John MacArthur on being a good listener: wait for the final words

Yesterday’s post closed my Forbidden Bible Series for the New Testament by discussing the last few verses of Paul’s letter to Titus.

In John MacArthur’s 1993 sermon which expands on those verses, ‘The Last Word on Relationships’, he shares what he has learned over decades in the ministry on being a good listener (emphases mine):

… we have Paul’s few closing comments. And really, you know what it is? It’s the last word on relationships. If I could title the message, that’s what I would title it…the last word on relationships. Paul is going to say his final comments with regard to the important relationships in the life of the church that lead to effective testimony.

Now I’ve learned a few things just by hanging around long enough to get old or older. I’ve learned some things by listening to people and kind of walking through life and being a part of the ups and downs of their life. And one of the things that I’ve learned in my years of many, many conversations that the Lord has allowed me to be involved in is usually when you’re having a conversation with someone and they come to you and approach you and have something to share with you that’s really on their heart, they will filter through some important things but generally speaking the last thing is of greatest concern. So now you know if you come to have a conversation with me I’ll be listening intently for the last thing you say. I have learned that much of what comes first is sort of setting you up for the kill which whatever is going to be comes last in the conversation. And it’s not a bad ploy, I think it’s one that we find even used often in Scripture by the writers of Scripture. Certainly Paul has done that. He frequently starts off with some ingratiating amenities and then comes to the main point.

If I may, I would like to suggest to you that you will learn to be a good listener when you learn that lesson because it will keep you tuned in to the end. Sometimes people take a long time getting to the end and maybe listening becomes more difficult as the conversation lengthens but it’s important for you to hang in there because until they get to the end you probably haven’t heard what’s most important.

What an amazing insight.

Many of us are likely to tune out before the final statements in a conversation.

Perhaps it is serendipitous that I found this sermon in the run-up to Christmas, the time of year when people in the developed world have the most conversations at various gatherings of family, friends and colleagues. See if MacArthur’s advice makes a difference. I certainly will.

John MacArthur on the importance of expository preaching

In my study of Titus 1:5-9 (see parts 1 and 2), I used one of John MacArthur’s sermons from 1992, ‘The Qualifications for a Pastor, Part 3: Teaching Skill’.

He discusses the importance of expository preaching and the divine call of a pastor (emphases mine):

The call is to come alongside the flock, give them spiritual strength by bringing healthy divine teaching to them.

It’s a serious thing. And anybody who steps into the pulpit or anybody who steps into ministry as an elder or a pastor and doesn’t teach sound doctrine is in some serious trouble.  That’s why James said, “Stop being so many teachers, theirs is a greater condemnation” (James 3:1).  You better not teach unless you’re willing to make sure you work hard enough to teach sound doctrine because if you take the role of a teacher and you don’t teach the truth, you’re in deep trouble with God.  Hebrews 13:17 says you’re going to give an account to God for some day for what you’ve taught your people and what you’ve done as your shepherd.  Very serious.  You go back and read in the prophet Jeremiah and read how God treated those shepherds who didn’t speak the truth. 

They died:

This is a severe rebuke and a fearful judgment.

MacArthur continues:

And I’ll tell you right now, no reasonable man would choose this task, and I’m a reasonable man.  No reasonable man would choose this task.  And secondly, no reasonable, rational man, having been called to it, would underestimate the seriousness of God about the truth that must be taught and come flippantly to a pulpit to teach whatever whimsically he had decided to say.

Here is a call for biblical, theological, God-centered preaching and teaching that exposits the Scripture.  There isn’t anything else.  There isn’t anything else to do.  And if you believe in an inspired Bible and an inerrant Bible and every word is written by God, then you know exactly what you are to preach and teach – the Word of God.  Ezra had it right.  This isn’t anything new. You can go all the way back to Ezra, chapter 7 – listen to this – verse 10.  “Ezra had set his heart to study the law of the Lord and to practice it, and to teach it.”  This isn’t anything new; he knew what he was supposed to do.  You study the law of the Lord, you practice it in your own life, and then you teach it.  That’s not that difficult, is it?  And there isn’t any new approach to be quote/unquote “more relevant.”  There isn’t anything better than Scripture.  There are only things that are woefully inferior to Scripture.  And what was it that so commends to us Apollos, according to Acts 18:24?  “He was mighty in the Scriptures.”  “He was mighty in the Scriptures.”  The ultimate commendation of the preacher, “he was mighty in the Scriptures.”  What else?  What else?

Go back, just look over a page to 2 Timothy 4:2, and let me take you back to that verse, just to remind you of what its importance is.  “Preach the word,” he says.  Now right there you have the subject of the preacher’s commission.  “Preach the word.”  I mean, how hard is that?  How difficult is that to figure out?  “Preach the word.”  Preaching God’s Word is the mandate.  We are to retain the sound Word; we are to accurately handle the sound Word, rightly dividing it; we are to guard the sound Word; and now we are to proclaim or preach the Word.

Colossians 1:25, Paul wrote very simply, “Of this church I was made a minister” – Why? – “according to the stewardship from God bestowed on me for your benefit.”  I was given a duty from God.  What was it?  “That I might fully carry out the preaching of the word of God.”  That’s it.

People have asked me through the years, “Why is it that you exposit the Bible. That’s all you do?”  And my answer is, “Because that’s what I’ve been told to do, to fully preach the Word of God.  What else is there to do?”  And I am also told that I am a minister of the New Covenant, and the New Covenant is the New Testament and that’s the emphasis. And that the Old Testament is given to us as examples. And so we preach the New Testament, the New Covenant, using the Old Testament as exemplary material to enrich the New and fulfill the mandate God has given us.  That’s why we talk about expository preaching.  That simply means we tell you what the Bible means. That’s what God intended.  God wrote the Scripture.  He wrote it because He wanted to communicate His truth.  He put His truth in here exactly the way He wanted it to be communicated.  My job is to communicate it to you the way He intended it to be communicated.  That’s my task.  Expository preaching is expressing exactly the will of God as He wanted it said, taking the thoughts of the Holy Spirit and bringing them to you.

The second thing you see here is not only the subject of our preaching, which is the Word, but the scope of it.  “Be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with great patience and instruction.”  What does that mean?  Well, we’re ready to preach it all the time, whether it’s seasonable or unseasonable.  That’s what that means.  It simply means whether the people want to hear it or don’t want to hear it, whether it’s popular or not popular.

I told you some weeks back, I can remember a few years ago when what we do, Bible exposition, was very, very popular.  Back in the ’70s and even the early ’80s.  I mean, what we were doing was the great new wave in the church; there was a tremendous interest in Bible exposition. And it was, it was running every place and people were saying, “How do you do this?”  And, “We want to learn how to do this.”  And it was popular.  And I was popular, sort of carried along in this wave.  And then, all of a sudden, the whole thing changed, and now Bible exposition is not popular, in general. It’s not popular; it’s not what people want; it’s not what’s the new thing.

The new thing is to be relevant.  The new thing is to be user friendly.  And the Scripture is not user friendly.  The new thing is to entertain people and make them feel comfortable and don’t offend them.  And the new thing is to sort of win people over with your cleverness and make them feel loved and accepted, no matter how they live.  The Bible doesn’t do that.

So the Bible as far as Bible exposition goes is not popular.  And with the decline in the popularity of the Scripture has come a decline in my popularity as well.  And that’s all right because we do this “in season and out of season.”  The seasons come and the seasons go, and the trends come and the trends go, and the mood of the mob shifts and changes, but what we do is never any different – “in season and out of season.”  We expose sin; we have to.  We have to reprove and rebuke and we do it patiently and with instruction.

And then he gives in verses 3 and 4 the urgency of all of this.  “The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine,” and we’re in that time right now.  They just want “their ears tickled.” They want to feel good.  They want to “accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires.” They want to hear what they want to hear.  And they want to “turn their ears away from the truth” and listen to the myths that sound so good.  And the church, instead of recognizing this and staying faithful to the Word, is saying, “If that’s what they want, we’ll give it to them.”  What a prostitution!  What a compromise!  Of course sinners are intolerant of uncomfortable truth – that’s to be expected.  I mean, I suppose it’s safe to say that the preacher who brings the message people most need to hear will usually be the preacher they least like to hear.

Psychiatrist and Christian writer John White has penned some compelling words that need to be heard.  He writes, “Until about 15 years ago psychology was seen by most Christians as hostile to the gospel.  Let someone who professes the name of Jesus baptize secular psychology and present it as something compatible with Scripture truth and most Christians are happy to swallow theological hemlock in the form of psychological insights.  Over the past 15 years there has been a tendency for churches to place increasing reliance on trained pastoral counsellors.  To me it seems to suggest weakness or indifference to expository preaching within evangelical churches.  Why do we have to turn to the human sciences at all?  Why?  Because for years we have failed to expound the whole of Scripture, because from our weakened exposition and our superficial topical talks we have produced a generation of Christian sheep having no shepherd.  And now we’re damning ourselves more deeply than ever by a recourse to the wisdom of the world.  What I do as a psychiatrist and what my psychologist colleagues do in their research or their counseling is of infinitely less value to distressed Christians then what God says in His Word.  But pastoral shepherds, like the sheep they guide, are following – if I may change my metaphor for a moment – a new Pied Piper of Hamlin who is leading them into the dark caves of humanistic hedonism.  A few of us who are deeply involved in the human sciences feel like voices crying in a godless wilderness of humanism, while the churches turn to humanistic psychology as a substitute for the gospel of God’s grace,” end quote.

That’s sad.  The failure to preach expositionally – theologically – is either a failure to understand the obvious implications of an inerrant Scripture written by a holy God, or is indifference to those implications.  It is either ignorance or outright rebellion not to preach the Word of God.  And it’s hard to imagine that any pastor or elder could claim ignorance.  It must be indifference.  Oh no, it could be something else – pride.  The unacceptable assumption that what I have to say is better suited to men’s minds than what God has to say.  God gave His Word to His people; He expected it to be communicated.

So, those who are going to be elders or pastors in the church must champion the faithful Word, they must exhort with it.  John Stott understands the difficulty of that when he writes this: “Expository preaching is a most exacting discipline.  Perhaps that’s why it’s so rare.  Only those will undertake it who are prepared to follow the example of the Apostles and say it is not right that we should give up preaching the Word of God to serve tables, we will devote ourselves to prayer and the ministry of the Word.  The systematic preaching of the Word is impossible without the systematic study of it.  It will not be enough to skim through a few verses in daily Bible reading, nor to study a passage only when we have to preach from it.  We must daily soak ourselves in the Scriptures.  We must not just study as through a microscope the linguistic minutiae of a few verses, but take our telescope and scan the whole expanse of God’s Word, assimilating its grand theme of divine sovereignty in the redemption of mankind.”

“It is blessed,” wrote C.H. Spurgeon, “to eat into the very soul of the Bible until at last you come to talk in scriptural language and your spirit is flavored with the words of the Lord.” That’s what we’re talking about.

In another sermon which I do not have to hand, John MacArthur says that expounding on only certain verses and not others is like reading only part of a letter, asking who would do such a thing.

Expository preaching is the only preaching. Would that pastors did away with the psychology, the poems, the novels, the films and give us the unvarnished truth — saving truth — verse by verse.

John MacArthur on principles versus values in Titus 1:1-4

My Forbidden Bible Verses post yesterday was an exegesis on Titus 1:1-4.

John MacArthur preached four sermons on those four verses in 1992.

The 1990s were a time when the word ‘values’ became part of Western consciousness.

In his sermon ‘Commitments of a Powerful Leader, Part 2’, MacArthur discusses the difference between values and principles. Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

St Paul would have had little appreciation for ‘values’:

… in this opening, in this salutation, the apostle Paul is presenting elements of his apostleship.  He’s dealing with features of his own life and ministry.  And basically what he does is give us principles that control his ministry.  This opening salutation then provides some excellent material for us to comprehend what made Paul so effective.  There were some principles in his life by which he operated.  In fact, I think it’s fairly safe to say he was a man who functioned completely on principle.

And you might say, “Well, what do we mean by principle?”  Well, basically principle is truth that doesn’t change.  There were some unchanging, non-shifting, unvarying, foundational truths that he built his life on.  He was not an individual who moved on his own whim or his own emotions or his own passion or the latest trend.  Principles, you see, are not subjective, they are objective. They are not internal, they are external.  Today you hear a lot of talk about values.  “Values” sounds good. We talk about moral values, family values, personal values, Judeo-Christian values or whatever, but generally values carries the connotation of “I value some things and I don’t value other things,” and “whatever I feel is valuable that’s what I commit myself to.”  And they can be somewhat subjective and somewhat internal.  Principles are not subjective; they are objective and they are external; they are outside the individual; they are fixed.

Paul never functioned on whim.  He never functioned on his own passion or his own emotion.  His whole life and ministry was built around a core of principles – absolutes that never changed, divine principles at that.  That’s what made him effective. That’s what made him useful.  It’s what made him fruitful in his service to God.  These principles were the core of his life.

