Servant of the Word and Flock (continued)
When this hostile publicity was dying down, on March
30, 1980, Mr Nally filed a suit of 'clergy malpractice' against
MacArthur, and sought one million dollars in damages. There were three counts:
1. The church, John and others, counselled Ken Nally to read the Bible, pray, and listen to church tapes and counsellors, but 'prevented' him from seeking professional psychiatric help.
2. Negligence in the training of the church counsellors.
3. 'Outrageous conduct' in that Grace Church taught that Catholics were not Christians, exacerbating Ken's pre-existing depression and eventually driving him to suicide.
When this went to court the only count taken seriously was the allegation that Ken had been prevented from seeking professional help. A year and a half later, when the church supplied thirty-two depositions showing that the statement was untrue,* the court threw out all three counts and ordered the plaintiffs to pay court costs. But this ruling was not accepted and the case went to an appellate court, to be reviewed by three judges. By a two to one decision, they overturned the first court's decision, on the grounds of a new charge introduced under the count of 'outrageous conduct'. It was argued by the plaintiffs that MacArthur's church condoned suicide on the part of Christians, and thus encouraged Ken Nally to regard suicide as an acceptable way out of his depression.
Although the claim on the teaching at Grace Church was false,* it meant a re-trial in the original court, which took place
Eight medical professionals had, in fact, treated Ken Nally, and there had been numerous referrals made by the pastors at Grace.
The claim was based on a sentence spoken by an associate pastor at Grace, eighteen months after the suicide. Lawyer Sam Ericsson responded: 'The record shows that everybody—John, his wife, and all the defendants—told Ken time and again that only God determines your life span and that suicide is wrong.'
Threatening Reversals 51 over four weeks in 1985. At its conclusion the judge dismissed the case, holding that the First Amendment to the US Constitution forbids imposing duties on clergy for church counselling.
The court also found that the pastors of Grace Church had acted properly in the way they sought to help Ken. Yet this second acquittal was again overturned at a further appellate court hearing in 1987. The finale was not reached until November 1988 when the Supreme Court of California, at San Francisco, finally dismissed the case. By this time it had been widely reported in the national press. The New York Times gave a lengthy summary in its issue of November 24, 1988. The Washington Post (Nov.
26) wrote of the widespread relief in churches, and asked the question: What would the world be like if individuals who seek to help others by providing sympathy, advice, and encouragement—all without charge—had to start buying malpractice insurance . . . There is more than good sense involved in protecting churches from this kind of litigation. How can a court, consistent with the First Amendment, decide that it is wrong for a minister to suggest certain prayers? It is the essence of religious freedom for individuals to make religious choices without regard to the standards of the state, and for clergymen to offer such advice without fear of being hauled into court.
Through the eight years in which this contest continued it might have seemed as if Grace Church had the sword of Damocles hanging over it. Certainly the issue was critical, yet newspaper reporters who visited the church during the period were surprised to find services continuing without so much as a mention of the law suit. MacArthur could say: 52 JOHN MacArTHuR: SERVANT OF THE WorRD AND FLOCK
We're just carrying on our normal church worship and teaching the Bible. Our people are also praying for the Nally family. We have a great concern for them spiritually and never want to do anything that might put up more barriers than are already there.
What was of first importance in his mind was how the church re-acted to the trial: It goes back to James 1. We are church people. For some reason God has chosen to put us in this situation. We count it a joy. If we were suffering because of evil doing, it would be a reproach to us, but if we suffer for righteousness' sake, we count ourselves worthy to be identified with Christ.
John also saw several signs of the providence of God in what happened. The final verdict had vital consequences for the churches in securing them against unjust litigation; but had another church been the target for what was a first law case of its kind, the outcome could have been different. It so 'happened' that out of 350,000 churches in 1980 only one had a lawyer with professional malpractice defence experience on its staff, and that was Grace Community Church. The lawyer was Sam
Ericsson. Before the case concluded, Ericsson became director of the Christian Legal Society's Center for Law and Religious
Freedom in Washington, and along with other legal helpers, continued to provide as able counsel as could be found in the land. At the Supreme Court the oral argument for the defence was led by Rex Lee, a respected orator and senior partner in a Washington, DC, legal firm. The church saw the hand of God in the readiness of these able men to help.
Threatening Reversals a wie
MacArthur was once asked, 'Are there special difficulties you have had to surmount and overcome?' He responded, 'There's a lot of pain in the ministry', and then spoke of the legal battle they had passed through. He also referred to 'two or three other times' when he was tempted to leave the church, 'when even the prospect of digging ditches for a living had a certain appeal'.
Perhaps he was momentarily forgetting the words of Campbell
Morgan he liked to quote, 'If you have no opposition in the place you are serving, then yourre serving in the wrong place.'
The trials I have sought to describe undoubtedly strengthened his understanding of the nature of the Christian warfare and of the only effective response. Of course, critical men and women do not know that they are being used by the powers of evil.
