Should We Fight for the Truth?

In article with the same title as this post, John MacArthur has this to say:

“Many self-styled evangelicals today are openly questioning whether such a thing as truth even exists. Others suppose that even if truth does exist, we can’t be sure what it is, so it can’t really matter much. This type of thinking is epidemic, even among some of the evangelical movement’s most popular authors and spokespersons. Some flatly refuse to stand for anything because they have decided that even Scripture isn’t really clear enough to argue about.

Except for the massive scale on which such thinking has attained popularity today, and the way it is seeping into the church, such ideas themselves are really nothing new or particularly shocking. It is exactly the same attitude with which Pilate summarily dismissed Christ: “What is truth?” (John 18:38

Certain avant-garde evangelicals sometimes act as if the demise of certainty is a dramatic new intellectual development, rather than seeing it for what it actually is: an echo of the old unbelief. It is unbelief cloaked in a religious disguise and seeking legitimacy as if it were merely a humbler kind of faith. But it’s not faith at all. In reality, the contemporary refusal to regard any truth as sure and certain is the worst kind of infidelity.

The church’s duty has always been to confront such skepticism and answer it by clearly proclaiming the truth God has revealed in His Word. We have been given a clear message for the purpose of confronting the world’s unbelief. That is what we are called, commanded, and commissioned to do (1 Corinthians 1:17-31). Faithfulness to Christ demands it. The honor of God requires it. We cannot sit by and do nothing while worldly, revisionist, and skeptical attitudes about truth are infiltrating the church. We must not embrace such confusion in the name of charity, collegiality, or unity. We have to stand and fight for the truth–and be prepared to die for it–as faithful Christians always have.”

Dr. MacArthur, without naming names, echoes the challenge to believers to ‘fight for the faith’, found in the Letter of Jude:

3 Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. 4 For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.”

This greatest danger to the church is not from outside it’s ‘walls’, but from with. Indeed ‘certain people have crept in unnoticed’, call themselves ‘Christians’ while peddling lies they have brought in riding on the back of truth. If you are reading this particular blog post and the term ‘Emergent’ comes to mind, you would be thinking rightly.

More to follow. . .

One response to “Should We Fight for the Truth?

  1. One day just before the meeting of the General Assembly Mrs. Stevenson, the wife of the seminary president, met B. B. Warfield on the street and said,

    “Dr. Warfield, I hear there is going to be trouble at the Assembly. Do let us pray for peace.”

    “I am praying,” replied Warfield, “that if they do not do what is right, there may be a mighty battle.”

    From Calhoun, Princeton Seminary Volume 2, p. 347

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