On July 14, a titan of American evangelicalism died. John MacArthur, who pastored Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California since 1969, also helped found The Master’s Seminary, The Master’s University, and the ministry “Grace to You.” His Bible teaching reached millions by radio, and he was a prominent Baptist preacher and author for over a half century.
MacArthur, like so many religious leaders of his generation, began his ministry as the Sexual Revolution swept America. Unlike so many of his generation, he refused to parley with the spirits of the age. Instead, his public witness was a bulwark amidst the moral collapse of mainline Protestantism and the cultural surrender and personal scandal of so many other evangelical figures and denominations.
John MacArthur called abortion “murder” and compared the mass destruction of the pre-born to the crimes of the Nazis. He began warning about the scourge of pornography before many pastors realized that a tidal wave was about to sweep their congregations, and consistently addressed the topic in the decades that followed. And perhaps most significantly, he spoke directly to the threat of LGBT ideology not only to the culture, but to the church. One of his most famous sermons was delivered on July 19, 2025.
It was less than a month after the U.S. Supreme Court delivered the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, imposing same-sex “marriage” on all fifty states and voiding the laws of thirty states that explicitly recognized traditional marriage, including 26 that enshrined traditional marriage in their state constitutions. MacArthur climbed the pulpit, and gave a sermon called “We Will Not Bow,” in the spirit of the famous declaration of the three friends in the Book of Daniel who would not bow to the idol of the king of Babylon.
“The two greatest attacks of terror on America were perpetrated by the Supreme Court. Not by any Muslim, but by the Supreme Court of the United States,” MacArthur said.
The first one was the legalizing of abortion. Subsequent to that, there have been millions of babies slaughtered in the wombs of their mothers. It’s incalculable to even comprehend that. The blood of those lives cries out from the ground for divine vengeance on this nation. The second great act of terror perpetrated by the Supreme Court was the legalization of same-sex marriage. The destruction of human life in the womb—in a sense, the destruction of motherhood—and now the destruction of the family itself.
No bomb, no explosion, no attack, and no assault on people physically can come anywhere near that kind of terrorism. Our country is being terrorized by the people most responsible to protect it—those who are to uphold the law.
“No human court has the authority to redefine morality,” he continued. “But this human court has said murder is not murder; and marriage is not marriage; and family is not family. They have usurped the authority that belongs only to God, who is the creator of life, marriage, and family. Any and all attempts to define morality differently than God has is a form of rebellion and blasphemy—blasphemy against God, against His holy nature, and His holy law, and His holy people.”
These decisions, MacArthur declared, proceed from “the kingdom of darkness,” and Christians are morally obligated to stand against them. “I admit that for a few hundred years America had a very rare reprieve from this normal kind of conflict that most of the world has always known,” he warned. “But that reprieve has come to a screeching halt.” America was founded on Christian values, but now her institutions are making war on her founding.
“Since marriage is vital to God’s design for ordered society, sensible civilization—civilization able to enjoy common grace—since marriage is, by God’s design, His way to pass on order, to pass on peace, to pass on temporal blessing, and even to pass on righteousness from one generation to the next, family has always been under assault, under assault,” MacArthur warned. The “reprieve” granted to the West by the influence of Christianity, he repeated, is coming to an end.
MacArthur was one of the few Protestant leaders willing to pinpoint a key cornerstone of the Sexual Revolution: Contraception.
This is not about same-sex marriage; this is about the total obliteration of the family so that there will be no more family, no more covenants. No more private, sovereign units that stand up against the corruption.
If you go back to contraception, you go back to where this all began. It is the product, admittedly, of the feminist movement. Go back to contraception; now when contraception comes in, you have sex without children. For the first time, the greatest restraint against having sex is eliminated…
So contraception comes along, and you can have sex without children. But that’s not enough—that doesn’t cover enough ground because that’s not complete enough, so you add abortion. And now you can have sex without children, and if it misses and you do have a child conceived, just kill it.
We’ve come all the way from sex without children to—listen to this—children without sex. You can manufacture a baby. Two lesbians can have a baby. A lesbian can have planted in her womb a living being from somebody else. Children can be manufactured. The normal reason for marriage, a man and a woman coming together to produce children, has been completely convoluted. Most people, it seems to me, would rather have a dog. So now you can have sex without children, and now you can have children without sex. You can just make them. Why do you need a family? Why do you need a husband? Why do you need a wife?
How should Christians respond to a society that is abandoning Scriptural revelation for Sexual Revolution? The answer, MacArthur stated, is simple and essential: We will not bow.
We are the target now. We’re in the bullseye. And there’s no deception; this is how it really is. Now, just to make it clear: We don’t bow down to Caesar. We bow to our King…
I was reading about a Christian college that was confronted on this issue and was told, “You will lose your accreditation if you do not immediately provide complete acceptance for homosexuals and allow them to conduct themselves any way they want in your dorms.” The school, when it was founded in 1885, the name of it was the Boston Missionary Training School. Here we are 130 years later, and that school proudly came up with fourteen pro-homosexual initiatives to keep their accreditation. What happened to the Boston Missionary Training School? They bowed.
You know, I ran through my Bible the other day, just looking for everywhere I could find the term “bow down.” Bow down, bow down—it’s all over the Old Testament. People bowed down before a superior. There are many of those illustrations. Look at the life of Joseph, and you’ll remember how his brothers bowed down to him.
But the faithful people didn’t bow down. The unfaithful people bowed down to idols. They bowed down to monarchs. They bowed down to godless kings. Faithful people didn’t bow down. Mordecai didn’t bow down. Daniel didn’t bow down; his friends didn’t bow down. Jesus didn’t bow down. Paul didn’t bow down.
There will be a barrage of persecution. These are going to be very challenging days. We will not bow. We will be gracious and we will be loving, but we will render to God what is God’s.
John MacArthur has gone now, but his message remains—and it is an essential one. His life encompassed the start of the Sexual Revolution through to its victories at the highest court of the world’s greatest superpower. But he knew—and preached—that ultimately, there is a higher Court, and a higher Judge, and that we are called to reject everything that He rejects. We will need to revisit that message, time and time again, in the decades ahead.