And just thinking about that a little bit – if you operate on principle, if principle is at the core of your life, you always, you always have a fixed starting point.  Paul had that.  He never groped around to try to figure out what to do, how to do it.  He always knew because there was this core of principles in his life.

MacArthur explains why we should operate on principles rather than values:

We need to operate off principle.  Let me tell you what principle affects.  It affects four things primarily in your life.  If you can imagine a sort of a little diagram, the center of your life is a core of principles and some arrows are going out – you could draw four of them.  And the way those principles affect your life comes in a fourfold manner.

One is confidence.  When you live by principle you live in confidence, you function with confidence.  There’s a certain security in what you do because you know it is built on something which is fixed.  You know what is true and you’re clear about what is true and you’ve committed yourself to what is true, and so you act confidently in response to the truth.  Confident people, like the apostle Paul, are confident no matter what happens. It doesn’t matter to them whether the result is good, bad, or indifferent; whether people love him or hate him; whether there is affirmation or hostility.  He does what he does with complete confidence because he’s operating off of a principle that God has planted in his heart. So he has the assurance to act.  There’s no hesitation; there’s no equivocation. He moves, he moves rapidly with confidence.

The second thing that comes out of a principled life is purpose.  You know what you’re all about.  You’re not only ready to act, you know what to do.  You know how to act.  The direction is laid down for you.  You know exactly what is expected of you, so you know what to do and you do it.

There’s a third little thing that kind of shoots out of this core of principle and that is wisdom, wisdom.  When you know principle and you act on principle, you discern and you have judgment, and you know how things are to be done.  You know enough to do something. You know what to do and you know how to do it because you have the principles that lay all of that out.

And I would think that the fourth thing is power, power.  When you operate on divine principle you have power, you move with strength, you have the energy to act because you’re acting in accord with divine principle – you have divine power, divine wisdom and divine discernment, divine direction.  The motivation of your heart is clear, and so you have divine confidence.

That was Paul.  Paul was a man of confidence.  Paul could say, “It doesn’t matter to me what you say, I know what I have to do.  It doesn’t matter what’s going to happen to me, I know what I have to do.  It doesn’t matter that I lose my life, I will move ahead because I know what the principles are and I will act on them.”

It was Paul who had such purpose in his life that he could set his face like flint in some direction and move there, and as we learn in the book of Acts, only the Holy Spirit by some miraculous means could stop him and redirect him.  And he was a man of amazing wisdom.  He applied that wisdom in a myriad of situations, and he certainly was a man of supernatural power.  All of that really flows out of the principled core of his life.  He had taken divine principles, he had acted upon them so frequently that they had become the very core of his behavior.  And those principles, I think, that controlled his ministry are revealed in this text.  Here’s the heart, here’s the core of this man that made him confident, wise, purposeful and powerful.

MacArthur looks at Paul’s greeting to Titus and contrasts it with what we see today in job applications:

Let me read you these four verses again.  “Paul, a bond-servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the faith of those chosen of God and the knowledge of the truth which is according to godliness, in the hope of eternal life which God who cannot lie promised long ages ago but at the proper time manifested, even His Word in the proclamation with which I was entrusted according to the commandment of God our Savior, to Titus my true child in a common faith: Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior.”

… He introduces himself as Paul, and then he doesn’t give a whole lot of credentials.  I just picked up some mail on my desk and in it were two job descriptions, two sort of curriculum vitae, they call them CVs, two – I don’t mean job descriptions – two job applications, people looking for ministry and giving page after page after page after page of their credentials and their accomplishments and their achievements and all of that. And I wasn’t able to receive it with the right frame of mind, having been prepared to preach on Paul who introduces himself as Paul, period – end of discussion, without credentials.

The only credentials he offers to us are that he is “a bond-servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ.”  That’s it.  And what you see there is his commitment to God’s mastery over his life.  “Bond-servant” is doulos.  It means “slave” and it carries all the connotations of slavery with it.  The word “apostle,” apostolos, is not a dignified, elevated term; it simply means “a messenger,” and a messenger was very often the function – messengering was very often the function of a slave.  He says, “I am under God’s mastery and my particular, specific task is to take a message that Jesus Christ wants me to take.  I am a messenger.  I am a slave who is delivering a message.”  His whole life was one of submission and yieldedness and slavery and servanthood.  He was committed to that.

Consequently, he didn’t do things that could achieve his own goals and his own ends and his own exaltation that could fulfill his own will and his own plans and could lead him to achievements which would some way aggrandize his own life.  He was committed to God’s mastery.  That principle in the core of his life affected everything …

Paul’s mission is very clear.  He was to bring the elect to saving faith by the gospel.  He was to bring the saved to sanctification by teaching them the full knowledge of God through sound doctrine that would lead them to holiness of life.  And he was to make crystal clear in their minds the reality of eternal life – that great and glorious hope that motivates toward purity and motivates toward service and galvanizes them through all the sufferings and struggles of life because they anticipate the eternal, heavenly glory. There is the sum of all his ministry, and all my ministry, and all your ministry packed in those simple and straightforward words.  He was committed to God’s mission, which was clear in his mind – evangelism, edification, encouragement.

MacArthur says that Paul has a lesson for all of us in these verses:

The man functioned from principle.  The driving principles at the core of his life, very clear – committed to God’s mastery, God’s mission, God’s message – revealed in Scripture. And it was because of those principles that this man operated the way he did –  confidently, purposefully, wisely, and powerfully.  And it really is the way we need to operate.  Certainly those are the things that should be true of my life and yours.  You’re to be under God’s mastery; you’re to be evangelizing, edifying, and encouraging at whatever level God has allowed you to have influence. And you’re certainly, you’re certainly to be one who proclaims and articulates the Word of God.  Live your life according to those commitments and you’ll be effective and useful and fruitful.

As my reader Rob wrote in response to Titus 1:1-4:

These are the things for which we should passionately yearn to hear each Lord’s Day, to remember through the week, and anticipate as we near the next day of divine services.

I could not agree more with Rob and John MacArthur.

Enough of subjective values. May the Lord return us to the principles of His eternal truth.

John MacArthur on personal treasure, the heart — and counselling

In His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said (Matthew 6:21):

²¹ For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

So many Westerners have been troubled, particularly since the pandemic and its lockdowns, that we have a near emergency with regard to mental health in people of all ages.

Of course, these days, therapy and counselling are seen to be the obvious and only solutions.

However, as with so many things in life, we can help ourselves a bit first.

As my regular readers know, I enjoy scriptural serendipity, by which I mean running across similar Bible verses and commentaries within 24 hours.

On Saturday, June 3, I posted my exegesis on the Gospel for Trinity Sunday (Year A), Matthew 28:16-20. While that post has to do with the Great Commission, John MacArthur encourages people to explore their hearts when they say they cannot afford to give to their church.

In his 1985 sermon on the subject, ‘The Making Disciples of All Nations, Part 1’, he cites a personal friend of his, Sam Erickson, who often receives requests for counselling. Let’s see how he handles those requests, beginning with MacArthur’s introduction about financing churches and missionaries (emphases mine):

I mean, there are people who will spend thousands of dollars to travel halfway around the world to shop, and wouldn’t spend half that much to send around the world to reach somebody with the gospel …

… We are crippled by the indulgent mentality of a self-centered society into which most Christians have bought. And instead of thinking, “How can I sell my house and get a smaller one, take my equity, and invest it in the winning of souls?” we’re thinking, “How can I get more money in my house, and get a bigger one?” I mean, that’s just so basic. But it’s frightening. Sam Erickson suggested to me that maybe the Lord hasn’t given us more money is because we’re such poor stewards of what He’s given us already.

I mean, where – where are we really setting the priorities? Sam was sharing with me that he has a technique that he always uses when people want counseling. He says people will call him and say, “Well, I have a spiritual problem, I have a burden; I want to talk to you” – he’s an elder in his church, chairman of the elders. And he says, “I always tell them the same thing. ‘I’ll be happy to talk with you. Bring your checkbook.’” And people will say, “My checkbook?” “Yes, your checkbook. I want to go over your checkbook with you first, before we talk about anything else.”

Well, the standard answer is, “Why do you want to do that?” And his answer is, “I want to see where your heart is, because Jesus said, ‘Where your treasure is, that’s where your heart is.’” I don’t think he does a lot of counseling. Where’s your heart? You want to know where your heart is? Look at your checkbook, look around your house. People think that they need to store up all their money for the future, they need to lay it all away, you know, build up all their assets, make all their investments, hoard all they possibly can, with the goal in mind of security in the future.

That is Satan’s lie to this generation of Christians. Now, I’m not saying you should be foolish. What I am saying is, there’s a world to be won for Christ, and who cares how comfortable it is for us? Misplaced priorities. Now, after you’re done checking through your checkbook, check through your calendar, and find out where you’re spending your time, and what occupies your mind.

These days, few people write cheques.

Therefore, those seeking therapy or counselling should first look at their credit card statements, their bank statements, the websites and apps they frequent — in addition to their calendars, as suggested above.

Sam Erickson showed up indirectly in another MacArthur sermon, one from 1987 — ‘The Danger in Loving Money’ — that I used to write my June 4 exegesis on 1 Timothy 6:6-10, which is about seeking godliness with contentment and ends with a warning about the love of money being the root of all kinds of evils:

In terms of what the Bible has to say about this matter of loving money, the Scripture is replete with injunctions against loving money of one kind or another. Perhaps the most telling statement in all of Scripture related to money are the words of our Lord, “Where your treasure is there shall your heart be also.” To put that into common language, show me where your money is and I’ll show you where your affections lie. To make it even more mundane, go through your checkbook and find out what you really care about. Your spiritual life can be measured probably better by what you do with your money than any other single thing. Experts tell us that the average person thinks about money 50 percent of his or her waking time. Amazing isn’t it? How to get it, how to keep it, how to save it, how to spend it, how to find it, whatever it might be, we’re tremendously occupied with the matter of money.

Jesus, in saying where your treasure is there your heart is also, tells us that what we do with our money is the measure of our hearts.

There was for centuries a well known saying, one I have not heard in a long time:

You are what you read.

Those seeking counselling should also examine their reading matter, because that will play a part in what dominates their thoughts. Similarly, online videos, boxed sets and popular films.

Many things in this world can trouble our minds and souls. Let us look for the roots of the problem and try to eradicate those first.

Although I am not a qualified counsellor and admit that some people do need some sort of professional therapy, in many cases, we can take those first steps ourselves by eliminating harmful influences from our lives.

If therapy is the only answer, it might result in fewer sessions because, by being honest with ourselves in the first instance, we will be able to present a clearer picture to the professional we pay for help.

Sometimes the simplest solution is the best, especially when money is tight.

John MacArthur on why John’s Gospel refers to Christ as the Word

In his sermon on the first five verses of John 17, John MacArthur explains why the Gospel writer referred to Jesus Christ as the Word.

Excerpts from his 2015 sermon, ‘The Lord’s Greatest Prayer, Part 2’, follow, emphases mine.

As a point of reference, here are the first five verses of John 1 and verse 14:

The Word became flesh

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was with God in the beginning. ³ Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴ In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome^[a] it.

¹⁴ The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Here are the first five verses of John 17, our Lord’s prayer — the only one we have — in the Garden of Gethsemane for Himself, for His disciples and for believers to come. These verses comprise the prayer for Himself:

Jesus prays to be glorified

17 After Jesus said this, he looked towards heaven and prayed:

‘Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. ² For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. ³ Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. ⁴ I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. ⁵ And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.

MacArthur addresses John’s Gospel, the objective of which is to show our Lord’s deity:

He is the head over all things. The Father literally gave to the Son all authority.

John has told us in chapter 5 that He has authority to judge. He has authority to judge, and He has authority to condemn, and He has authority to exalt. He will catapult the ungodly into eternal punishment, and He will exalt those who belong to Him into the heaven of heavens, and He will provide by His power resurrection bodies for both. He is the One who gives life …

Now we know that that authority that belonged to Him – that sovereign authority over all things, over the entire universe, and particularly over living things, including even spirit beings – that authority was set aside in His incarnation. And He literally came down; humbled Himself as a man, as a servant; became like a slave. He was basically mistreated by the contemporary Jewish authorities of His time. He was executed by the Roman authorities of His time. And He is the One who has authority over all creation, over all humanity, over all that exists, over all that lives. Authority belongs to Him. Authority belongs to Him for a very important reason, and that reason is stated for us back in John 1. Let’s go back to John 1.

That authority belongs to Him because of a statement in verse 4: “In Him was life.” “In Him was life.” That is the foundational identification of God. This is the foundational truth of Christianity. God, the eternal God, is the One who has given life to everything that exists. He didn’t receive life; in Him was life.

Before going into MacArthur’s discussion of Christ as the Word, a relevant passage in Acts 17 — Paul’s brief trip to Athens — tells us that the Greeks worshipped an unknown god, thought to have been the god of creation. As creation is an enduring mystery, this god had no physical attributes but was the greatest of them all:

²² Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: ‘People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. ²³ For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship – and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.

²⁴ ‘The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. ²⁵ And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. ²⁶ From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. ²⁷ God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ²⁸ “For in him we live and move and have our being.”^[b] As some of your own poets have said, “We are his offspring.”^[c]

²⁹ ‘Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone – an image made by human design and skill. ³⁰ In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. ³¹ For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.’