The weapons those powers employ consist of lies of all kinds—elaborate lies, massive philosophical lies, evil lies that appeal to humanity's fallen sinfulness, lies that inflate human pride, and lies that closely resemble the truth. Our weapon is the simple truth of Christ as revealed in His Word.°*
The threatening days of the 1979 period drove the preacher at Sun Valley closer to Scripture. The work of God always brings fruitfulness in the life of the messenger as well as with the message. While MacArthur was prepared for his ministry by the years of study, what God did afterwards, in humbling, 5 The Truth War: Fighting for Christianity in an Age of Deception (Nashville: Nelson, 2007), p. 49. refining and sanctifying him, was essential to his usefulness.
It is quality of life that makes a preacher persuasive, and that is something which is never self-produced.® While the public record of MacArthur's ministry might look like a success story, as in the case of Spurgeon, there were many trials and disappointments behind the scenes; these were all necessary to make him what he became. In those trials he had the unfailing support of Patricia, his parents, and faithful elders of whom he would later say, "Those elders exhibited a love and commitment to God's Word that helped stoke a fire that has burned brightly for forty years.'
Before we leave the 1970s reference must be made to the series of sermons, on the Sermon on the Mount, in which MacArthur was engaged in 1979. It was probably the most greatly used series of the first eleven years of his ministry, in his own judgment, 'a major turning point in the life of our church'. When they were later published, he wrote in the Preface that of all the series he had delivered 'this one has brought a seemingly greater sense of conviction, more self-examination, commitment, and conversion of the lost than any other'."
One of the crucial sermons in that series was entitled 'Which Way to Heaven?' When it was recently reprinted, Phil Johnson, the editor, commented: Just a few weeks after preaching this message, John MacArthur took his first extended vacation since his arrival at Grace Ghurch—a summer-long sabbatical with his * 'Paul's preaching was persuasive; but it was his life that won the hearts of people.' Expository Preaching, p. 345. 'A sanctified preacher, known as such to his people, is a powerful instrument when he opens the Word.'
' Kingdom Living, Here and Now (Chicago: Moody, 1980). This title was in a sixth printing by 1988, and was reprinted in 1998 as Only Way to Happiness.
Threatening Reversals Bis family. This sermon was still ringing in the hearts of people in the church when John returned in mid-September. The message was instrumental in motivating several long-time casual attenders of the church to examine themselves, and respond to Christ with real rather than superficial faith for the first time. It has likewise been instrumental over the years in bringing dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people to Christ"
That 'first extended vacation in 1979, mentioned above, was to stand out in John's memory, as he wrote twenty years later: I took a three-month sabbatical from the church I pastor in southern California, and we loaded our four children into a van and toured the country for the summer. As you might imagine, spending ninety sweltering days in a van with five other people was quite an adventure. Between bathroom stops, meal stops, and stops just to keep the peace, I wonder how we managed to travel beyond the boundaries of our neighbourhood.
But God was gracious, and we had a wonderful time. We covered a lot of ground that summer. We saw majestic sights like the Grand Canyon and Lake Geneva. We visited historic landmarks like Gettysburg, Ford's Theater, and Plymouth Rock.
As T look back on those three months on the road with my family, ''m amazed at what I remember most. While I certainly enjoyed the places we visited and the things we saw there, the historic structures and beautiful scenery don't represent the highlights. What clings tightest to my memory are moments I spent with my family—the conversations I enjoyed with Patricia, the opportunities I had to play with my children, or a meal we ate along the side of the road.
8 Truth Endures, p. 104.
But there was also an important long-term lesson about which Dr MacArthur wrote on another occasion: That vacation of twenty-five years ago ended up being important in shaping my ministry at Grace Community Church and at Grace to You. Back then, Grace to You was young and just starting to get its legs. I had written a few small books. We had been on radio for only two years and were heard on just a handful of stations. While the ministry was growing, it was still small. Yet I had no idea how farreaching and in demand it had already become. The trip my family took helped show me.
Along the way I met people whose lives had been changed by the verse-by-verse teaching of God's Word they had received from messages on tape and radio. People were expressing how they were sustained in their spiritual walk by our ministry. One family drove from Florida to a conference I was speaking at in New York just so they could meet Patricia and me, and tell us how much the ministry meant to them.' One young pastor came up to me, his eyes a bit watery, and said, 'John, don't do anything different and don't let anything change, because so many of us are depending on this kind of teaching.' It wasn't culturally relevant sermons drawing people to our ministry—it was divine truth, honoured, studied, taught, and re-taught. The Lord has used those encounters to confirm that novelty was not necessary. I needed to continue teaching the powerful Word, reiterating sound doctrines from all the rich texts of Scripture. Because God's Word is timeless, dynamic, and fundamental to godly living. No one ever outgrows it or exhausts its immeasurable depth.
The New York Conference was only one of a number interspersed among the travels.
Scripture and Preaching
W hen Christian leaders appear in history the tendency is to interpret their influence too exclusively in terms of their background. Certainly John MacArthur's upbringing was in churches of Fundamentalist outlook, and the two men who most influenced his youth, Charles Feinberg and his own father, were in sympathy with much that the term represented.
The spiritual standard that his father had set him was to be before him for much longer than his youth and was to continue into the following century. Dr Jack MacArthur would preach at Grace Church from time to time, and a note to him from John, dated December 28, 1981, tells us what that friendship meant:
Dad,
Thanks for a great message. I believe we will really see some fruit from the power of that presentation. One man had brought a friend, who said he was convinced, for the first time, that Jesus was the Christ. The tape will also have specially good use with Jewish people. aif, I praise the Lord for you and Mom-—and the special way God has used you to prepare and bless me.
