State University in Long Beach, California, Fall 1962. 'Eye-black' is grease
Youth in California 13
2. Football, John playing for Los Angeles Pacific College against California
State University in Long Beach, California, Fall 1962. 'Eye-black' is grease applied to reduce sun glare.
athletics at Bob Jones; and for another a 'fundamentalist' envi-
ronment, which urged 'third-degree separation' from other
professing Christians, was unfamiliar to him. He was later to
regard the time spent at Bob Jones as providing him with a view
of Fundamentalism from the inside, and the experience served
to lead him to a closer study of Scripture.
At the end of his first year at Bob Jones, John, bound for
home, shared a car with five other students as they drove through
Alabama. While they were proceeding at speed, the driver lost
control; a door burst open as the car turned over, and John was
thrown out. He was to land in a seated position on the asphalt
road and slide for over a hundred yards. Nothing was broken
but third degree friction burns took the flesh off his back, and
embedded asphalt in what remained. One hand would be scarred
14 JOHN MacArTHuR: SERVANT OF THE WORD AND FLOCK
for life. 'As I stood up on that highway, having never lost con-
sciousness', he would later say, 'I committed my life to serving
Christ. I told him I would no longer resist what he wanted me
to do, which was to preach His Word.' Three painful months
followed the initial hospital treatment, requiring the patient
to lie on his stomach, and undergo skin grafts and other treat-
ment. Life suddenly became very serious: 'I realized I was not
in control of my future. I had survived something that should
have killed me; God suddenly had my undivided attention.'
This was a great turning point. From this time the Christian
ministry became the pole star of his life. One more year, 1958-59,
was to follow at Bob Jones in South Carolina, and it was during
this year that he preached his first 'sermon'. The location was a
bus station in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he had been
instructed to preach and gather a crowd. It was not exactly the
situation for a novice, as he quickly discovered:
The sermon was terrible. I didn't know how to do it right.
I went in there—had my Bible in my hand—and I walked
in to this mostly empty bus depot. As I looked around at
a motley bunch, I started preaching a gospel message. You could just see the people looking at me and saying, 'The poor kid! He looks intelligent. Its so sad; he must have some kind of disability.'
And I thought, this doesn't make any sense at all. So I
did it for about ten minutes, and then I went down the
street where there was a high school dance beginning. I
sat outside and gave the gospel to the kids as they went
in and out. That's how I got my start preaching. It wasn't memorable, but I was eager to learn to preach, because I was determined to be ready whenever I was called on. I would go to rescue missions and military bases to preach
Youth in California hs
when I could. Over time, I learned how to connect with
an audience.
During 1959 John learned that he would be able to con-
tinue his Bachelor's degree at Pacific College in Los Angeles,
and this led to the decision for him to do his two final years at
that institution. Back home, sports were now resumed and he
excelled, especially in football. He was named in an All-America
squad as half-back, and was subsequently solicited by several
professional teams to determine his interest in a football career.
But there was now a higher purpose in his view, and this was
confirmed to him by an unexpected opportunity arising out
of a football luncheon at which he received an award. When
he used the occasion to speak of his faith in Christ, one of his
hearers asked him if he would visit a seventeen-year-old girl
named Polly whose spinal cord had recently been severed in
an accident.
John went to the hospital to see the girl who would remain
paralysed for life, and her first words to him were, 'Td kill myself
if I could. I have no reason to live. 'Not knowing what else
to do', he recalls, 'I started into a presentation of the gospel.
"Its not what happens to your body that matters, Polly, it's
what happens to your eternal soul. Youre going to live forever
somewhere. God can bring joy into your heart even now if the
issue of your soul is taken care of. Would you like to hear about
how that can happen?"
Her heart was opened to listen. After prayer and conversa-
tions on several occasions, she was able to say, "You know, John,
in some ways I'm glad this accident happened. If it hadn't, I
would never have met Jesus Christ.' This early experience in
16 JOHN MacArTHuR: SERVANT OF THE WORD AND FLOCK
pastoral work had a profound influence on John himself. After
that exposure to the power of the gospel, I thought, This is all
I want for my life. Nothing else even comes close in signifi-
cance."
* Hard to Believe, pp. 71-2. 'She became a follower of Christ and eventually met and married a wonderful Christian man.'
The Bible Takes First Place
n enthusiastic young man once introduced himself to a
well-known Bible teacher with the words, 'Oh, Sir, P''d
give the world if I knew the Bible like you do.' The older man
looked him straight in the eye and replied, 'Good, because that
is what it will cost you.' In 1961, now twenty-two years old,
John MacArthur proceeded to Talbot Theological Seminary,
wanting to face that cost.
Talbot, situated at La Mirada, on the southern side of Los
Angeles, had about 125 students. John's father had urged it on
account of the reputation of its dean, Dr Charles L. Feinberg,
who before his conversion had studied to be a Jewish rabbi. He
was said to know more than thirty languages, including Dutch,
which he had taught himself in order to read Dutch Reformed
Theology.
