What Kind of Being Is Man - Part 4 — Paris Reidhead

Psalm 8 and the Greatness of Man

I would like to read the entire psalm, but it's particularly the 4th and 5th verses that I'd have you see. O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth, who hath set thy glory above the heavens!

Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest kill the enemy and the avenger. When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him?

For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands. Thou hast put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field, the fowl of the air and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the sea.

O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth. Shall we bow our hearts together? Father, we ask thee to bless as we think about thy word. Devour the teacher, illumine our minds, guide the one who speaks, and as we listen, help us to listen in applying the truth to our own hearts and lives.

Accept now our thanks for this time of fellowship together, and for what thou wilt do in us, that through us thou may bring glory to the Lord Jesus, in whose name we pray. The purpose of this series of studies was to understand man.

I made the observation back in July that, in my judgment, the next area of Christian argument or debate or polemic was going to be not so much in the field of inspiration of the Bible, which has been the battleground over which we've been moving and fighting for 75, perhaps 100 years, but it was going to change and it was going to have to do with the nature of man.

What kind of a being is man? And I pointed out then and remind you of it now that most of the great denominational divisions, which were said to be on theological grounds, actually might better have been described as being on anthropological grounds.

For if you discuss with a Calvinist the distinctions in his mind between the teachings of Calvin and Arminius, it isn't so much the kind of a being God is, though of course that is a vital part, but the kind of a being man is.

And the same would be true if you went to those who follow Arminius and let them describe what they believe as they would see what those who call themselves Calvinists believe. And again, if you were careful in distinguishing between things that differ, you might arrive at the place of saying that the basic delineation is not so much in the matter of the nature of God as it is in the nature of man.

What kind of a being is he? And this is the question of the psalmist. What is man? We do have a... Let's see, could you... There's a seat right there, just inside the door. You wouldn't see it from there.

Sin, Repentance, and the Christian Life

We do have a... Just a brief review. I can see that many of you were not with us last Sunday or in the previous session. Three questions that we asked. Why did God make man in the first place if he knew that he could sin?

And the answer, which is given at great length in one of the first tapes, is that God made man in his image and in his likeness that man might be a fit and an appropriate object of God's love. We can only love that which is like us.

And God made us thus and described us thus as being like himself in that we might be the object of his love. And then the question was made, why did God make man so that he could sin? And the answer is that what is sin?

Well, sin is the committal of the will to the principle or the ruling passion, the supreme choice of the life, to please oneself as the object of being. In its essence, it's an unregulated and an inordinate and improper self-love.

A purpose to make one's own pleasure and gratification and satisfaction the end of being. And it is described, as we saw last week, as being treason and rebellion and anarchy and transgression. And the sinner is himself described as the enemy of God.

The carnal mind is enmity against God. Now, we have seen that this touches every area of the life and every aspect of the personality. We've also considered the nature of repentance. That repentance is a basic recognition of the crime of committing one's will to the pleasing of self and a renunciation of that crime, a change of intention and purpose from sin, which is the committal of the will to please self, to a redirected and a proper redirected use of the will to please God and to seek his glory and happiness and pleasure with us.

And on the basis of repentance, because we are told that it's repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ, on the basis of this, then the repentant sinner reaches out to savingly embrace the Son of God.

Now, what does he carry? The next question we have to ask is this. What does this repentant, believing, converted sinner carry with him into the Christian life? We've tried to see, as I've just outlined, some of these very, very important questions.

Perhaps your experience is parallel to mine and so many others, that shortly after we knew that our past was pardoned and we had in the joy of that experience felt that we were through with this thing of sin, we found that we were betrayed by ourselves, that we carried into the Christian life something which was going to work ill and harm.

Perhaps that was your experience, it certainly was mine, and I've related to you in another session of this experience. But what do, what does the sinner carry into the Christian life? Are they a repentant believer, the Christian who had been a sinner but now has become a child of God through faith in Christ?

Well, let's see some of the things. First, he carries memory. The day after you were converted, you carried with you the memory of the past that had not been obliterated, that had not been removed. You could remember your crimes, your sins of yesterday or yesteryear.