Love, Johnny
As late as 1996 Jack MacArthur was still to be found as a visiting preacher in his son's pulpit. In May of that year, John wrote in a Grace to You letter, A few nights ago, I had the joy of yielding the pulpit at my home church to a man who knows me better than perhaps any other, and who has been the single, most powerful influence on both my life and the course of my ministry.
The grey-haired gentleman who stood in my pulpit Sunday night is my father, and he delivered a bold, articulate message to our congregation and the graduating students of the Master's Seminary. Dad has been teaching the Bible and shepherding God's flock for more than sixty years.
Jack MacArthur's encouragement to his son took different forms. Referring to the example of his father's study habits, John wrote in 1997: 'He was—and still is—an insatiable reader, a non-stop studier, and a life-long learner committed to enlarging his mind with important, stimulating books. Even now it's not uncommon for him to send me a package in the mail—several books along with orders to read them and give a full report on what I think.'
The debt John owed to his father in this regard is noted in the dedication of his Commentary on Hebrews (1983), With loving gratitude to my father, Dr Jack MacArthur, who gave me the legacy of loving books and challenged me by his example to make use of commentaries.
Scripture and Preaching
It has become fashionable in evangelical circles today to join in criticism of 'Fundamentalism'. Perhaps MacArthur's early association with that tradition is the reason why his name is surprisingly omitted in a number of reputedly evangelical dictionaries. But Fundamentalism in America cannot be so easily ignored. As a movement it came into being early in the twentieth century as the unbelief prevalent in mainline denominations caused Bible-believing Christians to form new groupings. For the most part it was a stand for essential gospel truths, such as the infallibility of Scripture, the Person of Christ as God, and the necessity of conversion through faith in His death as our substitute. Fundamentalism, as Gresham Machen understood it, included 'all those who definitely and polemically maintain a belief in supernatural Christianity as over against the Modernism of the present day'.! And because it sought to be biblical, Fundamentalism retained gospel preaching and evangelistic urgency when it was disappearing from many churches.
That Fundamentalism also had a downside is a subject to which I will return later. For the present I am concerned with the belief that stood firm in Fundamentalism when it wavered or was lost elsewhere, namely: What Scripture says, God says.
MacArthur grew up in that assurance and it has governed his life as a preacher. Eric Alexander has written, 'The fundamental place of preaching 1n the church is simply a corollary of the 1 J. Gresham Machen, What 1s Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951), p. 244. fundamental place of Scripture in the church." How this works out in practice 1s to be seen in many ways.
To a marked degree Scripture has controlled MacArthur's selection of priorities in the use of time. The responsibility of presenting biblical truth to others overshadows everything else.
The real goal of ministry has always been to keep my opinions out of it as much as possible. I never want to be guilty of giving people the illusion that they have heard from God when in fact they have only heard from me.
This has meant that in his personal life he has kept to the strict discipline of making everything subservient to the study of Scripture. For forty or forty-five Sundays, through forty years, two new sermons have been prepared every week; in the early years it was three, as he also spoke at the church prayer meeting on Wednesday nights. During the 1970s speaking at the prayer meeting was delegated to others, but he was never to vary from his commitment to preaching morning and evening on Sundays.
The pattern of his week was to give the best of his time, from Tuesday to Friday, to preparation for preaching. In early years this meant some fifteen hours of work for each sermon; and he still may require from eight to ten hours. He has lived out his father's admonition, 'Don't go into the sacred desk [pulpit] unless you are fully prepared.' A high view of Scripture will always lead a preacher to the right priority. The apostolic example, "We will give ourselves continually to prayer and ministry
Eric J. Alexander, Biblical Preaching: Basics of the Reformed Faith (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2008), p. 7. of the word' (Acts 6:4), is always followed when the churches are in their healthiest state.
As another exponent of that fact wrote in the nineteenth century, 'If a minister would give the pulpit its appropriate energy, he will make all his varied experience subservient to the duties of the sanctuary.' In MacArthur's case this has meant, 'T use a system I call "planned neglect": I plan to neglect everything until my study is done."
But no faithful minister 1s going to study Scripture simply in order to speak to others: Even if I never preached another sermon, I would thank God every day of my life for the sanctifying grace that has come to me through the daily study of His precious Word. Pastors should study to know God, not just to make sermons. For me, the greatest joy of preaching comes, not in the final step, proclamation, but in the transformation of my own life.
In that transformation far more is involved than personal study. Referring to painful experiences already mentioned, MacArthur has said: I have learned to embrace failure and criticism as probably the most productive work of God in my life. I can exegete a passage, what I cannot do is to refine myself. I cannot crush my own pride. So there is a sense in which the best things that have happened to me have been the disappointments and the misrepresentations.
3 Gardiner Spring, The Power of the Pulpit (repr. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1986), p. 119.
4 This should not be understood as meaning that MacArthur 1s a comparative hermit. There are numbers of other weekly duties, and his preaching and addresses are by no means confined to Sundays. The able associates and staff he has gathered round him are an indispensable part to making his routine possible.
