One World (Urbana 57)
Speech delivered at Urbana 57by Donald Grey Barnhouse
It is trite, perhaps, in speaking of one world to remind you that in these days of intercommunication and travel the world has shrunk. I can testify to where I have been in the month of December and you will see how small the world is. On December first I flew out of international airport, Philadelphia, on Sunday after- noon and on Monday morning I was in Lisbon. On Monday night I was in Accra in Ghana in Africa. After 12 days in northern Nigeria, in five hours I flew across both the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean (which was very fast for Herodotus' day) and reached Europe in time to spend a few days there.
I had dinner in London a week ago last night and then got home again in time for Christmas and to come out here. So it is a very small world. I can give you many illustrations like that. In fact, some of these days if you travel right you can leave Tokyo and be in the same day, because you lose a day in the middle of the ocean, and can be on this side of the world. It's a small world, one world.
But before I speak of the spiritual aspects, because these other aspects mean
nothing to us who know the Lord Jesus Christ, I want to mention the fact that
I am addressing my remarks to believers in Jesus Christ. So if there is anyone
here who does not know Christ as his personal Saviour, you are not going to
receive very much from what I have to say. I Cor. 2:14 says the natural man
(and the Greek there is sukekos, "the soulish man") receiveth not
the things of the Spirit. They are foolishness unto him, neither can he know
them.
Therefore, as a preface to what I'm going to say all these mornings, I want to take a few minutes to show in the simplest form possible what is a Christian. There are many false definitions about it, but let's go to the Word of God, and I'd like to illustrate it in this graphic way.
I hold up my left hand, a left fist, and I say we are born with one nature. That nature is the nature of Adam. God has judged it. He has said it is corrupt. He has said that He will not even take good things from our Adamic nature. God curses the philanthropy of the unregenerate man. God refuses the prayers of the man who does not come through Jesus Christ.
Now this person, I, before I was born again, you, in your natural state you may sink to be a convict or you may rise to be a judge, but the judge is as far from God as the convict and maybe farther, for he is inclined to trust the fruit of his natural capacity and look upon his honor and his uprightness as being qualities in which God should be very pleased. But if the Bible teaches anything, it is that God curses and hates human character that comes from the natural man. If the Bible teaches us anything, it is that character can take us to hell but not to heaven. Now alongside this left fist, let me show you what happened when a man believes in Jesus Christ. And I put my right hand over and there is the second nature. Now a Christian is a man with a second nature, and you are going to be in heaven if you possess this second nature. And if the world says, "But you mean to say that a convict who is saved down here and has this second nature is going to get to heaven, while the honorable judge is not? And we say, "That is precisely what the Word of God teaches."
You must never believe the evidence of your eyes. You must never believe what you see in any individual. You cannot say, "Well, this must be true, because he is so good, I probably can find you very good people who believe that the earth is flat. But their goodness does not relate to the error that they hold. The Bible teaches us beyond question that God can never accept anything that comes out of Adam.
Now, how does the new nature come in? And here I stop being in the nature of
a Bible teacher for a moment, and I become an evangelist. I said to Billy Graham
one day, "You're an obstetrician and I'm a pediatrician:" Now Madison
Square Garden is the delivery room, but this is the nursery. And I'm going to
try to fix your formula and see that you don't grow up with spiritual rickets
and that you understand your manners. In other words, we must understand what
it is to be in Christ, what it is to be born.
Now God does not use anything that is in the Adamic nature in creating the
new nature that is in Christ. The new birth is a new birth. We've got to understand
this. When the Lord said, "You must be born again," Nicodemus' mind
went quickly around, trying to encompass what had been said to him. He did not
understand. All he could think of was that something was being said about obstetrics
and he said, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second
time into his mother's womb and be born?"
But what the Lord God Almighty was doing was giving us the beginning of the teaching on the nature of the new birth. Now the new birth is the work of God. Just as you had nothing to do with your physical birth, so you do not have anything to do with your second birth until after it has been given to you, and then with the new life you believe. To me the 64 million dollar question and answer is the fact that life comes before faith. And I believe that if you once get straightened out on the fact that life comes before faith, that you believe with your new nature and not with your old nature, then everything will begin to fall into place. You will be in confusion for a few minutes or hours or days or weeks depending upon your perspicacity and your perspicuity. You will be in a dither perhaps for awhile when you are entering into this great fact of truth, that God begets us, as it says in James 1, "Of his own will begat he us," and in I Peter, "Being born again, not of corruptible seed." Jerome in the Vulgate boldly translated it by the Latin word semen, "Being born again not of corruptible seed but of incorruptible by the word of God."
