The Truth War

by John MacArthur

  Before leaving the subject, let me stress that two common errors must be avoided in our thinking about God’s sovereignty as it relates to evil. One, of course, is this notion (sometimes advocated by certain hyper-Calvinists) that God actively and directly causes evildoers to be evil. As we have already seen, that idea violates several emphatic statements of Scripture that God is never the source or the direct agent of evil. “[He is] not a God who takes pleasure in wickedness, nor shall evil dwell with [Him]” (Psalm 5:4).

  THE PICTURE OF

  DIVINE SOVEREIGNTY IN

  SCRIPTURE IS THAT GOD

  POSITIVELY ORDAINS

  WHATSOEVER COMES TO

  PASS. HE ALWAYS ACTS

  WITH A PURPOSE.

  EVEN THE WICKED

  UNWITTINGLY DO HIS

  BIDDING, AND THEY THUS

  FULFILL HIS SOVEREIGN

  PURPOSE IN THE END.

  But an opposite error lies at the other end of the spectrum. We are not to think God’s command over evil and evildoers is limited to a kind of passive, prescient foreknowledge in which He reluctantly and grudgingly gives His consent to something He knows evildoers are going to do anyway.

  Rather, the picture of divine sovereignty in Scripture is that God positively ordains whatsoever comes to pass. He always acts with a purpose. Even the wicked unwittingly do His bidding, and they thus fulfill His sovereign purpose in the end. Here are God’s own words:

  For I am God, and there is no other;

  I am God, and there is none like Me,

  Declaring the end from the beginning,

  And from ancient times things that are not yet done,

  Saying, “My counsel shall stand,

  And I will do all My pleasure,”

  Calling a bird of prey from the east,

  The man who executes My counsel, from a far country.

  Indeed I have spoken it;

  I will also bring it to pass.

  I have purposed it;

  I will also do it. (Isaiah 46:9–11)

  Or to borrow Paul’s words, God “works all things according to the counsel of His will” (Ephesians 1:11).

  This is admittedly a difficult subject, but it is also profoundly important. And the main ideas we need to keep in mind turn out to be fairly simple: The biblical picture of God’s sovereignty is that He works in and through all that happens. Rather than merely trying to circumvent evil or rearrange His plan to accomplish good in spite of evil, He harnesses the deeds of the wicked to accomplish His good and perfect ends. He also guarantees the ultimate destruction of evil itself. Meanwhile, nothing thwarts any aspect of His plan. Even the most stubborn actions of the worst sinners turn out to be no actual impediment to the divine purpose. He simply employs them as tools to accomplish His will.

  That, after all, is precisely what Scripture says happened at the cross—which was the worst atrocity ever carried out by the collective forces of evil. But in the hands of a sovereign God, it was also the greatest good ever accomplished on behalf of sinners (Acts 2:23–24; 4:27–28).

  GOD’S ZERO-TOLERANCE

  POLICY FOR APOSTATES

  Someone might be tempted to think that if God is sovereign and can always overrule sinners’ evil intentions, the threat posed by apostasy and false teaching cannot really be critical. If everything currently happening is in complete accord with the eternal plan and decree of God, God Himself could not really be displeased with false teachers.

  Of course, Scripture says otherwise. God’s wrath against sin is real and terrifying.

  God is a just judge,

  And God is angry with the wicked every day.

  If he does not turn back,

  He will sharpen His sword;

  He bends His bow and makes it ready. (Psalm 7:11–12)

  Who can stand before His indignation?

  And who can endure the fierceness of His anger?

  His fury is poured out like fire,

  And the rocks are thrown down by Him. (Nahum 1:6)

  God’s anger against false prophets and heretics is particularly fierce. The condemnation of apostates was a common theme in the Old Testament prophetic writings. Jeremiah 5:13–14, for example, quotes this message from the Lord:

  “And the prophets become wind,

  For the word is not in them.

  Thus shall it be done to them.”

  Therefore thus says the LORD God of hosts:

  “Because you speak this word,

  Behold, I will make My words in your mouth fire,

  And this people wood,

  And it shall devour them.”

  Notice that both the false prophets and the people who departed from God’s Word to follow their lying words are all devoured by God’s judgment.

  Hosea 9:7–9 levels this condemnation at false prophets:

  The days of punishment have come;

  The days of recompense have come.

  Israel knows!

  The prophet is a fool,

  The spiritual man is insane,

  Because of the greatness of your iniquity and great enmity.

  The watchman of Ephraim is with my God;

  But the prophet is a fowler’s snare in all his ways—

  Enmity in the house of his God.

  They are deeply corrupted,

  As in the days of Gibeah.

  He will remember their iniquity;

  He will punish their sins.

  Various Old Testament prophecies were full of similar condemnations, all announcing, as Jude does, that the doom of the apostates was sure and certain.

  Why all the repeated warnings and pronouncements of doom against people who had turned away from God? If their judgment was really sure, if God had already turned His face away, if there was no more grace that might save them, the apostates clearly were not going to turn from their error anyway.

