Pastor John MacArthur: The Pulpit Lion Who Will Keep Roaring
Jules Gomes pays tribute to the preacher who had a huge impact on his faith and ministry
I will forever be indebted and grateful to the two “Johns” who fostered in me a strong passion and a disciplined approach to biblical preaching.
One was the Reverend Dr. John Stott, an Anglican pastor in England who is celebrated as one of the greatest biblical expositors of the twentieth century. I was heartbroken when Uncle John, as we affectionately called him, died in 2011.
Uncle John’s book I Believe in Preaching revolutionized my pulpit ministry. It was on the top of my reading list for students when I taught homiletics at Protestant and Catholic seminaries. In the era of cassette tapes, my goal was to listen to every sermon Uncle John had preached.
I remember playing Uncle John’s sermon on tape as the climax of a homiletics course at a Catholic seminary in India. I will never forget the stunned response of the seminarians. “We’ve never heard preaching like this,” they told me. “Can you help us to preach like John Stott?”
But my students often acknowledged they weren’t really well acquainted with the Bible. “How do we get to know every book of the Bible?” they asked. My response was to recommend the other John — the American John — the Reverend Dr. John Fullerton MacArthur, Jr., who passed into glory yesterday at the age of 86.
MacArthur’s Ministry Goes Global
I was introduced to MacArthur’s voluminous output of sermons and books when I was a student at the Union Biblical Seminary in Pune, India. After graduating, I realized I still had a long way to go in exploring the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.
I was learning the ropes at my first assignment as chaplain to a university college in the town of Ahmednagar, India. On my small stipend, I couldn’t afford to buy expensive theological books. MacArthur came to my rescue.
I discovered that his ministry, Grace to You, had a planted a little center on a dusty road in a dingy room in Pune — a three-hour drive from Ahmednagar. I took a coach to the Grace to India center and found that MacArthur’s minstry had a lending library full of cassette tapes.
It was primitive: a cyclostyled catalogue of every single sermon he had preached. I could borrow six tapes at a time or have them mailed to me. The service was free. I had to pay a nominal sum for the postage. I spent hours, days, and months listening to his sermons.
Along with thousands of pastors, evangelists, and seminarians in India, I was being nourished by the Word of God and getting my blood to become “bibline” (to quote the “Prince of Preachers” Charles Spurgeon).
The Sacrament of Preaching
MacArthur never wasted a minute of his congregants’ time. Like an industrious squirrel, he burrowed straight into the biblical text. Preaching in season and out of season for 56 years he would “reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Timothy 4:2).
He was gripped by the rock-solid conviction that “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16).
As a pastor, I remember reaching out for his preaching commentaries (his ministry reprinted them in India and sold them at a hugely subsidized cost) and benefiting from the hours he had invested in crafting his memorable outlines and laying out valuable exegetical nuggets. When I preached a series on the seven churches of Revelation to different congregations, I always used his superbly alliterated seven-point outline, giving MacArthur full credit.
Steeped in the tradition of the Reformation, MacArthur saw preaching as sacramental. He knew that the first mark of the Church is the preaching of the Word. God created the world by His Word. God brings into being a New Creation through His Word. MacArthur didn’t need the speech-acts theory to tell him that God’s speech, especially in the pulpit, brings reality into being.
No wonder MacArthur was faithfully expounding Scripture from the same pulpit at Grace Community Church for over 45 minutes at a time, up to five times a week, clad in his suit and tie. He didn’t need gimmicks, smoke machines, strobe lights, or a band: he had the Bible.
Uncompromising to the End
Even The New York Times is paying a glowing tribute to this “theologically uncompromising pastor” who “influenced generations of evangelical preachers and became a culture warrior late in life.”
Nearly 40 years after first encountering MacArthur’s preaching, he returned as an inspiration after I relocated to Rome to work as a journalist. When COVID-19 hit and Pope Francis and bishops around the world shut churches and peddled vaccines and masks, MacArthur defied public health orders and began holding in-person services with hardly anyone masked up.
“We are convinced that governmental encroachment on basic human freedoms constitutes a more intimidating threat to individuals, a greater impediment to the work of the church, and a larger calamity for all of society than any pestilence or other natural disaster,” he declared.
Grace Church’s elders issued a statement, “Christ, Not Caesar, Is Head of the Church.” The statement, subtitled “A Biblical Case for the Church’s Duty to Remain Open,” gives a biblical rationale for why the Church must gather.
We, the pastors and elders of Grace Community Church, respectfully inform our civic leaders that they have exceeded their legitimate jurisdiction, and faithfulness to Christ prohibits us from observing the restrictions they want to impose on our corporate worship services. … We cannot accept and will not bow to the intrusive restrictions government officials now want to impose on our congregation.
MacArthur’s courage gave the cutting edge to his pulpit ministry. For his first sermon at Grace Community Church in February 1969, the 29-year-old preached a sermon on Jesus warning His disciples that not everyone who utters His name will enter God’s Kingdom. Most American churchgoers, MacArthur told his new congregation, were likewise “dead spiritually.”
Unlike some celebrity evangelical preachers, he took a firm stand against abortion, stating: “God’s Word is not silent when it comes to the vile sin of murdering children in the womb.” But he also offered the Gospel as the “only solution” to “the guilt and shame suffered by many who participate in it.”
“Christ who died and rose again so that repentant liars and thieves and drunkards and adulterers and homosexuals and yes, even murderers, could receive forgiveness and peace with God,” he preached.
Offending All to Save Some
On Ben Shapiro’s show, MacArthur boldly stated: “I offend people all the time because that’s necessary. If you try to develop a kind of Christianity that’s inoffensive, that’s not Christianity, it’s not the Gospel.
“That is my initial goal,” he added. “To tell you that you are without God in the world, that there’s only one Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, that you’re in sin, that sin brings death and punishment, but the good news is that Jesus Christ is the Savior who has provided a way for you to be forgiven by buying your sins with His body on the tree.”
If the Gospel is true (and, of course, it is), Uncle John and Pastor John are having a whale of a time in Heaven right now discussing expository preaching and how they spent their entire lives assuring souls that “there is, therefore, now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” because “those God predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified” (Romans 8:1, 30).
The book of Amos begins with a description of Yahweh as a roaring lion. It climaxes with the prophet echoing the lion’s roar: “The lion has roared; who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken; who can but prophesy?” MacArthur knew his God as the roaring lion of Judah. His ministry was to echo the lion’s roar. He is no more with us, but faithful preachers following in his footsteps will continue to sound the roar of God’s Word.
Dr. Jules Gomes (BA, BD, MTh, PhD) has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.