And when God is going to save somebody, He reaches down supernaturally and
plants within them the ovum of saving faith and then somebody, and that is the
reason for missionary work, somebody comes along and circulates the sperm of
truth and the sperm penetrates the ovum. The Word of God penetrates the living
faith that God has planted there. And from that contact there is born a new
life.
Now, when we understand this, we are not going to fall for the specious arguments of those who think that Christianity consists in polishing the Adamic nature. A few years ago the paint manufacturers created a slogan, "Save the surface and you save it all." But they never tried to put even six coats of paint on a post that had been eaten by termites. Because if you paint a termite post with 14 coats of paint, it still is hollow on the inside and you've got to have a new ramrod up the middle if you're going to still maintain the paint surface.
Anybody in Christianity who ever starts working on the surface is in absolute folly. God does not work on surfaces. In fact, in the Old Testament when they were going to anoint David it was said, "Man looketh upon the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh upon the heart." And this is where we have to begin. And this is where you must begin. If you do not know that you are alive in Jesus Christ, then there is no other problem that faces you now at this convention, or any time, other than that one.
How can I be in such relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ that I know? Last year Mrs. Barnhouse and I were driving up from Texas and we stopped all night at a motel in Arkansas at Hot Springs and we didn't know the racing season was on and the whole town was pouring over dope sheets. We went back to our motel and began to talk to the lovely woman who was taking care of it. I said "Leave my papers and my Bible right there. We're going out. Don't touch any of my things." She looked at my Bible and sort of looked expectant and I said, "Do you know the Lord Jesus?" She said, "Oh, yes, I do." And I said, "Tell me, do you really know that He's your Saviour?" She said, sister, I don't have to reckon, I knows." Well, you know, that was one of the greatest glows of our whole trip. To meet that chambermaid in a motel and find in the midst of a city of Chicago racketeers down for the races, and all people like that, to find that the Lord God Almighty had His own right there. But I tell you, if you can go away from this convention for the rest of your life saying, "I don't have to reckon, I knows," why, then you are on a solid foundation.
And I must, before I now turn to my comments on the passage that we have before
us on One World, point out this fact, that this is the beginning for everyone
if us. There must be the new birth. Now don't ever believe those people who
try to tell you that if you don't know the date of your conversion, you're not
saved. That's a lot of applesauce. There isn't anybody here who can testify
as to your own birthday. You heard it and that's the only hearsay evidence that's
accepted in court.
How do you know what your birthday is? My mama done tol' me. That's all there
is to it. But I'll tell you this. Though you can't swear to when you were born,
I ask you in the name of God, do you know you're alive? It doesn't make any
difference if you don't know your birthday, if you're alive in Christ. This
is all that matters.
You don't have to know anything about it. Anybody, in fact, who tries to point back to a day of experience and say, "I got 'it' on that day," is generally slowed up on the greater sentence, "I have Him." Don't ever, ever, ever look for an "it!' in the Christian life. If you have Him, you'll have everything you'll need and more. All is in the Lord Jesus Christ.
The "One World" that I want to talk about in the New Testament is
the Greek word kosmos. You get it in the words cosmopolitan, cosmological, and
so on. Originally it meant ordered organization and began to be used in its
literal sense of the earth ball and the universe. Then it began to be used of
the totality of the people who are living in it.
I point you to this extremely important fact the word kosmos is found in Matthew nine times, in Mark three times, in Luke three times, but in John 79 times. This tremendous preponderance of the word "world" is the key to Christian truth.
John 1:29 says, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of
the world." And John 1:10 declares, "He was in the world, and the
world was made by him, and the world knew him not." The word continues
on down through to the 17th chapter, where the world has taken on such a horrible
aspect that in John 17:9 Jesus Christ refused to pray for the world. John 17:9,
"I pray not for the world," is one of the most horrible verses in
the Bible because it reveals that the world which crucified Christ is so alien
to the heart of God that it is one of the things that God says He will not touch.
He is going to save individuals out of the wreck, but the world itself is doomed.
God Almighty teaches this beyond any question. As we understand what the world is tomorrow we'll be able to understand what our place is in it. If you read John 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 after Jesus entered into the upper room, it is an issue of the world and you. You and the world. They and you. YOU and they. The world and you. The word "world" is used as the antithesis of the believers. The world is the total composition of all that put Jesus Christ to death. The world is the sum total of the educational world with its false emphasis upon rationalism; the ecclesiastical world with its false emphasis upon organization; the scientific world; the social world and all that it thinks of, being seen and being looked at; the financial world; the industrial world; all of these together are that which combined to murder God when He came here upon the earth and which would do it again if He came back tomorrow under the same circumstances.