While the work of God in preparing a preacher is much broader than his study, it is in the study, as MacArthur has said, that he is constantly thrown on God. More is to be done than the application of his mind to the text. Prayer is bound up with sermon preparation: the preacher needs the conviction that he has a message both from Scripture and from God. 'I seek His direction, thank Him for what I discover, plead for wisdom and insight, and desire that He enable me to live what I learn,'
The study is therefore both a sacred and an exciting place.
As MacArthur said to a friend while he was preaching through the Gospel of Matthew: There are many days when I can hardly stand what I am discovering. It just overwhelms me. In every paragraph there is this incomparable Jesus Christ and He is just devastatingly powerful and glorious. It is a crushing experience to be exposed to Him, and yet it is the most exalting thing—to realize He has embraced me for all eternity! I would rather preach Christ than anything else. He is the most compelling subject in all the universe.
The authority of Scripture is no less evident in the way a preacher handles the Word of God in public. The nature of Scripture as revelation from God must control the manner in which it is taught. There is something seriously wrong when a preacher thinks he must not put Scripture at the forefront of his message lest his hearers are 'put off". It is no less wrong when a man thinks the best way to gain a hearing is to sprinkle the message with appealing stories and humour. A man who cannot get attention without these things, MacArthur would say, does not know what it means to handle the sword of the Spirit.
This is not to say that stories have no place in his preaching, but when they occur they should have no prominence and occupy little time. 'He does not dilute his sermons with stories', was the appreciative comment of one regular hearer. From his student days at Talbot, MacArthur was convinced that the best illustrations to use are those taken from the Bible itself. To stay close to Scripture in everything is to rely on the highest authority. 'Stories have emotional impact, but they are lightweight compared with Scripture.* His second source for stories and illustrations is church history and biography.
The vital thing is that nothing should be introduced into a sermon that can lessen the recognition of hearers that the words which the Holy Spirit teaches are in a category all of their own.
'If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God? (J Pet.
4:11). Thus when questioned on the use of drama and visual aids in the pulpit, MacArthur replied: You have to believe that the power of God's Word will be more effective than any human drama or communication gimmick. Nothing 1s as dramatic as the explosion of truth on the mind of a believer through powerful preaching.°
It is also MacArthur's belief that if Scripture is to be taught accurately, this is usually best done by the consecutive and progressive teaching of a congregation through different parts of the Bible. As already mentioned, the 'expository' method has been 5 T tell a story when it is appropriate, but this happens only rarely.' Exposttory Preaching, pp. 342-3. Similarly, while MacArthur does not eschew all humour in the pulpit, his gift in that area is not in regular use. Preaching is not entertainment. 'There is great need in the church today to cry instead of laugh. The frivolity, silliness, and foolishness that go on in the name of Christianity should themselves make us mourn.' MacArthur New Testament Commentary: Matthew, vol. 1 (Chicago: Moody, 1985), p. 158.
6 Expository Preaching, p. 345. his practice from the beginning of his ministry, when he took up the Epistles to the Romans, Ephesians, and 1 and 2 Peter.
It is sometimes asked where the vogue for 'expository preaching' resurfaced in the twentieth century. Some have traced it to Martyn Lloyd-Jones. MacArthur, however, was listening to his father treat Scripture in a consecutive way long before he ever read anything by Lloyd-Jones; and he tells us that the examples his father followed were G. Campbell Morgan (1863-1945) and W. A. Criswell (1909-2002). There was to be, however, a growing difference between the older, Morgan-type exposition and MacArthur's. In his case, as with Lloyd-Jones, the devotional thought is grounded on the bringing out of clear doctrinal principles. Exposition needs to lead hearers to doctrinal certainties. MacArthur's definition of a strong congregation is a congregation that has learned to 'speak with one voice on essential doctrinal matters'. A sermon without doctrine does not build strong Christians.'
At the same time MacArthur's ministry has shown that the consecutive method of preaching through a passage is not the only way to be faithful in preaching. And he notes that sometimes what is called 'exposition' is deserving of criticism: 'The thing that kills people in what is sometimes called expository preaching is randomly meandering through a passage.' A mere running commentary on a passage is not preaching. If a sermon is going to be in a real sense a message it should have a clear theme, a unity of thought. As MacArthur's books show, while all his sermons are text-based, they are by no means all " He comments that those who only preach short sermons miss this point: 'T am convinced that biblical exposition requires at least forty minutes . . . Rarely does a man preaching twenty-five to thirty minutes do doctrinal exposition.' Expository Preaching, p. 339. He would not say this, however, without adding the caution that length is not the main feature of good preaching. tied in sequence to one book or passage. He has used a wise variation. wie
Another consequence of a preacher holding a right view of Scripture is that it will negate all contemporary ideas of adjusting the message to suit the 'target audience'. MacArthur sees the modern evangelical insistence on 'relevance' as seriously misguided. 'Relevance' has often come to mean that the presentation of Christianity should be guided by what men and women perceive to be their needs today. And because the modern world is thought to be so different from everything that has gone before, all that is 'traditional' in the churches comes to be questioned as a hindrance to an up-to-date presentation of the message. So a change in the presentation of the message comes to be justified in terms of an alleged greater effectiveness. Consequently, it is believed that the recognition of 'generational differences' is very important. Churches have even been known to advertise themselves as 'not your grandmother's church'.* An exponent of church-growth, quoted by MacArthur, says: "Those who want to minister effectively in this generation must remember to keep their tone "optimistic".' On which MacArthur comments: The typical presentation today starts exactly opposite where Paul started. He wrote of 'the wrath of God... against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men'. But modern evangelism begins with 'God loves you and wants to make you happy' . . . Let me say that I minister to a 8 David E Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), p. 212. This book is a powerful indictment of how evangelicalism has been misled in this area. In my opinion it is one of the most significant books to be published in fifty years. rather large group from the baby-boom generation, and I disagree with that writer's unwarranted generalization that they automatically tune out negative truth. The ones truly being saved certainly must and will accept the negative as motivation to repent."
