‘It’s Too Late For This Nation,’ Says John MacArthur, in Fiery Sermon
Pastor John MacArthur of Grace Community Church delivered a message to America during his March 28 sermon, explaining that judgement has come on the nation and that it’s too late for America, but not for the elect.
Preaching on Mark 12 and the Parable of the Vineyard Owner, he explains that the parable was one of judgment, with Jesus promising the destruction of Jerusalem and the nation.
Vengeance will come and it must come and it did…The temple was never rebuilt, the priesthood was never recovered. No sacrifices, no ceremonies, no Sadducees, no Pharisees, no priests, no chief priests to this day. The whole system ended.
Bringing application to this present day, he explained, “it can be for a generation of people too late.” It was too late for eighth-century [BC] Israel, when they were taken captive in Babylon, and too late for first-century Israel, when Jerusalem and the temple burned down in AD 70, and they were scattered and wholesale slaughtered during the First Jewish-Roman War. “It can be too late for every nation. Acts 14 says God allows all the nations to go their own way.”
How do you know when a nation passes the point where salvation is possible for a people? Well, Romans 1 talks about it…God gave them over to sexual immorality. God gave them over to homosexuality. God gave them over to a reprobate mind – a non-functioning mind.
So when you see a nation deep in sexual sin, pervasively affirming of homosexuality, and the insanity of a reprobate mind where they make laws to criminalize righteousness and to legalize gross evil, you know that nation’s under judgment.
And the message to this nation… is that it’s too late for the nation. We’re under judgment.
Mercifully, said MacArthur, there is hope:
But it’s not too late for the elect. Because as Romans 11 says, some are chosen.
What’s our message to this nation? You’re under judgment; it’s too late. Judgment has been unleashed. You can hear, but not understand. You can see, but not perceive. Your heart may be attracted, but hardened by God.
But God has His people. So we warn, because we don’t know who those [elect] people are and we also offer the grace of the Gospel. That’s our calling.
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…But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. — Romans 5:20
No. Sodom and Gomorrah’s grace ran out. When God judged Judah (captivity in Babylon), He told Jeremiah to stop praying for her…
It was a very sobering sermon to hear.
God knows exactly what he’s going to do with the United States. John MacArthur does not and while he makes some very good points about how God judges evil, I believe the theology contained in this sermon is not only overstated, but is inconsistent with what John MacArthur has said in the past, specifically his version of dispensational theology where God maintains clear distinctions between the church and Israel. The parable referenced in this article refers quite explicitly to Israel’s history of murdering God’s prophets which culminated in the murder of God’s own son, Jesus. Furthermore, when he references how it was too late for the Israelites taken into Babylonian captivity, he seems to be think that it’s a foregone conclusion that the United States is at that point right now. God does have every reason to be angry with the United States and in his righteousness, he may judge us as a nation, however, God is also very merciful and in his mercy, he may send spiritual revival which leads to repentance.
God may deal with us like Sodom and Gomorra and destroy us.
Then again he may for the sake of ten, not destroy us.
God may deal with us like Nineveh and cause mass repentance to break out as in Jonah.
Then again, maybe that time has passed and it is time for reckoning as in Obadiah.
The point is, that unless John MacArthur has a clear word from God that there is no chance for the United States (as a cessationist, I don’t think J Mac would say that), his job and the job of every pastor is to preach repentance. Maybe this sermon was something his congregation needed to hear and that’s fine, but we have to be careful that we don’t jump to conclusions about God’s plan for the United States based off of our current interpretation of world events. I have a hard time believing that given the choice between a righteous nation that seeks to follow God and a reprobate nation that revels in its sin, God wants a reprobate nation so He can judge them.
I wonder how John MacArthur’s premillennial eschatology plays into his evaluation of our current situation and if it’s possible that he sees the United States as a lost cause because everything is *supposed* to get worse and worse until Jesus returns. It is interesting to me, that the most successful evangelist since the early church was George Whitefield- a postmillennialist. I’m not arguing for or against a specific eschatology but rather for the types of attitudes they create in their adherents. In the same way that a Calvinistic soteriology can lead to passivity in evangelism when it’s applied incorrectly, I believe that premillennialism can lead to the same kind of passivity when its applied incorrectly.
