The Long Struggle to Preserve the Gospel (pt. 2)

"A previous blog post by Dr. MacArthur focused on some of the past few decades of conflicts within the evangelical movement that have provoked me to preach and write in defense of the gospel. It wasn’t an exhaustive list—that would be tedious, I suspect. Evangelicals as a group have shown an unsettling willingness to compromise or unnecessarily obfuscate all kinds of issues where Scripture has spoken plainly and without ambiguity.

For example, despite the clarity of 1 Timothy 2:12 (“I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man”), leading evangelicals have been debating for several years whether women qualify to be elders or pastors in the church. Many capitulate to cultural preference rather than submitting to biblical authority on this and other similar issues. Some have tried to redefine the role and proper functioning of the family. Others seem to want to deconstruct—or simply ignore—what the Bible says about divorce and remarriage.

More disturbing yet, over the past few years some evangelicals have begun to borrow moral rationalizations from secular culture in the wake of America’s sexual revolution. For years there has been a slow but steady softening of evangelicals’ stance against sex outside of marriage. More recently, and more ominously, several vocal evangelicals (including some in positions of leadership or influence) have been tinkering with novel ideas regarding gender fluidity, sexual orientation, transgenderism, and homosexual marriage. Those are issues that generations of believers would never have dreamed of putting on the table for debate or redefinition in the church. But at this very moment there is a burgeoning campaign to reconsider and abandon the church’s historic stance on LGBT issues under the banner of “social justice.”

Why have so many evangelicals openly embraced such compromises? The answer is very simple. It’s the next logical step for a church that is completely ensnared in efforts to please the culture. For decades the popular notion has been that if the church was going to reach the culture it first needed to connect with the style and methods of secular pop culture or academic fads. To that end, the church surrendered its historic forms of worship. In many cases, everything that once constituted a traditional worship service disappeared altogether, giving way to rock-concert formats and everything else the church could borrow from the entertainment industry. Craving acceptance in the broader culture, the church carelessly copied the world’s style preferences and fleeting fads.

The Long Struggle to Preserve the Gospel (Part 1)

"From the earliest days of the apostolic era, faithful Christians have been called upon to contend earnestly for the truth of the gospel. The hardest battles have taken place within the visible church, among those who claim fidelity to Christ. That’s because the greatest threats to gospel truth have not come from atheists and other overt adversaries, but always from influential voices that arise within the church who speak twisted things (Acts 20:30). The evidence that this was happening in the very earliest era of the New Testament church is seen not only in Paul’s parting words to the Ephesian elders, but also in his admonitions to Timothy and Titus, and in Christ’s letters to the churches in Revelation 2-3.

When I was studying doctrine and apologetics in seminary, I thought I was equipping myself to defend biblical truth against an onslaught of attacks from the world. I envisioned answering atheism and confronting threats to the gospel that would arise out of secular culture, the entertainment industry, the academic world, and other places outside the church.

Sometime after I entered full-time ministry, it dawned on me (to my profound shock) that the greatest threats to biblical truth typically arise from within the fellowship of professing believers—and it is a relentless parade of attacks. Looking back through church history, I realized that’s how it has always been. There has never been a time when false doctrines, harmful methodologies, unwholesome practices, bizarre beliefs, poisonous ideologies, and false teachers weren’t troubling the church of God—often with seriously divisive and otherwise spiritually destructive results.

In retrospect, it should not have been a surprise to me that the worst troubles come from within. I was born into a pastor’s home. My father was the son of a pastor. Both were part of the historic denominational landscape of planet church. They were in the American Baptist Church (ABC) denomination.

By the time I was a teenager, my grandfather was in heaven, having served as a pastor until the day he saw the face of Christ. My dad left the faltering, compromising ABC to plant an independent church in a building sold by a failing Lutheran congregation.