The memory of the past was part of the baggage that you carried from this past into this new relationship as a child of God. But there's something else. You not only carried memory, but you carried the habituated responsive to temptation.

From your earliest childhood, you had been acquiring habit patterns. You had the tendencies that you'd inherited, this nature that is described as fallen and wicked and sinful. But in addition to that, you had all the example of the environment around you.

So from your earliest youth, even before your memory, you were, before that which you can vividly recall as individual incidents, you had been acquiring habit patterns. It began way back in the playpen.

Your mother took you to visit her sister, and your little cousin had a playpen and some toys, and they said, let's see what they do together. They'll play nicely together. Except that when you took your cousin's little truck that he wanted, he reached over and pulled your hair and took the truck out of your hand and hit you on the head with it.

And so they discovered that they had all of the elements of international warfare right there between cousins. It's been going on between cousins in the Middle East for a long time ever since. But this business of habitual responses to your environment, to temptations, to pressures, to tests, you carried with you into the Christian life.

If, perhaps, before you met Jesus Christ, your means of dealing with criticism was to criticize, find fault with the other and emphasize that. That's one of the commandments of the sinner, do unto others before they do unto you.

And so you would then have acquired this habit, that if somebody said something against you, your response was to have stored up in your mind certain things that at such an occasion would be useful to say against them.

Now, when you came to Christ, you renounced sin, and this was included. But now, three weeks after you've been converted, you've carried into the Christian life this tendency. And so the criticism comes, and just about that fast, after you've received it, you say, but you know about them, and have you ever heard?

And so there it was. And just a little while later, you're stricken with remorse. Oh, God, I promised you I wouldn't do this. I wouldn't respond this way. But I did. Or, perhaps, instead of that, when problems came, and you had, in the past, responded by a swear word.

That may have been your means of relieving your tension and your pressure. And you're hammering on the wall. Now you're putting a picture nail up, and you hit the fingernail instead of the picture nail, and you say what you said two or four weeks before.

And I thought you were a Christian. Well, what's happened? You've carried into the Christian life responses, patterns. The domino theory really works in human experience. One thing triggers another, and that then is still a third, and the fourth, and so on.

And the first thing you know why this has happened. That you've carried into the Christian life. Your attitude, your learned responses to pressures and difficulties, your tendencies to such things as self-pity, or smoldering resentment, or festering bitterness.

These were things that had characterized you in the previous relationship when you were estranged from God and a sinner. And now you're a Christian, and so you've carried that into the Christian life.

Well, these are problems. And sometimes the preoccupation with these problems becomes so absorbing, so demanding, that some Christians who had a period of failure after their initial experience of conversion feel that the whole reason for being as a Christian is to find some means or method or discipline of victory over themselves.

Because this seems to be the highest good, and this seems to be virtually the only reason or purpose for their Christian life. Victory. I think this would characterize those that have escaped from the world and the flesh and the devil, and have gone out into monasteries and into convents only to discover that all three were there just about as actively as they had been a little different form, but they were there nonetheless.

But this desire to abnegate the flesh and to acquire personal practical holiness characterized the anchorites, who would go up on a broken column and sit there on four square feet of space as they would just stay there, because by this means they were punishing themselves in some way they were trying to find victory over their disposition.

Then in history we had one other method of dealing with it, the flagellantes. These were converted people that after their conversion had discovered they'd carried into the Christian life this crater of which I've spoken, and so they would go into the marketplace and they would talk to the people and try to single out the Christians, and they would tell about the temptations they'd had and the inability of dealing with them and handling them, and then they would say, we must bring the flesh under, and so they would take out a cat and ninetail, similar to what they thought had been used by the soldiers on Christ, and there in the presence of the crowd they would hit themselves until they tore the flesh from their backs, and they were saying, now this is what we must do to bring under these traits and tendencies and dispositions that we've carried with us from our unconverted life into the Christian life.

In other words, I'm saying that here is man, we've seen much of what he is, but we're seeing him come to Christ, forgiven of the past, assurance of salvation, walks into the door of the Christian life, and there he discovers that he has problems with his temperament and his traits and his attitudes and his habits, and he then acquires the feeling that dealing with ease is the primary reason for being, and that can become so demanding, so absorbing on the one hand, that it does occupy all of one's time or energy.

