MacArthur - The Truth About the Lordship of Christ

THE TRUTH ABOUT
___________________
the lordship of
Christ

THE TRUTH ABOUT
___________________
the lordship of
Christ

John MacArthur

2012 by John MacArthur

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Unleashing Gods Truth, One Verse at a Time is a trademark of Grace to You. All rights reserved.

Compiled from previously published material in The God Who Loves, Truth for Today, The Vanishing Conscience, Hard to Believe, The Gospel According to the Apostles, and Welcome to the Family.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are taken from THE NEW KING JAMES VERSION. 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE. The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James Version.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

MacArthur, John, 1939
The truth about the lordship of Christ / John MacArthur.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
ISBN 978-1-4002-0416-8
1. Jesus Christ--Lordship. I. Title.
BT270.M33 2012
232.8--dc23

Printed in the United States of America

12 13 14 15 16 QG 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1
LORD OF THE UNIVERSE

Christians have many reasons for rejoicing. The primary one is based on who God isHe is sovereign. That is the single greatest truth about God. Nothing is outside His control, and He controls everything to work out ultimately for our good (Romans 8:28). He has an infinite understanding of every aspect of our lives where we are and what we say (Psalm 139:24). And He exercises His understanding in perfect wisdom. Knowing God like that should give us inexpressible and glorious joy.

The believer who doesnt live in the confidence of Gods sovereignty will lack His peace and be left to the chaos of a troubled heart. But our confident trust in the Lord will allow us to thank Him in the midst of trials because we have Gods peace on duty to protect our hearts and minds.

God can do whatever He wants because He is God, and His decrees carry the full weight of divine sovereignty. God spoke, and the worlds were created. What is seen was not made out of things which are visible (Hebrews 11:3 NASB). He spoke things that were not, and behold! They were. He can call people, places, and events into existence solely by His divinely sovereign decrees. He can declare believing sinners righteous even though they are not. That is justification.

JUSTIFICATION AND LORDSHIP

But justification never occurs alone in Gods plan. It is always accompanied by sanctification. God does not declare sinners righteous legally without making them righteous practically. Justification is not just a legal fiction. When God declares someone righteous, He will inevitably bring it to pass. Whom He justified, these He also glorified (Romans 8:30). When justification occurs, the process of sanctification begins. Grace always encompasses both.

I am convinced from Scripture that God is absolutely sovereign in the salvation of sinners. Salvation does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy (Romans 9:16 NASB). We are redeemed not because of anything good in us, but because God chose us unto salvation. He chose certain individuals and passed over others, and He made that choice in eternity past, before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4). Moreover, He chose without regard to anything He foresaw in the elect; simply according to the good pleasure of his will [and] to the praise of the glory of his grace (vv. 56 KJV). Election arises from the love of God. Those whom He chose, He loved... with an everlasting love [and drew them to Himself] with lovingkindness (Jeremiah 31:3).

But certainly we can affirm those truths without also concluding that Gods attitude toward the non-elect is one of utter hatred.

LOVE AND HATE

I am troubled by the tendency of someoften young people newly infatuated with Reformed doctrine who insist that God cannot possibly love those who never repent and believe. I encounter this view, it seems, with increasing frequency. The argument inevitably goes like this: Psalm 7:11 tells us God is angry with the wicked every day. It seems reasonable to assume that if God loved everyone, He would have chosen everyone unto salvation. Therefore, God does not love the non-elect. Those who hold this view often go to great lengths to argue that John 3:16 cannot really mean God loves the whole world.

Perhaps the best-known argument for this view is found in the unabridged edition of an otherwise excellent book, The Sovereignty of God, by A. W. Pink. Later in the book, he added this:

Is it true that God loves the one who is despising and rejecting His blessed Son? God is Light as well as Love, and therefore His love must be a holy love. To tell the Christ-rejecter that God loves him is to cauterize his conscience, as well as to afford him a sense of security in his sins. The fact is, that the love of God, is a truth for the saints only, and to present it to the enemies of God is to take the childrens bread and cast it to the dogs. With the exception of John 3:16, not once in the four gospels do we read of the Lord Jesusthe perfect teachertelling sinners that God loved them!

In an appendix to the unabridged edition, Pink argued that the word world in John 3:16 (For God so loved the world...) refers to the world of believers (Gods elect), in contradistinction from the world of the ungodly.

Gods Choice

Pink was attempting to make the crucial point that God is sovereign in the exercise of His love. The gist of his argument is certainly valid: it is folly to think that God loves all alike, or that He is compelled by some rule of fairness to love everyone equally. Scripture teaches us that God loves because He chooses to love (Deuteronomy 7:67), because He is lovingbecause He is love (1 John 4:8)not because He is under some obligation to love everyone the same. Nothing but Gods own sovereign good pleasure compels Him to love sinners. Nothing but His own sovereign will governs His love. This has to be true, since there is certainly nothing in any sinner worthy of even the smallest degree of divine love.

Unfortunately, Pink took the corollary too far. The fact that some sinners are not elected to salvation is no proof that Gods attitude toward them is utterly devoid of sincere love. We know from Scripture that God is compassionate, kind, generous, and good even to the most stubborn sinners. Who can deny that these mercies flow out of Gods boundless love? Yet it is evident that they are showered even on unrepentant sinners. According to Paul, for example, the knowledge of divine goodness and forbearance and patience ought to lead sinners to repentance (Romans 2:4). Yet the apostle acknowledged that many who are the recipients of these expressions of divine love spurn them and thereby store up wrath for themselves in the day of wrath (v. 5). The hardness of the sinful human heart is the only reason people persist in their sin, despite Gods goodness to them. Is God therefore insincere when He pours forth mercies calling them to repentance? And how can anyone conclude that Gods real attitude toward those who reject His mercies is nothing but sheer hatred?