Blogging through “The Jesus You Can’t Ignore”

I’ve received the book The Jesus You Can’t Ignore: What You Must Learn From the Bold Confrontations of Christ by John MacArthur to review. When I am done with the book (which, at the current rate, will be soon), I’ll provide a summary review. But, as I was going through the early part of the text, I came to some remarkable portions that I felt an urge to discuss in a bit more detail than a summary review allows for.

This post will serve as an introduction to what I find to be the focus of the text so far. As the subtitle— What You Must Learn From the Bold Confrontations of Christ— indicates, this MacArthur book hopes to present a Jesus who is characterized in Scripture as bold and confrontational, as opposed to a meek, peace and love teacher. Instead of the congenial, hospitable, diplomatic Jesus the evangelical community has bought into, the author wants everyone to see the true Jesus, of whom he said,

Hostile is not too strong a word to describe His attitude toward the religious system [the Pharisees] represented, and that was evident in all His dealings with them. (pg. xxxvi)

As near as I can figure so far, the audience for the book is the conservative evangelical community that may succumb to the allure of the Emergent Church, or, at least, the segment of Christianity that may tend toward ecumenism, or having dialogs with various faith groups versus the antagonism and debate. In essence, John MacArthur is trying to counter the idea that Jesus was a sissy, which is apparently the way emergent minded Christians portray him. He will argue that Jesus was not always the nice guy, and we Christians need to recognize when we need to be confrontational, and stop always being the nice guy unwilling to stand up for truth.

Should be an interesting read. However, I quite quickly picked up some remarkable issues. For starters, is MacArthur unaware of the group of radicals alive and strong today who understand Jesus to be a confrontational, political figure who quite openly and selflessly attacked the powers that be? Is he aware that a growing number of Christians have already realized that with Jesus giving us our example we are to confront injustice boldly and with truth, which can result in us being persecuted, arrested, attacked and even killed?

But, I recognize his reader base is probably not grounded in those circles. That’s okay. Let’s see where the book goes on it’s own merits.