On the other hand, it can become so intimidating that it has the effect of of destroying all sense of confidence that one can be useful to God or one's expectancy of God being pleased to use them. And it's because of the incidence of this in the experience of the Church that men in other days and in this day have sought to find a message of victory.

Union with Christ and Freedom from Sin

And I think this is one of the reasons why in the last thirty years, for instance, there's been so much more emphasis on our identification with Christ, our union with Christ. You see, Paul dealt with this problem.

There was one group of people that he dealt with that said, look, after you're saved, you're going to sin, and then you confess your sin, and God forgives your sin, and God gets glory because he's been gracious and forgiven your sin.

Therefore, the more you sin, the more opportunity you give God to be gracious. And this was called antinomianism. And Paul dealt with it. What, then, shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? And can you hear his sandal foot hit the...

God forbid! How shall we that are dead to sin live any longer therein? That's one answer, antinomianism. Then there was another answer, and that was Judaism. There were those who said in Paul's time, yes, after you're saved, God forgives all the past, certainly, Christ died, but when afterwards, after you're converted, you then find that there's sin in your life, then you've got to go back to the temple and bring the sacrifices and bring the offerings, because that's the means of penance and the means of grace.

And of course, then, Paul has to deal with that, and that's the epistle to the Galatians, as he's dealing with these Judaizers who are going to try to bring... So you've got two extremes, antinomianism on the one hand and Judaizing on the other.

And what's Paul's answer? Well, the answer is identification or union with Christ. In Romans 5, you have Christ died for us. In Romans 6, you have Christ died as us. And in Romans 8, you have Christ in us.

And this is how he deals with the antinomianism on the one hand and the Judaizing on the other. And he's saying, look, the Lord Jesus didn't just die to save you from hell. He died to save you from you.

He didn't die just to save you from an eternity in that place of punishment. He died to save you from the tyranny of your habits and attitudes and traits and dispositions. Now, you must understand this.

So in Romans 6, 6, knowing this, you know this, you dear people at home that are tending toward antinomianism, knowing this, that our old man is crucified with Christ. Why? That the body of him might be destroyed or annulled.

And henceforth we should not be the slaves of sin. So what's he talking about? He's saying this, look, the Lord Jesus didn't just die and rise again from the dead and ascend into heaven to forgive your past and leave you go on in a lifetime of unmitigated misery and failure.

That wasn't his purpose. He wanted to save you not only from the past, but he wanted to save you from the penalty of sin and the power of sin. And one day he's going to save you from the presence of sin.

And you've got to understand then that the purpose of this full salvation, if you please, salvation from the past and salvation from the temptation. And obviously when we've talked about this in the past, and some of you have been hearing many times when I've been speaking about our union with Christ, that there were two people on the cross.

Christ was on the front of it dying for you, but since he was there as your representative and substitute then in God's eyes from heaven's view, there were two people on the cross, Christ on the front of it, you on the back of it, crucified with Christ.

He not just, didn't die just for you, he died, you died with him. Why? So that you could be released from those habits you carried into the Christian life and those tendencies and those traits and those dispositions and all that would hinder and hobble and shackle.

Redemption and the Four Words for Redeem

It's interesting that Schofield in his Bible uses four words for redeem. I don't pretend to be a scholar at all because I just am not. I know a little Greek and a little Hebrew and a little Greek runs a restaurant and a little Hebrew runs a clothing store.

But my first Bible was from, was a Schofield Bible. And in it on some place he has the word for redeem and there's four words as I recall, agorazo. I don't think even that's pronounced properly, but maybe you don't know as much as I do.

So then I'm all right. I'm an expert if I know more than you do. So agorazo means to buy in the marketplace, to go down where people were held as slaves and buy them. And then there's another word translated redeem that puts an ex on the front, ex-agorazo, to buy in the marketplace and take out of the marketplace, buy from.

In other words, we were slaves of sin and he came where we were and he negotiated for us and he died for us right there, but not to leave us there, ex-agorazo. So redeem us means to take us out from our bondage and our slavery.

Then there's a third word translated redeem. It's lucru, to loose. Can you see this one that's shackled and tied with rags and he's been bought in the marketplace and bought out of the marketplace and there the ropes are cut, the irons are severed and he's relieved.