  I am convinced these warnings are primarily a message to those still under the influence of the truth. It is a deterrent, first of all, for people who might be sitting on the fence. Apostasy is nothing to trifle with. If you willfully abandon the truth after the Holy Spirit has graciously opened your eyes, there is no coming back. (Again, I believe that is the whole message of the difficult warning passages in Hebrews, especially 6:4–6; 10:26–29; and 12:15–17.) “If the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men” (Matthew 5:13).

  But the multiple warnings are also a reminder to all the faithful about the seriousness of the Truth War. Jude is urging us to rise up and contend earnestly for the faith against apostates and their false teaching. Remember: he is dealing with gospel-corrupters and Christ-deniers, not merely people with whom we might disagree on peripheral issues. These are heretics who have abandoned the faith once delivered to the saints, and now they are trying to get others in the church to follow them in that error. We are not to allow such false teachers to remain unmolested inside the church, calling themselves Christians, spreading their evil doctrines. We don’t need to be hesitant about engaging them in conflict or refuting their lying words, especially for the sake of those they are seducing. We don’t need to waste a lot of angst wondering if we are alienating them—because they have already deliberately rejected the truth, and they have already been ordained to condemnation.

  That is, when we attack the lies of an utter apostate with the truth, we are doing the work of God. There is no need to pull punches. Handling false doctrine with kid gloves is never a good tactic. There is no value in toning down the truth with ambiguities or withholding the hard parts. Do what Jude did: sound a clear signal. Those who are being deceived can be rescued only by the gospel. The more clearly we proclaim the message and the more starkly we set it in opposition to the error, the better.

  Jude is issuing a deliberately shrill call to battle. The threat he observed was both imminent and serious. His words about these men being destined for damnation are not mere childish triumphal-ism. Th
at pronouncement, preceded by Jude’s militant call to contend earnestly for the faith, is meant to shock us out of lethargy. The danger these apostates posed was of far greater concern to Jude in this instance than the niceties of polite discourse.

  A TIME TO BE TOUGH;

  A TIME TO BE TENDER

  Remember, Jude is writing about apostates and gospel corrupters. He is not suggesting that every trivial flaw in someone’s thinking about nonessential or difficult doctrines is an occasion to bring out the heavy weapons. He is certainly not exhorting us to get militant every time there is a disagreement in the church. Sometimes, even close friends and true brothers in Christ disagree sharply. In such cases, if reconciliation proves impossible, parting company amicably is preferable to a fight (Acts 15:37–41). As the Old Testament sage reminds us, there is “a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace” (Ecclesiastes 3:7–8).

  I touched on this point briefly in chapter 2 and again at the end of chapter 3. But the caveat is worth stating again here with emphasis: honest disagreements between true brethren should never escalate into mortal combat (Psalm 133:1; John 13:35; 1 Corinthians 1:10; Ephesians 4:3–6). Jude’s call to battle applies when there is a serious threat to “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints”—the kind of false teaching that undermines the foundations of the gospel. The error Jude has in mind does not stem from some slight misunderstanding about a difficult text. He is talking about heresy that is ultimately rooted in willful unbelief—a denial of “the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ” (Jude 4). He has in mind an error that corrupts the essential character of the gospel. He is talking about damnable error. He stresses that fact when he says the purveyors of such heresies are destined for condemnation. Now, bear in mind that such errors are often subtle and hard to spot. The only way to develop the discernment necessary for detecting such subtle error and correctly assessing its danger is by applying oneself conscientiously to the task of rightly dividing the Word of God (2 Timothy 2:15). That skill must be perfected over time through faithful diligence.

  THE ERROR JUDE

  HAS IN MIND DOES NOT

  STEM FROM SOME

  SLIGHT MISUNDERSTANDING

  ABOUT A DIFFICULT TEXT.

  HE IS TALKING ABOUT

  HERESY THAT IS ULTIMATELY

  ROOTED IN WILLFUL

  UNBELIEF—A DENIAL OF

  “THE ONLY LORD GOD AND

  OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST”

  (JUDE 4). HE HAS IN MIND

  AN ERROR THAT CORRUPTS

  THE ESSENTIAL CHARACTER

  OF THE GOSPEL. HE IS

  TALKING ABOUT DAMNABLE

  ERROR. HE STRESSES THAT

  FACT WHEN HE SAYS THE

  PURVEYORS OF SUCH

  HERESIES ARE DESTINED

  FOR CONDEMNATION.

  Furthermore, as I have stressed from the start, apostates are usually clandestine about their unbelief. The mere fact that someone professes to be a brother in Christ and insists that he is only making negligible and perfectly benign doctrinal distinctions does not make it so. In fact, that is exactly what Jude is describing: false teachers who deliberately try to remain unnoticed—who pretend loyalty to Christ, but whose doctrine contradicts that profession. It can be quite difficult to see past someone’s phony profession of faith and assess the true gravity of his error. That is one of the main reasons harsh judgments are not to be made lightly. “Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment” (John 7:24, emphasis added).