For those of you who have had any Greek, I want to point your attention to a new book that has been published in the last few weeks that is probably the most important tool for Bible study that has yet appeared in the English language. It is published by the University of Chicago, financed by the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, and it is Arndt and Gingrich's translation of Bauerls great Greek lexicon. For the first time we have, in English a Greek lexicon that contains not only a study of all the words in the New Testament, but all of the words in early Christian literature.
I want to read you one paragraph out of Arndt and Gingrich's lexicon on the leaning of the world "world."
"The world and everything that belongs to it appears as that which is at enmity with God, that is, lost in sin, wholly at odds with anything divine, ruined and depraved. This world in contrast to the other world, unjust and hostile, ruled by the prince of this world, the devil, lying in the power of the evil one. The Christian must have nothing to do with this world of sin and separation from God. Instead of desiring it, one is to keep oneself unstained by the world. When he takes this attitude, the Christian is naturally hated by the world as his Lord was hated. Also in Paul, God and the world in opposition. The spirit of the world and the Spirit that comes from God. The world is condemned by God, but also the object of the divine plan of salvation. The kosmos stands in opposition to God and hence is incapable of knowing God and excluded from Christts intercession. Neither Christ nor His own belong in any way to the world. Rather Christ has chosen them out of the world, even though for the present they must still live in the world. All the trouble that they must undergo because . of this means nothing compared with the victorious conviction that Christ and the believers with Him have overcome the world and that it is doomed to pass away."
That is the work of a group of the greatest Greek scholars in the world today.
That is the meaning of the word "world" as it is found in the Scripture.
It is a hellish, awful thing. It is human. The word "human" in Latin
comes from the same root as that which is given as "humus." That is
the word which has to do with all that is vile. The world, of course, is the
sum total of that which is the individual unit. The world wouldn't be what it
is if it were not for what man is.
Now let us look for a moment at this. What is the individual man? The carnal
mind is enmity against God. It is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed
can be, so that they that are in the flesh cannot please God. The Scripture
is so formal that it states flatly that if God had not had the secret weapon
of the fact that
He had chosen a great group before the foundation of the world, no one would
have been saved. If God had left it to a human decision, the angels might have
screamed from heaven, "God loves you. Christ died for you," but nobody,
but nobody, would ever have believed.
Turn to the first chapter of the Gospel of John for a moment. There we have a verse which reveals in a wonderful way what the world was in the totality of its human beings. Verse nine says, "That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not." Now back in verse five, "And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not."
For many Years I pored over this passage and thought of it and had memorized
it. In odd moments I would think of it trying to find out what it meant. Because
if you can understand this passage you are going to understand a great deal
about why Christ came, and what the nature of redemption is, and what the nature
of our place in the world is. There is a transition here that seems so stark
and sharp that you wonder if an editor's pen didn't slip.
My children used to play a game when push button radio first came in. They
would get two lectures on the radio and push one button and get a sentence out
of one and then another button to get a sentence out of it. To get a political
speech and a ball game at the same time was terrific. "And so if you will
vote for me . . . pop fly to center field." And believe it or not this
really happened in a rebroadcast of Philip and Elizabeth's wedding. They had
a prizefight on at the same time. The Archbishop of
Canterbury took their hands and put them together.. At that moment the fight
announcer said, "Shake hands and come out fighting."
What we find here in the Gospel of John seems almost as though you are on two
wave lengths. When you understand why God put these two sentences together you'll
see. Listen to verse four: "In him was life, and the life was the light
of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehendeth it
not. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John."
Why on earth is he put into this story at this place? What is he talking about?
"Oh," says God, "Don't you see? The light shineth in the darkness
and the darkness comprehendeth it not, so I had to send John." Well, I
still don't get it.
I'll tell you how I got it. Just before the war I began a mission in Belfast,
Ireland. There were about 120 churches involved and our evening meetings were
in the largest hall in Belfast, a great oval auditorium with three or four galleries
and a vast skylight of glass. It began on the very day Chamberlain declared
war on Hitler. Of course, everybody was expecting bombs and the city was in
a blackout. They hadn't had time to paint over the skylight. So the chairman
introduced me and said, "At 8:14 the blackout hour is coming and we have
to turn out the main switch."
Fortunately I don't use any notes and in the middle of my sermon my audience
utterly disappeared and there we were. After repeating a sentence or two while
they settled down, I went on and finished my sermon; night after night the same
thing.