Of course, this criticism of the quest for 'relevance' does not mean that all that is old deserves to be preserved; within the boundaries of Scripture there is always room for changes in style or method; but any thinking that credits man with the ability to decide what is 'relevant' is actually supplanting the Word of God. God has declared man's real need and it does not change from age to age: Church history is strewn with examples of those who thought they could mould the message for their own time—but ended by corrupting the truth . . . If church history teaches us anything, it is that different times do not require different messages. Those who preach anything other than the unadulterated gospel forfeit the power of God in their ministries.!°
Nothing is wrong with the message . . . If they don't hear the truth, cool music won't help. If they don't see the light, power-point won't help. If they don't like the message, drama and video won't help. They're blind and dead. Our task is to go on preaching not ourselves, we carry a supernatural message of everlasting life."
Behind the cry for relevance, commonly, is a wrong estimate of human nature. Man fundamentally is a product not of his times but of the Fall. While the changes in the world are external,
" Ashamed of the Gospel, p. 132.
'° Truth Matters, p. 108.
"' Hard to Believe, p. 49.
human nature is abiding. Thus men today are dominated by the same sins as were present in the nineteenth or any other century. What was fundamental to the empires of Assyria and Babylon is to be seen in the nations today. As Lloyd-Jones used to say, men today may now travel at four hundred miles an hour instead of four, but they do the same things when they reach their destination.
What, in reality, is the precise difference between the pride which the modern man takes 1n his culture and sophistication and the pride of those men who, at the very dawn of history, tried to build the tower of Babel into heaven?!"
Wherever Scripture controls preaching, it means there will be dependence on the power of God 1n addressing the conscience of man in sin. That 1s the real point of contact (Rom. 2:14-15).
Faithful preaching means addressing 'every man's conscience in the sight of God' (2 Cox 4:2).
12D. M. Lloyd-Jones, Truth Unchanged, Unchanging (London: Clarke, 1951) pp. Lie.
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The Rediscovery of Old Truth if earlier mentioned a downside to Fundamentalism, and it is with reference to this that John MacArthur's ministry moved in a significantly different direction. Some historical background 1s necessary to follow this development. In the early twentieth century, when there was widespread defection from biblical Christianity, fundamentalist churches, their organizations and publishers, drew together with something of a fortress mentality. They stood apart from those outside.
It is true that the line of division was not as sharply drawn in all parts of Fundamentalism. George W. Dollar, Professor of Church History at Bob Jones University, depicted Talbot Seminary, and the leaders of the denomination in which MacArthur was ordained, as 'moderate Fundamentalists'. They were men, he thought, who lacked 'a war psychology'. MacArthur saw something of the difference between Dollar's position and his father's during his two years of study in South Carolina, and it did not appeal to him. Yet at that date he was not conscious of the mistake which had weakened the fundamentalist churches in general. Their withdrawal from the historic Protestant denominations had engendered an indifference to what had once been the heritage of those denominations. Fundamentalism gave little place to church history before the nineteenth century. It was as though there was nothing to be learned from the confessions of faith and the literary heritage of an older evangelicalism. For the majority of fundamentalists, the best-known edition of the Bible was the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909, and few suspected the comparative novelty of some of its notes.
Lewis Sperry Chafer (1871-1952), friend of C. I. Scofield (1843-1921), was a standard-bearer of Fundamentalism. Distinguished as a preacher and an author, he founded the influential
Dallas Theological Seminary in 1924. When B. B. Warfield of Princeton reviewed one of Chafer's books in 1919, he judged that it contained 'two inconsistent systems of religion . . . The one 1s the product of the Protestant Reformation and knows no determining power in the religious life but the grace of God; the other comes straight from the laboratory of John Wesley."!
What Warfield meant by these words, and how MacArthur became convinced that his evaluation was true, is crucial to understanding the major development in the latter's ministry.
The issue concerned the question whether the number who come to eternal life is ultimately determined by the purpose of God or by the will of man. By his opposition to the doctrine of election, Wesley tilted the understanding of numbers of evangelicals away from what had been the confession of the Reformation and the Puritans. But if man possesses a fallen nature, at enmity to God and to spiritual things, how can a 'decision' by him to turn from death to life be the cause of conversion?
' Princeton Theological Review, April 1919, p. 322.