³² When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, ‘We want to hear you again on this subject.’ ³³ At that, Paul left the Council. ³⁴ Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.

MacArthur tells us more about the ‘Word’ and the Greek ‘logos’, which means ‘word, reason or plan’:

“The Word,” meaning Christ, “was with God” in the beginning – “was God,” as evidenced by the fact that He has made everything that exists. Again, I say this is the definitive reality of Christianity.

“The Word” – Why isn’t He called the Lord Jesus Christ? Why does John use “the Word”? Because, among the Greeks there was this very obvious idea that there was an intelligent designer. There was a power; there was a cosmic force. There was massive energy somewhere in the universe, and it was highly intelligent because of the complexity of what it made. It was highly personal because there is personality among human beings. The Greeks were way ahead of the contemporary movement called “intelligent design,” which is a kind of contemporary answer to the foibles and follies of evolution …

Well, you would be one of the Greeks who would say there’s a cosmic force, and energy, and power, and intellect out there that is massive and way beyond us; and they actually called it logos, logos. And to the Jews, logos was the Word of God, the Old Testament; and God revealed Himself through His Word. So John just borrows that term from the Greeks and the Jews and said that “the cosmic force that you talk about, the intelligent designer that you recognize out there, that is the Word, the Word.”

And the Old Testament was God speaking, and now God has spoken through the Word. And then in [John 1] verse 14, he pulls that together by saying, “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” The abstract, intelligent mind, power, force that created the entire universe became a man – the Word of God, the Word of God spoken in the Old Testament. Hebrews 1, “God spoke in the past, but has in these last days spoken through His Son.” “The Word became flesh.” That’s Christianity.

Now, the word “became” is very important in verse 14: “The Word became flesh,” ginomai. What does that mean? It means that the Word was now something that it never was before – it “became.” God is immutable. God is pure, eternal being. God is not becoming anything. God does not change. He does not develop. He does not progress. He is eternal, pure being.

But all creatures are becoming. They’re in the process of becoming, changing. Even the incarnate Christ was in the womb, and then out of the womb an infant, and then a toddler, and then a child, and then a young adult, and then a full adult – “maturing in wisdom, and stature, and favor with God and man.” At that point, the second member of the Trinity, the Son of God, became something He never had been. He became something He never had been – He took on the fullness of humanity. He was always God, but He became man ... Charles Wesley’s wonderful words: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; hail the incarnate Deity, pleased as man with man to dwell; Jesus, our Immanuel [God with us].”

Eternally, God the Son – always God – became something He was not. He became a man “and dwelt among us.” He dwelt among us – not a vision; not an apparition; not some kind of esoteric, dream-like experience. He became a man. “He was made in the likeness of man” (Philippians 2). He partook of flesh and blood. He lived here for thirty-three years on earth, fully man. That Word, pure being, became a man. The rest of the gospel of John is to tell the story of His life through the lens particularly of His divinity.

… This is why He says, “Glorify Me with the glory I had with You before the world began. Because of who I am, I am worthy to be restored to that glory.”

First of all, He speaks of His preexistence. Verse 1: “In the beginning was the Word.” Verse 2 says the same thing: “He was in the beginning with God.” What is “the beginning”? “The beginning” is “the beginning.” “The beginning” is Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

When “the beginning” began, He already was. Do you see it? “In the beginning was the Word.” Was already existing, “the Word” – not became the Word. He wasn’t part of the creation. He already existed when the creation was made – already in existence. He’s not a created being; He existed from all eternity …

Let me make it simple for you. Something must be eternal – something; and not something, but someone. Someone with massive power, someone with massive complex intelligence must be eternal. I know it’s hard to think about things that are eternal. That’s really an impossibility for our feeble minds to grasp. But reason would tell you, to say nothing of divine revelation. Something has to always be there, because whatever wasn’t always there was made by something that was always there, and that something is none other than God. If you want to literally chop the bottom out of Christianity, just deny Genesis, just deny creation, just deny God as the Creator. That is not a small issue.

Since time began at creation, you go before creation. You’re beyond time. You’re into eternity where only God exists. So “in the beginning [time] the Word already was” – eimi, the verb eimi, “being.” Had John used gínomai, then we would have to struggle with the fact that he seemed to be saying Jesus came into existence, which would make Him a created being. But John doesn’t tamper with his verbs.

And, of course, Jesus said things like this: “‘Before Abraham was, I Am.’” And He refers to Himself as the “I Am,” over and over in the gospel of John. The apostle Paul in Colossians says that “He is before all things. He was in the beginning with God.” When “the beginning” began, He was already there. This emphasizes preexistence. He didn’t become God in time. He’s not some emanation from God, some creation by God. He preexisted everything that exists. That puts Him into eternity. That puts Him into the Godhead. Only God is eternal.

Not only was He preexistent, but coexistent. Go back to verse 1. He was not only “with God,” but He “was God” – not only was “with God” at the creation, but He “was God.” He is preexistent; that is before anything else existed. When nothing existed, He existed. And He not only was there “with God,” He “was God.” This is a powerful, powerful statement.

The Greek expression means “face-to-face with God on an equal basis,” “face-to-face with God on an equal basis.” Literally, the Greek says Thes n ho Lgos, “God was the Word,” “God was the Word,” full deity, verse 14. His glory was the glory as of the prttokos from the Father, “full of grace and truth.” He had all the attributes of God because He “was God.”

So who is Jesus? He is God, preexisting all that exists, coexisting eternally with God as God. And then this remarkable third element of His nature: He is not only preexistent and coexistent with God, but He is self-existent, self-existent. Verse 3: “All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life.” Really a defining, defining statement.

“All things that came into being, all things,” positive. Negative: “Nothing came into being that hasn’t come into being through Him.” Why? He was the possessor of life. Life came from Him. It wasn’t given to Him, it came from Him. He is the Creator. He is the Creator. Genesis, God is the Creator. Genesis, the Spirit is the Creator.

In John, the Son of God is equally the Creator. The triune God is the Creator, and nothing exists in the entire universe that God did not make: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Creator of everything that exists must necessarily be uncreated. Right? The Creator of everything that exists must necessarily be uncreated, and only the eternal God is uncreated, so Jesus is the eternal God. He is preexistent, He is coexistent, and He is self-existent.

Theologians call this the aseity of God, a-s-e-i-t-y, the aseity of God. Nothing gives Him life; nothing takes life from Him. He is life itself. That’s why when God gave His name, He said, “‘I Am that I Am.’” No past, no present – “‘I Am that I Am.’”

Now you know who Christ is. The proof is that in Him is life – a massive statement. Not bíos life, not biological life; z, spiritual life. He has the life in Himself.

I found that a remarkable explanation of Christ’s deity, and I hope you do, too.

John MacArthur on work: a command, an example, a way to glorify God

In the UK, polls have showed that Britons, particularly younger ones, have no intention of working.

The latest Government findings came out on January 22, 2023. The BBC reported (emphases mine):

Most of the 2.7 million “inactive” people under 25 are students, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The majority of them don’t want a job.

This was also true in 2021, as CityAM informed us:

Data from the Office for National Statistics shows of the 13m Brits who are not looking for work, over half said they were doing so because they did not want to work.

In 2015, a student posted the following message on The Student Room forum. Granted, she sees the possibility of owning her own small business but only just:

I’m 22 now and it’s slowly dawned on me that I have no intention of working/having a career. I find most work boring and I am simply not inspired by the rat race. I think I want to be a small business owner and a stay at home mother.

It seems with feminism most women just aren’t looking to go down the ‘small job, husband and babies’ route anymore. Am I the only one who doesn’t want to work…at all ?

Maybe a small online store or something and a husband and kids. Nothing more (?)

Anyone else ?

The benefits balloon stretches back at least to 2013, possibly earlier. On April 24 that year, the Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith, the then-Secretary of State for Welfare and Pensions said:

Around 1 million people have been stuck on a working-age benefit for at least three out of the past four years, despite being judged capable of preparing or looking for work.

Ten years on, The Spectator reports that real figures show that five million Britons are receiving out-of-work benefits. Their figures have been disputed, but in November 2022, the magazine’s editor Fraser Nelson explained how the data were put together. For now, this is the message:

How can 20 per cent of people in our great cities be on benefits at a time of mass migration and record vacancies? It’s perhaps the most important question in politics right now, but it’s not being given any scrutiny because the real figures lie behind a fog of data …

Every month, an official unemployment figure is put out on a press release – and news organisations are primed to cover it. It’s normally about 1.2 million looking for work: the problem, of course, is so few Brits are actually doing so …

The true benefits figure is not to be found on a press release, but buried in a password-protected DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] database with a six-month time lag …

The five million figure ‘seems to be incorrect,’ Full Fact said in their email to us. ‘According to the most recent statistics, there are around 1.5 million people claiming out-of-work benefits.’ But the real figure is more than three times higher – but rather than reply to them, I thought I’d write this blog for anyone interested …

DWP data is now on Stat-Xplore, a versatile open data tool. The password bit is deceptive: you can bypass by clicking ‘Guest log in’ to find an Aladdin’s Cave of data. Look at the dataset ‘Benefit Combinations – Data from February 2019‘. Click Table 5, then click ‘Open table’ to get the numbers …

Nelson has posted graphs and a map to illustrate his figure of five million.

He concludes:

To fail to match up 1.2 million vacancies with at least some of those on out-of-work benefits is not just an economic failure but a moral one. But to solve a problem, you need to recognise a problem. Officially counting all five million people on out-of-work benefits would be a good way to start.

Living a life of idleness, however, is nothing new.

St Paul grappled with the same problem two millennia ago when he planted a church in Thessalonika (present day Saloniki).

The following passage, 2 Thessalonians 3:6-12, is one example of his command to work:

Warning Against Idleness

⁶ Now we command you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep away from any brother who is walking in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you received from us. ⁷ For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us, because we were not idle when we were with you, ⁸ nor did we eat anyone’s bread without paying for it, but with toil and labour we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you. ⁹ It was not because we do not have that right, but to give you in ourselves an example to imitate. ¹⁰ For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. ¹¹ For we hear that some among you walk in idleness, not busy at work, but busybodies. ¹² Now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living.^[d]

John MacArthur explains why we must work in ‘Work: A Noble Christian Duty, Part 3’, from July 19, 1992.

There were reasons why some in the congregation were not prepared to work:

As we have said in the past … they perhaps have been influenced by some of the Jewish background of the scribes who thought that anything other than studying the law was an unworthy way to spend your life.  They surely were affected by the general Greek attitude that work was demeaning and sordid and base and low and belonged only to slaves and not to freemen. 

And they probably had had those predispositions somewhat exaggerated by virtue of the fact that someone had come along and told them that they were already in the day of the Lord and the return of Christ was imminent and there probably wasn’t much use in doing anything other than evangelizing and studying the Word of God.  And so they had given themselves to that happily because of their disdain for work anyway.  Problem was, at least long term, if you can call several months long term for the Thessalonians in that Paul had dealt with it when he was there.  Several months later, when he wrote them the first letter, he dealt with it, and here he is writing a second letter and dealing with it a third time.  They didn’t want to work.  It was beneath them. 

Homer, the famous Greek writer, had said that the gods hated man.  And the way they demonstrated their hatred was to invent work and punish men by making them work.  This kind of philosophy being existent in that time, it found its way into the lives of those people and thus, when they became converted, it found its way into the church.  Becoming a Christian doesn’t change everything immediately.  We will always have residuals of our past, and we will always to one degree or another be affected by our culture.  And so here in this church in which so many good things had happened, a genuine conversion, a genuine godliness, they were not slack in spiritual service, they had a work of faith and a labor of love, and they did it with patience and endurance because they hoped in the return of Christ.  They worked hard at ministry, but they didn’t want to do the jobs that they had to do in the world, at least some of them. 

And so Paul was dealing with a church that had its spiritual life on target and was doing well, excelling spiritually, but they had this one problem that dominates the church in terms of its conduct, and that was that there were people there who didn’t work.  They then became a burden on everybody else, and it wasn’t that they couldn’t work, it wasn’t that they had a physical disability, it wasn’t that there wasn’t a job available, they refused to work, seeing it as beneath them or not a priority for those engaged in kingdom enterprises. 

MacArthur cites American statistics on work from 1980 to 1991:

I suppose 25 years ago, a situation like this would have struggled to be relevant in our time then because America was a hard-working country 25 years ago.  In fact, the American work ethic has always been hailed as sort of the supreme work ethic of the industrialized world.  We have always sort of set the pace for productivity and enterprise – up until more recent years, that is.  Last year, Charles Colson and Jack Eckerd, who heads the Eckerd Company, which operates drug stores in other parts of America, they wrote a book and the title of their book is Why America Doesn’t Work.  Now, that’s really a new thought, a new concept for our culture, for our society.  The subtitle is, “How the decline of the work ethic is hurting your family and future.”  The future of America is changing dramatically.  There are other nations that are putting us to shame in terms of work habits and a work ethic. 

