Reviewing the latest NAR propaganda from John MacArthur...

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Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience. For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed. - Romans 13:1-7 (ESV)

Pastor John MacArthur has long been the doctrinal darling of many folks, including many in discernment circles. He really was considered doctrinal royalty in a church with so many compromised preachers. This adoration often rose to unseemly levels as many essentially deified Mr. MacArthur and any criticism was often met with swift rebuke. I get it. I truly do. With so many false teachers, MacArthur was a diligent and solid exegete. Well, except for the fact that he is Calvinist. Oh, and his cessationism. These two positions are simply unsupported by the bible but other than that, he was usually spot on in his scripture interpretation. While I liked Mac, I never deified him. I was willing to write about the flaws in his teaching because the truth is what should matter. I remember doing a devotional called The Parable of John MacArthur and the Publican, where we examined the false Calvinist beliefs. Overall though, MacArthur has always been pretty solid.

Then COVID hit and he lost his doctrinal mind. Initially, Johnny Mac sided with the precautions and shut his church down, as the State of California demanded due to the spread of the virus. The problem with MacArthur's church is the same with any mega-church - they rely on tithing to survive and the pandemic halted giving. So strangely, Mac changed his mind about the church being closed in July of 2020, which was the height of the pandemic. COVID cases were still rising and people were still dying. These are established facts. The only disagreement comes from the QAnon, disengaged from reality crowd that unfortunately many Christians fell prey to. During this time, MacArthur continued to thumb his nose at the government, science and reason. The L.A. Times reported that he mocked the virus insisting there was no pandemic even as members of his church fell ill. Let me be very clear. While Mac usually has a pretty good grasp of theology, he is not a scientist. He is not an epidemiologist. He is not a virologist. Not even close. Like Rodney Howard Brown before him, he just refused to stay in his lane. It is not the job of any pastor to publicly declare there is or is not a pandemic because they do not have the training, experience or education. If I wanted Ephesians exegeted I would not ask Dr. Fauci. Mac was even quoted as claiming the virus was not as deadly as projected, essentially slapping the faces of the families of the 150,000 who had already died at that point in this country. If you find yourself wanting to disagree realize that at present there have been over one million deaths in this country so save it. You are wrong. John MacArthur was wrong and in many cases, dead wrong.

It was reported toward the end of 2020 MacArthur himself contracted COVID and many feared for his life. He of course will not confirm or deny this but he was absent from his church for a month and even when returned was visibly still fighting respiratory distress but he just joked that the people there would contract what he had by Noon. Yeah, very funny John. Reminds me of Pastor Loren Sandford who also opened his church in the middle of the plague and then bragged that no one in his church was sick. Then his entire church contracted COVID. Then Pastor Sandford died. Not so funny anymore for his family. Johnny Mac's church by the way placed a new warning sign for all who entered his building exonerating the church from any legal proceedings if anyone happened to catch COVID at the church, which is odd because he insisted there was no pandemic, right? Because you know, what butt would Jesus cover, right?

Then an even stranger thing happened. The NAR embraced the former outcast MacArthur. Remember Mac was the guy who spoke against the strange fire he was seeing in Charismania but after being persona non grata for so long, he was now adored. Why? Because the NAR embraced the dominionist theology Mac now was espousing. The entire revolt against the Democratic led government thing is the heart of dominionism. I remember seeing John MacArthur being interviewed by Steven Strang on Charisma news and wondered what the hell was going on? How can someone who is considered so biblically smart not realize the fact that the largest media cesspool of the NAR was now platforming him? To this day, even Mac's strongest defenders have no defense for this. As much as MacArthur probably would rail against Rick Warren and the Purpose Driven Church, he fell for one of its core teachings. The church is not meant to be an hour and a half on Sundays. Many churches used the pandemic to do real ministry and be a source of support for their neighborhood and country. While not ideal, sermons can be live streamed. Ministries and groups can be remote. I found a quote from someone who attended MacArthur's church who also worked in healthcare at the time that sums up the dichotomy being presented:

"I have people ask me every day, 'Am I going to die?' And [MacArthur] is saying, 'Everybody meet in here, no problem, it's like I live in two different worlds."

He was right. There were two different worlds. In one world there was reason, science and concern for the health and wellbeing of people. In the other was crazy bat-poop conspiracy theories and a church that did not mind feeding their sheep into the COVID woodchipper in exchange for the Sunday show from compromised men who knew nothing about what they were speaking to. I remember early on Rodney Howard Browne espoused that he should be the authority to speak for the health of his congregants. Eh, no Rodney. You stick to heresy and let the scientists speak about the virus. The truly sad thing is we may never know how many people John MacArthur killed with this selfishness. I know that stings but that's the truth and the bible says he will be held to a higher account. The blood remains on his hands beloved. I do not care if you love him or deify him. He will answer for this we can be assured.

Perhaps the most disgusting portion of the NAR dominionist, anti-government arguments was the claim of persecution and MacArthur fell in line with this nonsense as well. There is real persecution in this world beloved. Christians in China have to meet underground and face severe consequences if caught practicing Christianity. Believers in the Middle East are beheaded for refusing to denounce Christ. That is persecution. The government saying you cannot hold services with large crowds for the fear of people getting sick is not persecution. It is common sense. Mind you, the church was never asked to close. They simply could not hold services with large crowds - as no one could! Not just the church! The victim mentality sold by the NAR was quickly adopted by MacArthur. He attempted many tortured and unbiblical defenses of this position but at the end of the day they all fall short of the truth. John MacArthur was wrong then and remains wrong today. These are not matters for debate. These are proven facts. His scientific statements were stupid and ignorant, and his biblical defenses were so vacuous and self-serving that he probably would have rebuked them just a few years ago.