The Rediscovery of Old Truth "ak
Charles G. Finney (1792-1875) carried the deviation much further than Wesley by teaching that man does not have a fallen nature at all. He taught that faith is fundamentally a human decision and that salvation is secured by the sinner's movement toward God and the gospel.* This belief was almost universally accepted in Fundamentalism, and it was compounded by an error that came from another quarter. The scheme of unfulfilled prophecy that became accepted in Fundamentalism was Dispensationalism. This scheme believed that Scripture is to be understood as distinguishing sharply between 'law' (Old Testament) and 'grace' (New Testament). Jesus taught 'the law' because the new dispensation of 'the church age' had not yet begun, but for us who now belong to a new dispensation, the law has no place.
J. N. Darby, Scofield's chief mentor, taught that Christ's preaching to Jews—as in the Sermon on the Mount—was no guide for preachers today; Darby held it was a different message because the Jews lived in 'the kingdom age'. Christians are now in 'the church age' which began after the Jews rejected 'the kingdom'.
Whereas in the 'kingdom age' the message was 'law', in the church age it is 'grace', and these two things, it was claimed, stand opposed to one another. The law requires 'works'; the gospel is all grace. So an omission of the law of God—the Ten Commandments—became endemic in evangelism, and the unforeseen consequences were vast. If sin is 'transgression of the law', and if it is 'by the law' that the real nature of sin becomes
2 Ashamed of the Gospel, p. 158. See also the extended Appendix, "Charles Finney and American Evangelical Pragmatism', pp. 227-35. The pervasiveness of this teaching in Fundamentalism is scarcely open to question. George W. Dollar wrote that 'Most Fundamentalists . . . would have refused to adopt any statement of the Five Points [of Calvinism].' History of Fundamentalism, p. 276; known (1 John 3:4; Rom. 7:7), then inevitably, where this is omitted, the seriousness of what it means to be an unregenerate sinner is going to be lost. When that happens, instead of pressing for conviction of sin and the fear of God, evangelistic preaching gives the main attention to encouraging sinners to make 'a decision for Christ'. In other words, everything necessary for conversion is reduced to the human choice, with the time of conversion determined by man. Even the work of God in regeneration 1s made a consequence of man's decision.
Another result of the thinking that made the work of God dependent on the human will was that a 'revival' can be planned and announced weeks before it is supposed to take place, the term being understood simply as a series of evangelistic meetings where 'decisions' would be certain and counted by the response to 'an altar call'.
This understanding of evangelism was so strongly established in Fundamentalism that it was no easy thing for anyone to depart from it. In John MacArthur's case the first step to a different understanding occurred while he was in Mississippi before he ever settled at Grace Church. We have noted him above recording the conversion of over 2,300 whom he saw 'come forward to receive Christ'. But in the course of participating in these Mississippi Crusades he came to see that, while real conversions took place, to estimate their real number by counting those who made a public response, was no sure guide. Experience made it evident to him that effective speaking, and urgent appeals, could account for numbers responding. From that time on he dropped the so-called 'altar call as a supposed means of giving the number of conversions.
The Rediscovery of Old Truth
More slowly, however, did he come to see the effects of the popular practice upon the churches. Under a heading 'A Personal
Lesson', he has detailed three cases of people who had gone back on a Christian profession. They were men who were all, at one point, close friends. The first was a high school classmate and team-mate. He and I worked summers at his dad's car dealership. We spent a lot of other time together besides work and school, passing out tracts and witnessing in Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles. He seemed for all the world to be on fire for Christ.
The second friend was co-captain with him in the college football team, who also taught Bible studies and was thinking about the pastorate. The third man actually trained with John at Talbot. Yet all three were to abandon the faith; one was to be convicted as a criminal, and another was to erect a Buddhist altar in his home.
At one time he might not have been dogmatic on how to understand this abandonment of faith, but more reflection was leading him to a strong conclusion. It was stimulated, in part, by an experience in his early ministry which followed his meeting with a stranger. On a cross-country flight he found himself sitting next to a man. When this individual noticed that MacArthur was reading a Bible, he introduced himself and put the surprising question, "Excuse me, you wouldn't know how
I could have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, would you?' What followed I give in MacArthur's own words: Prospects like this do not approach me very often, so I did not want to lose this one! I said, 'Well, yes, you simply "believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and accept Him as your Saviour.' I explained that Jesus died and rose again so that we might have eternal life. I told him all he needed to do was to receive Christ as his personal Saviour.
T'd like to do that', he said. So I led him in a prayer, and he asked the Lord to be his Saviour. Later that month I baptized him. I was very excited about what had happened and eager to follow him up in discipleship. After a short time, however, he broke off contact with me. I recently discovered he has no continuing interest in the things of
Christ.'
While such experiences contributed to John's change of mind, it was Scripture which finally convinced him that there was something fundamentally wrong with the popular evangelism.
I have already noted his preaching from the Gospel of Matthew, and its chapters on the Sermon on the Mount. It was during his seven-and-a-half years of studying and preaching from that Gospel (begun in January 1978) that he was finally convinced of the difference between Christ's presentation of the gospel and much contemporary practice. According to that practice, it is an easy thing to become a Christian. But this was not what he found in the Gospel narratives. Jesus, instead of telling would-be disciples that they had 'only to believe in Him, so often took a different course. The lesson came home to him particularly as he worked though the Sermon on the Mount, with its insistence on the place of the law. It also shook the self-confidence of numbers of his hearers.
