The Truth War

by John MacArthur

US TO GET CLOSE

  TO THEM. JUDE

  SUGGESTS THERE IS

  SEVERE DANGER IN THIS.

  WE CAN’T ALWAYS TELL

  THE DIFFERENCE

  BETWEEN THE MERELY

  CONVINCED AND THE

  FULLY COMMITTED.

  SOME ARE DECEIVED;

  OTHERS ARE

  DELIBERATE DECEIVERS.

  In 2 Corinthians 10:4–5, Paul describes spiritual warfare as the demolishing of ideological fortresses: “The weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.” The language is deliberately militant. But notice that he is not talking about warfare against people. He is describing a battle against evil ideas—thoughts, arguments, fortresses made of satanic lies. People are basically victims of the ideas, trapped and imprisoned by false doctrines and evil systems of thought. The point of the warfare is to liberate people from those fortresses.

  So there is a ministry of mercy to the confused. There’s a more urgent and solemn ministry of rescue to the convinced. And then Jude speaks of a third group: the committed. Here Jude employs his strongest and most vivid language: “On some have mercy with fear, hating even the garment polluted by the flesh” (v. 23 NASB).

  Obviously, pulling people from the fires of apostasy requires us to get close to them. Jude suggests there is severe danger in this. We can’t always tell the difference between the merely convinced and the fully committed. Some are deceived; others are deliberate deceivers. Some are disciples of error; others are the propagators, the leaders—the false teachers themselves. Jude suggests that we ought to show even the false teachers themselves a kind of mercy (for sometimes even the deceivers themselves are, to a degree, deceived, and occasionally, by God’s grace, even they can be pulled from the fire). So show them mercy, Jude says. But do it with fear, despising the defilement of their evil.

  The expression Jude employs is shocking. It is as coarse as any expression in Scripture. Jude uses a Greek word for “garment” that signifies underwear and a word for “polluted” that means “stained in a filthy manner; spotted and stained by bodily functions.” He is comparing the defilement of false teaching to soiled underwear.

  If you have ever questioned what God’s own view of false religion and apostasy is, that is it. One of the most important aspects of Jude’s entire message is this theme, which runs through the whole of it: false teaching is the deadliest and most abhorrent of evils, because it is always an expression of unbelief, which is the distillation of pure evil.

  The deadliest? Most abhorrent? What about pornography, abortion, sexual perversion, marital unfaithfulness? Those are all gross sins, of course, and they are eating away at the fabric of our society. It is certainly right for us to be morally repulsed and outraged at such monstrous evils. But heresy that undermines the gospel is a far more serious sin because it places souls in eternal peril under the darkness of the kind of lies that keep people in permanent bondage to their sin.

  That is why there is no more serious abomination than heresy. It is the worst and most loathsome kind of spiritual filth. Therefore, Jude says, we should no more risk being defiled by apostasy than we would want to clasp someone’s filthy, stained underwear close to ourselves. Scripture employs this same shocking imagery in other places too. Isaiah 64:6, lamenting the apostasy of Israel, says, “But we are all like an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses [i.e., self-righteousness and false religion] are like filthy rags.” In that text, Isaiah uses a Hebrew expression that speaks of soiled menstrual cloths. In Revelation 3:4, Christ says to the church at Sardis, “You have a few names even in Sardis who have not defiled their garments.” That has a similar meaning, for He is referring to the defilement of heresy and apostasy.

  These passages not only give insight into what God thinks of apostasy; they give us explicit instructions about how to deal with apostates. False doctrine and the wickedness of those who believe it stain the soul. Don’t get close enough to be corrupted. Paul said something similar at the end of Romans: “I urge you, brethren, note those who cause divisions and offenses, contrary to the doctrine which you learned, and avoid them” (16:17). You can’t build a real friendship with a false teacher. You cannot pretend to accept such a person as a fellow believer. You have to understand that people who buy into apostasy and damnable error are (either wittingly or unwittingly) agents of the kingdom of darkness and enemies of the truth. Don’t risk being defiled by their corruption.