I think the answer to the America-under-judgement question is to be found in Revelation 11, with the silencing of the Lord’s public witness.
Alexander Hislop, author of The Two Babylons, wrote another book, much less well known, called The Red Republic, in which he argued the case that the beast that slays the Lord’s public witness in Revelation is the same scarlet coloured beast that was, is not and yet is of Revelation 17, which empowers a final federation of nations (Hislop said European only, but in my view, it’s all the western ones) and to which those nations give their power and strength, in unity of policy and action… So when one of them says, “build back better”, they all say the same thing in echo-chamber style.
That beast, said Hislop, would be communism and it is communism today that is the instrumentality waging war on what little remains of the Lord’s public witness in the West (like John Gill before him, Hislop refuted the notion that this was all fulfilled at the Reformation). The Communist Party USA’s own definition of its ultimate target for destruction is what it calls “the ultra right”, which it defines further as… wait for it… “evangelical Christians” – link: https://jrnyquist.blog/2021/01/27/the-communist-program/
Hislop made one howler, sadly, that probably explains the obscurity of his book; he got the timing wrong and thought the silencing of the Lord’s public witness was imminent in his day (mid 1800s) whereas history shows that was plainly not the case. But his interpretation of the symbols is otherwise largely flawless.
However, like Gill, Hislop held that the recovery locale of the Lord’s public witness would be the UK, on the basis that it must be in the location where the Lord’s people are most abundant in this earth. And while that may have been true of Britain in the respective eras of both writers, it is – to me as a Brit living in eastern Europe – the USA of today where the Lord’s public witness retains any lingering semblance of meaningful numbers.
Returning to Revelation 11 then, a strange thing happens to the public witness for the Lord three and a half years after it will be silenced: the spirit of life from the Lord will enter into it and it shall be raised up to heaven in the sight of the Lord’s enemies; that is, the Lord’s witness on earth shall receive life from a position of death, which aligns with Romans 11:15, when Paul describes the coming Jewish Epiphany, when Israel awakens to Christ as its Messiah, as being “life from death” to the Gentile church.
It is at that point that a great earthquake causes one tenth of the Great City of Revelation 11 to fall, which means – to me and certainly to some of the old commentators from centuries ago – that one of the western nations / tribes will see the godly ascend to power, in such a fashion as to astonish the onlooking ungodly. And this fits seamlessly into Daniel 2’s description of the stone cut out without hands smiting Nebuchadnezzar’s dream’s image in the feet and bringing the old world order of ungodly rule down, once and for all, bringing in a new era of Christ’s spiritual rule on earth through his servants: “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice” (Proverbs 29:2).
So, in closing, I say don’t despair of America or the other Anglo nations; on the one hand, I would agree with MacArthur insofar as America as we knew it is over (as is the West per se), but on the other hand, I believe America will probably be the launchpad locale for the recovery of the Lord’s public witness in the West, three and a half years after that witness will be silenced by that red entity so many of us thought was vanquished at the end of the Cold War, only to find that it’s back, menacing and silencing the Lord’s people through its campaign of wokeness which inevitably will culminate in the churches of the Lord being shut in the name of “hate speech”, “anti-terrorism”, “national security” or any other disingenuous pretext.
I always wonder how to respond to this as someone who has basically lived my life according to God’s will. Yes, I am a sinner, as all humans are, but I have spent
my life in various ministries overseas and here serving God and serving others. The choices of abortion, homosexuality, etc, were never my choices. When shown by the Lord I have gotten off track, I repentand get back on track. And there are many like me, Christians who have lived their life righteously. I do not see myself as part of the “retrobate”.
The man displays hate towards others not like him.
He doesn’t walk in love.
He has a Salvation issue.
.
He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now.
He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him.
But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness
and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes.
(1 John 2:9-11 KJV)