In their book, they point out that we have in America declining rates of productivity, the loss of competitive position in some world markets, and workers who aren’t working.  And they concluded it is a bleak picture.  And I suppose they ask the right question, the question we would all ask at that point:  What has happened to the industry and productivity that made this country the marvel of the world at one time? …

We have an ethical malaise all the way from the jet set corporate leaders down to the person working at the bench.  The whole concept of work has so dramatically changed, it no longer has a transcendent motive.  There’s no longer something beyond me to make me perform at a certain level.  Thus, the meaning of work has been sapped from everybody from the top to the bottom, to some degree.  Obviously, some people still work harder than others. 

A 1980 Gallup Poll conducted for the Chamber of Commerce found that people still believed in work-ethic values, 1980, they still believed.  That’s over ten years ago.  Eighty-eight percent said working hard and doing their best on the job was personally important.  But were they doing it?  They said they believed it, it was still sort of in the air in 1980, but were people working hard?  1982 survey came along.  In that survey, it was reported that only 16 percent said they were doing the best job they could at work.  Eighty-four percent admitted they weren’t working hard – 84 percent.  So you can see they were still holding on to a residual ethic that didn’t translate into how they functioned, which meant that it was somebody else’s transcendent value, somebody else’s ethical value imposed on them externally but not truly believed. 

Working hard, they said, was important but they weren’t doing it, so how important was it?  Eighty-four percent also said they would work harder if they could gain something from it.  And now you can see that the ethic is not transcendent, the ethic is utilitarian.  It’s all tied in to what I get out of it, what’s in it for me.  And that’s part of the cynicism of our society.  That’s part of the direct consequence of the 60s’ moral revolution, which is a rejection of transcendent values. 

God is not an issue in anything.  He is not an issue in the way I conduct my sexual life, He is not an issue in my marriage, He is not an issue at my job, He is not an issue in education, He is not an issue anywhere.  God is not an issue; therefore, there is no value beyond myself.  So whatever is enough to get me what I want is enough.  It is a kind of societal economic atheism.  In fact, psychologist Robert Bellah calls it radical individualism.  Surveying 200 middle-class Americans, this UCLA professor discovered that people seek personal advancement from work, personal development from marriage, and personal fulfillment from church.  Everything, he says, their perspective on family, church, community, and work is utilitarian.  It is measured by what they can get out of it, and concern for others is only secondary. 

Down to specifics, James Sheehy, an executive with a computer firm in the upper echelons of the work strata, saw first-hand how this kind of utilitarian value was affecting work.  He wanted a better understanding of the expectations and psyche of younger employees.  Looking at what the future held, what kind of people were going to come up in this generation to work in his company?  What would they be like?  So he decided the best way to find out was to spend his vacation taking a job in a fast-food restaurant.  He wrote most of his coworkers were from upper income families, they didn’t need to work but they wanted extra spending money.  He watched and listened as his coworkers displayed poor work habits and contempt for customers.  His conclusion was, “We have a new generation of workers whose habits and experiences will plague future employers for years.” 

He writes, “Along with their get-away-with-what-you-can attitude and indifference to the quality of performance, their basic work ethic was dominated by a type of gamesmanship that revolved around taking out of the system or milking the place dry.  Theft, skimming, and baiting management were rampant and skill levels surprisingly low.  The workers saw long hours and hard work as counter-productive.  ‘You only put in time for the big score,’ one said.”  After recounting his experience, Sheehy concluded, “Get ready, America.  There’s more of this to come from the workforce of tomorrow.” 

Doesn’t sound too good if you happen to be an employer, does it?  A recent Harris Poll showed 63 percent of workers believe people don’t work as hard as they used to.  Seventy-eight percent say workers take less pride in their work.  Sixty-nine percent think the workmanship they produce is inferior, and 73 percent believe workers are less motivated and that the whole trend is worsening and the numbers are going up. 

Imagine. If people felt that way in the 1980s, and it is probable that Britons also did at the time, we are now into a second generation of people who don’t care about work, with a third generation on the way.

MacArthur says:

The more and more people demand recreation and idle time, the more corrupt they will become.  The two go hand-in-hand.  An escalating pornographic, sinful, wicked culture is sped on, the slide is greased, by a shrinking commitment to work.  And we fill up all that time with things that feed the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. 

He lays out why work is a God-given command:

Now, our society may not have a choice but they have to accept this, but as Christians, we can’t accept this.  The Christian faith does not accept a utilitarian work ethic.  The Christian view of work is transcendent.  That is, it escapes me and my world and directs its attention toward God. 

… First, work is a command from God.  Six days shall you labor.  God commands us to work.  Secondly, work is a model established by God for it was God who worked for six days and then rested on the seventh, and God, of course, is the worker who continually sustains the universe.  Man, being created in the image of God, then, is created as a worker.  Thirdly, work is a part of the creation mandate.  In other words, what I mean by that is it is the role of man.  Stars shine, suns shine, moons shine, on the earth plants grow, animals do what they’re supposed to do, rocks do what they’re to do, mountains do what they’re to do, water does what it’s to do, clouds do what they’re to do, and we do what we’re to do.  As Psalm 104 says, all of creation moves in a normal course and part of it is man rises, goes to work until the setting of the sun.  It is creation mandate.  It is how we contribute to the processes of life in God’s wondrous creation. 

Work is a command.  Work is established as a model by God.  Work is part of the natural creation.  Fourthly, work is a gift from God.  It is a gift from God.  It is a gift through which we glorify Him and the wonder of His creation as we produce things, putting on display the genius of God who created us, in all of our abilities.  It is a means by which we can glorify our Creator.  Just as the beast of the field gives me honor, as Isaiah said, and just as the heavens declare the glory of God by what they do, and we sit in awe of them, so man declares the glory of God, the wonder of His creative genius by doing what he has been given the ability to do.  Work is a gift from God, not only to glorify Him but to give meaning to life.  Work is a gift from God to give us something to do, which avoids the idleness that leads to sin …

Work is a gift from God also to provide for needs.  Work is a gift from God so that we can serve each other.  And lastly, in the Christian work ethic, work is to be done as if the boss was the Lord Himself.  It says in Colossians chapter 3 and Ephesians 6 that we’re to work as unto the Lord and not men. 

So the Christian faith does not sanctify the kind of attitude we’re seeing in our own country toward work.  In fact, as I said, 25 years ago, this message may have seemed a bit obscure when America was working productively.  Now it seems to be rather on target for we are suffering today with some of the things that Paul faced in the Thessalonian church.  But as Christians, we have to establish the standard. 

I often watch BBC Parliament, not because I love MPs or the Lords, but in order to gain a better insight in to what they are doing to us, the British people.

The number of Opposition — Labour, Liberal Democrat, SNP — MPs who complain that the Conservative government isn’t giving enough handouts, when clearly it is, as we can see from the aforementioned statistics, is mind-numbing.

Moving to MacArthur’s and his congregation’s personal experience, and still tied in to that, this is what happens when work is suggested:

It is an aberrant unbeliever that doesn’t work.  The tragedy of those people, the real tragedy, is that they are so deep in sin and so deep particularly in the sin of drunkenness and irresponsibility and immorality that they have put themselves in the position they’re in.  And I again say I’m not talking about people who are genuinely in despair, and I’ve seen those people all around the world.  But there is a mass of people who shouldn’t eat because they will not work. 

We see them here at the church.  They come by and they want money and they want food and we suggest work and they leave.  I was told today by one of the gentlemen in our church, serves with the police department, that they will hold a sign – they’ve tracked them – they will hold a sign, “I need work, homeless, need work,” and recently in one of the shopping centers just a couple of days ago they were tracking to find out what was going on.  None of them got jobs but they were averaging $15.00 an hour in donations.  One policeman told me he went by and offered a lady a sandwich purchased at a fast food place and she said, “What’s this?” and he said, “Well, it says ‘homeless and hungry,’ so I’m just giving you this to eat.”  She put it in a bag and he said to her, “Well, aren’t you hungry?”  She said, “I’ll eat it when I get home.” 

So you need to be careful about that.  Sometimes the car is parked around the block and the stash is growing in the back of the car.  Just have to be careful because there are people who don’t work because they won’t work, not because they can’t work.  And if you don’t work and won’t work, then you don’t eat, that’s what the Bible says.  There needs to be an opportunity for you to earn your own food and you need to take that opportunity, and again I want to say this:  It may be that in some cultures there is not enough work to go around and that a person couldn’t do enough work to really make the whole living, then in generosity and charity and love, we make up the lack, but we don’t feed the indolence. 

Even our blessed Jesus encountered a crowd of this type. After He had fed the Five Thousand, they returned the next day for another miraculous meal. They became angry when He refused them and said that He was the bread of life, which is infintely more important, then and now. John 6 has the story.

MacArthur interprets the episode:

Jesus, you remember, in John chapter 6, fed the multitude and it was a large crowd.  We talk about feeding the 5,000 but it says 5,000 men, so wherever there are 5,000 men, there have to be 5,000 women, at least, and throw in a few thousand mother-in-laws and grandmas, sisters and aunts, and throw in 15,000 kids, at least, and you’ve got a crowd somewhere between 20 and 50 thousand.  It could have been a massive crowd and Jesus fed them all.  You remember He had those five little cakes, five loaves, they’re actually little barley cakes, and two pickled fish and He just created food.  And I’ll promise you, it was the best lunch they’d ever had because it bypassed the world …

Now, do you realize when He said no to breakfast, I really believe that their anger was turned on Him because in an agrarian society like that, they had to work with the sweat of their brow to produce their own food.  They didn’t go down to some market and flip out food stamps or a check or a credit card or whatever it is, they didn’t go to a fast food restaurant.  If they didn’t work that day, they didn’t have the food to eat.  And not only a matter of preparation, but a matter of provision.  And so when Jesus – when they saw Jesus make food, they thought they had just found the Messiah who would bring the ultimate and eternal welfare state.  “We don’t even need food stamps, just show up and He passes it out.  And you don’t even have to get in line to collect it, they serve it.”  And when time for breakfast came, they were there and he left, and I think their anger and hostility turned on Him because they knew then what He could do but He refused to do it.  He could have done it for us as well, but He knows the value and the benefit and the purpose of work.

Concluding on Paul’s message to the Thessalonians, MacArthur says:

So here were these Thessalonians and they wouldn’t work.  And so he says if they don’t work, don’t let them eat.  That will help them get the message.  That’s survival. 

In our world, able-bodied people, believers or not, should be made to feel guilty for depending on the taxpayer for their daily bread. As The Spectator‘s Fraser Nelson said above, it is a moral issue.

Whether we like it or not, work is the order of the day. We must provide for ourselves to the fullest extent possible.

John MacArthur on our Lord’s various calls of the Apostles

Those who have been following the Year A Lectionary readings during the season of Epiphany have good reason to be confused.

On the Second Sunday of Epiphany (January 15, 2023), the Gospel reading was John 1:29-42. The following Sunday, the Gospel was Matthew 4:12-23. Both tell how Jesus called John the Gospel writer, who goes unnamed in his own account, and brothers Simon Peter and Andrew to follow Him.

Why are they so different?

This is why.

John’s account relates how John the Baptist told his followers that Jesus is the Lamb of God and that they should follow Him. From this, we can see that John the Gospel writer, Andrew and Simon Peter became disciples of John the Baptist. John and Andrew spent several hours, probably an overnight stay, with Jesus learning from Him. The following day, Andrew told his brother Peter (John 1:41):

He first found his brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which is translated Anointed).

It was at this point that Jesus named Simon Peter Cephas, meaning ‘rock’ (John 1:42). The name Peter also means ‘rock’. Cephas is pronounced ‘KEFF-us’, by the way:

He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas” (which is translated Peter).

In John 1:43-51, Jesus calls two more of His initial disciples, Philip and Nathanael.

Because John was with Jesus from the beginning, his Gospel has accounts that the other three — Matthew, Mark and Luke — do not have. John 2 has the miracle of the wedding in Cana and our Lord’s first cleansing of the temple courts. John 3 recounts His first encounter with Nicodemus and the brief simultaneous ministries of Jesus and John the Baptist along the Jordan. John the Baptist says (John 2:30):

He must become greater; I must become less.”^[h]

In John 4, we have the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman. Thanks to her testimony, many other Samaritans from her town believed in Jesus and asked Him to spend more time with them. John begins his account of our Lord’s Galilean ministry in verse 43:

After the two days he left for Galilee.

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke are known as the synoptic Gospels because they have the same episodes from our Lord’s ministry, with slight variations. Of those three writers, only Matthew was an Apostle.

Matthew lived in Galilee, in Capernaum. Therefore, he knew Jesus only when He began His public ministry there. His account in Matthew 4 is our Lord’s second calling to the same men. It is an escalated call, one designating apostleship, although it is the first in a series of apostolic calls. Each of these calls took the men higher up the rungs of evangelism.

Consider that when a person receives a call to become a priest or a pastor, he goes to seminary. He has received what we know as a divine calling, one to a vocation. However, at that point, the seminarian has not been ordained nor does he go out to preach and to teach until later in his studies. After ordination, he is assigned a church and its flock. He may move on to another church, perhaps a larger one. In some denominations, he might become a bishop or, again where applicable, an archbishop. Those are examples of escalated divine callings, each carrying with it greater responsibilities.

