Romans, vol 5: God's Grace: Exposition of Bible Doctrines

By Donald Grey Barnhouse

Romans is based on Donald Barnhouse’s renowned series of radio broadcasts on the epistle from 1949 until his death in 1960. Demonstrating the author’s acute understanding of Romans and heart for effective preaching, these classic studies reverently expound even the most difficult passage in a clear way. Examining the Letter to the Romans phrase by phrase, Barnhouse elucidates the Scripture with reference to both its immediate context and the Bible’s overarching truths. Barnhouse’s zeal for a universal appreciation of the epistle fuels his commentary and invites all readers into a deeper understanding of the life-changing message of Romans.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jan 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781467467377

Donald Grey Barnhouse

DONALD GREY BARNHOUSE (1895–1960) was a renowned evangelical preacher and pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. Most famous for his radio broadcasts and public speaking, Barnhouse also founded, wrote for, and edited Revelation and Eternity magazines.

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PREFACE

It is with great joy that I send forth the fifth volume in this series of studies in the whole Bible, taking as my point of departure the Epistle to the Romans.

The fact that the previous volumes have gone into further editions, and the many expressions of blessing received from them, encourage me to go on in this work of love.

This volume is copyrighted only to prevent its misuse. All truth belongs to the whole church of Christ, and I gladly allow any minister to preach any of these studies, with or without credit to me.

I wish to recognize those who have helped prepare the manuscript, and special mention must be made of Miss Antha E. Card and the Rev. Ralph L. Keiper.

If you are blessed in the reading of this book, will you pay your debt by praying for the author?

Donald Grey Barnhouse

Note: Occasionally, I have identified a translation of the Bible, but often I have taken a word from one and a phrase from another version, and in some cases have given my own rendering directly from the Greek. In all cases, my purpose has been to render the original as closely as possible.

D. G. B.

I

ADAM VERSUS CHRIST

From the mount of praise on which we found ourselves at the close of Volume IV, we descend to the valley of practical living. For the Christian life is not withdrawal from the world. God never called anyone to live in monastic seclusion. Since we have been saved entirely by the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, we can add nothing to His merit. Therefore, to attempt to store up merit is to dishonor His grace; and the notion that God wants men and women to leave active life for pious contemplation has no authority in the Word of God.

The only souls expected to live in seclusion are those whom God has touched with a physical ailment that prevents normal activity. The Lord sees these people in their chambers of suffering and gathers from them the fragrance of yielded wills and bodies. In order to bring glory to Him, they have accepted pain as the sweet messenger of God. But for healthy men and women to withdraw from active life is a travesty on the Christian faith. The believer must live in the world, even though he is not of the world. For him there is no euthanasia. The Lord Jesus did not pray for His followers to be taken out of the world; He asked only that they be kept from the Evil One (John 17:15).

ADAM’S GUILT

Before we attack the problem of daily living, we must understand the doctrinal background of our victory. Romans 5:12–21 deals with this. Of these verses the revered Handley Moule, Anglican Bishop of Durham, writes:

"We approach a paragraph of the epistle pregnant with mystery. It leads us back to Primal Man, to the Adam of the first brief pages of the Scripture record, to his encounter with the suggestion to follow himself rather than his Maker, to his sin, and then to the results of that sin in his race. We shall find those results given in terms which certainly we should not have devised a priori. We shall find the Apostle teaching, or rather stating, for he writes as to those who know, that mankind inherits from primal man, tried and fallen, not only taint but guilt, not only moral hurt but legal fault.

"This is ‘a thing heard in the darkness.’ It has been said that Holy Scripture ‘is not a sun, but a lamp.’ The words may be grievously misused, by undue emphasis on the negative clause; but they convey a sure truth, used aright. Nowhere does the divine Book undertake to tell us all about everything it contains. It undertakes to tell us truth, and to tell it from God. It undertakes to give us pure light, yea, ‘to bring life and immortality out into the light’ (2 Tim. 1:10). But it reminds us that we know ‘in part,’ and that even prophecy, even the inspired message, is ‘in part’ (1 Cor. 13:9). It illuminates immensely much, but it leaves yet more to be seen hereafter.

