But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath.” He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.”
(Matthew 12:2-8)
In my early years as a pastor, I benefitted greatly from the preaching, teaching, and writing ministry of John MacArthur, Jr. I remember using his book “The Gospel According to Jesus” as a text in a Sunday morning class and we all profited from his rejection of the idea that a person can be a Christian and yet never confess Jesus as Lord (ie, obey Jesus). Because, that false teaching maintained, we are saved by grace and to require obedience to Jesus as Lord would be to add works to the gospel. MacArthur used God’s Word to shut down what really was a heresy.
We know that MacArthur produced a tremendous number of books and articles. He preached and taught at Grace Community Church for decades, edited the MacArthur Study Bible, founded the Master’s Seminary, taught on a longstanding radio broadcast, and more.
And yet…what are we to think? I ask this question because there have been very troubling cases of MacArthur and his elders and staff doing great harm to victims of domestic violence. The case of Eileen Gray and her abuser husband is a classic example. Eileen was publicly ex-communicated by MacArthur and the church provided comfort to her (at the time) husband, David Gray. David would ultimately be convicted of aggravated child molestation and other charges of abusing their children, a conviction for which he received a sentence of 21 plus years in prison. But even then Grace Community Church continued to support him, even helping him start a Bible study ministry to fellow prisoners.
So…what are we to think? How can a pastor preach and teach God’s Word and accomplish such apparently great things for Christ…and yet mistreat and even endanger an abuse victim and her children? Let me suggest one explanation.
John MacArthur fervently stood for the inerrancy and authority of the Bible. He used a “hermeneutic” (ie, a method of Bible interpretation) that was what I call “wooden literalism.” Now, I believe and teach that the Bible is indeed the inerrant and authoritative Word of God, and that we are to interpret it for exactly what it says and means. But I recognize that the Bible often uses symbols and types and figures to convey those literal truths which they represent. Much of the book of Revelation, for instance, uses such symbols and those who insist that the multiheaded beast is literally a multiheaded beast, or that the armies of locusts are actual hordes of locusts, well…such people are going to come to wrong and ridiculous conclusions. However, those symbols represent a literal thing or place or persons. To recognize the use of symbols and figures is certainly not a denial of the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible.
But what has this to do with John MacArthur? Simply this – his approach to the Bible was so unbending and stiff that it led him to wrong conclusions in numbers of cases, and specifically in respect to the Bible’s teaching about marriage and divorce. For MacArthur, when he read this:
But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. (Matthew 5:32)
…he concluded and taught that Jesus meant to establish an absolute, universal principle which applies in all cases. “Divorce for any reason but adultery and it is sin.” Boom! There it is! [If you have read David Instone-Brewer’s book “Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible,” you will understand that there are valid reasons to conclude that Jesus was dealing specifically with a particular type case which His opponents connivingly asked Him about].
But back to MacArthur’s wooden literalism. If you simply look at the cases which he and his church leadership have handled, such as that of Eileen Gray’s, you will see that his hermeneutic led MacArthur to ridiculous, damaging, and illogical applications. No divorce ever except for adultery. No separation ever for domestic abuse. If a husband commits literal adultery with another woman, ok, the wife can divorce him. But if he has sex with one of the children….she must stay in the marriage, suffer for Jesus, and be a saintly model to the kids. See it? This is just like the Pharisees and their “letter of the law” approach to Scripture which Jesus condemned. They would refuse to support their own parents who were in need and instead give a tithe to the Temple. Jesus told them – listen to this very carefully –
‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless.
It is my conclusion therefore that John MacArthur, for all of his accomplishments, failed at one of the most important points in standing for Christ. He applied the Bible in a merciless manner in cases like that of Eileen Gray and her children. Why? Only the Lord really knows, but could it be that MacArthur was soooo zealous to stand for the Bible as the Word of God and to oppose the heresies of liberal theology and the false gospel or Rome, that his zeal carried him into the realm of error and merciless handling of cases where mercy was required?
