Somewhere in my library I have a pamphlet by Donald Grey Barnhouse entitled How to Mark Your Bible. This pamphlet contains suggestions for using Bible markings as an aid to Bible study, and it contains sample pages from a Bible Barnhouse used and marked thoroughly. I think of this now because at Romans 3:21 and following, Barnhouse had written the picture of a heart in the margin of his Bible. That was to remind him, as he came to this passage, that Romans 3:21-27 is the heart of the Word of God.
The last point I want to make is that the Word of God makes Christians strong, strong enough to resist the idols of their culture and go God’s way. I do not think we have a very strong church in the United States today. We have many people who are Christians. When the Gallup Poll tells us that there are fifty million born-again people, that is a very impressive statistic. But it is much different from saying that the church of Jesus Christ is qualitatively strong.
Yesterday we looked at the first two things the Word of God provides. Today we consider two more.
Third, the Bible is where we learn the will of God for our lives. We have many questions in this area. We say, “Here I am living in this particular time, in this particular place, with these particular talents. What am I to do? Which direction am I to go in? Am I to do this or that? Am I to move here or there?” We have no specific answers to these questions in the Word of God, but we do have great principles that will guide us in ninety-nine percent of the circumstances.
Over against the way of the ungodly, the psalmist sets the way of the righteous. And everything that is said to be lacking in the case of the one is present in the other. Is it true that the wicked will not stand in God’s judgment? Yes. Then, the righteous will stand; he will be justified by the work of Jesus Christ. Is it true that the wicked will be like chaff that the wind blows away? Yes. Then, the righteous will not be like chaff, but rather like grain.
The psalmist says two important things about the man who walks according to his sinful dispositions.
First, the course of the wicked man is always downhill. He is caught in a downward progression. This is a very important thing to see about sin. We see it in somebody else and say, “Look how sin has caught that person and dragged him down.” But we add, “That won’t happen to me. I’m going to do just this one little thing. Then I’ll draw the line and I won’t go any further.” But sin is not like that. Sin catches us and draws us along. You cannot sin “just a little bit.”