"As with other mysteries which will meet us later, so with this; we approach it as those who ‘know in part,’ and who know that the apostolic Prophet, by no defect of inspiration, but by the limits of the case, ‘prophesies in part.’ Thus with awful reverence, with godly fear, and free from the wish to explain away, yet with anxiety lest God should be proved unrighteous, we listen as Paul dictates, and receive his witness about our fall and our guilt in that mysterious ‘first father.’

We remember also another fact of this case. This paragraph deals only incidentally with Adam; its main theme is Christ. Adam is the illustration; Christ is the subject. We are to be shown in Adam, by contrast, some of ‘the unsearchable riches of Christ.’ So that our main attention is called not to the brief outline of the mystery of the Fall, but to the assertions of the related splendor of Redemption.

PRESENT RIGHTEOUSNESS

The purpose of this great passage in Romans is to explain to all believers that salvation in Christ provides life and power now. Our faith does not promise merely pie in the sky by and by; it is for today. It provides present, prevailing righteousness, dynamic, effective life, and irresistible, invincible dominion. The Lord does not want us to be weaklings; He proposes to live through us.

ONENESS WITH ADAM

In order to obtain this righteousness, life and dominion, we must realize that we are joined to Christ; and to understand our union with Him, we must understand our union with Adam. We are inseparably joined to the original man who, created in the image of God, lost that image in the fall. Through oneness with Adam we are partakers of sin, death and judgment. By the work of the Lord Jesus Christ we become partakers of His life, endowed with His righteousness and dominion.

The earlier chapters of Romans deal with the outbreak of sin in all human beings, considered not as sin but as sins; not the poison in the bloodstream but the boils caused by that poison. Here, however, God is discussing not sins but the poison, which is original sin.

CONTRASTS

This passage contrasts the actions of two men, and the results of their actions. Adam disobeyed and brought death to all humanity. Jesus, the Lord from Heaven, obeyed and brought life to all who become His in the reconciliation. Thus, as we were one with Adam in sin, we are one with the Lord Jesus Christ in righteousness.

This passage connects the first part of the argument with all that follows. Our oneness with Adam explains the universality of sin and its fatal hold on humanity. Oneness with Christ is the basis for the life of triumph expounded in succeeding chapters of Romans. Failure to live victoriously in Christ results from not understanding this passage, one of the most important in the Bible. If man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God (Matt. 4:4), surely this rich passage will furnish incalculable nourishment to the soul that feeds upon it. Here justification is joined to sanctification.

At this point it is important to understand that nowhere does the Bible teach justification without sanctification. The person who holds that because he believes he can do as he pleases has no authority for his position within the pages of divine revelation. Beyond question, one of the principal aims of salvation is to produce holiness within those who are joined to Christ.

DEATH AND LIFE

To prove that being joined to Adam produced spiritual death, the writer points to physical death, which is the lot of all. Babies die; the good die; the mentally irresponsible die. Why? Clearly, physical death is but the surface ripple of the deeper death which engulfs every child of Adam.

The Apostle then shows that Adam and death prefigured the Lord Jesus and life. If multitudes, through the sin of their first parent, inherit a nature of evil and consequent death and judgment, is it not also true that multitudes benefit by the righteousness of the Author and Finisher of our faith, the Lord Jesus Christ? Possession of His righteousness and life gives every believer the right to constant victory over sin. Since multitudes of Christians know little or nothing of this victory, we see how important is the principle here set forth. Are you living triumphantly? Does sin easily beset you? Is yours a half-and-half Christian life? Without committing blatant evil, are you defeated in many spheres? If so, you are like those queer people who scratch in garbage cans for food while possessing thousands of dollars in the bank.

COME HOLY SPIRIT

Isaac Watts wrote a hymn which to my mind is one of the saddest of public confessions:

Come Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove,

With all Thy quickening powers

Kindle a flame of sacred love

In these cold hearts of ours.

Why should our hearts be cold if we are joined to the Lord of all warmth?

Look how we grovel here below,

Fond of these trifling toys;

Our souls can neither fly nor go

To reach eternal joys.

Why can’t they? We may inherit groveling from Adam, but we have been made partakers of the divine nature and should be strong and triumphant. He has given us wings; let us use them.