  But that verse (often erroneously cited as an argument for withholding all judgments completely) is actually the opposite: a command to judge righteously. We can’t set aside all judgment just because discernment is difficult. Willful gullibility is disobedience to God’s Word. “Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1).

  Still, overzealousness is clearly a danger we need to guard against carefully. There are indeed some full-time critics operating today, always looking for a fight, taking fleshly delight in controversy merely for controversy’s sake, and making judgments that may be too harsh or too hasty. Don’t fall into the trap of assuming that the most censorious and nitpicking opinions are automatically the most “discerning” ones. Watch out for the person who shows no caution or restraint about making severe judgments and yet claims to be a “discernment” expert. True discernment is gained by applying our hearts and minds to biblical wisdom, not by fostering a critical spirit.

  As a matter of fact, Scripture says that those who are merely pugnacious or quarrelsome are unfit for spiritual leadership (1 Timothy 3:3). When Paul laid out the qualifications for church leaders, he was emphatic about this. “A servant of the Lord must not quarrel but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient, in humility correcting those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth” (2 Timothy 2:24–25). That is the spirit we must cultivate. Contending earnestly for the faith does not require us to become brawlers. Let’s acknowledge that as plainly as possible and never lose sight of it.

  But by far the greater danger facing the church today is utter apathy toward the truth and indifference about false teaching. Frankly, we are not very good these days at guarding the truth. We tend not to see truth the way Scripture presents it—as a sacred treasure committed to our trust (1 Timothy 6:20–21). I think that is why evangelicals on the whole don’t take seriously the duty to expose and refute false teachers. Too many have decided it is easier and seems so much “nicer” to pretend that every doctrinal deviation is ultimately insignificant. That kind of thinking has given Christians a dangerous sense of false comfort and security.

  HOW TO SPOT AN APOSTATE

  Jude seems to suggest that the church in his day had been lulled into a similar state of deadly apathy, and the false teachers were having a heyday because of it. Perhaps that is why his warning sounds so shrill.

  In fact, the sharpness of the warning is suited to the danger posed by the purveyors of heresy. As we shall shortly observe, their ungodliness had multiple dimensions.

  Ungodly is one of the key words in Jude’s epistle. In verse 15 alone, he uses the word four times. (The Lord is coming, he says, “to execute judgment on all, to convict all who are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have committed in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him” [emphasis added].) In verse 4 he uses the word as a general description of the apostates themselves. This is their chief characteristic: they were ungodly. They were without God. They were godless in their thoughts, their affections, and their doctrine. They claimed to belong to God, to represent God, and to speak for God. But of all the lies they told, that was probably the most glaringly untrue. They were actually ungodly—without any real love or obedience in their hearts toward the true God.

  Jude then points out three major ways the ungodliness of the false teachers was manifest:

  Their character. First, Jude candidly refers to the false teachers as “ungodly men” (v. 4). That is his assessment of their character. They had no integrity, were not men of principle, and were utterly lacking in all the fruits of true godliness. They were without any actual reverence for God and evidenced no true love for Him. They were barren of any authentic holiness. Aside from their phony profession of faith in Christ, they had no vital connection to Him whatsoever. They certainly did not reflect any degree of Christlikeness in their character. They simply played at religion.

  Their conduct. Second, these “ungodly men . . . turn[ed] the grace of our God into lewdness” (v. 4). That means they presumptuously regarded God’s kindness to sinners as a license for immoral conduct. They talked a lot about “grace” and promised “liberty,” but they themselves were slaves of corruption (2 Peter 2:19). All their stress on freedom in Christ was actually a backh
anded assault on God’s grace. “Grace” to them was nothing more than a phony justification for lust-driven behavior.

  Jude 18 echoes the same charge, again using the key word ungodly as a description of the false teachers’ character: they “walk according to their own ungodly lusts.”

  Get the picture here: these were seriously ungodly men, and they were in the church. They were teaching and influencing people with nice-sounding words about grace and freedom in Christ, while in reality they were driven by their own unbridled lust and evil desires. Nevertheless, they gained a following in the church.

  We must not be naive. Evil apostates like that are still in the church today. Their ungodliness is not always instantly evident. Some try to hide it under religious robes, divert attention from it by affecting kindliness or congeniality, or mask it with some other superficial kind of piety. They work hard to keep up the spiritual facade, but their true character is ungodly, and they cannot ultimately suppress the inevitable fruit of that. “The works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like” (Galatians 5:19–21, emphasis added).

  The ungodliness of an apostate system will occasionally become gross, widespread, and scandalous. A network of pedophile priests, for example—carefully camouflaged under a methodical cover-up that has been orchestrated by the church hierarchy—is a pretty clear sign of a system shot through with apostasy. No amount of clerical garb can mask the evil in that.