  Nevertheless, there is a place for showing apostates mercy. It is a fearful mercy, and once again it involves giving them the light of truth. Confront their error with the truth, for that is the only hope of freeing them from the bondage and defilement of their own apostasy. But do it with the utmost care, always mindful of the dangers such an evil poses.

  WHAT, AFTER ALL, IS TRUTH?

  What is truth? We began this book with that question, and my earnest hope is that the answer is clear by now: Truth is not any individual’s opinion or imagination. Truth is what God decrees. And He has given us an infallible source of saving truth in His revealed Word.

  For the true Christian, this should not be a complex issue. God’s Word is what all pastors and church leaders are commanded to proclaim, in season and out of season—when it is well received and even when it is not (2 Timothy 4:2). It is what every Christian is commanded to read, study, meditate on, and divide rightly. It is what we are called and commissioned by Christ to teach and proclaim to the uttermost parts of the earth.

  Is there mystery even in the truth God has revealed? Of course. “‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,’ says the LORD” (Isaiah 55:8). In 1 Corinthians 2:16, Paul paraphrased Isaiah 40:13–14: “Who has known the mind of the LORD that he may instruct Him?”

  But then Paul immediately added this: “We have the mind of Christ.” Christ has graciously given us enough truth and enough understanding to equip us for every good deed—including the work of earnestly contending for the faith against deceivers who try to twist the truth of the gospel. Although we cannot know the mind of God exhaustively, we certainly can know it sufficiently to be warriors for the cause of truth against the lies of the kingdom of darkness.

  And we are commanded to participate in that battle. God Himself sounded the call to battle when His Spirit moved Jude to write his short epistle and it permanently entered the canon of Scripture. This is not a duty any faithful Christian can shirk. Earthly life for the faithful Christian can never be a perpetual state of ease and peace. That’s why the New Testament includes so many descriptions of the Christian life as nonstop warfare: Ephesians 6:11-18; 2 Timothy 2:1-4; 2 Timothy 4:7; 2 Corinthians 6:7; 10:35; 1 Thessalonians 5:8. I hope by now you understand that those unwilling to join the fight against untruth and false religion are no true friends of Christ.

  The handful of vignettes from church history we have examined together in this book are only a brief introduction to how the Truth War has been fought over the past two millennia. I hope what we have examined here will provoke you to pursue the study further on your own. Look at any period of church history and you will discover this significant fact: Whenever the people of God have sought peace with the world or made alliances with false religions, it has meant a period of serious spiritual decline, even to the point where at times the truth seemed almost to be in total eclipse. But whenever Christians have contended earnestly for the faith, the church has grown and the cause of truth has prospered. May it be so in our time.

  In other words, the Truth War is a good fight (1 Timothy 6:12). So let’s wage good warfare (1 Timothy 1:18)—for the honor of Christ and the glory of God.

  APPENDIX

  WHY DISCERNMENT IS OUT OF FASHION

  This I pray, that your love may abound still more and more

  in knowledge and all discernment, that yo
u may approve the

  things that are excellent, that you may be sincere and

  without offense till the day of Christ.

  —Philippians 1:9–10

  This appendix is adapted from my 1994 book, Reckless Faith, which is now out of print. It included a chapter about biblical discernment, and I am excerpting that section here in the hope that it will encourage and equip Christians who desire to be faithful soldiers in the Truth War.1

  Many summers ago I drove across the country to deliver my son’s car to him. He was a recent college graduate, then playing minor-league baseball in Florida. He needed his car for local transportation. The cross-country trip fit perfectly with some previously scheduled ministry engagements on my calendar, so Lance Quinn (my senior associate pastor at the time) and I made the journey by automobile together.

  As we drove through Lance’s home state of Arkansas, our route took us off the main highways and through some beautiful rural country. We topped one hill, and I noticed near a rustic house a homemade sign advertising hand-sewn quilts. I had hoped to stop somewhere along the way to buy an anniversary gift for my wife. She likes handmade crafts and had been wanting a quilt, so we decided to stop and look.