My father took his stand in the liberal-fundamentalist conflict. The issue then was the inspiration and authority of Scripture. My dad was bold and relentless, always with grace, to defend the Bible as inspired by God in total. He was cut off from lifelong friends who stayed in the ABC, but he was never divided in his loyalty to the true doctrine of Scripture. He encouraged me as a teenager, as a college student, and as a seminary student to learn and acquire all the doctrinal and evidentiary proofs necessary to defend the Word of God against the modernist and liberal attacks.

Will the REAL Mary Please Stand Up? (pt. 1)

Catholic's "venerate" Mary above all "saints."

With their being over 1 billion Catholics worldwide evangelicals cannot speak of Mary without qualifying what “Mary” they are talking about.  Hence our current series, "Will the REAL Mary Please Stand Up?"

During this series we will ask and answer the following questions:  Is it appropriate to "venerate" and to "sing and pray" to Mary?  Is it unbiblical to refer to her as “OUR mother?”  “The second Eve?”  “The new Ark of God?”  “The dispenser of all graces?”  “Our intercessor?”  “The Holy Queen of heaven?”  "The comforter of the afflicted?” & as “our Co-Redemptrix?

I recently read Catholic apologist Scott Hahn's book, "Hail, Holy Queen:  The Mother of God in the Word of God."  All of these titles are found throughout Roman Catholic literature.  Should evangelicals "devote themselves" to Mary as Pope John Paul II did?  

We also need answers to these questions:  Was Mary SINLESS  Did she remain a virgin (AFTER the birth of Christ)?  Was Mary taken up to heaven like Enoch, Elijah, and Elisha were? Most importantly, can you defend your position from Scripture?  Do your doctrinal convictions rest in the authority of God’s Word alone; OR are they deeply rooted in tradition and in the decrees and pronouncements of men?

Should Protestants distance themselves from the biblical Mary?  If not, how would God have us view her today?

Undermining the Legacy of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement

My wife and I were finally able to view the film SELMA. Overall, it was a very moving movie with a great cast.  As I watched the film I thought to myself, "Self, I hope you would have had the courage to join/support the peaceful march from Selma to Montgomery had you been alive and pastoring in 1965."  By the grace of God I believe I would have.

 

In this vein, my former pastor John MacArthur, was personal friends with John Perkins.  Perkins was one of the original Civil Rights leaders from the 1960's (Mr. Perkin's brother was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan).  Because of these associations MacArthur was refused meals at "white restaurants" while visiting the deep South.  In fact, John MacArthur was preaching the gospel in Jackson, Mississippi when Dr. King was shot and tragically killed in 1968.  MacArthur and some of his ministry friends drove through the night to Memphis and witnessed the MLK crime scene with their own eyes.  According to historian Iain H. Murray, "The experiences in Mississippi confirmed the truth to John that he already knew: the gospel alone could abolish the racial division, and he saw something of its power in the numbers of young people who were converted; some of them were to train for full-time Christian service;" but now I digress.

 

Back to Selma.  The only thing I did not appreciate in Selma was the theme song that was played near the end of the movie. The music to "Glory" was absolutely beautiful but some of the lyrics were fundamentally flawed.  In my opinion, one of the best ways to undermine the heroic work of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is to connect his Civil Rights legacy with the recent (violent) protests in Ferguson (and Baltimore).   Unlike so many martyrs in the original Civil Rights Movement Michael Brown was not killed because he refused to sit in the back of a bus, nor was he targeted simply because he was black.   Mr. Brown had just robbed a store and had roughed up a fellow minority in the process.  Brown fled the crime scene and was eventually shot and killed by a law enforcement officer (note carefully Romans 13:1-7).  According to news reports Brown was facing other criminal charges as well.   If true, this was not Mr. Brown's first felony arrest.  More importantly, even though the "hands up, don't shoot" narrative was disputed by several witnesses, it remains a dominant mantra among many activists today.  MLK reminded us, (quoting Jesus), that it is the truth that sets men free.