One night, right in the middle of my sermon, somebody off in a back room looking
for something turned a switch which he thought lighted only an inner room, and
it lit up the whole building. Of course, everybody knew that there was a beacon
pointed towards the sky which could have been seen by enemy airplanes 100 miles
away. I stopped preaching, the ushers jumped to their feet, and there was instant
confusion. My first reaction was to note that approximately 5,000 people had
put their chins on their breasts and were listening. When the lights went on
everybody's head went up, all at once.
Well, the key to the story lies in the fact that down in front was a man who had been brought in in a wheel chair. And when this incident took place he scrabbled at the person next to him and said, "What's the matter? Why'd he stop? What happened? What's the matter?" And just as definitely as could be, I heard the person next to him say, "The lights have gone on."
Why did he have to tell him the lights had gone on? He was blind. Now, says God, when Jesus Christ came into the world, nobody looked up. Well, God says, this is why I sent John the Baptist. John the Baptist came saying, "The light is on, the light is on."
Look at it, verse six: "There was a man sent from God, whose name was
John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light."
"The light is on, the light is on. God is here. The light is on." And the world says, '"what light?" And the Pharisees, "What light?" And the Sadducee says, "You talk about God. Who is God? Give us a philosophical definition."
Now don't forget it. If God Almighty had not determined before the foundation
of the world that He was going to take John the Baptist and have a witness,
there would have been no witness there. And if God Almighty hadn't in the fullness
of time gone on in His work, I am totally committed to the fact that no human
being would ever have reached heaven, if there had been the necessity of man
doing it for himself without the aid of God, without His quickening Spirit.
That is why you must bow your heads and thank God that "you hath he quickened
who were dead in trespasses and sins" (Eph. 2:1). That life is the first
thing God gives you. With that life you look up and are troubled. Sometimes
it takes you days, weeks and months, while that light is penetrating the fog
and haze of your being. Then comes the day when you say, "Jesus!"
But you did it with your new nature and not with your old nature.
One of the most hellish doctrines in all the false doctrines that have encrusted
themselves like barnacles on the ship of truth is the idea that man can lift
himself to God. Someone may say, "But Dr. Barnhouse, are you teaching the
doctrine of total depravity?" Yes. Now let me define it. I'm not saying
there is no good in man. But I am saying there is no good in man that can satisfy,
God. A canoe is a wonderful little boat for a June evening in the moonlight,
but it is a totally depraved boat for crossing the Atlantic Ocean. You take
it to Atlantic City and start to paddle and you won't even get to the nineteenth
wave.
Your character is a wonderful little canoe to paddle around campus, your church and way stations, but God help you if you ever try to go to heaven in your character. You must be born again.
The world, this world, is the world that crucified Christ. I take you now to
the fifteenth chapter of John where we have a statement concerning Christ and
the world that is of very great importance. In verse 18 Jesus says, "If
the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were
of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world,
but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you."
The world will never hate you if you start a campaign to stop gambling or liquor;
the world will never hate you if you start a campaign to clean up the slums;
the world will never hate you if you start a campaign for better race relationships.
Good as all of these things are, and as much as it is necessary for us to do
everything we can for every good cause, the only reason anybody will really
hate you is if you say, "I am born again, ,saved, and going to heaven.
If you remain as you are, you are
lost and on your way to hell." Then everything of evil will break forth
against you.
Don't forget, the reason we have been called out of the world and left to live
in the world is in order that we might testify against the world. There are
only two reasons why we could be left here. After all, my readiness for heaven
doesn't depend on anything that happens to me while I'm here on earth. I was
as ready for heaven when I had been saved one second as when I shall have been
saved a hundred years. My readiness for heaven is Jesus Christ. I have no other
readiness for heaven. I have been justified by Him, and you, most of you, have
been justified, believing in the Lord Jesus Christ. God has given you the new
life, the second life. Individuals taken out of the world have been born of
God and have been given the new life.
Why then does God leave us here after we are saved? Why do we have to go through this process of living the Christian life? You are here for two reasons. You are here to fellowship together, to know Christ in the midst of a world that does not know Him. And you are here to testify against the world.
You don't do it by putting on a banner or a sandwich board and walking down the street saying, "Where will you spend eternity?" I've seen people like that, but I've never heard of anybody ever being saved through looking at a sandwich board. I'm always on lookout for such things.
I doubt very much if God ever called anybody to do a thing like that. Each individual is responsible to God, but God never called me to that. I'm a believer in great dignity in connection with the things of the Spirit. Very, very definitely, God Almighty has put us here to testify against the world.