John MacArthur explains our Lord’s calls to His first disciples, who later became Apostles, in his 1978 sermon, ‘Fishing for Men’. Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

In the first instance, we go back to John, Andrew and Peter in John 1 and Matthew 4, two different calls, Matthew’s being the second:

Now, this is their call, but I want you to notice something.  This is phase two of their call.  I’m going to give you a little technical thing that’ll help you in your study of the gospels.  We have several different calls of the disciples in the gospel. Each gospel writer, for his own purposes, chooses one or the other.  There was a sequence of things.  In other words, there were at least five different times when Jesus sort of called them; each one taking them to a different level, kind of like you.  Once you were called to salvation, right?  Then, maybe there was a time in your life when you were called to a new level of commitment.  Then, maybe there was a time in your life, like in my life, when you were called to serve Jesus Christ in a specific way.  Then, maybe there was a time in your life when you were called to a specific place, to Grace Church, or some other specific ministry.  In other words, the way God directs us may have phases, and that is true in the case of the disciples.

The first call is in John chapter 1 ... This was their call to salvation.  Andrew, John, Simon, Phillip, Nathaniel and James called to salvation.  This was the initial call, and you remember it was when John the Baptist said, “Don’t follow me anymore.  Follow Him.”  They took off after Jesus Christ, and it was the call to salvation. 

Now, this is phase two in Matthew 4:18.  This is the call to be fishers of men.  They’re now going to follow Jesus, but it was only a kind of a momentary thing here.  It isn’t the full final departing from everything. For now, they followed Him. For this moment, for this day, for this time, they were called to win souls.  They were called to fish for men.  They were called to come after Him.

Before I continue with MacArthur’s train of thought, another question popped up at the service I attended on Sunday. We had a guest vicar preach who pointed out Matthew 4:21 and 4:22:

4:21 As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them.

4:22 Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.

The guest preacher wondered how they could leave their father Zebedee behind.

I suspect that John, having followed John the Baptist and being with Andrew in spending many hours with Jesus once being told that He was the Lamb of God, went home and told his brother James as well as his parents Zebedee and Salome what he had experienced.

In my post ‘John MacArthur on the synagogues of our Lord’s era’, there are several citations from the Gospels on the power of our Lord’s words when He taught and proclaimed the Good News. Imagine you and a friend are sitting alone with Jesus as He discourses on the kingdom of God. It’s just the three of you and He would answer any questions you put to Him. It must have been the most life-changing experience ever for Andrew and John.

No doubt Zebedee and Salome gave their blessing to John to follow Jesus.

In my post on Matthew 4’s account, I cited Matthew Henry’s commentary, which has a follow-up on them:

James and John left their father: it is not said what became of him; their mother Salome was a constant follower of Christ; no doubt, their father Zebedee was a believer, but the call to follow Christ fastened on the young ones. Youth is the learning age, and the labouring age. The priests ministered in the prime of their life.

Returning to MacArthur, Jesus made further calls to His first disciples. The third occurs in Luke 5:1-11 with the bursting fishing nets. This took place in the daytime, which is even more extraordinary as big hauls are caught at night:

Jesus Calls His First Disciples

5 One day as Jesus was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret,^[a] the people were crowding around him and listening to the word of God. ² He saw at the water’s edge two boats, left there by the fishermen, who were washing their nets. ³ He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little from shore. Then he sat down and taught the people from the boat.

⁴ When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch.”

⁵ Simon answered, “Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.”

⁶ When they had done so, they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to break. ⁷ So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them, and they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink.

⁸ When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus’ knees and said, “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!” ⁹ For he and all his companions were astonished at the catch of fish they had taken, ¹⁰ and so were James and John, the sons of Zebedee, Simon’s partners.

Then Jesus said to Simon, “Don’t be afraid; from now on you will fish for people.” ¹¹ So they pulled their boats up on shore, left everything and followed him.

MacArthur says:

There’s a third call.  Luke records it in chapter 5.  This comes after the one in Matthew; it’s different.  There are some similarities, but there are some distinct differences.  As you look at Luke chapter 5 for a moment, you’ll see them.  I’ll show you the level of call here.  In Luke 5, He comes along, and the situation is a little different.  They’re still fishing, which indicates that the second phase, they did not leave their profession permanently.  They simply followed Him for that moment, and now it’s going to be a little more firm.  He’s not going to say, “I want you to just be fishers of men,” generally.  He’s going to say, “I want you to be fishers of men only.”  This is the next step, and this time He stood by the Lake of Genessaret, which is another name for the Sea of Galilee.  Of course, Luke calls it a lake, as I said, because he’s been around.  He’s seen some big stuff, and that doesn’t rank with it.

He saw two boats standing by the lake, and the fishermen were gone out of them and so forth.  He entered into one of the boats, Simon’s, and now there’s a difference here.  All of a sudden, we’re in a boat.  Different than the situation in Matthew.  He says, “Launch out, let down your nets,” and there’s a whole fishing miracle that occurs here.  This is a completely different account.  What it is, is a time for them to come to grips with a real commitment, and Jesus reiterates it in verse 10.  There were, “James and John, the sons of Zebedee, partners with Simon, and Jesus said to Simon, ‘Fear not from henceforth,’” doesn’t matter you can’t catch fish anymore.  You remember the story?  They couldn’t catch fish on their own, not without the Lord.  He was going to control the fish. 

He said, “You want fish?  Put it down where I say, and you’ll get fish.  Without me, you won’t get anything.  Don’t worry about whether you’re going to be able to catch them without me. “From now on you shall,” what? “catch men.  When they had brought their boats to land they forsook,” what? “all and followed Him.”  You see this is another level of commitment.

I guess this is a part of our life, isn’t it?  At some point in time you come to Christ, and it isn’t long after that somebody says to you, “You are to fish for men.”  But maybe it’s a long time after that, and maybe it’s never for a lot of folks, that you forsake all to catch men.

The next call comes in Mark 3. Why so early in that Gospel? Because Mark’s is the shortest of the four. He wrote in a journalistic style and for the people of Rome that they might know Christ. Every Gospel has a different theme. Mark focuses on Christ’s miracles. In my 2012 post on Mark, I wrote:

Mark’s Gospel focusses on Jesus’s divinity as He expressed it through His miracles. Many men have profited greatly from reading Mark. Some fell on their knees and embraced Christianity as a result …

Mark’s Gospel also ends suddenly. Some translations provide a smoother conclusion in an attempt to tie up loose ends. I read somewhere that the last part of Mark’s scroll might have gone missing, which may account for this.

In the 1930s, a playwright or theatre critic — I don’t recall — fell to his knees one night in New York after having read Mark’s Gospel into the early hours of the morning. I no longer have the link, but, one evening, a Christian friend of his stopped by to chat. Their conversation developed and the friend brought up Christianity. The theatre chap said that he was an atheist. His friend suggested reading Mark’s Gospel. The man said he’d think about it. After his friend left, he couldn’t get to sleep. So he pulled out a Bible — again, I don’t remember if his friend left him a copy or if he had one already — and read through Mark. He read it in its entirety then fell to his knees in awe. He still couldn’t get to sleep, so he walked the streets of Manhattan until early in the morning. That was his conversion story. He never looked back.

But I digress.

This is what Mark 3 says about the calling of the Apostles:

Jesus Appoints the Twelve

¹³ Jesus went up on a mountainside and called to him those he wanted, and they came to him. ¹⁴ He appointed twelve^[a] that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach ¹⁵ and to have authority to drive out demons. ¹⁶ These are the twelve he appointed: Simon (to whom he gave the name Peter), ¹⁷ James son of Zebedee and his brother John (to them he gave the name Boanerges, which means “sons of thunder”), ¹⁸ Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus, Simon the Zealot ¹⁹ and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.

MacArthur says this was the official apostolic calling:

In Mark 3, there was another call.  They were not just going to catch men.  They were going to be official apostles.  In verse 14, “He appointed twelve,” Mark 3:14, “that they should be with Him, that He might send them forth to preach, and to cast out demons.”  Boy, now they’ve got miraculous power, and they were given the power also to heal diseases.  So they went from salvation to a general call, to a specific total commitment, and now to a miraculous power.

He says that the fullest calling came in Matthew 10, when Jesus sent the Apostles out to teach, preach (proclaim) and heal:

Jesus Sends Out the Twelve

10 Jesus called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out impure spirits and to heal every disease and sickness.

² These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon (who is called Peter) and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee, and his brother John; ³ Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; ⁴ Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.

The rest of the chapter gives our Lord’s full instructions on what the Apostles were to do and not do. It is the blueprint of Christian ministry to this day. Admittedly, not all clergy follow it.

MacArthur says:

Then finally, the fifth phase is recorded in the tenth chapter of Matthew in the first verse. “And when He had called to Him those twelve, He gave them power against unclean spirits to cast them out, to heal all manner of sickness and diseases.”   He said, “Go,” in verse 7, and He told them all how to go, and He sent them out, verse 16, “As sheep in the midst of wolves,” and they went to preach. 

Now, do you see the progression here, beloved?  It is to be so with us.  It all begins at some point in time when we meet Jesus Christ, and we accept Him as Savior.  Then a little later the prodding of the Spirit of God, fish for men.  Then, hopefully later, you forsake all and your life is geared for that.  Then the time comes when, in the midst of that, you sense the power of God, and you move out, an official sent one to do His work.

As students of the Gospels know, it took Jesus three years to smooth the Apostles’ rough edges. Sadly, among them was His betrayer, Judas Iscariot. The process did not finish until the Holy Spirit appeared upon them at the first Pentecost, by which time Matthias had replaced Judas. Then the Church took off in leaps and bounds. The powers that Jesus gave them to teach, preach and heal in His name lasted during the Apostolic Era, or Apostolic Age, which lasted until around AD 100. The Book of Acts chronicles some of those events, including those of Saul of Tarsus who became Paul, arguably the greatest of the Apostles, also personally instructed by Christ in his three days of blindness on the way to Damascus and later in an African desert, after which Paul evangelised everywhere he could possibly travel.

One might ask how it works in our time, if all of us, like the everyday men Jesus called, are to do likewise.

Here, too, MacArthur has an answer. He tells the story of a man on the Grace Community Church staff who trained other church members to evangelise:

Several years ago, we brought – I guess all of you know Jim George on our staff.  We could have hired a man to do visitation, to go out and evangelize.  You know what we did?  We decided to support a man, who would train others to evangelize.  If we had just hired a man to evangelize, you know what we’d have now five years later?  We’d have a man evangelizing, but instead we’ve got between 200 and 300 people trained to catch men.  That’s what Jesus did.

As to how we evangelise effectively, MacArthur begins by talking about the Apostles then tells us that obeying the Gospel commands is the surest way:

You say, “Well did they have a great passion for souls?”  I doubt it, seriously doubt it.  I’m quite confident they didn’t have a passion for anything.  So what they’d do it for?  Listen, you want to know something? You want to know how to get a passion for souls?  Try obeying to start with.  That’s where it all begins.  Just be obedient.  I put it this way; obedience is the spark that lights the fire of passion.  The way to gain a passion for souls, the way to have your heart burn for the lost is to obey God and move out, and watch God take the pilot light of obedience and fan it into a forest fire.

Amazing.

Does Jesus want us to evangelise? Yes, He does.

Matthew’s Gospel ends with the Great Commission, Matthew 28:16-20:

The Great Commission

¹⁶ Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. ¹⁷ When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. ¹⁸ Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. ¹⁹ Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰ and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

MacArthur reminds us:

Listen, God’s greatest concern is to win people to Himself; Christ’s greatest concern, the Spirit’s greatest concern, the greatest concern of the apostles, and it was the greatest concern of the early church.  When they were scattered in Acts chapter 8, they went everywhere preaching Jesus Christ, endeavoring to win people to Him.

Even in the Old Testament, it was no different.  In the Old Testament God’s great heart was a concerned heart, and it was concerned for those that were lost.  In fact, in Proverbs 11:30, we have this great statement, “He that winneth souls is,” what? “is wise.”  If you know anything about the term “wise” in the book of Proverbs, you know that the term wise is a synonym really for righteous living.  The truly righteous person, the person who really lives with understanding, the person who doesn’t just know but lives it out, is the one who wins souls.  He is truly wise.

MacArthur’s closing words on evangelising are useful:

You say, “Can I do that?”  Yeah.  You say, “How?”  Listen, number one, be a believer.  You can’t be on the team unless you are.

Number two, be available.  Learn how to win people to Christ.  If that means getting involved in an evangelism ministry, then get involved.  If that means reading the New Testament and underlining everything about evangelism and cataloging it and learning it, do it.  Be a believer and be available.

Three, be concerned, be concerned.  Maybe that means reading some books.  Surely, it means meeting some unsaved people.  It all starts with obedience, so be obedient.  Go out and do it.  Even if the passion isn’t there, do it.  Reach out to that neighbor.  Speak the words you’ve always wanted to speak and never have.  Then, realize Jesus is your pattern. Study how He did it.  Then, find somebody else you can follow, and let them be your model.

