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The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Church Under Fire & Into All the World
John MacArthur
born 1939American
The pastor who preached verse by verse through the entire New Testament from one California pulpit across forty-three years, and never softened a hard text.
Summary
- Lived born 1939, American.
- Stood in The Church Under Fire & Into All the World (1930–today).
The life
John Fullerton MacArthur Jr. was born in Los Angeles on June 19, 1939, into a family line of preachers. His father, Jack MacArthur, was a pastor and radio preacher; the ministry went back generations on that side of the house.
He nearly died at nineteen. A car accident threw him out along the pavement at speed. He spent months recovering, with gravel worked out of his back a piece at a time, and came out of it settled that he would preach.
He studied at Los Angeles Pacific College and then at Talbot Theological Seminary. In February 1969 he took the pulpit of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, a suburban congregation in the San Fernando Valley. He stayed fifty-six years.
His method was simple and relentless. Open the New Testament book, start at the first verse, and work through it. He did not preach topics. He did not chase the calendar. Matthew alone took him eight years. Over forty-three years he preached verse by verse through every book of the New Testament, finishing in June 2011 with the last verses of Mark, a project he had begun before anyone in the church owned a computer.
Those sermons became the MacArthur New Testament Commentary, more than thirty volumes, and the MacArthur Study Bible, which has sold in the millions and been translated into Spanish, Russian, German, Chinese, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Arabic. His radio program Grace to You went out daily on hundreds of stations. He served as president and then chancellor of The Master's University and The Master's Seminary, training pastors to do what he did.
He was a fighter, and he did not soften. The Gospel According to Jesus (1988) argued that saving faith submits to Christ as Lord, and set off a public dispute that ran for a decade. Charismatic Chaos and later Strange Fire attacked the modern charismatic movement head on, a position many believers, including many who valued his exposition, rejected outright. He preached against psychology in the pulpit, against seeker-driven church growth, and against what he considered the drift of evangelicalism into entertainment.
In 2020, when California ordered churches closed, Grace Community Church reopened and MacArthur refused to shut it again. The county took the church to court; the case ended in a settlement.
He was still preaching in 2025 when he contracted pneumonia. He died on July 14, 2025, at eighty-six, after fifty-six years in the same pulpit.
What he left is a shelf and a school: a full New Testament commentary, a study Bible in a dozen languages, a seminary, and five decades of recordings from one platform in the San Fernando Valley.
Sources: Iain Murray, John MacArthur: Servant of the Word and Flock; John MacArthur, The Gospel According to Jesus and the MacArthur New Testament Commentary series; Grace Community Church's published announcement of his death, July 2025; contemporary obituaries.
What was happening while he lived8 moments · 1930–today
- May 1934The Barmen DeclarationOne hundred thirty-nine delegates met in a church hall in Barmen, a district of Wuppertal, while the German government was busy fusing the Protestant church to the Nazi state. Their six short theses, drafted mainly by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, said the church listens to one Word, Jesus Christ as Scripture presents Him, and to no other lord, event, or leader.
- October 1945The Stuttgart Declaration of GuiltGerman church leaders, Niemöller among them, admitted before the world that they had not resisted enough, not prayed enough, not believed enough. It is one of the rare times a national church has said plainly that it failed.
- 1948–1964Richard Wurmbrand's fourteen yearsA Romanian Lutheran pastor of Jewish descent, converted at thirty, was seized off the street in February 1948 and spent fourteen years in communist prisons, about three of them alone in an underground cell where he kept his mind by preaching a sermon every night to no one. He was released in 1964 under Romania's general amnesty for political prisoners and left the country in 1965, after Western Christians paid for his exit.
- 1949–1955China's long night beginsAfter the communist victory, foreign missionaries were pushed out within a few years and churches were pressed into a single state-supervised body. Wang Mingdao, a Beijing pastor who had refused Japanese pressure a decade earlier, refused this too, and was arrested in August 1955. He signed a confession under interrogation, could not live with it, took it back, and served roughly twenty-two more years.
- 1958The widows go backElisabeth Elliot, with her toddler daughter Valerie, and Rachel Saint, Nate's sister, went to live in the Waorani settlement, among the men who had done the killing. Years later two of those men baptized Nate Saint's son and daughter in the same river.
- 1966–1976The Cultural RevolutionRed Guards closed the last open churches, burned Bibles, and sent pastors to labor camps. Watchman Nee, imprisoned since 1952, died in a camp in 1972. Public Christianity in China effectively ceased, and the faith moved into kitchens and back rooms, where it was never counted.
- July 1974The Lausanne CongressAbout 2,700 Christians from 150 nations met in Switzerland at Billy Graham's invitation. The Anglican John Stott drafted the resulting covenant; the missiologist Ralph Winter's address put "unreached peoples" on the map; and Latin Americans like René Padilla and Samuel Escobar pressed the point that preaching and mercy are not rivals.
- Autumn 1989Candles in Leipzig, and the wall comes downMonday peace prayers had gathered for years at the Nikolaikirche under pastor Christian Führer. On October 9 about seventy thousand people, the figure the city's own contemporary reports give, walked out of that neighborhood carrying candles past armed police, and not a shot was fired. The Berlin Wall opened a month later, on November 9.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search John MacArthur at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Standing beside himThe Church Under Fire & Into All the World · 37 on this stretch of wall
Hid Jews behind a false wall in her family's watch shop, survived Ravensbrück, and went back to Germany to forgive.
Stepped out of the Auschwitz line and asked to be starved to death in place of a man he had never met, who lived another fifty-four years.
The Oxford atheist who came in kicking and struggling, then explained the faith to a whole century.
Signed the confession his interrogators wanted, could not live with it, took it back - and paid for that with twenty-two more years.
Gave up his best Olympic event rather than run on a Sunday, won a different one in world-record time, and died in a prison camp teaching other people's children.
Built China's house churches, then spent the last twenty years of his life in a labor camp for it.