I work the graveyard shift at work. I have a work vehicle I drive around in all night. And so, I often will listen to Christian radio. The lineup of pastors they have preaching throughout the night includes John MacArthur’s Grace To You broadcast. The broadcast for January 6^th, 2023 was a sermon MacArthur originally delivered back in 1989. The sermon title is: Spiritual Stability, Part 3: Humility and Faith—Phil. 4:5-6a. So, he’s clearly going to be discussing anxiety, and its cure by trusting and resting in Christ. And absolutely, the Lord, as we humbly and boldly come to His throne room of grace, is always ready and present to be with us, especially as we walk through the fire and deep waters of life; after all, the Christian God is the cruciform God. Because of this MacArthur, rightly, is critical of secular humanism, and an aspect of its religion: i.e., psychology. What he would be referring to is the type of therapeutic self-helpism that our ‘secular age’ has turned to as its way of coping with life; a way that isn’t a turn out to Jesus Christ, but a way that is corollary with the fallen self: the homo incurvatus in se. I agree, generally speaking, that many of the anxieties people deal with are self-generated, and end up being because the person only pushes deeper into themselves rather than flying higher out of themselves as they look to Christ, and receive, ecstatically, His life as theirs, moment-by-moment.

And yet, MacArthur is sloppy. He lumps “behavioral” generated anxieties in with anxiety in general. He engages in a sweeping generalization in his discussion on anxiety and depression (and other ailments). He doesn’t account for the physiological processes, the biological lacuna that might be present in some individuals. In other words, he doesn’t leave space for certain psychological issues to be related to actual medical deficiencies a person is born with; and this, indeed, because of the fallen bodies we inherit as a fallen humanity. That is to say, he doesn’t seem to recognize that there are people who lack the capacity to release adequate levels of serotonin in their brains, which, by God’s design, allows people to more readily operate at a ‘normal’ or base level of biological and human functionality. There are masses of people, Christian people included, who suffer with what is called MTHFR (I am one of them); this condition contributes to an inability to biologically produce the levels of serotonin the brain needs to function at a normal level. It is no different than someone who, say, suffers from an overly active histamine production in their bodies (I am also one of them). As a result, in order to quench the over-active histamine production some of us have to take not just anti-histamines, but also histamine-blockers, in order to avoid constant sinus and other respiratory infections and disorders. As corollary, people who suffer from MTHFR (this is just one example), or other biological and physiological lacunas, might need medical support in order to allow the brain to operate at a normal baseline level. Without this type of intervention, the consequences can be dire; as dire as suicide, or simply living with overwhelming anxiety and panic attacks (along with depression). I have lived with an ‘anxiety disorder’ for at least thirty years. The Lord has been gracious to me, and brought me through untold terror and misery; I don’t even understand how. And yet, He never ‘cured’ me of the physiological source standing behind all of this. And so, I have had seasons, over the years, of various anxiety and panic attacks that can be debilitating (almost). In light of that, here’s part of the transcript of MacArthur’s sermon noted above:

Now, let me tell you something, folks.  The Lord is near and this is the Lord who is near, the capable God of the Scripture, and if you will delight yourself in Him and if you will meditate on His law day and night, on His Word day and night, you will then know the God that He is, and you will know how He acts, and that will be the source of your own confidence.

Now, what is the result of knowing the Lord is near?  “Be anxious for” – what? – “nothing.”  What am I going to be worrying about?  Something God can’t handle?  Wait a minute, that’s blasphemy.  If you fret, worry, are in trauma, are unstable, if you launch off into everything from anorexia to schizophrenia and all kinds of things, you are really saying, “I can’t cope with life.  I can’t handle life.”  And if you – whatever mechanism you use to manifest that inability, the real demonstration – and I want to say this with love and graciousness – the real underlying demonstration is you really don’t trust whom?  God.

That’s a form of blasphemy.  Two ways.  One, if you imagine that God can’t help you, then you have created a god other than the true God, and that’s blasphemy.  You have created a god who is not God.  Two, if you believe that God could help you but won’t, that’s blasphemy, too, because you’re questioning not His character but His integrity and His Word.  So the key to a stable, firmly planted life – back to Psalm 1 – is to be delighting in the Lord – I delight in who He is – and meditating on His law, I become very familiar with how He acts.  And as I understand who He is and how He acts, I can look at my life and say, “That’s the one who’s near, this is who He is, this is how He acts; I’m not going to worry.”  And again I go back to what I said:  The great weakness of the Christian church today is a lack of understanding about who God is and how God acts.  They do not understand the majesty of His wonderful attributes, and that is why we have such wholesale instability.  Because we do not know God, we do not trust God to act consistently with His revealed character and His revealed history of acts.