Be a believer, be available, be concerned, be obedient, be following Jesus, and be taught by an example.  So, Jesus began at the right point, in the right place, with the right proclamation, and the right partners.  The light dawned, beloved, and we’re to carry it to the rest of the world. 

The easiest way to evangelise is to lead by example, wherever we are in life. Combine that with studying Scripture and praying regularly. Our good Lord will take it from there.

John MacArthur on the synagogues of our Lord’s era

This year’s Gospel reading for the Third Sunday of Epiphany — January 22, 2023 — was Matthew 4:12-23.

It was about the beginning of our Lord’s ministry in Galilee and His calling of two sets of brothers to be among His Apostles, to be fishers of men: Andrew and Simon Peter as well as John and James.

Verse 23 says:

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.

Jesus, as did the Apostles after the first Pentecost, particularly Paul, taught in the synagogues regularly.

John MacArthur describes these houses of worship and their additional functions in ‘The Healing Work of Jesus’ which he preached in 1978.

Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

MacArthur begins by commenting on the verse itself and how it fits in with Matthew’s Gospel as a whole, with its theme of Jesus as the Messiah, the King of Kings:

Let’s look at verse 23: Jesus began on the right plan.  “And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.”  Now here we come right to those two dimensions of messianic credentials: His words and His works.  Let’s look at some specifics here.  “And Jesus went about,” that’s an interesting verb.  I want to stop for a minute; it’s an imperfect tense verb, and when you have the imperfect it doesn’t mean it’s less than perfect. It’s just a term used for something that’s continuous action in the past tense.  It means that He was constantly going about, the idea of a constant endeavor.  You might even translate it, “He was continually going around” – incessant effort is the idea.  And really what you have in verse 23 – hang on to this thought – is a one-verse summary of the whole Galilean ministry.

Now notice, Matthew will take this one-verse summary and expand it in chapter 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, so that those chapters to come – 5 through 9 – are an expansion of verse 23.  In fact, His words are the subject of chapter 5, 6, and 7.  His works are the subject of chapter 8 and 9.  So Matthew simply introduces those two elements here and then he begins to expand them in the next section, verses 5:1 through 9:38.  First, 5, 6, and 7 – His words – the great truth of the Sermon on the Mount that was absolutely shocking, devastating, and divine. And then His mighty works and miracles, chapters 8 and 9.

So He went all over the place incessantly and constantly, and you’ll notice it says, He “went about all Galilee.”  He was moving all the time.  Now “all Galilee” is a strong expression.  The term “all” is a very strong term, and when it says “all” in this sense it really does mean in a comprehensive sense …

The point is this: that to cover 204 villages and to move around through all of that mass of humanity required much time and constant travel and Jesus was busy.  Somebody figured out just to touch every town, moving at a rate of one town a day, is gonna take a half a year, and that would be only if you stayed one day in each place …

And so Jesus moved about.  He was going to touch as many as He could.  It was important that the whole of all those people – and remember they were Jew and Gentile mixed, and even the Jewish ones had been exposed to Gentile culture.

That is because Galilee was along the trade route to and from Africa.

The local synagogue was the heart of the community:

First of all it says, in verse 23, “Teaching in their synagogues.”  Within Galilee Jesus chose to kind of center His ministry in the synagogues.  Now the synagogue was the most important institution in the life of any Jew.  Keep that in mind.  It was the most important institution.  It is very like the church is to you, you that are Christians. You love the Lord Jesus Christ, you’re active at Grace Community Church, you’re involved here – this is the most important institution in your life.  Your family is here, your kids are here, your friendships are here, this is your life.  No different in those days.  The whole of Jewish life centered around the synagogue.  In fact, in some cases it would be even more intense because even the politics of life and the economics of life – you traded there, you learned to sort of match up your businesses with people of like trade because they sat according to trade.  It was everything to the Jewish people.  In fact, the worst thing that could ever happen to a Jew was to be unsynagogued.  Aposunaggos, “to be unsynagogued” was it.  And you see, that’s exactly what happened when a Jew became a Christian.  He was dis-fellowshiped from the synagogue.  It was vital.  That’s why the whole book of Hebrews is written.  It was written to Christians, but also there are warnings throughout that book to certain Jewish people who were so afraid of being unsynagogued that even though they believed the gospel, they wouldn’t receive Christ.  This synagogue was the key to their life.

He describes the physical location of the synagogue:

In most cases, the synagogue was built on a hill, using the most prominent hump in the city of the little town, and every town had one.  And there would be the synagogue, and it would be the highest place in the city and usually would be distinguished by a tall pole shooting up in the sky so that everybody could focus on that.  It was as familiar a sight to go into a Jewish town and see a synagogue spire as it is to go in the middle of New England and see a little church spire in the little villages.  It’s common.

Sometimes, if there weren’t any hills, they would build along the river and the bank of the river, and very often they built synagogues without a roof.  They just let their worship go up to God … the synagogue they’ve uncovered in Capernaum and have reconstructed really doesn’t have any roof.  We don’t know if it did or didn’t have one or what kind of one it had, but it was where they gathered.

This was the pattern of worship:

Divine worship was held in the synagogue every Sabbath, every Saturday.  Sabbath ran from Friday at sundown to Saturday at sundown, and on the second and fifth day of every week they had special services, every Sabbath they had special services.  Of course, they had special services every festival day, all the feast days and all the special days.  Now basically when they came together on the Sabbath, if it wasn’t a special day, this is how the format went: first there was the reading of the Law and the reading of the Prophets by certain people who were called upon, and then there were prayers offered by the leader, and then there were responses by the people.  They would respond with amens and various praises to God.

Following that there would be an exposition of some text of the Scripture, and that went all the way back to the return under Ezra and Nehemiah.  When they read the Scripture – You remember in Nehemiah? – “and then Ezra the scribe stood up and gave the sense of it” – expository preaching is not something new in this generation.  It is the kind of preaching in the restoration under Ezra and Nehemiah, and it is historically what the Jews have done in their synagogue, first the reading, then the prayer, and then the exposition.  And it was interesting, if there was a visiting dignitary or a visiting rabbi, he would be given the right to speak the exposition very often. And that’s where, of course, Paul moved right into the synagogue and used some Old Testament text and took off.  That was very common.

This is how the synagogue was organised and how it ruled over the community:

The affairs of the synagogue were administered by ten men; basically, ten elders of whom three were called the rulers of the synagogue.  They acted as judges.  They would admit proselytes or not admit them.  They settled issues.  There was a fourth ruler called the angel of the church who was sort of the chairman of the board.  There were others who were called servers who carried out the direction of the three and the one.  There was an eighth one, according to Jewish tradition, that was the Hebrew interpreter who took the ancient Hebrew and translated it into the vernacular.  There was a ninth one who headed up the theological school.  And by the way, every synagogue had a theological school in it.  And there was a tenth one who interpreted the theological school instructor stuff because it was usually over the heads of the people.  So they had this whole organization, this incredible structure.

Listen, the synagogue became the court of law, and any disputes or court problems or civil things, they came there; their judgment was made and execution was even pronounced.  Listen, you know the Roman government only took away from the Jews the right of execution at the time of Jesus.  They could do everything else.  They could run their own affairs.  The only thing they couldn’t do was take somebody’s life.  That’s why they had to take Jesus to the Romans to have Him crucified.

… They ruled their own affairs.  And as we see, the small villages and towns in the time of Jesus, they would have their own court of law.  Also the synagogue was a public school for boys, and the little boys would go there, in their childhood, and learn the Talmud.  And further, the synagogue was a theological school for the men.  So this was the center of the whole concentration of Jewish life.  And when Jesus went there to that place, He would be stepping right into the midst of Israel.

The temple in Jerusalem differed from the synagogue, as it was only there where sacrifices and monetary offerings could be made:

Now there’s a vast difference, remember, between the synagogue and the temple.  There’s only one temple, and that is at Jerusalem.  That’s the only temple.  There isn’t one there now, as you know, not since 70 A.D. when Titus came in and wiped it out.  But there was only one temple, but wherever there was a small colony of Jews, wherever there was a handful of Jewish men, they could start a synagogue.  And so they were every place, and they were the platform for Jesus, and they were the platform for the apostle Paul.

By the way, the temple was not a place for teaching, and the temple was not a place for preaching, unless like Jesus you happened to stand up in there and take off.  The temple was a place for offering sacrifice and making offerings.  But the synagogue was a place of teaching and preaching.  It was essentially a preaching/teaching place.  In fact, the church today pretty well has modeled its patterns after the synagogue.  Now we still have Jewish synagogues with us.  There’s one right down the street, only now they call it a – What? – a temple. But it isn’t, because there’s no blood sacrifice being offered there.  It’s simply a synagogue, a gathering place.

MacArthur describes how Jesus made use of the synagogues for His teaching:

Well, Jesus took advantage of the opportunity for any dignitary, any visiting rabbi or teacher, to have the opportunity to speak.  And so Jesus would go in the synagogue and He would teach – Why? – because this would reach the heart of Israel.  Listen, the most zealous people for God were in the synagogue.  That’s where you’d find the true hearts, if there were any in Israel.  That’s where the remnant would be, wouldn’t they?  They’d be there worshiping the true God in the best way they knew how. So Jesus went where they would listen to Him, where they would hear Him – the synagogue.  And He would go in, and He would teach the Scripture.  That was His pattern – to open the Scripture, to give exposition.  This is exactly what He did throughout the pattern of His ministry.  Even when He was in Nazareth He broke open His whole ministry by doing an exposition on an Old Testament scripture that referred to Him.  Even in the Sermon on the Mount He kept referring, “You have heard it said, and the Scripture says, and I say,” and He’d take off from there, either from a scripture of God’s authorship or from some ancient tradition that they had held to. Jesus would move off from there to do the exposition and turn the whole thing to Himself.

And so Jesus was teaching in the synagogues.  By the way, the word didask has to do with didactic, instructive relating of truth.  The word concentrates on the passing of information.  The word emphasizes the content, the passing on of information.  That’s what Jesus did.  And by the way, His method, I’m quite confident, was expository, taking the text and out of it teaching the principles.  I really believe this is the greatest way to preach and teach the Word of God.

Proclaiming, MacArthur notes, is different to teaching:

Secondly, it says in verse 23, “Not only was He teaching in their synagogue, but He was also preaching the gospel of the kingdom.”  Now this is a different word – kruss – and it means “to proclaim,” and it concentrates not so much on the didactic method, the relating of truth, the content, as it does on the very voice, the very style of proclamation. And it simply means “He heralded it out,” “He cried out.”  Often about Jesus you see the word ekraxan, “he cried out.” That’s preaching.  Teaching is where there is the careful, instructive relating of content.  It’s kind of from the mind to the mind.  Preaching is the crying out, the impassioned cry of Jesus Christ to the people.  And there it wasn’t so much in the synagogues, although He did both there as well, and the two are mixed up in His ministry so you can’t separate ’em.  There was never teaching without preaching, and there was never preaching without teaching, but the preaching is the crying out.  It is the heralding of the gospel.

Some have said preaching is the heralding of the gospel and teaching is the explaining of the gospel that’s been heralded.  Jesus did both – preaching, making a public announcement.  William Hendrickson, who’s a great commentator, says this:  “Between preaching and teaching there is a difference.  Though it is true that good preaching is also teaching, the emphasis is nevertheless not the same.  Preaching means proclamation.  Teaching, on the other hand, indicates imparting more detailed information regarding the proclamation that was made,” end quote.  That’s the idea.

… The proclamation is what is called the krugma, and the teaching is what is called the didach.  You may see those terms sometime in your reading, and there’s never any good krugma without didach.  It doesn’t do any good to proclaim something if you don’t explain what it is.

MacArthur points out that Jesus avoided teaching about the socio-political issues of the day. He focused only on the kingdom of God:

Look at it in verse 23, the gospel of the kingdom, the good news of the kingdom.  This is what He was always talking about, always.  He was always talking about this.  In fact in Acts chapter 1, after He had risen from the dead, until He ascended, He had 40 days with His disciples, and it says in verse 2 of Acts 1, “Until the day in which he was taken up after he through the Holy Spirit had given commandments unto the apostles whom he’d chosen: to whom also he showed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs” – now watch this – “being seen by them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.”

From the time He began His ministry in Matthew right here, to the time that He was silenced in His ascension, He never spoke of anything other than the kingdom of God.  He never got dragged into social issues that were unrelated; He never got dragged into politics, into revolutions, into economics – He spoke of the kingdom of God.  And it’s a great pattern.  I feel in my heart I need to follow that kind of pattern.  Sometimes people ask me why I don’t say things about this and that and the other thing, and I guess maybe it’s because Jesus, until He was taken up, spoke to them the things concerning the kingdom of God. And if that was His priority, then that’s going to be my priority.

Jesus began His ministry gently by speaking of the good news of the Gospel: repent and be saved. As He neared the end of His ministry, however, He began to pass righteous judgement on wilful unbelief:

… first of all, the word “gospel” means something simple, good news, good news.  It’s good news and the world is full of bad news – Isn’t it? – all bad news.  This is the only good news, really good news.  The teaching and preaching of Jesus Christ was filled with good news.  You know something interesting?  Listen to this: John the Baptist’s preaching is never called good news, never.