The final confirmation for him was Christ's dealing with the rich young ruler in Matthew 19. Here was 'a young man who asks in the clearest possible terms how he can lay hold of eternal life'. The answer was he had to forsake all that he had: * The Gospel According to Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), pe7/: Instead of taking him from where he was and getting him to make a 'decision', Jesus laid out terms to which he was unwilling to submit. In a sense, Jesus chased him off.
What kind of evangelism is this? Jesus would have failed personal evangelism class in almost every Bible College or Seminary I know!
It was now settled in MacArthur's mind that the falling-away phenomenon related to the fact that people were treated as converts who had never been converted at all. It was not because they did not 'believe' the message they had heard; they did, but this 'faith', instead of changing their lives, had allowed them to settle in a delusion. The message itself had misled them: Unbelievers are told that if they invite Jesus into their hearts, accept Him as personal Saviour, or believe the facts of the gospel, that's all there is to it. The aftermath is appalling failure, as seen in the lives of multitudes who have professed faith in Christ with no consequent impact on their behaviour.*
By means of such teaching large numbers are in the churches who are not Christians and they do not know it. They have been given assurance that to have 'good feelings' about Jesus is enough to show they are born again. In contrast to this, MacArthur saw that it is not the church's role to give assurance: 'The Holy Spirit alone gives genuine assurance (Rom. 8:16).
Don't usurp His role in someone's life. Don't let false assurance overrule His conviction work."
MacArthur was later to be accused of falling into the 'error' of the Puritans. While Puritan authors were not the decisive cause of the development of his thinking, some of them were certainly elbidiy ps.
Hard to Believe, p. 96. a help to him at this time. It was the thoroughness of their commitment to Scripture which especially appealed to him.
There was a day when the great students of Scripture and theology were pastors. Puritan ministers, rather than being just good communicators, were first and foremost students of God's Word. They worked at understanding, interpreting, and applying the Word of God with precision and wisdom.°
Thomas Watson was one of the first of the older authors to gain his attention. Watson is quoted repeatedly in the first volume of MacArthur's New Testament Commentary (on Matthew, 1985), and called 'the great Puritan saint'. In another book, published in 1983, MacArthur wrote, 'One of the great experiences of my brief life has been to read The Existence and Attributes of God by Stephen Charnock.' Other Puritan authors to whom he refers include John Flavel, Richard Sibbes, and Richard Baxter.
Connected with the above reading was his admiration for the books by Martyn Lloyd-Jones. He never met the one-time minister of Westminster Chapel, London, who died in 1981, but he came to quote him more than any other twentieth-century author.' His copy of Lloyd-Jones' Sermon on the Mount was bought in 1977 and was heavily marked. Some of the Welsh preacher's convictions, however, were his own before he ever read them in that source. He had, for instance, declined to share in Dr Billy Graham's crusades in Los Angeles on account of the latter's willingness to direct enquirers to non-evangelical
© The Masters Plan, pp. 151-2.
" Another twentieth-century 'Puritan' whom he came to quote at times was A. W. Pink. churches, including the Roman Catholic.' Also included in MacArthur's widening reading, at this period, were the biographies of such evangelicals as William Tyndale, Jonathan Edwards and Henry Martyn.
MacArthur has written of Fundamentalism moving apart in two directions after World War II: One wing, desperate for academic respectability, could not resist the pluralism of the modern age . . . Another wing of Fundamentalism moved in the opposite direction. They were keenly aware that an obsession with academic respectability had led their brethren to abandon the fundamentals. For that reason they distrusted scholarship or spurned it altogether. This right wing of the fundamentalist movement was relentlessly fragmented by militant separatism. Petty concerns often replaced serious doctrine as the matter for discussion and debate.'
But a still more significant development from Fundamentalism and Dispensationalism was in the direction where MacArthur himself was now to lead. That a breach was occurring ought to have been clear enough in 1980 when he published a small book on the Sermon on the Mount, significantly titled Kingdom
Living, Here and Now."°
8 Graham crusades were held on three occasion in Los Angeles and each time the use of Grace Community Church for connected purposes was requested. MacArthur valued Graham's gospel preaching, and said nothing publicly critical of the evangelist until the latter expressed his agreement with Robert Schuller in 1997.
Reckless Faith: When the Church Loses Its Will to Discern (Wheaton: Crossway, 1994), pp. 95-6.
10 Tn his Preface to the book, reprinted in 1998, he noted: "To declare Jesus' Sermon on the Mount irrelevant to this age is to cut the heart out of our Lord's instructions to His people.'
He would come to speak of B. B. Warfield as 'the great Reformed theologian', and take his side over against that of Chafer in the Princeton professor's review already quoted: If Chafer and those who were influenced by him had interacted seriously with Warfield on these issues, perhaps twentieth-century American evangelicalism might have been spared a lot of confusion and false teaching."!
The development from Fundamentalism that MacArthur came to represent, while retaining strengths that initially belonged to that movement, reconnected with the older Christianity of the Reformed tradition. What this would mean, the following years were to tell.
"' The Gospel According to the Apostles (Nashville: Word, 2000), p. 125 n.
