Remembering the Legacy of John MacArthur, the Polemicist
He was the last of a dying breed—a pastor who not only knew what he believed, but believed what he knew. John Fullerton MacArthur Jr., born in 1939, didn’t just walk into history; he stormed in like a theological tempest. While most pastors today tiptoe through the tulips of cultural relevance, MacArthur thundered across the pulpit with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball wrapped in Scripture.
He began preaching at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, in 1969, and for more than five decades he fed his flock not with syrupy platitudes, but with expository preaching sharp enough to split bone from marrow.
He wrote—a lot. Aside from preaching, writing must have been his favorite thing to do. From his multi-volume New Testament Commentary Series to his gold-standard MacArthur Study Bible, his pen bled ink saturated in sola Scriptura. That Study Bible alone became a spiritual compass for millions, a theological anchor dropped deep in the stormy seas of modern evangelicalism. His commentaries—each of them like precision airstrikes on heresy—offered verse-by-verse clarity in an era of vagueness, where most pastors couldn’t exegete their way out of a children’s devotional.
He founded The Master’s Seminary to train a generation of warriors, not showmen. And his radio ministry, Grace to You, filled the airwaves with sermons that weren’t so much sermons as they were surgical demolitions of weak doctrine and soft-spoken apostasy.
But even the strongest vessels creak under pressure. In the final years of his life, MacArthur’s body began to show signs of wear. Pneumonia put him in the hospital. His preaching slowed, his gait slowed, but his convictions never did. MacArthur stood behind the pulpit with a weakened frame but a steel spine. And then, on July 14, 2025, the Lord took him home.
Quietly. No fanfare. No parade.
Just a faithful soldier crossing over to glory, leaving behind a world noisier, shallower, and infinitely more confused than when he first took the pulpit.
And yet, what he left wasn’t a vacuum—it was a gaping hole in the side of a crumbling evangelical ship. Because John MacArthur wasn’t just a preacher, he was a polemicist in the truest, most biblical sense. A guardian at the gate. A watchman who actually stayed awake. He didn’t simply rebuke false teachers—he incinerated them.