John MacArthur Issues Public Statements on Alistair Begg "Gay Wedding" Controversy / Blasts TGC

Hello.

Why MacArthur’s Comments on the Begg Controversy Matter

In this video, I'm going to be covering two clips by John MacArthur. In one of them, he is warning about TGC, or the Gospel Coalition, that they are a woke organization that people shouldn't follow. But in the first clip, John MacArthur, for the first time, has made public statements about the Alistair Begg controversy.

So this was from a recent Q &A at Grace Community Church. I'll play the clip in a moment. But before I do, some people had reached out to me and they were wondering, how come I didn't do a video on John MacArthur's own statements where he gave advice in a Q &A for Ligonier Ministries several years ago, where apparently it seems like John MacArthur gave advice that it's okay to bake a cake for a gay wedding.

And people are like, wait a minute, how does that fit with him disinviting Alistair Begg from Shepard's Conference over this whole thing? So yeah, that's a good question. And here's the reason why I didn't do a video about MacArthur, because when I was doing the Alistair Begg videos, I was totally unaware of the MacArthur clip from Ligonier.

That's number one. Number two, by the time I saw the clip and was ready to do a video, MacArthur had clarified his remarks. And when I heard his clarification, I was happy with it. I'll say I was satisfied with it.

So that's why I didn't do a video about MacArthur. I don't think it was the same thing as what Alistair Begg did. You can search the MacArthur bake a cake Ligonier Ministry Q &A. You can search that video on YouTube for yourself, but I don't think it was the same thing.

Number one, he wasn't saying go to the gay wedding. Alistair Begg said to the grandmother, you should attend the gay wedding. MacArthur didn't say you should attend. So number one, it wasn't the same advice.

Number two, MacArthur gave clarification, which helped Alistair Begg, on the other hand, just double down and triple down. And then number three, Alistair Begg attacked conservatives. You're just a bunch of American fundamentalists.

You're just like the Pharisees. That's basically what he said in this sermon. John MacArthur didn't do that. So I don't think it's the same thing at all. But if you want to disagree, that's up to you.

But let's listen to what John MacArthur said in this first clip.

MacArthur’s Critique of Alistair Begg’s Advice on a Transgender Wedding

John, I have a question that's been heavy on my heart about one of our Scottish brothers. Will you comment and guide us as to why Alistair Begg is mistaken in advising a member of his flock to attend and solemnize a marriage of her granddaughter to a transgender partner?

Can you guide us as to why we should not bend to do this?

Yeah, that question came up and has gotten all over the internet. Let me say, first of all, that Alistair and I have been friends for, well, 45 years. When I was in Scotland 45 years ago, I was pushing his 45-year-old son in a pram.

You know what a pram is, Neil. It's like a baby buggy. So we've had a lot of history together, and I have a great affection for him. I also want to say that you shouldn't judge a man by his weakest moment.

All of us will have a moment of weakness. Having said that, I have to disagree with the answer that he gave to the question. A believer should not go to a homosexual, transgender wedding for a lot of reasons.

But he was making the argument that you go out of compassion rather than condemnation. You go to show love to them as a means to reach them. My response to that is, the most loving thing you could possibly do would be not to go and to condemn the relationship.

That is loving. It's not loving to help somebody celebrate stepping into the fury of God's judgment. No transgender person, feminine, homosexual, will enter the kingdom of heaven. This is not a time for you to celebrate thinking that your affection for somebody is the means of their salvation.

They will come to salvation when the Lord exposes their sin. That's why the Holy Spirit, John 16, convicts of sin and righteousness and judgment. And what should be said to somebody is, this is wrong.

This is against God's order. This is not marriage. It is not a marriage because you can't have a marriage between two people of the same sex. It's not a marriage at all. It is defying God who ordained marriage and ordained male and female and designed procreation.

It is a blasphemy against God, as is transgender life and homosexuality as well. That is the message to give in love. I couldn't, beyond the theological reasons and the biblical reasons, I couldn't affirm that.

If I went, I would affirm that. Not only could I not affirm it, I don't think I could tolerate it. I don't think I could survive sitting in something like that and feeling like I was supportive of it and then to give them a gift, that is to aid and abet the celebration of something that is defying God's design and the very, very, I would say, point of the spear currently of the corruption of this entire culture.

Thank you so much.

Well, it's my pleasure. I do say this. I don't understand why you would answer the question that way. I thought if somebody was in that situation and had that view and you're on the radio and somebody says, and this, you're recording this, right?

So whoever your host is is going to ask you a question. And the host says, what would you tell this grandma about going to a transgender wedding? I would immediately say, ask me another question. Particularly if I was at all prone to suggest that that might be okay, I would never say that because you have to calculate the cost of that.

And how do you calculate that? I mean, the price for that is really epic. It's really epic. And there's so much more about him that is wonderful and faithful in his ministry. Just past 40 years of pastoral ministry in that church, and it was a great celebration.

And now he's going to be defined by that. I don't know how you calculate doing that for that reason. Unless there is some very personal relationship with someone you're trying to win over or protect. But that's really speculation in my mind.

Okay.

The Gospel Coalition, Wokeness, and the Collapse of Evangelical Organizations

So hopefully you found those comments helpful. On to the next story. John MacArthur is now warning about the woke agenda of the Gospel Coalition. Here's the thing, just going back to Alistair Begg. Alistair Begg was actually a council member.