So what do we do?  In the church, we’ve got all these unstable people with all their problems.  Instead of giving them God and His character and His attributes and the history of how He functions and how He acts and the amazing integrity of all of His acts, we try to give clever human solutions to the instability, which in the long run projects that instability into a way of life and gives no solution at all.

In the last generation, A. W. Pink in his book Gleanings in the Godhead wrote, “The God of this century no more resembles the sovereign of holy writ than does the dim flickering of a candle resemble the glory of the mid-day sun.  The God who is talked about in the average pulpit, spoken of in the ordinary Sunday school class, and mentioned in so much of the religious literature of the day and preached in most of the so-called Bible conferences, is a figment of human imagination and invention of maudlin sentimentality,” end quote.

We aren’t even giving people a knowledge of the true God in His character and His works.  As a result, there is a tremendous lack of confidence in Him.  No wonder people have guilt, fear, and anxiety, have an inadequate knowledge of God and an inadequate trust in God – both are blasphemous.  If you imagine God to be other than He is, that’s an idol, that’s blasphemy.  If you imagine God to do other than what is consistent with His own character and promise to His people, that, too, is blasphemy; it questions His integrity.  And instead of teaching God and getting people into the Word of God, most churches are trying to patch up the unstable by giving them human solutions and worst of all, psychology, of which even psychologists say it has no answers.[1]

In general, do I believe that knowing who God is, more accurately, meditating on Scripture, deeply, can assuage the most anxious minds and hearts of deep anxiety and depression? Absolutely! But that said, this does not account for the actual medical/physiological aspects that we as a fallen people are often strapped with, by no choice of our own. I have seen the Lord intervene on my behalf a thousand times over, over the last thirty years and more! But He hasn’t ‘healed me,’ per se, of the underlying physiological source that stands behind so much of the angst and hell I’ve walked through. He has formed and shaped me in certain distinct ways through the forging fires of many deep waters, but He hasn’t healed me. More recently I have been confronted with another season of deep anxiety and panic, of an irrational sort (the fear behind it). It has been as if this time the Lord has said it’s enough, and has led me to seeking a medical support (one I should’ve done thirty years ago, but the Christian subculture, along with the secular, had so stigmatized that type of medical support, that it didn’t seem like a viable option). This time, it is as if the Lord is saying it is time to deal with this in a different way, so I can work through you in a different way. Just as with my terminal cancer diagnosis back in 2009. The Lord ultimately, and miraculously healed me, but not till after going through a hellish medical protocol that literally almost killed me multiple times. He could have foregone that, and simply healed me miraculously from the get-go. Instead He chose that I walk through a fire, that He would see me through; and He decided that He would work through the medical route, with the scars and trauma to the body in tow. Similarly, it seems this time He is using a medical route to finally provide the support I have needed for decades, in regard to helping with my MTHFR and the physiological lack that has produced in regard to a balanced brain functionality. For me, my anxiety and panic hasn’t been a matter of not knowing who God is, not meditating on Scripture (which I’ve read through fifty times, memorized books of, prayed through, so on and so forth); for me it has been a physiological issue, that indeed becomes a hook for a spiritual attack, which the Enemy will exploit, and attempt to use, in order to destroy me (and those with similar physical makeup). And so, this time the Lord has seen fit to bring me to the point of recognizing that it is time to make a medical move.

I share part of my story only to illustrate how MacArthur’s sermon fails to be sensitive to the general population out there. All anxiety and panic, and other ailments, aren’t simply a matter of not trusting the Lord enough. The ironic implication of this, if MacArthur followed his logic through, would land MacArthur in the Word Faith tribe. This is ironic because MacArthur is a vocal critic (as he should be) of such “theology.” And yet that is exactly the implication of what he is saying: i.e., that if you have enough faith you’re going to necessarily be a stable well-balanced individual. Ironically, again, this thinking pushes the person deeper into introspection, and thus deeper into the abyss God in Christ came to save the person from.

