JOHN MACARTHUR ON THE REFORMATION: A LESSON ABOUT HERESY & THE POWER OF TRUTH

 
JOHN MACARTHUR ON THE REFORMATION: 
A LESSON ABOUT HERESY & THE POWER OF TRUTH
BY BUD AHLHEIM
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
 

This is THE year.   2017.  So many have been awaiting its
arrival with anticipation, with hope, with a desire to see history
repeat itself.  And NO. It isn’t about some eternally unimportant temporal American election.

It’s about the explosion of truth … God’s Truth … across the
planet. It’s about when Truth was unshackled from a millennium of
virtual bondage in a blasphemous prison built by the apostate hands of
man.   It’s about not a mere celebration of a historical event – the
Reformation – it’s about praising God for giving bold, historic evidence
of his claim in Psalm 138:2:

You have exalted above all things
your name and your word. Psalm 138:2

The Reformation serves as providential, temporal, historic evidence
that His Name and His Word will always remain unfettered by the prideful
whims of man and unshadowed by the efforts of a God-hating enemy.
Utterances from the truthful lips of God (Proverbs 12:19) remain forever.

The Reformation was a providential movement of God, protecting His
Truth and thereby extending grace to the undeserving world. Its’ fruit
has, as of this year, continued to bless the world for five hundred
years.

But, though we know the many warnings of end-time diversions off the
narrow path and how the church will increasingly be plagued with false
teachers and false gospels, the true church – not the superficial one – prays for another reformation.

We want another reformation that brings to the modern church what the
Reformation brought to the 16th-century one – the restoration of God’s
Name and God’s Word to their rightful, exalted place. We want that
preached in our pulpits and taught in our Sunday school rooms. We want
THAT Truth to be the visible image of the church to an onlooking world.
And we want that Truth to be proclaimed, defended and contended, so that
the elect hearts of men may be saved by it. We want that Truth blasted
across an increasingly depraved world because THAT Truth gives glory to
Jesus, the Lord and the Savior.

But the modern superficial church – the one most unbelievers think of
when they think about “church” – is light years away from the authentic
light of God’s Word, though that Word is so often merely a
fingertip away. False teaching is rampant because the Word goes
unheeded. Error is hurled, tolerated, and endorsed with ever greater
ferocity because sound doctrine is ignored. Deception continues WITHIN the church as “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4, 1 John 5:19) appealingly deludes with unsound doctrine (2 Timothy 4:3) imprisoning men’s minds in strongholds of darkness. (2 Corinthians 10:4)

On his daily Grace To You Radio
broadcast today, John MacArthur prefaced his message with a quick look
at two particular lessons from the Reformation. These studio comments
come ahead of the rebroadcast of his message, Is Jesus The Only Way?

Here’s what Dr. MacArthur had to say:

“I think there are a couple of things that come out of the Reformation that are just really profound, far-reaching lessons.”

“The first one is that error, heresy, false Christianity can
survive for a very long time. It can not only survive, it can actually
be a dominant force in society. That is exactly what happened for a
thousand years in the development of Roman Catholicism.”

“If you think that there’s not a powerful, massive, embedded
force for heresy, for a corrupted Gospel and a corrupted church, alive
and well in the world, you don’t know history.”

“Error is always seeking to be permanently embedded and given a
kind of dignity, a kind of acceptability, a kind of prominence in the
world. And that’s what happened for a thousand years in the development
of the Roman Catholic Church.”

“The other thing that comes out of the Reformation is this … that
as profoundly embedded as evil is for such a long time and through tens
of thousands of people, God can use one person as He did Martin Luther –
or two or three – to literally bring the Truth.”

“That’s something we ought to pray for even today.”

There’s really only one thing that can be said to this … AMEN.