I'm not sure if he still is, but he was, or maybe still is a council member for TGC, which that's Begg really lending credibility to this organization. John MacArthur, however, just calls him out. And in this age of confusion, that's what we need.

We need straight talk, not good guys working with bad guys to where now you wonder, well, Gospel Coalition seems woke, but Alistair Begg works for them and he's good. And yeah, it just confuses everything.

But that's why I appreciate John MacArthur's straight talk. So here is the article from The Dissenter. This is where I got the clip. The headline reads, John MacArthur blasts the Gospel Coalition, calls them woke, calls them a useless entity, sort of like Christianity today, which John MacArthur calls Christianity astray.

The dissenter, here's what they say, we at The Dissenter had been warning about the Gospel Coalition, TGC, and its clones like T4G for years. We concluded that these organizations were compromised in such a way that they shouldn't even be called Christian.

Okay.

So that's a pretty, that's pretty a hard line that they're drawing here. Yet they say evangelical churches around the globe still flocked to these organizations because of the notoriety of those involved.

So that would be men like Tim Keller, Don Carson, Al Mohler, Russell Moore, and you can include Alistair Begg because again, he was a council member for TGC. The article continues, however, in a recent Q &A, John MacArthur poured a little bit of water on that fire by calling out, didn't he pour gasoline on it?

Maybe not water. Anyways, they say he poured something on that fire by calling out these woke institutions for what they are. When asked by a member of the congregation about these organizations, John MacArthur said that when they started out, they seemed to have noble intentions to bring people together and unite them around the gospel.

He said that when they, but when they bought into the deceptiveness of the woke movement and racial baiting that was going on a couple of years ago, that quickly put them out of business. So here's the clip from MacArthur warning about TGC.

Watch.

Intent to bring different people together, leaders, pastors, theologians, around the gospel. It was very much like T4G, together for the gospel, that had that conference. We had as many as 10 ,000 people.

I was a part of that every year at these huge conventions, and it was together for the gospel. But both of those organizations, well, T4G is basically nonexistent. They bought into the deceptiveness of the woke movement and the racial baiting that was going on a couple of years ago, and it literally put them out of existence.

I was thinking the other day how interesting it was that the last panel discussion that I was on at a T4G event was to honor R .C. Sproul, who had died, and I spoke at his funeral. This was, I think, 2017 or 2018.

So the T4G guys wanted to honor him with a panel, and we spent an hour and 15 minutes, and it was just beautiful tributes to R .C. from all of us who knew him so very, very well. And the strange irony was a year later, they did the same thing for Martin Luther King, who was not a Christian at all, whose life was immoral.

I'm not saying he didn't do some social good, and I've always been glad that he was a pacifist or he could have started a real revolution. But you don't honor a nonbeliever who misrepresented everything about Christ and the gospel in an organization alongside honoring somebody like R .C. Sproul.

This was a symptom of the impact of the woke movement that basically displaced that whole organization. It was over after that. And some of the effects of those men who were leaders there are still going on, and it had a negative effect on their leadership, and I think even the role they play in evangelicalism today.

Well, the gospel coalition kind of followed the same pattern, and today the gospel coalition is propagating just about anything and everything, good, bad, and indifferent. So, no, I wouldn't feel comfortable with the gospel coalition.

You know, once a few years ago, we tried to be friends, to warm up with them, and they said they would like to have a conference at Grace Church. And so we said, well, that would be great. They said, we've associated with some of the wrong people, some of the compromising people, and we'd like to identify with you.

And so we said, well, we'll certainly consider that. Send us the program that you would like to have here. And I remember they sent us a program of speakers that we would never, ever, ever have here dealing with issues of gender and all that kind of thing.

So, these amorphous evangelical organizations without diligent, fastidious, vigilant leadership to keep them faithful to the truth of Scripture just wander off into everything, and they become, I guess in a sense, useless as an entity.

There would be people in all of these that are still good people and honor the Lord, but the inability to discern what was really going on broke them into pieces. And the gospel coalition is like Christianity today.

It's Christianity astray. Okay.

Why Christians Should Avoid Woke Compromise and Stick to Reliable Teachers

Okay, so straight talk from John MacArthur. One last comment. In the day and age we live in, with all the confusion out there, there's so many, here's the thing, there's so many good, reliable Bible teachers, especially now that we have YouTube.

There's just no point, even if groups like TGC and men who work for them, even if they have some good insights here and there, it's just not worth the risk. If there's a person, a pastor, an organization, and they have woke tendencies, why bother listening to them?

Over time, that has a corrupting influence. So, there's so many good teachers, so many good ministries, especially on YouTube. Why bother listening to some of these guys? So, my advice would just be to stick to somebody who's not woke at all.

Listen to those ministries that you know are dependable. Don't bother listening to someone who's compromising on the main issues of the day. Steer clear of all of that. Stick to the people that you know are solid.

And then when somebody isn't solid anymore, there's going to be 50 other good pastors or good ministries that you can listen to. So, just cut out all the woke stuff. We'd be a lot better off. And that's all I have to say about that.

So, I hope this video was helpful. If you liked it, consider subscribing. Like the video. When you press like, it helps to get it out to more people. And until next time, may the Lord be with you. Have a great day.