He's been loosed and he gave himself for us that he might loose us from our sins, from our attitudes and our habits and our traits and our dispositions that were going to cripple and handicap us. And then there's another word and I'm probably not pronouncing this properly either, but it's called, I think it's apulucrozo, which means to permanently set free, never to be fed back into slavery again.

In other words, if the slave goes back it's because he likes it and hankers for it. He doesn't have to. Nobody's going to make him go back. He goes because he wants to. Well, that's a marvelous word, isn't it?

Redeemed, all four words are used giving us this complete insight into the redemptive work of the Lord Jesus Christ. But how many there are that say, well, yes, I know my past is forgiven and so they go on silenced by their failure, intimidated by the habits over which they find no victory and just tyrannized by the realization that their lives are so inconsistent before those who know them best that they can't open their mouths for Christ.

And he doesn't want that. Whom the Son makes free, we are told, is to be free indeed. And so it's terribly important for us to understand that the Lord Jesus wanted to release us. His death on the cross was that he might release us from all that had characterized the dominion in which we were held when we were under Satan.

But that's victory, victory over ourselves, victory over our attitudes and our habits, again I say. That's Romans 6. Then Romans 7 is an illustration of Romans 6. He gives some examples of it. Then he comes to Romans 8.

And here is the glory and the beauty of it. Romans 8, Romans 5, to remind you, is Christ died for us when we were sinners, when we were ungodly. Romans 6, Christ died as us. And Romans 8, Christ wants to live in us.

Christ living in us. Now, if you understand that, then you understand how important man is to God. Some people, as they listen to the gospel as it's preached or as it's written, get the idea that the Lord Jesus came from heaven, lived in time, died and rose again, and went back to heaven so that he could have our sins forgiven here.

Here we stumble along at a poor dying rate and the blessing begins when we die. I've watched congregations for years and they sing, When by his grace I shall look on his face, that will be glory for me.

And you know from the expression of the face and the tone of the voice that they don't expect to have any glory until then either. That's when it's going to start and they're reconciled to it. And someone was given a testimony in prayer meeting and a little old lady got up and she said, Forty years ago I was saved and I am going to hold out to the bitter end.

And she wasn't kidding. It was bitter. Because if you have to go on every day doing things that you don't want to do and grieving him whom you love, then the Christian life can have a choir to inquire many of the elements of tragic bonding.

And the Lord Jesus didn't want that. When he left heaven his destination wasn't Bethlehem where he was born. That was where he spent a while. His destination wasn't a refugee's home in Egypt. He lived there several years.

When he came from heaven his destination journey's end wasn't Nazareth in a carpenter's home. That wasn't where he was. Why he came, that was just a way stop on his itinerary. It wasn't Capernaum, the city that he loved and where he was received and called his city.

That wasn't his destination. When he came his destination wasn't Jerusalem. That wasn't it. It wasn't even a cross or a tomb. That wasn't his destination. When he ascended into heaven and sat down in the right hand of the Father, that wasn't his destination.

He'd been there from eternity past. He didn't make this long circular trip to do that. That's where he'd been. Do you know what his destination was? When he left heaven, your heart, your life. He made that long pilgrimage into time, into Bethlehem, into Egypt, into Nazareth, to Capernaum, to Jerusalem, to the cross, to the tomb, to heaven, so that he could live in you.

That's the only way he could remove all the legal barriers that stood in the way of his fulfilling the reason for which he made you. Now for you to gather from the scripture that the purpose is to take you there when the word is so absolutely clear that so that he could come here to live in you and walk in you and dwell in you.

Christ Living in the Believer

Now does this give you a little insight into the nature of man, how important he is? What is man that you've made him a little greater than the angels, that you might crown him with glory and honor? What is it?

That Christ might live in us. What greater glory is there than this? Christ shall dwell in our hearts through faith. Come out from among them and be separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing, and I will receive you and be a father unto you, and I will dwell in you, and I will walk in you, and you shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.

The apostle Paul said, I am crucified with Christ, and he could have added, I am buried with him, I am quickened with him, I am raised with him, I am seated with him, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.

