John MacArthur has been a huge voice in modern Christianity fro as long as I can remember,  Since completing his first best-selling book The Gospel According to Jesus in 1988,he’s written hundred of books and study guides including the MacArthur Study Bible, which has sold more than 1 million copies and received a Gold Medallion Book Award. Other best-selling books include his MacArthur New Testament Commentary Series (more than 1 million copies), Twelve Ordinary Men (more than 500,000 copies),^[6], and the children’s book A Faith to Grow On, which garnered an ECPA Christian Book Award. His titles have been translated into more than two dozen languages. But primarily he is known for his internationally syndicated Christian teaching radio program Grace to You which airs more than 1,000 times daily throughout the English-speaking world, reaching major population centers on every continent of the world. It also airs nearly 1,000 times daily in Spanish, reaching 23 countries from Europe to Latin America. “Grace to You” television airs weekly on DirecTV in the United States, and is available for free on the Internet worldwide. All of John’s 3,000 sermons, spanning more than four decades of ministry, are available for free on the Grace to You website. MacArthur is the pastor-teacher of Grace Community Church, as well as the president of The Master’s University and Seminary  Last week, MacArthur led the signing of a statement that condemned evangelical’s “newfound obsession with the notion of ‘social justice,'” and was met with signatures from over 3,000 other evangelicals who supported the statement.

Now, before you go “Ho-hum”, read why this is important.

“The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel” asserts that the Bible’s teachings are being protested against by “the broad and somewhat nebulous rubric of concern for ‘social justice,” stating that “values borrowed from secular culture are currently undermining Scripture in the areas of race and ethnicity, manhood and womanhood, and human sexuality.”

The opening paragraph of MacArthur’s statement reads as follows:

“The besetting sin of pragmatic, style-conscious evangelicals has always been that they shamelessly borrow fads and talking points from the unbelieving world. Today’s evangelicals evidently don’t believe the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God (1 Corinthians 3:19). Virtually any theory, ideology, or amusement that captures the fancy of secular pop culture will be adopted, slightly adapted, perhaps cloaked in spiritual-sounding language, propped up with specious proof texts, and peddled as an issue that is vital for evangelicals to embrace if we don’t want to become totally irrelevant. That’s precisely how evangelicals in the mid-twentieth century became obsessed for several decades with positive thinking, self-esteem, and “Christian psychology.” After that, it was marketing savvy and promotional strategies. By the beginning of the twenty-first century it was postmodernism, repackaged and aggressively promoting itself as the Emerging Church movement. Today, critical race theory, feminism, intersectional theory, LGBT advocacy, progressive immigration policies, animal rights, and other left-wing political causes are all actively vying for evangelical acceptance under the rubric of “social justice.”

After several pages of that expound and expand on this message, the statement closes with this:

“Christians are the last people who should ever become offended, resentful, envious, or unforgiving. Love “does not take into account a wrong suffered” (1 Corinthians 13:5). The mark of a Christian is turning the other cheek, loving our enemies, praying for those who mistreat us. Christ is the example whose steps we are to follow: “While being reviled, He did not revile in return; while suffering, He uttered no threats, but kept entrusting Himself to Him who judges righteously” (1 Peter 2:23).  Hatred, envy, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, hostility, divisiveness, bitterness, pride, selfishness, hard feelings, vindictiveness—and all similar attitudes of resentment—are the self-destructive works of the flesh. The beneficial fruit the Spirit produces are the exact opposite attitudes: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”  The NIV translates 1 Corinthians 13:5 this way: “[Love] keeps no record of wrongs.” Such qualities, frankly, are in short supply in the rhetoric of those advocating for social justice.  Doing justice (i.e., biblical justice, not the secular substitute) together with loving mercy and walking humbly with God are all essential virtues. Those are the chief practical duties incumbent on every believer (Micah 6:8). Constantly complaining that we are victims of injustice while judging other people guilty of sins we cannot even see is antithetical to the Spirit of Christ.  As Christians, let’s cultivate the fruit of the Spirit, the qualities named in the Beatitudes, the virtues outlined in 2 Peter 1:5-7, and the characteristics of love listed in 1 Corinthians 13. Any notion of moral equity that omits or minimizes those righteous qualities has no right whatsoever to be called “justice.”