MacArthur’s approach is corollary with his prior theological commitments, and ironically, his respective doctrine of God. He broadly receives what in Puritan times was known as experimental predestinarianism. This doctrine is adjunct to a doctrine of predestination, election/reprobation, wherein God decrees that a certain number of individuals are elect, and the others are reprobate (whether actively or passively). In order for the elect to know they are elect, subsequent to God’s absolute decree (decretum absolutum), the person engages in a lifetime of ‘experimentation’ to see if they have enough good works, or enough fruit of the Spirit to determine whether or not they are indeed one of the elect of God, or maybe they only appear to be that, and end up having a ‘temporary faith’; thus being one of the reprobate. This thrusts the person into a mode and lifestyle of performance and introspection that could cause the deepest types of anxieties and depressions. Indeed, someone who lived under this teaching in the Puritan days, a man named, Humphrey Mills, wrote of his despair, that is until he was relieved of this teaching through the correction pastor and theologian, Richard Sibbes brought to him:

I was for three years together wounded for sins, and under a sense of my corruptions, which were many; and I followed sermons, pursuing the means, and was constant in duties and doing: looking for Heaven that way. And then I was so precise for outward formalities, that I censured all to be reprobates, that wore their hair anything long, and not short above the ears; or that wore great ruffs, and gorgets, or fashions, and follies. But yet I was distracted in my mind, wounded in conscience, and wept often and bitterly, and prayed earnestly, but yet had no comfort, till I heard that sweet saint . . . Doctor Sibbs, by whose means and ministry I was brought to peace and joy in my spirit. His sweet soul-melting Gospel-sermons won my heart and refreshed me much, for by him I saw and had muchof God and was confident in Christ, and could overlook the world . . . My heart held firm and resolved and my desires all heaven-ward.[2]

MacArthur’s soteriology is of a species with the type that Humphrey Mills languished under for years; that is until he was presented with a more accurate way of the Gospel by Richard Sibbes. It is a performance based, highly introspective ‘Gospel’ wherein a person becomes swamped by their own failures and bruises, such that the abstract subject becomes overwhelmed by their own inadequacies and “traumas.” The irony of this, again, is that MacArthur et al. push people into a “self-help” type of the Gospel precisely because of their inadequate doctrine of God.

The genuine Gospel does not push a person to introspection and performance based living, wherein a contract is achieved (as in Federal theology). The genuine Gospel recognizes that all of humanity is born in a helpless status, and always already inhabits that status, every day they inhabit the fallen bodies of death they were born with (cf. Rom. 7). As such, our only hope is to look to God in Christ, and His performance therein, moment-by-moment, and understand that He alone, Grace as He is, is the one who vicariously stands in our stead, lives our life for us, as He is the ground and reality of all human life in His archetypal humanity. This is our hope! And it is a dynamic organic hope that is ongoing. It isn’t some static thing of the past (MacArthur’s doctrine) that the human person is supposed to somehow emulate through self-performance and exemplar modulation. No, the Gospel is living and active, and is currently grounded by the One seated at the Right Hand of the Father, where He continuously makes intercession for each and every one of us; those of us united to Him spiritually by the Holy Spirit.

MacArthur, if anything, is consistent with his commitment to an abstract notion of a God-world relation. Not only does this impact his soteriology, but it equally implicates his thinking on matters like we have been touching upon throughout this article. At base, if your idea of a God-world relation is grounded in the idea that God relates to the world, as a matter of structure, through an abstract decree, rather than in the concrete of His life for us in Jesus Christ, then you will end up with a performance-based Christianity, through and through, which will affect the way you not only exegete Scripture, but culture at large. This article is intended to be an example of how a bad doctrine of God (such as MacArthur’s) leads to other bad fruit in regard to the way things get generalized, and thus communicated to the body of Christ writ large. The consequences of this can literally be deadly; not just eternally, but here and now. A baby Christian, who struggles say with MTHFR, who comes into MacArthur’s church, and hears the above the sermon, might think they are in sin for taking an SSRI (or whatever is suited for the particular brain deficiency to function more properly), stop taking it, be thrust into a world of overwhelming fear and anxiety (because of a physiological problem), and commit suicide. This is the type of dire consequences MacArthur’s theology could potentially have in the life of those who might be the most bruised among us. And this is why I am writing this post, as a censure, once again, of the type of bad theology MacArthur et al. promote.

[1] John MacArthur, Spiritual Stability, Part 3: Humility and Faith—Phil. 4:5-6a, accessed 01-07-2023.

[2] Ron Frost, The Devoted Life: An Invitation to the Puritan Classics, citing, John Rogers, Ohel or Bethshemesh, A Tabernacle for the Sun (London, n.p., 1653).