Prior to this date, despite the example of his parents,
MacArthur's commitment to reading had been comparatively
small, a fact that came out when father and son together met
Feinberg at the seminary. Jack MacArthur opened the interview
with the words: 'This is my son Johnny, and I want you to make
him a Bible expositor.' "Well, what has he been up to now?' the
'7,
18 JOHN MacArTHUR: SERVANT OF THE WorbD AND FLOCK
dean responded. And John heard his father reply, "He's basically
a football player.' At this Feinberg looked quizzically over his
glasses as though to say, 'Are you kidding me?'
Father wasn't kidding. As John later wrote of this point in
his life:
When I was in college I didn't want to read. I was a typ-
ical athletic guy who was usually outdoors, and I preferred not to be indoors reading. I arrived at seminary and had no choice. So I just began to read and, of course, it was
all about what I wanted to know. I really fell in love with reading theology.!
One of MacArthur's great incentives at Talbot was his admir-
ation for Dr Feinberg of whom he says:
He read the Bible through four times every year. Needless
to say, he was exceptional and intense. We were all right-
fully in awe of him, and I loved him at the same time. He
was a real model for me.
The dean became his chief mentor and to please him was now
part of his life. It was the more painful, therefore, to receive
from him one of the most memorable rebukes of his lifetime.
All students had to preach at least twice in the seminary chapel,
and as they did so members of the faculty sat behind them on
the platform and filled in critique sheets. When MacArthur's
turn came he was assigned to preach on 2 Samuel 7, the passage
where the prophet Nathan's encouragement to David to build
a temple was overruled by God. MacArthur took as his main
theme the importance of not presuming on God, and, suppos-
' Rediscovering Expository Preaching (Dallas: Word, 1992), p. 336. His earlier lack of interest in reading cannot be taken in an absolute sense for he had graduated at Pacific College with the Bachelor's degree, composed of a major in Biblical Studies and a minor in New Testament Greek.
The Bible Takes First Place 19
ing that he had preached well, he anticipated receiving the high
opinion of Dr Feinberg at the end of the service. Instead the
critique sheet the latter handed to him was blank apart from
the words, "You missed the whole point of the passage.' Later
he had to enter his teacher's study, to find him shaking his head
in disappointment as he exclaimed,
How could you? How could you? The passage presents the Davidic Covenant culminating in the Messiah and His glorious kingdom—and you talked about 'not presuming on God in our personal day-to-day choices.
The hearer of these words says it was 'the deepest single impres-
sion I ever recetved in seminary. I can still hear Dr Feinberg's
heartfelt admonition ringing in my ears. If you don't have the
meaning of Scripture, you do not have the Word of God at
Alae
A visiting lecturer to Talbot, who also helped MacArthur,
was Ralph Keiper of Philadelphia, secretary to Donald G.
Barnhouse and the primary editor of Eternity. John never met
Barnhouse but read some of his writings. Among anecdotes of
Barnhouse that he would later use, was the occasion when the
famous preacher was interrupted by an admirer as he was read-
ing his Bible on a plane flight. 'I wish I could know the Bible
like you do', the stranger exclaimed. Barnhouse's response was
to say, 'Well, you could start by putting down Time magazine
and reading the Bible.' One of the lessons Keiper impressed
'on John was the value of illustrating the teaching of a passage
not by anecdotes but by other incidents in Scripture. Part of
2 From an address, 'Why I Still Preach the Bible after Forty Years of Ministry', delivered at the first "Together for the Gospel' conference in 2006, and as put down on paper by Phil Johnson.
20 JOHN MacArTHuR: SERVANT OF THE WORD AND FLOCK
the charm of Keiper's personality lay in his humour and in that
area he was also of help to John. John's father, hearing some
of his son's first efforts in speaking, had impressed on him,
'The pulpit is no place for humour. You've got to get out of
that.' While Keiper was equally against turning sermons into
entertainment, John says he helped him 'to have a little bit of humour in my life.'
Sports still took some time while he was at Talbot, and he had
a good friendship with Feinberg's son Paul, who was an outstand-
ing athlete. John still had an approach to turn professional, but
the pull was no longer what it had been in earlier years.
Before he began his last year at Talbot, there was another
life-changing event. Patricia Sue Smith belonged to his father's
church, where her father, Dale Smith, was superintendent of
the Sunday School, and for two years John had taught the
Bible class to which she belonged. Dale, and his wife Lorraine
(née Robertson), had moved to Los Angeles from a farming background in Nebraska in about 1940. Patricia was the fourth
in their family of four daughters and one son. It was through a
relationship between her and John's oldest sister that he became aware of Patricia, who was often in the MacArthur home. At some point she became to him 'the cutest girl I ever saw', and the fact that she loved the Lord determined the matter. Perhaps
Patricia's estimate of John was a little longer in its formation, but all was settled to their mutual joy when they were married in August 1963. A later MacArthur title would be dedicated to 'Dale and Lorraine Smith on their Fiftieth Anniversary, with gratitude that they have given their lives to the Saviour and me their daughter."
* The Ultimate Priority: Worship (Chicago: Moody, 1983).