In the life I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God. What was it? What was the faith of the Son of God? Well, I think it was this, that if you knew that you couldn't redeem yourself and pay for your past sins, you'd have sense enough to know you couldn't live the Christian life to its glory by your own energy.

And you'd say, Lord Jesus, I can't. But you can. And you'd present your body to him and say, Now, Lord, I want you to live in me. Crucified with him to have victory over the flesh. Buried with him to have victory over the world.

Quickened, raised, seated with him to have victory over principalities and powers. Present your body to him so that he could live in you. Wise man? Man was to be the tabernacle of God, the dwelling place of God, and that great temple took forty years, all those years for Herod to build was nothing, or all those years for Solomon to build, and later, that was nothing but a picture of us, you, and what will be one day when the church is perfected.

And by the way, the only perfect church we'll ever find. If you're criticizing some church on this side, you'd better stop because the Bible tells us where the perfect church is, and if you want, he may send you there and put you in it.

You're looking for the perfect church. You know where it is? It's in heaven. Yeah, that's where it's coming from. It's coming down out of heaven as a bride is going for her husband, and some of you are so anxious to get in the perfect church.

All right, keep on. He'll put you there. If you told me the perfect church was somewhere, I'd say, I can't even be bothered. I wouldn't cross the street to find it because if it was when I got there, it wouldn't be any longer, and so, I'm not going to spend my time with that.

No, but what a marvelous life it is. The life is Christ living his life in you. Now, that's part of what this is all about. That's one of the aspects of it. So, from a Christian point of view, we were converted.

We repented of our sin. We received Christ. We carried the habits and attitudes and faiths and dispositions into this new life, and now we've discovered that we've got to have help, and the help comes from our union with Christ and our victory comes through our identification with him, and then our normal life is for us to invite the Lord Jesus to live in us his own way.

The Mind as God's Gift to Every Person

Now, that has to do with the Christian. Let's go back. What is that which we share with the unconverted? What is that which is standard equipment to every man who comes into the world? Let's look at that for a moment.

We don't want to sell man short. What is part of the inventory or the standard equipment, as I say, for every model? There's never been a model change as far as man is concerned, you know. God has just been repeating it with all the faults and difficulties and problems.

There's never been a model change. I get interested in the new cars. Every one is going to be purchased, but so was the one last year, and so was the one before that, and so was the one before that. At least God isn't pretending.

He said, here he is. This is the way he's been, and I've searched every new model as it came along, and I found they all have the same defects. I've recalled them for repairs. There isn't one of them that's been world-worthy here.

Their steering wheel's out, their motor's out, their wheels are out. Everything about them, they're even got to blow out a horn. There's nothing right with them, and they're all got to come back to be remanufactured, remade, recreated.

But having said that, what's wrong with them? What's right with them? Let's get acquainted with that. What's right with them? What has he done? Well, first, he's given to us, he made us in his image and likeness, and that, in some respects, of course, fellowship with God was despoiled and broken by sin, but the fact that we were intrinsically made in the image and likeness of God remained because man is still worthy of the redemptive work of Christ, or valuable, at least, in the eyes of God so that he was willing for Christ to die for sinners.

Now, what does this sinful man have as part of his equipment? Well, let's look for a moment. First, he has a mind, and we don't know much about that. We're learning a little bit, but there's a couple of factors that are important, and I want to dwell on them for a few moments.

Every human being carries with him a mind. Unconverted people can write poetry. Unconverted people can paint beautiful pictures. Unconverted people can write beautiful music. Unconverted people can design magnificent buildings and construct fantastic bridges.

And unconverted people can get vehicles to the moon and safely back again. And they have, therefore, tremendous abilities that have been invested in them by God. We have to recognize this, and we have to appreciate this.

We deprecate man morally because of his crimes, but we must not feel because we have so much emphasis on the fact that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, that somehow sin has destroyed or annulled or annihilated those factors of enormous value and worth and importance.

So, man has a mind, a creative mind. Bacon said God has given to man the second degree of creation. God made the tree, and man makes the furniture. God made the iron, and man makes the pool. God made the sunset, and man makes the poem.

God made the bird sing, and man writes the music and makes the instrument with which to play it. God has given to us the second degree of creation. That is, the ability to use our minds because everything begins with the mind.