There are lessons here for all of us. Every Christian must be zealous for the Lord, but we must be sure that our zeal is really for God and His truth and not something concocted by our own ideas. Paul saw this error in his own countrymen:
For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. (Romans 10:2)
We must also recognize that we go wrong if we make too much of any man and begin to regard him as infallible. Those are dangers lurking for all who look at the ministry accomplishments of MacArthur. We can be thankful for the good, but always aware that our trust must be in the Lord alone and never come to a point of accepting something simply because a famed man said it.
We should pray that the pastoral staff of Grace Community Church and the Master’s Seminary faculty all have their eyes opened by the Lord and turn away from their serious errors of denying mercy to those in need of it.
Step
I must say, I respected John MacArthur, but never wholeheartedly trusted him due to these matters. Probably why Jesus warned us to test all things.
I will be forever grateful for RC Soroul’s sermon “Divorce”, where he specifically addresses this and other issues in marriage. I cried when I heard it as I realized had I heard it years before, I might have left my husband after 10 years instead of dragging through for almost 30.
Jeff Crippen
Thank you. I am not certain which sermon on divorce from Sproul that you have in mind. I do know that earlier he held to the same position as MacArthur – divorce for adultery only. I corresponded with him on this issue and he told me that he had changed his position to one much closer to my own. However to my knowledge he never publicly announced his new position. Perhaps I have not come across it. Thank you again.
elfmom55
His extensive wealth bothers me also like all the rest of the big name preachers.
Jeff Crippen
Elfmom55 – I had to edit your comment because I don’t have documentation regarding the other two points you mentioned. You may well be correct – I just haven’t seen the sources. But your note about the great wealth – yes, that is troublesome for sure.
elfmom55
John McArthur and MOTB
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQKxbUamUno
Sarah
Thank you for this article! My abuser often listened to this man’s sermons and the abuser was encouraged in his actions. I appreciate what you wrote!
Lynn
I have mixed feelings about how to process the passing of John MacArthur.
The question I keep coming back to is: how can we trust a pastor who, when confronted with egregious sin, like publicly shaming and excommunicating a female congregant for choosing to protect herself and her children from an abusive man, and then spent years refusing to repent? For those who may try to claim that he repented privately, it doesn’t work that way. Public sin requires public repentance. We never witnessed that with MacArthur. For years, there was a call for him to repent by many people – both in his church and the larger church community globally – for the shameful way he publicly excommunicated Eileen Gray. One of his elders resigned over it.
We need to ask ourselves, what does his behavior say about the state of his heart? Is that an example of Christian love that we should honor and model?
Of course not.
MacArthur’s behavior had more in common with the Pharisees in Jesus’s day than the Lord he claimed to serve. His wooden literalism crushed many sheep under his care. He will have to answer to God for that.
Watching the vitriolic responses by MacArthur’s fanboys as the stories of his abusive actions towards fellow believers – men, women, and children – who exposed his hypocrisy is disheartening. They are mad that the survivors are taking the time to remind the larger audience that there were two sides to John MacArthur. One that elevated expository preaching from the pulpit for over 50 years and sided with their political and patriarchal views. The other that repeatedly sided with evil men when abuse in his congregation, his seminary, and staff was exposed, even when these wicked men were convicted and sent to prison for the crimes they committed against their own families.
The only way I can square that circle is to say that, based on the actions of his life, John MacArthur was a hypocrite. It gives me no pleasure to make such a statement, but I don’t know how to conclude otherwise. He lacked the biblical love that God calls his children to display to each other and to the world. Some of the fruit of his life was rotten. Rotten fruit, when placed next to healthy fruit, corrupts it, not the other way around. The only way to stop the rotten fruit from spreading to the healthy fruit is to remove it.
The mask he wore on Sunday when he got up to teach through the Bible was convincing. It drew many like him to GCC and Shepherd’s conference. His true heart was exposed in how he treated the abuse victims that came to him and GCC for assistance and relief. He offered them nothing but pain and inflicted even more damage by poorly reflecting the heart of God to those victims with his ungodly advice. He was complicit in GCC’s consistent failure to report child abuse to the authorities as the law mandates. As the head pastor of GCC, everyone looked to his example on how to handle these situations. He didn’t handle them in a godly way. If the only version of God’s love that the women in his congregation, like Eileen Gray, experienced was through their interactions with John MacArthur, then God’s great name was profaned, not glorified.
