State University in Long Beach, California, Fall 1962. 'Eye-black' is grease
Youth in California 13
2. Football, John playing for Los Angeles Pacific College against California
State University in Long Beach, California, Fall 1962. 'Eye-black' is grease applied to reduce sun glare. athletics at Bob Jones; and for another a 'fundamentalist' environment, which urged 'third-degree separation' from other professing Christians, was unfamiliar to him. He was later to regard the time spent at Bob Jones as providing him with a view of Fundamentalism from the inside, and the experience served to lead him to a closer study of Scripture.
At the end of his first year at Bob Jones, John, bound for home, shared a car with five other students as they drove through Alabama. While they were proceeding at speed, the driver lost control; a door burst open as the car turned over, and John was thrown out. He was to land in a seated position on the asphalt road and slide for over a hundred yards. Nothing was broken but third degree friction burns took the flesh off his back, and embedded asphalt in what remained. One hand would be scarred for life. 'As I stood up on that highway, having never lost consciousness', he would later say, 'I committed my life to serving
Christ. I told him I would no longer resist what he wanted me to do, which was to preach His Word.' Three painful months followed the initial hospital treatment, requiring the patient to lie on his stomach, and undergo skin grafts and other treatment. Life suddenly became very serious: 'I realized I was not in control of my future. I had survived something that should have killed me; God suddenly had my undivided attention.'
This was a great turning point. From this time the Christian ministry became the pole star of his life. One more year, 1958-59, was to follow at Bob Jones in South Carolina, and it was during this year that he preached his first 'sermon'. The location was a bus station in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he had been instructed to preach and gather a crowd. It was not exactly the situation for a novice, as he quickly discovered: The sermon was terrible. I didn't know how to do it right.
I went in there—had my Bible in my hand—and I walked in to this mostly empty bus depot. As I looked around at a motley bunch, I started preaching a gospel message. You could just see the people looking at me and saying, 'The poor kid! He looks intelligent. Its so sad; he must have some kind of disability.'
And I thought, this doesn't make any sense at all. So I did it for about ten minutes, and then I went down the street where there was a high school dance beginning. I sat outside and gave the gospel to the kids as they went in and out. That's how I got my start preaching. It wasn't memorable, but I was eager to learn to preach, because I was determined to be ready whenever I was called on. I would go to rescue missions and military bases to preach
Youth in California hs when I could. Over time, I learned how to connect with an audience.
During 1959 John learned that he would be able to continue his Bachelor's degree at Pacific College in Los Angeles, and this led to the decision for him to do his two final years at that institution. Back home, sports were now resumed and he excelled, especially in football. He was named in an All-America squad as half-back, and was subsequently solicited by several professional teams to determine his interest in a football career.
But there was now a higher purpose in his view, and this was confirmed to him by an unexpected opportunity arising out of a football luncheon at which he received an award. When he used the occasion to speak of his faith in Christ, one of his hearers asked him if he would visit a seventeen-year-old girl named Polly whose spinal cord had recently been severed in an accident.
John went to the hospital to see the girl who would remain paralysed for life, and her first words to him were, 'Td kill myself if I could. I have no reason to live. 'Not knowing what else to do', he recalls, 'I started into a presentation of the gospel.
"Its not what happens to your body that matters, Polly, it's what happens to your eternal soul. Youre going to live forever somewhere. God can bring joy into your heart even now if the issue of your soul is taken care of. Would you like to hear about how that can happen?"
Her heart was opened to listen. After prayer and conversations on several occasions, she was able to say, "You know, John, in some ways I'm glad this accident happened. If it hadn't, I would never have met Jesus Christ.' This early experience in pastoral work had a profound influence on John himself. After that exposure to the power of the gospel, I thought, This is all
I want for my life. Nothing else even comes close in significance."
Hard to Believe, pp. 71-2. 'She became a follower of Christ and eventually met and married a wonderful Christian man.'
The Bible Takes First Place n enthusiastic young man once introduced himself to a well-known Bible teacher with the words, 'Oh, Sir, P''d give the world if I knew the Bible like you do.' The older man looked him straight in the eye and replied, 'Good, because that is what it will cost you.' In 1961, now twenty-two years old, John MacArthur proceeded to Talbot Theological Seminary, wanting to face that cost.
Talbot, situated at La Mirada, on the southern side of Los
Angeles, had about 125 students. John's father had urged it on account of the reputation of its dean, Dr Charles L. Feinberg, who before his conversion had studied to be a Jewish rabbi. He was said to know more than thirty languages, including Dutch, which he had taught himself in order to read Dutch Reformed
Theology.