In vain we tune our formal songs,

In vain we strive to rise;

Hosannas languish on our tongues,

And our devotion dies.

It is not because our Lord has not put a new song in our mouth. Rather, our mouth has been filled with laughter and our tongue with singing, and we have our boast in God. Then why should praise die on our tongues? Is there something wrong with the fountain of song?

Dear Lord, and shall we ever live

At this poor dying rate?

Our love so faint, so cold to Thee,

And Thine to us so great!

Certainly it is not necessary to live at a poor, dying rate. Life has been poured out like a full-flowing fountain. If there is obstruction, it is not because the source has dried up. Love cannot be cold if it is joined to the Sun of Righteousness.

The passage reveals that life, abundant life, is available. Shall not the free gift from Christ equal the debt from Adam? Shall not life brush away death? Is it not much easier to believe that the God of all love can make many righteous through the obedience of one Man, Christ Jesus, than that He was forced to pass the sentence of death upon the race when unrighteousness entered?

WHAT HAPPENED

Perhaps the best way to conclude this summary is to present these ten verses as J. B. Phillips has paraphrased them in his New Testament in Modern English: "This, then, is what has happened. Sin made its entry into the world through one man, and through sin, death. The entail of sin and death passed on to the whole human race, and no one could break it for no one was himself free from sin.

"Sin, you see, was in the world long before the Law, though I suppose, technically speaking, it was not ‘sin’ where there was no law to define it. Nevertheless death, the complement of sin, held sway over mankind from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sin was quite unlike Adam’s.

"Adam, the first man, corresponds in some degree to the man who was to come. But the gift of God through Christ is a very different matter from the ‘account rendered’ through the sin of Adam. For while as a result of one man’s sin death by natural consequence became the common lot of men, it was by the generosity of God, the free giving of the grace of the one man Jesus Christ, that the love of God overflowed for the benefit of all men.

"Nor is the effect of God’s gift the same as the effect of that one man’s sin. For in the one case one man’s sin brought its inevitable judgment, and the result was condemnation. But, in the other, countless men’s sins are met with the free gift of grace, and the result is justification before God.

"For if one man’s offense meant that men should be slaves to death all their lives, it is a far greater thing that through another man, Jesus Christ, men by their acceptance of his more than sufficient grace and righteousness should live all their lives like kings!

We see, then, that as one act of sin exposed the whole race of men to God’s judgment and condemnation, so one act of perfect righteousness presents all men freely acquitted in the sight of God. One man’s disobedience placed all men under the threat of condemnation, but one man’s obedience has the power to present all men righteous before God.

There it is! Sin, death, and judgment flowed from the act of Adam. Righteousness, life and kingship flow from the cross of Christ. The sin of Adam was a stone cast into a pool which sent ripples to every inlet. The cross of Christ was the rock of ages cast into the ocean of the love of God, and it is the destiny of all who are in Christ to be carried on the swell of His majestic love and life and power both now and forever.

II

THE ORIGINAL MAN

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned (Rom. 5:12).

Having made a survey of the Last ten verses of Romans 5, we now settle down to examine one of the most crucial passages in the Word of God, the central theme of the epistle to the Romans. By one man sin entered the world. Was there one original man? Did God create only one pair, and are all descended from them? Were Adam and Eve historical personages? Did they have no contemporaries?

Multitudes of people do not believe in original creation. In fact, it is here that many depart from Christianity. There could have been no Marxian philosophy, no communism, if men had not first attacked the Bible teachings concerning God, man and sin. The Christian view of these three doctrines supposedly causes men to reject Christianity. The apostasy of modernism within the framework of Christianity stems from man’s aversion to the biblical account of man’s relation to God.

UNDERMINING THE TRUTH

The basic hatred of man is against God Himself; but unable to attack God directly, men attack the truths at the edges of Christian doctrine and hope thus to undermine the whole. C. S. Lewis describes this method in his Introduction to J. B. Phillips Letters to Young Churches, applying it to the attack on the works of the Apostle Paul: In the earlier history of every rebellion there is a stage at which you do not yet attack the King in person. You say, ‘The King is all right. It is his Ministers who are wrong. They misrepresent him and corrupt all his plans—which, I’m sure, are good plans if only the Ministers would let them take effect.’ And the first victory consists in beheading a few Ministers: only at a later stage do you go on and behead the King himself.