  OUR GENERATION

  IS EXPOSED TO MORE

  RELIGIOUS IDEAS THAN

  ANY PEOPLE IN

  HISTORY. RELIGIOUS

  BROADCASTING AND

  THE PRINT MEDIA

  BOMBARD PEOPLE

  WITH ALL KINDS OF

  DEVIANT TEACHINGS

  THAT CLAIM

  TO BE TRUTH. THE

  UNDISCERNING PERSON

  HAS NO MEANS OF

  DETERMINING WHAT

  TRUTH IS, AND

  MANY ARE BAFFLED

  BY THE VARIETY.

  We went to the door of the old house and knocked. A friendly woman with a dish towel answered the door. When we told her we were interested in quilts, she swung the door open wide and ushered us in. She showed us into the living room, where she had several quilts on display.

  The television in the corner was on, tuned to a religious broadcast. The woman’s husband was lounging in a recliner, half watching the program and half reading a religious magazine. Around the room were piles of religious books, religious literature, and religious videotapes. I recognized one or two of the books—resources from solid evangelical publishers.

  The woman left the room to get some more quilts to show us, so the man put aside his magazine and greeted us. “I was just catching up on some reading,” he said.

  “Are you a believer?” I asked.

  “A believer in what?” he asked, apparently startled that I would ask.

  “A believer in Christ,” I said. “I noticed your books. Are you a Christian?”

  “Well, sure,” he said, holding up the magazine he was reading. I recognized it as the publication of a well-known cult. I took a closer look at the stacks of material around the room. There were a few evangelical best sellers, materials from several media ministries, a promotional magazine from a leading evangelical seminary, and even some helpful Bible study aids. But mixed in with all that were stacks of The Watch Tower magazines published by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a copy of Dianetics (the book by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard), a Book of Mormon, Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health, some literature from the Franciscan brothers, and an incredible array of stuff from nearly every conceivable cult and -ism. I watched as he jotted down the address of the television preacher who was at that moment offering some free literature.

  “You read from quite an assortment of material,” I observed. “These all represent different beliefs. Do you accept any one of them?”

  “I find there’s good in all of it,” he said. “I read it all and just look for the good.”

  While this conversation was going on, the woman had come back with a stack of quilts and was ready to show them to us. The first quilt she laid out was a patchwork of all different sizes, colors, and prints of fabric scraps. I looked at it, trying to see some kind of pattern or design in it, but there was none. The color combinations even seemed to clash. The quilt itself was—well, ugly.

  I described for her the kind of quilt I was looking for, and she pulled one out that was exactly what I wanted. Her price seemed reasonable, so I told her I would take it.

  As she wrapped up my purchase, I couldn’t help looking again at that first quilt she had brought out from the back room. Frankly, it was the least attractive of all her quilts. But she was obviously quite proud of it, having labored over it for hours. It was evidently her personal favorite—and undoubtedly a genuine piece of folk art. But I couldn’t imagine anyone else being attracted to that particular quilt.

  Her quilt, I thought, was a perfect metaphor for her husband’s religion. Taking bits and pieces from every conceivable source, he was putting together a patchwork faith. He thought of his religion as a thing of beauty, but in God’s eyes it was an abomination.

  Too many people are like that—fashioning a patchwork religion, sifting through stacks of religious ideas, looking for good in all of it. Our generation is exposed to more religious ideas than any people in history. Religious broadcasting and the print media bombard people with all kinds of deviant teachings that claim to be truth. The undiscerning person has no means of determining what truth is, and many are baffled by the variety.

  Meanwhile, evangelicals (once known for a very prudent and biblical approach to doctrine) are fast becoming as doctrinally clueless as the unchurched people they are so keen to please. At least three decades of deliberately downplaying doctrine and discernment in order to attract the unchurched has filled many once-sound churches with people who utterly lack any ability to differentiate the very worst false doctrines from truth. I constantly encounter evangelical church members who are at a loss to answer the most profound errors they hear from cultists, unorthodox media preachers, or other sources of false doctrine.

