I finished reading John MacArthur’s book, The Truth War this morning — on the same day that the main headline in my newspaper (referring to the question of Roger Clemens’ supposed steroid usage) was, “Testimony hits no closer to the truth.”
The headline is a revelation of the time in which we live. We tear down the walls of truth, supplanting them with relativism and subjectivism and then are indignant when someone is lying. We publicly decry the harshness of objective standards, yet we inherently understand our reliance on truth and the necessity of standards. There is something called truth; the opposite of truth is deceit, and — as the headline in today’s paper implicitly acknowledged — a culture cannot exist on that deceit.
Neither can the church. There is a truth, and we need that truth.
Yet there are many within the church who, echoing the seductive call of the culture, are repeating historical errors and doctrinal deviations and embracing postmodern thought and deviation. MacArthur’s book is a warning about straying down that path and an exhortation to cultivate afresh the practice of biblical discernment.
MacArthur is explicit in his illustrations of the current state of the church, making the argument in the introduction, “why the truth is worth fighting for.” He then demonstrates how the church-at-large arrived in its current place, tracing its movement from modernity to postmodernity (chapter 1), and also showing how postmoderns are really just advocating the old theological heresies of the Judaizers, Gnosticism, Sabellianism, and Arianism (chapters 4-5), and simple licentiousness (chapter 6). The entire book is framed around an exposition of the book of Jude and the admonition to “contend earnestly for the faith.”
This is an important book — the clarity and frankness of the admonition needs to be heard by leaders in the contemporary church, because as MacArthur notes,
…the church today is quite possibly more susceptible to false teachers, doctrinal saboteurs, and spiritual terrorism than any other generation in history. Biblical ignorance within the church may well be deeper and more widespread than at any other time since the Protestant Reformation. If you doubt that, compare the typical sermon of today with a randomly chosen published sermon from any leading evangelical preacher prior to 1850. Also compare today’s Christian literature with almost anything published by evangelical publishing houses a hundred years or more ago. [p. 165.]
The church of Jesus Christ is the instrument God has designed to be the pillar and defense of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15). We must contend (Jude 3) and live for that truth. This book is a great help in identifying the subtle errors that are leading us away from the truth, and not just a call to return to the truth, but a map to lead us back to the truth.
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