That being said, I do believe that God has used MacArthur to further His Kingdom. What we need to remember is that all credit for salvation belongs to God, not man. Even if John MacArthur’s sermons and books produce 1,000s or millions of saints, he is not the one doing the saving. God is the one doing the saving. Making sweeping statements glorifying MacArthur’s life and his impact on Christianity like many in his camp have done and ar doing, shift the focus from Christ where it belongs to a man who’s life at best was a mixed bag. As helpful as past Christian men like Spurgeon, Luther, Origen, or Clement may have been to the understanding of the faith, it is Jesus who saves. It is the work of the Holy Spirit that effects repentance in the hearts of the saints, not the work of men or women. We are messengers of the gospel. That’s it. How a person responds is between them and God. Trying to take credit for the salvivic work that the Holy Spirit does in others is wrong because if we see much success, it allows a root of pride to grow in the heart. Pride is a sin, not a virtue.
We need to be very careful not to put pastors on pedestals. We are called to be good Bereans and study God’s word for ourselves to see if what we are being taught is actually the truth. We are called to love the brethren, expose evil, and remove it from our midst. MacArthur refused to do that. He covered up evil, sided with abusers, demanded victims remain in abusive environments, and only kept yes men on his elder board. None of those actions reflect the Jesus he claimed to serve.
Jesus would have comforted the victims, housed and fed them, and supported them as they sought legal and criminal actions against their abuser. He would have taken the abuser to task, brought the cops to arrest the abuser, and exposed their wickedness to the Church before publicly excommunicating them from the Church.
It is too easy to twist scripture to mean what you want it to mean. MacArthur did this regarding marriage. His wooden literalism and refusal to support divorce for abuse harmed so many in his congregation and those impacted by his seminary students. He didn’t properly equip his ministers with the truth because of his own twisted hermeneutic. This has resulted in abusive practices on a global scale due to the size and influence of GCC and The Master’s Seminary.
There is an attitude in the visible church that seems to be, if you expose the evil deeds of a pastor like MacArthur that the theobros like, you are the viper, the Jezebel, the emissary of Satan, not the one who committed such vile acts. If this attitude doesn’t change, we will continue to see genuine Christians leave what is considered “the church” today, to find healing and protection from these abusive practices elsewhere.
That being said, I am grateful he can no longer harm victims like Eileen Gray and her children. I am grateful that, regardless of where his soul ends up, he knows the truth.
Time will tell if the GCC leadership will repent. I pray they do, lest they prove to be like the church in Sardis in Revelation 3.
Jeff Crippen
Well said, Lynn. Thank you.
Alive or not, itstill happened
Thank you Pastor Crippen for raising this – for a minute I thought you were unaware of John MacArthur’s treatment of those who suffered extreme cruelty in domestic violence under his shepherding. When I was in the thick of recovery hands down he was one name that came up in the community over and over as a walking contradiction – and one whose great messaging in one area was eclipsed by the severity of what had happened under his watch to the domestic violence survivors.
I trust the Lord has this covered with him and the others, and that is where I have to leave his life and death. There is such crushing anguish under his watch that this is one I simply do not say anymore about. It happened and his passing does not change it, Lord willing though it will change the future lives.
Jeff Crippen
Thank you. Yes, I have been aware of his cruel treatment of domestic abuse victims and also the same by his counseling department at the seminary and his elders. They forbid divorce for abuse and they tell victims that God wants them to suffer in the abuser as a Godly testimony. Interesting that they didn’t excommunicate David Gray even after he was convicted of molesting and abusing his children, but they put Eileen out of the church for divorcing him. Really I think these cases come down to “you will obey us. We are the leaders of this church and you will submit to our authority.” I really think that the excommunication is for the “sin” of refusing to submit to their unlawful commands. There is nowhere in the Bible where we are told that a person has to have the permission of their church to divorce. Yes, the church has authority to discipline for sin as, for instance, in a divorce that is indeed unbiblical and sinful such as “well, I just didn’t want to be married anymore so I’m leaving.” But Eileen Gray was fleeing an abusive man who broke the marriage covenant long before. MacArthur is/was a very confusing study in contradiction. Standing for the gospel, for the inerrancy of the Bible – and yet treating the abused so cruelly.