  THE RISE OF EXTREME TOLERANCE

  Aclosely related second reason for the low level of discernment in the church today is the growing reluctance to take a definitive stand on any issue. This, too, has been one of the central themes of this book. But it deserves to be stressed one more time.

  Discernment is frankly not very welcome in a culture like ours. In fact, the postmodern perspective is more than merely hostile to discernment; it is practically the polar opposite. Think about it: pronouncing anything “true” and calling its antithesis “error” is a breach of postmodernism’s one last impregnable dogma. That is why to a postmodernist nothing is more uncouth than voicing strong opinions on spiritual, moral, or ethical matters. People are expected to hold their most important convictions with as much slack as possible. Certainty about anything is out of the question, and all who refuse to equivocate on any point of principle or doctrine are therefore automatically labeled too narrow. Zeal for the truth has become politically incorrect. There is actually zero tolerance for biblical discernment in a “tolerant” climate like that.

  In the secular realm, postmodernism’s extreme tolerance has been foisted on an unsuspecting public by the entertainment media for several decades. A plethora of talk shows on daily television have led the way. Phil Donahue established the format. Jerry Springer took it to ridiculous extremes. And Oprah made it seem somewhat respectable and refined. Shows like these remind viewers daily not to be too opinionated—and they do it by parading in front of their audiences the most bizarre and extreme advocates of every radical “alternative lifestyle” imaginable. We are not supposed to be shocked or notice the overtly self-destructive nature of so many aberrant subcultures. The point is to broaden our minds and raise our level of tolerance. And if you do criticize another person’s value system, it cannot be on biblical grounds. Anyone who cites religious beliefs as a reason to reject another person’s way of life is automatically viewed with the same contempt that used to be reserved for out-and-out religious heretics. The culture around us has declared war on all bi
blical standards.

  Some Christians unwittingly began following suit several years ago. That has opened the door for a whole generation in the church to embrace postmodern relativism openly and deliberately. They don’t want the truth presented with stark black-and-white clarity anymore. They prefer having issues of right and wrong, true and false, good and bad deliberately painted in shades of gray. We have reached a point where the typical churchgoer today assumes that is the proper way of understanding truth. Any degree of certainty has begun to sound offensive to people’s postmodernized ears.

  A few years ago I did a live radio interview where listeners were invited to phone in. One caller told me, “You seem like a lot nicer person than I thought you were by listening to your sermons.” He meant it kindly, and I took it in that spirit. But I was curious to know what he had heard in my preaching that he interpreted as not “nice.” (When I preach, I am certainly not angry or acrimonious.) So I asked what he meant.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “In your sermons, you sound so opinionated, so certain of yourself—so dogmatic. But talking to people one on one, you’re more conversational. You just sound nicer.” Like many people today, he thought of dialogue as “nicer” than a sermon. Someone who is “loving,” by that way of thinking, could never be emphatic, critical, or zealous for the truth. That reflects a severely skewed understanding of what authentic love demands. Real love “does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:6).

  One young pastor told me he didn’t like the authoritarian implications of the word preaching. He said he preferred to speak of his pulpit ministry as “sharing” with his people. He didn’t last long in ministry, of course. But sadly, his comments probably reflect the prevailing mood in the church today.

  D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones noticed the same trend several decades ago. His marvelous book Preaching and Preachers began by noting that modern society was becoming uncomfortable with the whole idea of “preaching”:

  A new idea has crept in with regard to preaching, and it has taken various forms. A most significant one was that people began to talk about the “address” in the service instead of the sermon. That in itself was indicative of a subtle change. An “address.” No longer the sermon, but an “address” or perhaps even a lecture. . . . There was a man in the U.S.A. who published a series of books under the significant title of Quiet Talks. Quiet Talks on Prayer; Quiet Talks on Power; etc. In other words the very title announces that the man is not going to preach. Preaching, of course, is something carnal lacking in spirituality; what is needed is a chat, a fireside chat, quiet talks, and so on!3