There are three things that are preeminent: the Bible, the Gospel, and the Christian Life. Anyone that is for these is for Christ and a friend. This is why MacArthur and [R.C.] Sproul had such a beneficial friendship. Not because they agreed about everything. Not even close. But because they agreed about those things everything else was something leftover to discuss.

With MacArthur, you’re going to see hundreds of posts and glowing reflections upon the man and his ministry by people that hated him during his life.

He was the most influential Baptist theologian of his century but very self consciously not a Southern Baptist (SBC). He was Reformed but not within any Reformed Church. He was a Dispensationalist but without many of the most egregious and divisive aspects carried through from the birth of the movement. Premillennial but not sensational, theonomic but not legalistic, moral but not a moralist, a Calvinist but not confessional.

As such, he made enemies in just about every group and denomination. But also good friends, among those that understand the true nature of being the church in our time and place.

There are three things that are preeminent: the Bible, the Gospel, and the Christian Life.

Anyone that is for these is for Christ and a friend. This is why MacArthur and Sproul had such a beneficial friendship. Not because they agreed about everything. Not even close. But because they agreed about those things everything else was something leftover to discuss.

Those that hate him because of his ethics, they do not have a historically Christian doctrine of the Christian Life. Their good and evil, their “love”, their obedience is not reconcilable with a Christian obedience so they burn with aggression toward what they will not tolerate: that the moral laws of God in the Bible are the rule of the Christian Life.

Those that hate him because of his Gospel will never accept that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone. Any other Gospel is in truth no Gospel at all. What the fallen churches, the world and the American professor of religion wants is a gospel of no clear definition and of vague inclusion. MacArthur would not include them in his estimation of a saving faith. This makes merely religious people angry especially in Christian churches.

The Bible, as the infallible and inerrant word of God, at first seems inoffensive to the church but after we exclude all religious groups that deny it outright, or deny it through fanciful redefinition, we are left with ministers that deny it through hermeneutical ingenuity. People that say that they hold to the Bible as the perfect, inspired word of God but then have interpretations and readings of obvious biblical teachings that are marvelously foreign to the text. These are no better than those that reject it outright. Practically, there is no difference.

And this is the heart of the matter, that those endorsing heresies, immorality, sin and compromise under the guise of grace and being “gospel centered” are forgers. False prophets, magi, soothsayers and religionists. They have no part in Christ and their blindness is the symptom of their unregenerate state. And he did not laugh with them, and eat with them, and pretend they stared a common faith. This was his greatest sin; an inability to pretend a peace.

So today, and tomorrow, they will shower him with praise and say what a good man he was, but if they did not claim his holiness in life they should not perform social niceties in his death.

He was a good man and fought the good fight, and God alone will judge the value and purity of his labors.

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