Now maybe it was good news, and maybe it might have been called good news, but it never is.  I began to think about why.  Perhaps it is because the note of judgment is so strong, the ax is laid at the root, the winnowing fan is moving, the fire is consuming, and John fired out so much judgment and so much condemnation and cried for such repentance that maybe his message was too strong to win the gracious title “good news.”  But it really was good news, wasn’t it?  It’s kind of like the deal you’ve gotta have bad news before you get good news. But I think the reason John’s is never called good news is because there never really was good news until Jesus arrived.  There never really was any good news until Jesus came.  And it is Jesus who is said to preach the good news.  John was saying, “Get right, repent, get ready, and avoid judgment.”  And then Jesus came along and gave the other side of it, and come to Me and I’ll take you to heaven.  That was the good news.

After the Messiah had encountered more and more of the hypocrisy and more and more of the hostility of the hierarchy of Israel, His preaching became even more stern than John’s.  You know that?  But at the very beginning there was no strong word of condemnation.  Jesus didn’t come saying there’s going to be an ax, and there’s going to be a winnowing fan, and there’s going to be a fire consuming you.  You don’t hear that at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.  That comes later.  It was just the good news.  And what is the good news? – the kingdom, the kingdom.  That God is going to establish His rule.  That we can be a part of God’s dominion, that as Paul said we can be translated out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of His dear Son, that our sins can be forgiven.  Listen, the gospel of the kingdom is the same gospel preached today.  It’s just the message of salvation.

The good news is this: God has a kingdom; He wants you to be a citizen; here’s how.  That’s the good news.  Oh, it has all kinds of ramifications, as we’ll see as we go through Matthew.  But it’s the good news of salvation because that’s the way you get in His kingdom.  Once you’re in it has all kinds of features.  There is the element of the kingdom now in us in the Holy Spirit.  There is the element of the millennial kingdom for a thousand years on earth.  There is the element of the eternal kingdom and glory in the new heaven and the new earth forever with God.  It has different facets and wondrous things that we’re gonna see, but for now all we need to know is that the good news is that God has a kingdom and you can be in it.  You can be a part of it.  That’s good news.

I’ll tell you the alternative is pretty sad, isn’t it?  These people had long had a weariness of being in the kingdom of Rome, before that the kingdom of the Greeks, before that the kingdom of the Medes and the Persians, before that the Babylonians.  And even when they tried to do it on their own with their own kings, it was nothing but debauchery and evil.  And the very fact that there could be a kingdom with God was what they had longed for.  This was good news.  Jesus was saying, there’s a way to escape.  There’s good news, there’s a kingdom, and the good news is you can be a part of that kingdom.  How?  What is that good news that gets you into the kingdom?  First Corinthians, chapter 15 and verse 1, tells us.  Here’s the gospel which I preach to you – listen – “For I delivered unto you, first of all, that which I also received” – here comes the good news – “that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures…that He was buried…that He rose again the third day according to the scriptures.”  That’s the gospel, folks.

The good news is this: Jesus died for you.  He rose for you.  Your sin is paid for.  Your eternal life is purchased, and you can be in God’s kingdom.  That’s good news, isn’t it?  And that’s what Jesus came preaching and teaching.  The plan of salvation is the good news.  Oh, He didn’t cover all the ground early on here.  He just simply announced, “I’ve got good news.  God has a kingdom for you.  God has a kingdom for you.”  In fact it would have been an earthly kingdom if they had believed, wouldn’t it?  If they had accepted Jesus as their Messiah, and they’d have been saved there, and the nation Israel had repented, and come to Christ, their kingdom would have been right then and there. 

It should be noted that everyone who heard Jesus understood the powerful accuracy of His teaching and preaching:

The words that He preached; “no man” – the officers had it right – “ever spoke like that man spoke.”  His words about the kingdom for three years went across the land of Israel.  They should have known.  It should have been obvious.  To some it was.  Listen to Luke 4, verse 22, “And all bore him witness.” This was when He was preaching in Nazareth.  And by the way, He did an exposition of an Isaiah passage; took Isaiah and just cracked it open for them.  Isaiah 61 – preached a sermon off of that text, and then they listened, and finally, in verse 22, they “bore him witness, and wondered at the gracious words that proceeded out of his mouth. And they said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’”  I mean, “these words coming from this guy who grew up in our town, the son of a carpenter.”  Verse 31, “And he came down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee, and he taught them on the sabbath days. And they were astonished at his doctrine: for his word was with power.”  And in verse 36, they said, “What a word is this!”

In Matthew chapter 24, I think it’s verse 35, He said this: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.”  He spoke an eternal word, a powerful word, like no one ever spoke.  They could never confound Him in His words. They could never trap Him in His words. They could never stump Him in His words. They were literally devastated by His words.  They were so powerful that they were literally thrown down in their own tracks when they tried to encounter Him and catch Him in His words.

I pray that John MacArthur’s exposition on our Lord’s preaching and teaching bring His words to life for us, if they have not done so already.

John MacArthur reminds us that Jesus also prayed, so why shouldn’t we?

My regular readers know that I have been writing about 2 Thessalonians over the past two weeks.

My January 8 post covered 2 Thessalonians 1:5-10, which is Paul’s brief yet stark description of the Second Coming.

In the two verses that follow, Paul wrote that he prayed for the enduring faith and love of the Thessalonians, some of whom were preoccupied by the prospect of the Second Coming, expecting it to be imminent:

¹¹ To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfil every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power, ¹² so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

In 1992, John MacArthur preached a sermon on those verses, ‘Praying for the Right Things, Part 1’, which is an excellent examination of prayer.

Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

MacArthur contrasts Paul’s prayer with many of our own:

That is what I would call a prayer report from Paul.  It is not a prayer, though his letters have many prayers in them, but it is a report of how he prays.  He is telling the Thessalonians the nature of his prayer for them.  And as you look at that prayer and consider it, you come to the conclusion that he is praying for the right stuff.  Sadly, the prayers of most Christians are directed toward the wrong stuff. 

Most of the time, Christians pray in regard to themselves and those they love for somewhat shallow things.  The prayers are often misdirected and very shortsighted and, in fact, selfish.  Christians typically pray for health and happiness and success.  They pray for personal benefit.  They pray for comfort.  They pray for solutions to fix all of the little problems of life.  They pray for a healed body or a home or food or a job or a car, a husband, a wife, a promotion, more money.  Those things, while they certainly make up part of life, are very low on Paul’s priority list.  They’re also very low on the priority list of Jesus, who said basically take no thought for what you eat or drink or wear, knowing full well that God supplies all of those things.  Get on with seeking matters that relate to the kingdom of God.  Often we ask, says James, and receive not because we ask amiss for the sole purpose of consuming it on our own lusts.  So very often we not only pray for the wrong stuff but we pray for the wrong reason ... 

I suppose at this particular point I could ask the question of you:  What do you pray for?  When it comes down to you and your life and your family and the people in your world, the people you love, your church, for what do you pray?  What do you desire for yourself?  What do you desire for your spouse?  What do you desire for your children?  What do you desire for the people that you love?  What do you desire for the people in your church?  What do you really want? 

If God showed up and said, “I want to give you three wishes.  Whatever you ask I will do,” what would they be?  What would you ask God for?  Do you have the right values?  Do you have the right priority list?  We live in a world, of course, that is skewed, a world that is deviated, a world that knows little of true value.  We live in a world where people pursue all the wrong stuff.  And that massive overpowering pursuit that is all around us encroaches on our lives and gets us caught up in the very pursuit of things which mean nothing or should mean nothing to us …

The world is full of fools, fools who the hard way learn what is the right stuff and fools who never learn what is the right stuff.  We who know the Lord Jesus Christ and who have the Word of God need not be so foolish.  We need not waste our time endeavoring to get what is ultimately, after all, not even valuable.  We need to spend our time gaining what is priceless.  Three wishes Paul had for them:  worthiness, fulfillment, and powerful service.  Before we look at those requests and their implications, I want us to consider the text from the perspective of prayer.  Paul begins in verse 11 by saying, “To this end also we pray for you,” and he introduces us to his resource.  Whatever it was that he wanted for the Thessalonians, he knew he could obtain only by prayer.  He did not turn to human ingenuity.  He did not turn to some program.  He turned to God. 

MacArthur looks at Paul in his role as shepherd of that flock, even though he was in Corinth at the time when he wrote his letter:

As we think about this great text and before we look at the requests and the reasons for the requests in verse 12, we need to look at this matter of the resource, which is prayer.  “To this end also we pray for you always.”  Several things flow out of that.  First of all, obviously, that he prayed for them.  Secondly, that he prayed for them all the time, unceasingly, which, of course, was typical of Paul.  And thirdly, that in praying for them all the time he had a goal in mind, to this end or for this reason or for this purpose.  His prayers were very pointed.  They were very direct.  They were not generic.  They were not general.  They were specific.  And the three things that were the goal or the end or the purpose or the direction of his prayer were worthiness, fulfillment, and effective service.  That’s what he prayed for.  He sought for them the right stuff. 

… The pattern of prayer for the shepherd is a prayer for the sanctification of his people, for the maturity of his people, for the growth of his people, for the development of his people spiritually, and that is that for which Paul prays.  Not only, of course, did he pray for them but he also taught them the Word of God.  That’s the twofold responsibility …

There are brief times that we’re able to teach.  There are unlimited times that we’re able to pray.  And the prayer life of the shepherd is a constant thing.  He may not always be on his knees.  He may not always have his hands folded or his eyes closed, but there is seldom a waking moment when the shepherd doesn’t have the sheep on his heart, and being on his heart they are thus carried to the heart of God, and the prayer for sanctification is a way of life.  So we’re not surprised when Paul, in writing his epistles, stops at points to pray or inject a prayer report about how he’s been praying and will continue to pray for them.  So here he says, “I know this, I want you to be sanctified.  I want you to be worthy.  I want you to be fulfilled.  And I want you to serve with power.  And the resource that I tap for that is God.  I go to God.”  And here we’re introduced to a wonderful balance.  We know we must teach the people because they must obey the Word to be sanctified.  But we also know that it is God alone who can prompt that obedience.  That’s why when anything good happens in our life, who gets the credit?  God.  Because in our flesh, we can do no good thing. 

MacArthur discusses the spiritual tension that the true Christian experiences:

So there’s a wonderful tension there that must be maintained in our hearts and minds that basically says if I’m going to be a sanctified Christian moving along the path to Christlikeness, if I’m going to be growing in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord, if I’m going to be more and more holy, moving from level of glory to the next level of glory, changed by the Holy Spirit to be more and more conformed to Christ, if that process is going on in my life, it demands my obedience.  I must obey the Word and the Spirit.  But I also know that the only way that that can happen is when God empowers it to happen.  And so I’m caught, as it were, on the vortex of that same tension that exists so many, many places in the Word of God and the truth of the Christian faith. 

But I want to speak to that, if I might, this morning because I think it’s important.  There is a growing response among Christian people to the truth of God’s sovereignty, and I thank God for that.  The church is finally awakening to the fact that God is an absolutely and utterly sovereign God, that God controls all things by the word of His power, that God will do what He will do when He will do it the way He will do it because He has so ordained and because He is absolutely in charge and because He has the power to do it.  God has set in motion His perfect purpose from before the world began.  It is all set and established by His infinite mind and will operate according to His infinite power and purpose.  I’m glad the church has affirmed that.  But I also am concerned that in the affirmation of the absolute sovereignty of God, there come not a depreciating sense of responsibility on the part of the believer, either on the one hand to pray or to obey. 

… Just as obedience is an element in which God works His sovereign purposes of salvation and sanctification, so prayer is a human element by which that purpose is effected.  That is a mystery which is not understood but is believed. 

MacArthur looks at the prayers of Jesus, who is all divine and all human — another holy mystery:

In Luke 22 – this is fascinating – Jesus says to Peter, “Simon, Simon,” – and He called him by his old name when he was acting like his old self – “Simon, Simon, behold:  Satan has demanded permission to sift you like wheat.”  “Satan wants to come after you.”  And the implication is, “And I’m giving him permission.”  But you could also fill in the white spaces, “I know you’re going to survive.”  Right?  He knew that.  He knew Peter wouldn’t totally lose his salvation and be plunged into Satanic power and end up in hell, He knew that.  “Satan wants to have you and he’s going to put you through a very sifting test, and I’m going to let him do it.”  And He knew exactly how it would turn out.  But look at verse 32:  “But I have” – what? – “prayed for you.” 

Do you know that the prayers of Jesus were even a part of the sovereign plan of God?  Jesus didn’t say, “Well, there’s no sense in me praying, I know how this whole deals going to come out.”  Jesus didn’t say, “Well, not only do I know how it’s going to come out, I’m controlling the whole deal, so why should I pray?”  Jesus, in His humanity, gives us an example of one though knowing perfectly the plan of God who yet prayed for that plan to be fulfilled.  He knew Peter would pass the test, survive, ultimately give his life in the cause of Christ as a faithful servant, die a martyr, without renouncing his faith.  Jesus knew all of that, He planned all that, He made that all happen, He effected that in Peter’s life, and yet He prayed for Peter right here.  If the Son joins in prayer along with the sovereign plan of the Father, then should we do less?  Prayer and sovereign power go together with pleading and human responsibility. 