In the statement, the signatories claim that the social justice movement endangers Christians with “an onslaught of dangerous and false teachings that threaten the gospel, misrepresent Scripture, and lead people away from the grace of God in Jesus Christ.”

Over the course of 14 sections, the statement addresses cultural narratives “currently undermining Scripture in the areas of race and ethnicity, manhood and womanhood, and human sexuality” and argues that a secular threat is infiltrating the evangelical church.

At the time of this recording, the statement has received around 7,000 signatures.

The statement comes at a time when a series of blog posts and sermons attacking social justice from MacArthur, a popular California pastor and author, have sparked controversy in the evangelical community.

The harsh reaction to MacArthur’s ideas was shaped by the events of the past four years, says Washington, DC, pastor and Gospel Coalition council member Thabiti Anyabwile. “They land in the midst of an evangelical movement that is already fraying and fracturing under the weight of the last five years, if I’m dating this back to the Mike Brown shooting and the fallout,” said Anyabwile. “Evangelicalism as a movement splintered instantly as to how they understood that issue and different quarters circled one another in suspicion and sometimes outright attack.”

Further, the statement’s specific attacks on particular nomenclature have been troublesome because its drafters haven’t defined their terms, says Anyabwile. “They’re so imprecise in the terms that are used and defining those terms. What exactly is meant by social justice?” he said. “What are we talking about when we talking about reconciliation or intersectionality or critical race theory? These are things that are thrown out there that are red meat for one quarter of evangelicalism and might be acceptable parlance, depending on how you define it, in other quarters.”

Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, has responded to John MacArthur’s recent claims that evangelicals’ embrace of social justice is a threat to the Gospel.  Moore is president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. The ERLC is the moral and public policy entity of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.  The Wall Street Journal has called Moore “vigorous, cheerful, and fiercely articulate.” He was named in 2017 to Politico Magazine’s list of top fifty influence-makers in Washington, and has been profiled by such publications as the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and the Weekly Standard. Moore’s book Onward: Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel was named Christianity Today’s Book of the Year in 2016.

The Christian Post reports that Moore recently sat down with the hosts of Holy Post Podcast to discuss MacArthur’s statement and social justice within the Church. When asked if he believed the separation of the Bible and social justice was helpful, Moore responded by saying, “No, because the Bible doesn’t put those two things in separate categories.” He continued, “Sometimes what people want to do is to essentially do with public justice what other people do with personal morality.”

“You will have people who will say anytime someone starts talking about the imperatives of Scripture — like being sexually pure — ‘That is legalism and all that matters is who I am in Christ,'” Moore continued. “Is there such a thing as legalism, of course. If someone were to say, ‘Maintain sexual purity in order that you may be acceptable before God,’ well that is legalism. But that is not what the Scripture is teaching.”

Moore notes that it would be unsound to argue that because legalism – the dependence on moral law rather than on personal religious faith – can happen in personal morality, that personal morality is and should be separate from the Gospel.

On this Moore said, “Of course not. The same thing is true with what we do together. The Bible doesn’t make these artificial distinctions between what we are doing privately and personally and then what we are gathering together and doing.”

He continued, “The people who would say that, don’t really believe it [because they] don’t act that way when it comes to the issues they care about and in most cases rightly care about.”

The statement led by MacArthur, comes after an unsuccessful push earlier this year, by some in the Southern Baptist Convention to get the Protestant denomination to denounce the social justice movement.

Moore added that it is “disheartening” to watch the Church repeat the same issues of the past with the “same talking points.”

“So, if you were in the Southern Baptist or Southern Presbyterian context in 1845 and the question of slavery comes up, the response is going to be ‘You are distracting us from the Gospel. We need to be the people who are sharing the Gospel and evangelizing the world and not to get involved in these social issues like slavery,'” Moore said. “Well, if you stand up and call people to repentance for drunkenness and adultery but you don’t call them to repentance for participating in or applauding the kidnapping, rape, forced servitude of image-bearing human beings, then you have spoken to it. You have said, ‘This is an issue to which you will give no account at judgment.’ That is not what the Bible teaches.”