I was just reading a book, Norman Vincent Peale, some years ago, and he was telling about his friend Napoleon Hill, and Napoleon Hill had written a book, and the printer was saying, you've got to get me a title for it, and he couldn't come up with one.

And Norman Vincent Peale told us, he said that Mr., the publisher said, if I don't have a title from you by Monday, such and such, I am going to print the book, and its title will be Use Your Noodle and Get the Boodle.

That's it. So it was a great deal of thought, a great deal of thought and effort and attention, Napoleon Hill came up with Think and Grow Rich, which clearly translated means Use Your Noodle and Get the Boodle.

But isn't it astounding, isn't it amazing that this so-called think literature, which there's a great deal, is the children's bread, and they've kicked it under the table, using an analogy from the scripture, for when the woman, the Syrophoenician woman came and said, that's for the children, she said yes, but even the dog's skin is the bread that falls from the children's table.

And he said, great faith you have. Well, I'm saying that the basic thing that's in that is Think and Grow Rich is scriptural. Whatsoever things are pure and true and lovely and have virtue and good report, think.

You do it. Imperative. On these things. Isn't it astounding, the only thing God gave you total and absolute control over is your mind. You can't control what you see, because I may get in the way between you and something nice to see.

You can't control what you see. You can't control what you hear. Certainly you can't control what you smell. And you can't control what you feel, because somebody may come up when you're sitting there in the stoplight, perfectly innocent, and hit the back of your car.

You can't control what you feel, what you hear, what you see, what you smell. But God gave you total and absolute control over what you think. That's the only thing that he said, geared up the loins of your mind and bring every thought into the captivity of Christ.

God gave you the power to use your mind, to control your mind. I had the pleasure of playing golf last year with my one doctor friend. My doctor's been saying for a long time, you've got to get exercise, you've got to get exercise, you've got to get exercise.

I get up in the morning and I go like this, and if I work, I'm in business. That's all I use all day long. Anyway, you know. So that's my physical exercise. And if you don't learn how to play, you're not going to be able to work very long.

You can't do that. You've got to learn how. You've got to relax. You've got to do it, and so on and so on. I called my doctor here. He's got a missionary in Africa and very kind to take me as the only general patient he's got, I guess.

And I said, I was visiting a doctor over the weekend in Connecticut, and he said that I should do something, and I asked him if golf was something, and he said, yes, if you did it right and walked. And so I said, would you as my doctor consider that you are, I said, would you think my doctor would do tap?

I said, do you think my doctor would consider golf exercise? He said, yes. And if you ask your doctor, I think he will go with you. I think he will play with you. So every Thursday, as often as we can, which is maybe two or three times a year, or oftener, as it seems to me a lot, we play golf together.

And it's been an astounding thing to me as I have worked with Tap and as I have learned in talking with him, how large a percentage of the sicknesses that come before the doctor are psychosomatic. Do you know that he says, I don't know if he's right, but you've got to deal with him.

I've only had a little paragraph. He says between 50 and 80 to 85 percent of all of the patients they see are there with psychosomatic. Now, that doesn't mean it's imaginary. You know, like ulcers. It's not caused by what's eaten them.

To see something, imagine something, and then to proceed to do it. You know, we've got to understand that. We've got to give man back to himself the dignity that he has and recognize the powers that he possesses.

And we've got to see it because it is tremendously important for us to realize that all man, all mankind, have been given this tremendous power to imagine, to see what isn't there as there already were there, and then to take the appropriate steps to organize resources, material, and equipment to bring to pass what's been seen.

Now, this is the intrinsic capacity and ability of man. You know how tremendously important it is. I remember years ago in 1944, 40, no, 45, we were getting ready to go to Africa and the mission gave over and said, you, possibility that you could do some pioneer linguistic work in Sudan, and we want you to go out to Briarcrest, Saskatchewan for the Summer Institute of Linguistics.

Well, we went in Briarcrest. That was something. Oh, my, that was something. It was an old hotel that had one bath on each floor, well, usually one bath on each floor, but there were plumbing troubles, so occasionally that wasn't the case, and had pictures in bowls in each room.