MacArthur advises us how to pray, citing an example from Isaiah 38:

You want to pray for one another, this is how you pray.  These are the things you pray for because these are the things that concern God.  God doesn’t really care about the little nuances of life as much as He cares about the big, spiritual issues of life.  You see, the purpose of God by the Holy Spirit is to conform you more and more to the image of Jesus Christ.  The little things in life that come and go are incidental to that process.  They work with that process maybe one way or another.  And so God has a sovereign plan which He will sovereignly fulfill, but within that sovereign plan there is a place for prayer as we line up ourselves up with that plan and as we even become the means to activate that plan for the effectual prayer of a righteous man does avail much – it does avail much. 

And do we need to be reminded of that most fascinating illustration about Isaiah?  Isaiah went to Hezekiah.  “This is what the Lord says,” Isaiah told him, “Put your house in order because you’re going to die.  You’re not going to recover.”  Isaiah 38:1.  Told him, “You’re not going to recover; you’re going to die.”  After that, the king wept bitterly, you remember, and he prayed about his impending doom.  Well, it was Isaiah, then, who hadn’t even gotten out of the king’s house after delivering the first message who was told by God, “Go back and tell Hezekiah this:  This is what the Lord the God of your father David says, I’ve heard your prayer, seen your tears, I will heal you, I’ll add fifteen years to your life.”  Amazing.  The prophet’s own account makes it very plain that had the king not prayed, if he hadn’t prayed, he would have died.  So somehow the instrumentality of prayer fits into the plan as does obedience, for if you don’t obey, you won’t be sanctified.  If you don’t obey the gospel you won’t be saved. 

We cannot, then, believe in the sovereignty of God, we cannot just believe in the teaching of the Word of God if it somehow strips us of the passion to pray.  Prayer, then, is the heart longing to unite with the holy purposes of God for their accomplishment …

Paul then prays, “And to this end, that God may count you worthy of your calling, fulfill every desire for goodness and the work of faith with power,” those three things.  They are magnificent things.  Worthiness, that has to do with spiritual character.  That the Lord would make you the kind of person you ought to be.  Fulfillment, that God would then fulfill in your life circumstances every holy longing.  And then, finally, that whatever service you do would be done with power.  That’s what God’s after.  A worthy life, a fulfilled life, a powerful life.  That’s the right stuff to pray for.  When you pray for your spouse or you pray for your children or you pray for your friends or you pray for your church or you pray in behalf of your own spiritual life, you pray for those things: worthiness, fulfillment, power in service. 

MacArthur concludes:

Can you stay focused?  Can you stay at the speed God wants you to stay at, moving toward the goal He wants you to move at with all the stuff going on around you and be undistracted?  Can you stay with the right stuff?  That’s the challenge.  You can’t, on your own, and that’s why Paul prays that you be able to by the power of God.

MacArthur’s reflections add a whole new dimension to the purpose of and petitions in prayer, things to think about in the week ahead.

John MacArthur on handling Christmas advertising complaints

Yesterday’s post on 2 Thessalonians 1:5-10 referenced several of John MacArthur’s sermons, one of which was ‘The Vengeance of the Lord Jesus, Part 2’ from January 19, 1992.

In it, he related a true story about his friend Spencer Nielsen, who was involved in the well-known Nielsen Report, which measures and analyses various types of data to help major corporations market themselves better.

Late in 1991, Nielsen received a complaint about the religious Christmas insert he had included with the December newsletter.

MacArthur takes up the story (emphases mine):

I have a friend, Spencer Nielsen. He writes “The Nielsen Report” … It’s a very scholarly and esteemed newsletter, quoted often in The Wall Street Journal and other places. In the December mailing of his newsletter, Spencer included the gospel, as he likes to do around Christmas, to share that with all of these people. In response to that he receives letters. Here is one from an executive of Bell Atlantic, the phone company on the east coast. “Dear Mr. Nielsen, I am writing to voice my displeasure at receiving the religious material insert in my last issue. This is most inappropriate and detracts from the strength of each subject in a stand-alone manner. You should reevaluate this as a business practice. My guess is that most of your readers were put off by it.” And the letter is signed.

This, he faxed to me, was his reply and he wanted to know if I thought this was a good reply. “Thank you for your December 30 letter. I was pleased to hear you noticed the Christmas message. Regarding your comment that it was inappropriate to include it in my newsletter, there is no such thing as an inappropriate time to talk about Jesus Christ. Each year I get an equal number of letters and phone calls thanking me or objecting to the Christmas message I send. Negative comments are generally because they consider it offensive. The message of Christ is offensive. Christ was crucified by people who considered Him offensive. He tells us we are all born sinners in need of salvation, that we must be washed clean by His blood, shed on a cross, that no one will get to heaven unless they come to the realization they are powerless to save themselves, that Christ died to redeem them from punishment they can’t escape unless they accept Him as their Savior. That’s all pretty offensive, but true. Over the centuries His disciples were stoned, beheaded, and tortured for simply confessing their belief in Him. So I consider myself fortunate in this age to be able to speak freely about Him without anyone being able to stop me. I don’t mind the criticism as long as it brings anyone who is not saved to the realization it is necessary to make life’s most important decision now, before it is too late. Sincerely,” and he signs his name.

MacArthur says:

How can anyone who understands where history is going and what the end of it is take any other approach? If we understand that Jesus Christ is coming to deal out retribution to all those who know not God and obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ and that what awaits them is pain forever in a ruined condition, away from His presence and His glory for all eternity, it would seem to me that nothing could restrain us from compelling people to that realization, offensive or not. And I thank God for the faithfulness of Spencer and others who hold back nothing. God would be offended if we didn’t warn the sinner.

2 Thessalonians 1:5-10 has the starkest description of the Second Coming outside of Revelation. Paul wrote it to comfort the Thessalonians who were faithful and loving in spite of persecution. Paul assured them that God would punish their persecutors.

MacArthur gives us insights as to how God will exact His divine retribution, including this description of hell:

Who is going to feel the retribution of God? Those who persecute Christians, who are part of a larger group who do not know God because they do not obey the gospel of the Lord Jesus.

How is this retribution meted out?  Back to verse 6, “After all, it is only just for God to repay with affliction.”  That’s how, with affliction, pain if you want another word, a synonym, pain.  If you want a good definition of thlibō, this is the term used here. It’s used in the New Testament in other places. The best illustration of what it can encompass is in 2 Corinthians 7:5.  Paul says, “We came into Macedonia, our flesh had no rest, no relief, we were afflicted.” There’s the same word. “On every side,” and here he defines it, “conflicts without, fears within, but God who comforts the depressed comforted us.”  What is it?  It’s affliction.  It’s depression.  How is it defined?  Conflict on the outside, fear on the inside. That’s why it’s the word “pressure,” “squeeze.”  You’re squeezed between the terrors on the outside and the terrors on the inside.  That’s the punishment.  God is going to give you pain.  God’s going to make you feel that pain, misery.  And that misery and pain with which He will afflict you is further described in verse 9, “And these will pay the penalty of eternal destruction.”

Now here we find something that needs our attention: The word “eternal.” This pain, this misery, this depression, this affliction is forever.  The word “eternal” is aiōn and it basically means a period of undefined length, age-long. However long the age is, that’s how long this is.  The reason it’s always translated “eternal” is because it is always associated with eternal things.  Seventy-five times aiōn is used in the New Testament. Out of seventy-five, only three refer to other than an endless duration. Only three times is this word used for other than an endless duration: Romans 16:25; 2 Timothy 1:9; Titus 1:2.  Seventy-two of the seventy-five mean an endless duration.  For example, it is used of God. God is aiōn. He is eternal, Romans 16:26.  In John 3:16 it is used of our time in heaven, or our period in heaven, which is eternal, forever.  Hebrews 5:9 it is used of our salvation, which is forever.  In Hebrews 9:12 of our redemption, which is forever, and on and on for 72 times; it must mean forever.  The coming age has no end, as God has no end, as we have no end, as salvation has no end.  It is not an abbreviated time, it is forever.

How is this vengeance and punishment going to come?  It’s going to come as pain, pressure, affliction, conflict in…outside and fear inside crushing the person forever.  He calls it here “destruction,” which adds another component, olethros.  The word means “ruin,” ruin.  It has the idea not of annihilation, not of being obliterated and put out of existence, but the idea of the loss of all that makes life worth living.  It speaks of somebody who is ruined.  It would be a… It would be a condition perhaps best, most graphically articulated to you as a condition like the physical condition of a dying … patient.  You’ve seen them, skin and bones lying on a bed with sunken faces and hollow, glassy eyes, unable to move, racked with killing disease, tortured with excruciating agony, and unable to have the strength to even respond.  Only it is that same condition forever, never the relief of death.  You never die. You just experience the uselessness, the hopelessness, the emptiness of a life with no meaning, no value, no worth, no accomplishment, no purpose, no goal, no future, no change, no hope.  You’re ruined forever.

The Lord Jesus had some terrifying things to say about this ruined existence.  He said it is an experience of fiery torment.  It is an experience that burns with a furious fire and yet gives no light to impenetrable darkness.  It is an experience of weeping and grinding of teeth in pain and frustration.  Soul and body are both ruined as far as worth and beauty are concerned.  Any vestige of the image of God is gone. Consuming worms eat but never die and are never satisfied.  The fire never goes out.  There is no escape.  And worst of all, there’s no second chance.  That’s what happens. God pays back and He pays back with pain and He pays back with pain that lasts forever, pain that renders a person absolutely useless, ruined forever.

Then there are two reasons given why this life is so terrible.  One, verse 9: “Away from the presence of the Lord.”  Wherever this place is called hell, God isn’t there.  There isn’t a vestige of His presence there.  In fact, in Luke 16 … in the story … of Lazarus and the rich man, there is a great gulf fixed between the place where the blessed are and the place where the cursed are.  And that gulf separates the cursed from God and all that represents His presence.  Imagine an existence like that.  Imagine an existence in this kind of terrible, ruined, worthless, useless, purposeless, painful, eternal existence where there is no vestige of anything that connects with God. James 1:17, James said, “All good things come from God. All perfect things come from God.”  There won’t be any of them there, nothing good, nothing meaningful, nothing beautiful, nothing valuable, no joy, no peace, no love, nothing, no pleasure, nothing because God isn’t there.  Jesus said it. In Matthew 7:23, He said, “Depart from Me.” That’s the point, “I don’t know you, go out of My presence.”  That’s what hell is, it’s away from the presence of the Lord.  There is nothing of God there, therefore there’s no beauty, there’s no joy, there’s no pleasure, there’s no purpose.  God isn’t there.  You’re gone, banished, exiled from God.

As Leon Morris says, “Those who oppose the things of God here and now are not engaged in some minor error.”  This is not a minor error.  There’s no fleshly sentiment that can alter the consequences to not knowing God and not obeying the gospel of the Lord Jesus.

Then Paul adds another feature of hell. Not only are they away from the presence of the Lord, but also they’re away from the glory of His power.  That’s a magnificent reality, you know, the glory of His power.  What does it mean?  It means visible splendor, His majesty, and the display of that majesty in power.  They’ll never see that.  They’ll never see that.  There will be nothing of the presence of God there. There will be nothing of the power of God there.  Nothing of His presence to comfort, nothing of His presence to give meaning, nothing of His presence to give beauty, pleasure, joy, peace, happiness, nothing of His presence to bring those things that make life worth living, and nothing of His glory and His splendor and His majesty and His power.

Your company?  The devil.  Your company?  His evil angels.  And yet an eternal loneliness.  Jesus is coming and He’s bringing retribution.  He’s bringing retribution.  Why?  It’s just. It is just.  On whom?  Those who persecute Christians who belong to that larger order of people who do not know God because they do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.  And how will the retribution come?  It will come with pain that is eternal that ruins them and they will live forever without any vestige of the presence of the Lord or any display of His glorious power through all eternity.  That’s the coming of Jesus Christ.  That’s what it means to the people who reject Christ.

Unbelievers will say, ‘As I do not believe in God, I don’t care about His presence or the loss thereof’.

However, suppose that the realisation of the lack of God’s presence becomes crystal clear as one goes to meet Satan and his angels forever. In the first instance, following death, the condemned souls are in torment. After the Second Coming, they are reunited with their body in their second death. With the physical aspect, the torment increases.

There is no rest, mentally or physically.

Unlike cartoon depictions, there is no drinks trolley at 6 p.m. There is no fun, no beauty of any kind, nothing to lift the spirit. There aren’t any relationships, either.

It’s hard for us to imagine.

In closing, MacArthur reminds us:

John the Baptist didn’t come along … and say, “It would certainly be wonderful if you would repent,” he said, “Repent, or else.”

Don’t wait until it’s too late.