Likewise, the latter-century attack on Moses was actually a phase of the revolt against Christ. Men were not ready in large numbers to attack Christ Himself. They only made the first move—they attacked one of His principal ministers. The Lord Jesus foresaw this, for He said to the Pharisees, How can you believe, who receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? Do not think that I shall accuse you to the Father; it is Moses who accuses you, on whom you set your hope. If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words? (John 5:44–47).

THE MODERN VIEW

Satan understood the connection between the Lord Jesus Christ and the book of Genesis, so in the nineteenth century he presented through his ministers the famous Weltanschauung, a view of the world which purported to rest upon a scientific basis. Ably conceived and brilliantly defended, it opposed the heart of Christianity. As one writer said, The popularity of this counterview of the universe—frequently described as the ‘modern’ view—is not to be denied. It commands wide acceptance; multitudes are attracted by its plausibility, and by the seeming cogency of its scientific proofs; many would deem it presumptuous, and a mark of ignorance, to call in question a view believed to have behind it so large a body of expert opinion; while perhaps a still greater number, with little firsthand knowledge, are powerfully influenced by the extent to which its theories and watchwords are, as the phrase is, ‘in the air.’

NO SYNTHESIS POSSIBLE

Some have attempted to form a synthesis of the two views, to revise Christianity and reconcile it with the evolutionary view of the origin of mankind. The biblical views of God, man and sin cannot be bedfellows with those of any other system. It is the whole Bible and the whole Christ or no Bible and no Christ. The modern philosophical views of the world are fatal to the foundation upon which not only Christianity but all religion rests. Ernst H. Haeckel, a foremost proponent of the modern view, stated in The Riddle of the Universe that the three ideas of God, freedom and immortality were the three great buttresses of superstition, and that science must destroy all three. Many years have passed since Haeckel, whose philosophy produced Marxism and Hitlerism. Scientists now are humbled by their discoveries and say that man without faith is lost. Yet they will not accept the faith which God reveals in His Word. They cling to logical conclusions drawn from their false assumptions.

I know that not many Marxists or similar extremists will read these words, but perhaps some of my readers believe that they can hold to part of the Bible while surrendering such basic truths as our text sets forth. By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for all have sinned. Discard that simple statement, and you cannot maintain true Christianity.

GOD’S IMAGE IN MAN

About the beginning of this century, the late Professor James Orr of Glasgow, Scotland, wrote a remarkable book entitled God’s Image in Man. I am convinced that its arguments have never been answered. Dr. Orr says, "If, following the guidance of the modern spirit, we put ourselves in the standpoint of the dominant anthropological theories, we find ourselves at a stroke far removed from the doctrines we have been accustomed to call biblical. The story of Eden, the picture of man coming upright and pure from his Maker’s hand and afterwards, by his wilful disobedience falling from his first estate, and dragging down his posterity with him into spiritual ruin and death—this, it need hardly be said, is dismissed as baseless legend—the idlest of dreams. They float down to us—or are supposed to do so—these fables of the world’s infancy—from Babylonian antiquity, and though purified and made the vehicle of deeper moral teaching, still, in their childish naiveté, betray an age that knew nothing of science. Instead, we have the nineteenth-century gospel of evolution to tell us what man actually was, and how he has come to be what he is now. The myth of the fall of man is replaced by the scientific theory of the ascent of man. Man, as we now learn, is the last and highest product of the evolutionary process which has been going on for countless ages, first in the cosmic and inanimate, next in the organic worlds. Man’s ancestry, starting from the primitive protozoon, is to be sought for proximately in the forms of animal life nearest to his own, viz., in the anthropoid apes. ‘Sufficient for us,’ says Haeckel, ‘as an incontestable historical fact, is the important thesis that man descends immediately from the ape, and secondarily from a long series of lower vertebrates.’"

THE CREATION OF MAN

Let us turn to the simple teaching of the Word of God on the creation of man. There are phases of development which cannot be accounted for except as God’s intervention. For no theory of science has bridged