Prior to this date, despite the example of his parents, MacArthur's commitment to reading had been comparatively small, a fact that came out when father and son together met
Feinberg at the seminary. Jack MacArthur opened the interview with the words: 'This is my son Johnny, and I want you to make him a Bible expositor.' "Well, what has he been up to now?' the 18 JOHN MacArTHUR: SERVANT OF THE WorbD AND FLOCK dean responded. And John heard his father reply, "He's basically a football player.' At this Feinberg looked quizzically over his glasses as though to say, 'Are you kidding me?'
Father wasn't kidding. As John later wrote of this point in his life: When I was in college I didn't want to read. I was a typical athletic guy who was usually outdoors, and I preferred not to be indoors reading. I arrived at seminary and had no choice. So I just began to read and, of course, it was all about what I wanted to know. I really fell in love with reading theology.!
One of MacArthur's great incentives at Talbot was his admiration for Dr Feinberg of whom he says: He read the Bible through four times every year. Needless to say, he was exceptional and intense. We were all rightfully in awe of him, and I loved him at the same time. He was a real model for me.
The dean became his chief mentor and to please him was now part of his life. It was the more painful, therefore, to receive from him one of the most memorable rebukes of his lifetime.
All students had to preach at least twice in the seminary chapel, and as they did so members of the faculty sat behind them on the platform and filled in critique sheets. When MacArthur's turn came he was assigned to preach on 2 Samuel 7, the passage where the prophet Nathan's encouragement to David to build a temple was overruled by God. MacArthur took as his main theme the importance of not presuming on God, and, suppos- ' Rediscovering Expository Preaching (Dallas: Word, 1992), p. 336. His earlier lack of interest in reading cannot be taken in an absolute sense for he had graduated at Pacific College with the Bachelor's degree, composed of a major in Biblical Studies and a minor in New Testament Greek.
The Bible Takes First Place 19 ing that he had preached well, he anticipated receiving the high opinion of Dr Feinberg at the end of the service. Instead the critique sheet the latter handed to him was blank apart from the words, "You missed the whole point of the passage.' Later he had to enter his teacher's study, to find him shaking his head in disappointment as he exclaimed, How could you? How could you? The passage presents the Davidic Covenant culminating in the Messiah and His glorious kingdom—and you talked about 'not presuming on God in our personal day-to-day choices.
The hearer of these words says it was 'the deepest single impression I ever recetved in seminary. I can still hear Dr Feinberg's heartfelt admonition ringing in my ears. If you don't have the meaning of Scripture, you do not have the Word of God at
Alae
A visiting lecturer to Talbot, who also helped MacArthur, was Ralph Keiper of Philadelphia, secretary to Donald G.
Barnhouse and the primary editor of Eternity. John never met
Barnhouse but read some of his writings. Among anecdotes of Barnhouse that he would later use, was the occasion when the famous preacher was interrupted by an admirer as he was reading his Bible on a plane flight. 'I wish I could know the Bible like you do', the stranger exclaimed. Barnhouse's response was to say, 'Well, you could start by putting down Time magazine and reading the Bible.' One of the lessons Keiper impressed 'on John was the value of illustrating the teaching of a passage not by anecdotes but by other incidents in Scripture. Part of 2 From an address, 'Why I Still Preach the Bible after Forty Years of Ministry', delivered at the first "Together for the Gospel' conference in 2006, and as put down on paper by Phil Johnson. the charm of Keiper's personality lay in his humour and in that area he was also of help to John. John's father, hearing some of his son's first efforts in speaking, had impressed on him, 'The pulpit is no place for humour. You've got to get out of that.' While Keiper was equally against turning sermons into entertainment, John says he helped him 'to have a little bit of humour in my life.'
Sports still took some time while he was at Talbot, and he had a good friendship with Feinberg's son Paul, who was an outstanding athlete. John still had an approach to turn professional, but the pull was no longer what it had been in earlier years.
Before he began his last year at Talbot, there was another life-changing event. Patricia Sue Smith belonged to his father's church, where her father, Dale Smith, was superintendent of the Sunday School, and for two years John had taught the Bible class to which she belonged. Dale, and his wife Lorraine (née Robertson), had moved to Los Angeles from a farming background in Nebraska in about 1940. Patricia was the fourth in their family of four daughters and one son. It was through a relationship between her and John's oldest sister that he became aware of Patricia, who was often in the MacArthur home. At some point she became to him 'the cutest girl I ever saw', and the fact that she loved the Lord determined the matter. Perhaps
Patricia's estimate of John was a little longer in its formation, but all was settled to their mutual joy when they were married in August 1963. A later MacArthur title would be dedicated to 'Dale and Lorraine Smith on their Fiftieth Anniversary, with gratitude that they have given their lives to the Saviour and me their daughter."
The Ultimate Priority: Worship (Chicago: Moody, 1983).