out of sight as much as possible while he shined the light of that book with healing effect into the hearts and souls of the listeners.