Nonetheless, John MacArthur must be feeling some deep conviction because now he feels the need to continue to defend what he did. To that end, he is releasing a movie entitled The Essential Church. This is a not so clever play on the statement from the state that non-essential functions needed to close during the pandemic. The NAR and now Johnny Mac have seized on this poor wording to make it sound as if the state was maligning the church as non-essential. Do not fall for this beloved as what was non-essential was the corporate gathering each week where 5000 people jammed into a confined space with a deadly pandemic spreading all around them. If you are still arguing that this was essential then you are too thoughtless to discuss this. The church is essential for God's plan but the shining city on a hill has absolutely nothing to do with meeting on Sundays. The church can still be the church and I would argue is far more essential in other ways. The opportunity lost during the pandemic for the church to step into the gap is staggering as people like MacArthur fell for the NAR propaganda. Now, he is making propaganda of his own.

The Essential Church reviews times during history when the church suffered persecution. The problem is this is presented solely to add the COVID, self-perpetuated drama to that list. This is categorically absurd and inaccurate. I do not know how simpler this can be. There was a pandemic spreading across the globe that to date has killed seven million people. Several state governments, who are charged with protecting the public safety, decided that large public gatherings needed to be placed on hold. They did not decide this in a vacuum as they listened to the brightest scientists and doctors in this field. A few months into the virus, many churches that sided with the NAR dominionist theology realized they could use this horrific situation to score cheap political points. They realized that their purpose driven models of church growth relied upon the tithe and that was all but vanishing without the main event of a Sunday service. So, they rebelled against their governmental authority. This is despite the clear instruction of scripture found in the key verses today. MacArthur realized his stance violated these scriptures so he tried this tortured logic to defend himself:

"Some will think such a firm statement is inexorably in conflict with the command to be subject to governing authorities laid out in Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2. Scripture does mandate careful, conscientious obedience to all governing authority, including kings, governors, employers, and their agents (in Peter's words, "not only to those who are good and gentle, but also to those who are unreasonable" [1 Peter 2:18]). Insofar as government authorities do not attempt to assert ecclesiastical authority or issue orders that forbid our obedience to God's law, their authority is to be obeyed whether we agree with their rulings or not. In other words, Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 still bind the consciences of individual Christians. We are to obey our civil authorities as powers that God Himself has ordained. However, while civil government is invested with divine authority to rule the state, neither of those texts (nor any other) grants civic rulers jurisdiction over the church." - John MacArthur

He made many other ridiculous arguments but let's just focus on these. This notion that Romans 13 hinges upon whether the government attempts to exercise ecclesiastic authority is from the mind and deceitful heart of John MacArthur, not scripture. Do you see this anywhere in the key verses? No. The notion that the state cannot issue orders that forbid our obedience to the law is equally moronic. Being asked to temporarily not gather in large groups is not forbidding us to obey the law. Mac's argument here is that the modern-day Sunday church service is somehow compatible with the Mosaic Law and that not going is somehow sin. If missing Sunday service was a sin then we are all going to hell. This transparent ploy also forgets that the law was nailed to the cross, except the moral law. So is MacArthur making the argument that attending his church on Sundays was a moral imperative? The jurisdictional argument falls flat because the ask was not for the church to not be the church but just not to jam 5000 people into a confined space while a lethal virus was loose. Never lose sight also that the reasoning from the state was public health. It does not matter what John MacArthur's opinion about this was. He is not a doctor.

So, MacArthur is now releasing a movie that compares this asinine, insensitive and potentially deadly stance he took against his own sheep, to periods in church history of great persecution. That is propaganda of the highest order. I said so yesterday in response to a post on Facebook and the blowback was swift. The defenses offered however were based on personality not scripture. There is no scriptural defense for what John MacArthur did and producing a movie lying about what he did is not going to change that. If you are prepared to defend this doesn't it give you pause that Charisma News is backing him? That he thinks nothing of sharing a platform with them? I will close with one more nugget from Mac's own defense:

"Politicians may manipulate statistics and the media can cover up or camouflage inconvenient truths. So a discerning church cannot passively or automatically comply if the government orders a shutdown of congregational meetings--even if the reason given is a concern for public health and safety." - John MacArthur

I love my pastor but I am not taking virology advice from him any time soon. Note here that politicians MAY manipulate stats which the media MAY cover up, but that conspiratorial nonsense goes both ways. Either way, to present the mere possibility as a rationale for this action is beyond stupid. His arrogant statement here that the church cannot obey Romans 13 because of the possibility of deception is such a self-serving argument. He just dismisses public health out of hand. Remember - seven million people are dead! If you want to see this fluff piece of NAR conspiracy marketing, knock yourself out. It does not change history. It does not change facts. It does not change the bible. Johnny Mac should have known better and deep down I think he does but he is now all in on the NAR dominionist side. Deified or otherwise, John MacArthur is to be marked and avoided.

Reverend Anthony Wade - August 1, 2023

Authors Bio:
Credentialed Minister of the Gospel for the Assemblies of God. Owner and founder of 828 ministries. Vice President for Goodwill Industries. Always remember that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.