The 1980s ii ohn MacArthur's ministry entered a major new phase in the late 1970s in a way that seemed accidental. While the tape ministry developed during the 1970s, the preacher had no plans to create a media organization. It was a letter that came to Grace Church one day 1n 1977 that was to change the situation. The writer, from Maryland on the other side of the States, expressed his thankfulness for a MacArthur sermon on Ephesians which had been broadcast by the radio station WRBS, Baltimore. The letter was a puzzle to the staff at Grace Church for they knew nothing of any such broadcast. An enquiry revealed that a listener to that station had simply offered a MacArthur cassette recording which had been put on air.
This unexpected indication of how the ministry could be multiplied on air led to Grace making a tentative beginning with one radio station for a daily thirty-minute broadcast of MacArthur sermons. Once again, it was the work of volunteers that made this possible. These broadcasts, under the title Grace to You, were soon to multiply. By 1981 they were being carried by more than one hundred stations across the United States, and were heard in at least eighty cities. Nor were the broadcasts to stop at the nation's boundaries. By 1983 they were heard in Puerto Rico, with other countries overseas soon to follow, such as Britain in 1988. Referring to the 'turning point' that radio brought to his ministry in 1978, John was later to comment: Preaching on Christian radio had generally been relegated to hour-long broadcasts usually heard at weekends. In the Lord's perfect timing, Grace to You hit the air waves at a time when believers across the country were starved of Bible teaching, and we helped pioneer a half-hour format for daily preaching and teaching that is now staple. Back in 1978, no one expected our radio experiment would eventually have eternal implications for God's people across the globe . . . Truly the opportunities we have today are greater than any era in the history of Christianity.
The radio preaching had two unforeseen repercussions. It led to an explosion of interest in the cassette-tape ministry. From the one hundred tapes prepared weekly in 1970, Word of Grace produced a million in the twelve-month period a year after the sermons went on air. Overseas centres for their duplication and distribution came into existence in India, Singapore, Hong
Kong, and the Philippines.
Further, the hearing of the spoken word fuelled a demand for written material by the preacher. In October 1979 MacArthur began to write a monthly personal letter to Grace to You supporters, and from the next year a four or six-page newsletter began to be sent out.! It was also in 1980 that a series of Bible Study Guides, in booklet form, was initiated. These were put together from his sermons by a new member of staff, Mike ' The personal letter has continued to the present date; the newsletter terminated in 1989.
The 1980s 81
Taylor, and were immediately in demand. The first issues in 1980-82 included such subjects as the 'Christian's Armour', the 'Holy Spirit, the 'Church', 'Heaven', and 'How to Study the Bible'. Ultimately there were to be 187 items in this series.?
MacArthur has always seen the gift of committed men, such as Taylor, to Grace Church as fundamental to the larger ministry.
It was at this point that another such man came to them who would exercise a still larger influence in the realm of literature.
Phil Johnson's name has already been mentioned several times in these pages. Born in 1953, he had joined the staff of Moody
Press as a manuscript editor after graduating from Moody Bible
Institute. When MacArthur was in Chicago, speaking at Moody
Bible Institute in 1977, Johnson heard him for the first time. He came to that meeting as a reluctant hearer and only the persistence of a friend had got him there. For one thing, the visiting preacher's name was unknown to him; and he had heard enough speakers already on 'Guidance'-—the subject on which the man from California was advertised to speak. It only took one hearing for Johnson's indifference to turn to admiration.
When Johnson moved on to be an assistant pastor in St Petersburg, Florida, his appreciation of MacArthur was to deepen.
Finding himself in a situation where evangelism was identified with 'easy-believism', with regard for a changed life as evidence of authentic conversion ignored, what he heard from MacArthur broadcasts from Tampa, Florida, was a lifeline.* He remembers: 2 The editing of the Study Guides was largely the work of Mike Taylor (1952-2009) who was hired for that purpose in 1982, and was to take a key role in the literature side of the work. He was still a staff member at the time of his death. A graduate of Michigan State University, he had come to California seeking work in the film industry before conversion turned his life in a new direction.
3 The radio station in Tampa was one of only three in the nation that carried
For almost every day I listened to Grace to You on the radio. I was hooked from day one, and especially appreciated John's stance on the Lordship controversy because that was an issue that had immediate practical ramifications in our church's ministry to young people, which was one of my responsibilities.
Contrary to the popular teaching, Johnson heard MacArthur insist that Christ cannot truly be received as Saviour, unless there is also submission to Him as Lord. The two men had not met personally in 1977, but when Johnson was invited to meet MacArthur he relished the opportunity. The invitation came from his former employers, Moody Press, who wanted to commit the Californian preacher to a long-term series of commentaries on the New Testament. The attention of the Press had been drawn to the way MacArthur was preaching through the Gospel of Matthew and the possibility of an extended series of volumes was seen. The editing of material delivered in the pulpit would require skilled help, and it was estimated the whole project would take a ten-year period. Johnson was, accordingly, one of the six potential editors whom the publisher brought together to meet with MacArthur in Chicago in August 1981.
After the meeting, Johnson recalls,
John, who is extremely cordial in settings like that, made it a point to speak to each editor individually. My first ever words to him were, 'I listen to Grace to You every day and love your teaching. And I think you need to write a book on the Lordship issue.' He instantly replied, 'I do plan to write a book on that subject! I even have a title in mind: The Gospel According to Jesus. What do you think?
Johnson was at this point considering returning to Moody as the Grace to You broadcast in 1979.