How do you testify against the world? You do it in a thousand different ways: by not stealing somebody else's parking place, by being kind, by not being catty when someone says, "Did you see Mary So-and-So? Now I don't want to be a cat, but . . ." And then you go on and be a cat.
You see, in not doing it you testify against the world. Somebody came to me
once and said, "Dr. Barnhouse, you ought to know this about Mr. So-and-So,
one of the elders of the church." I said, "Where are your two witnesses?"
"What do you mean?" he said.
I said, "The Bible says, 'Receive not an accusation against' an elder
except before two witnesses.' Where are your witnesses?
"Oh, but . . ." Back out fast, you know.
I said, "Don't you realize that God says to listen to gossip against any
minister or any elder or any leader in the Christian faith is as bad as 'thou
shalt not steal,' and 'thou shalt not kill'?"
Then the person who told me this had the temerity to say, "But if I did like that, I'd never hear anything." I accept your laughter as the equivalent of "Amen" in a holy roller meeting. It is a public acknowledgment of mass conviction of sin. It is the fact that the buzzard nature of the gossip is in everyone. But it is sin.
We must understand that we are in this world to testify against it by the holiness
of our lives, by kindness and upright honesty, by integrity, and the lack of
self-seeking. These are the things that testify we are not of this world.
Now look in John 15:19-21, "If ye were of the world, the world would love
his own: but because ye are not of the world, but. I have chosen you out of
the world, therefore the world hateth you. Remember the word that I said unto
you, The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they
will also persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also.
But all these things will they do unto you for my name's sake, because they
know not him that sent me."
In addition to the 79 times the word "world" is found in the Gospel
of John, the word "they, they, they, they" is found again and again.
You add these two words, "they and the world," and you find that the
sum total is way over 100 times in the Gospel of John. With an absolute sword
stroke the Lord God Almighty divides between those whom He has chosen in Christ
and those who have not yet bowed before Him to believe in Him. Their responsibility
is totally thereof. "Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life."
I am not going to enter into any theological speculations about the difference between the two phases of this truth, but boldly present the antithesis and point out the fact that it is in the Word of God. We are called upon to face this fact we live in a world that is hostile to God.
I want to close with this story. A few years ago I was preaching in Toronto.
I have a very good friend there, a layman who is active in Toronto Christian
life. I spoke somewhat along these lines and he said to me, "I have a story
I think you can use."
He said, "We moved into a house up in north Toronto. It had been unoccupied
throughout all the spring and summer. The grounds and garden had gone to seed.
We moved in late one evening. In the morning I went into the bathroom to shave.
As I stood in front of the mirror I caught a sight of something (we didn't have
any curtains up yet).
"I caught sight of something red. I looked outside and there in the midst
of a whole patch of weeds was a beautiful red rose. I thought, I'm going down
and get this first fruit of the garden and give it to my wife for breakfast.
I went down, went into the weeds, and they were so high I couldn't find it.
So I went back up to the bathroom, looked out the window, by triangulation fixed
certain points in my mind, and went down and found the rose.
"Now here's the illustration. When I found it I pulled it up out of the
weeds. I thought, I'll get a long stem. Suddenly I discovered that the stem
was running on and on. Nine feet away, in the neighbor's well-cultivated and
well-fertilized garden, the -root was lying, but the bloom was blooming over
in the weeds in my place. That's the Christian life rooted in heaven and blooming
in the weeds of earth."
This is exactly what we must understand: "If ye were of the world, the
world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen
you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you" (John 15:19).
May we close in John 17. When Jesus was leaving the world, He said to His Father,
"I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou
gavest me to do" (John 17:4). And in John 17:9 He said, "I pray for
them." That is you and me. Then He said, "I pray not for the world,
but for them which thou gavest me; for they are thine."
We finish our first Bible study with a summary again that I read out of the
Greek lexicon. God and the world are in opposition. The spirit of the world
and the Spirit that comes from God are opposed. The world is condemned by God,
but is also the object of the divine plan of salvation. The kosmos stands in
opposition to God and hence is incapable of knowing God and is excluded from
Christ's intercession. Neither Christ nor His own belong in any way to the world.
Rather, Christ has chosen us out of the world, even though for the present we
must still live in the world.
While we live, may we be rooted in Him, blossoming in the circumstances where God has steamed us, so that we may grow there in a way that will be well-pleasing to Him.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
Print
Email
Comments
Be the first one to add a comment.
To post a comment, please login or register