Today’s article comes from John MacArthur as he recounts an experience he had early in his ministry which made a lasting impact on him.

In those days, every seminary student had to preach in chapel. When my turn came, I was assigned to preach on 2 Samuel 7, the great text on the Davidic Covenant. My sermon was probably a fine example of structural craftsmanship. It had a zinger for a beginning and a zapper at the end. It would have been a great success, too—if it hadn’t been for my lack of biblical content in the middle section. I preached a “practical” message that was only superficially related to the biblical text. In that passage, Nathan encourages David to build a house for the Lord. And God says, “Wait a minute, you didn’t check in. That’s not the plan.” So I preached about how important it is to not to presume on God.

When I finished, I felt pretty good. The chapel audience seemed to have followed with interest, and I even thought I heard some murmurs of approval. But I really only cared about the opinion of one man—my mentor, Dr. Feinberg. The faculty sat behind us when we preached in chapel, and they had legal-sized criticism sheets, which they filled out during the student’s sermon. After we were done preaching, we would stand at the door, and the faculty would hand us their sheets as they left the room. I just wanted Dr. Feinberg’s.

He was at the end of the line, and I could see that he had folded his sheet up very small and very tightly. When he handed it to me, he did not even look up at me. He kept his eyes straight down and walked firmly past. That was not a good sign. So at my first opportunity, I unrolled his paper. I was eager to read his feedback, hoping desperately that he would be impressed with my sermon.

To be sure, I expected some constructive criticism. But the few bold red words that stared back at me were much worse than anything I had prepared myself for. He had completely ignored all the suggested categories and scoring helps that were printed on the sheet. Instead, he wrote across the page in bold red letters a one-line critique that hit me like a hard punch to the solar plexus: “ You missed the whole point of the passage .”

That is the worst possible mistake any preacher could make—but especially in front of someone like Dr. Feinberg.

Like many young preachers, I had naively concerned myself with just about everything except getting the meaning of the text right. My preparation was focused on delivery, gestures, anecdotes, the right mix of humor and illustrative material, and the alliteration of my main points. I had actually approached the biblical passage itself almost as an afterthought.

Later that day, I received a message instructing me to go to Dr. Feinberg’s office. When I got there, he was sitting at his desk, shaking his head in disappointment. “How could you? How could you? That 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. That would have been a fine admonition to preach from Numbers 15:30-31 or Psalm 19:31, but you can’t reduce 2 Samuel 7 to that ! You missed the entire point of the passage, and it’s one of the greatest of all Old Testament passages. Don’t ever do that again.”

He never said another word about it to me, but that incident hit me like a sledgehammer. In fact, it was the deepest single impression I ever received in seminary. Never miss the point of the passage. To this day, when I come to the text each week and begin to study its richness and depth, 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 all. If you miss the true sense of what God has said, you are not actually preaching God’s Word! That reality has compelled me for nearly 40 years of preaching.

How would He react to the post-evangelical goulash of opinions represented in Christian magazines, in the Emerging blogosphere, or in the trendy evangelical megachurches that have held the evangelical movement in thrall for the past few decades? Would He affirm the current mainstream of evangelical apathy toward truth and authentic biblical unity? Would He approve of those who, confronted with a plethora of contradictions and doctrinal novelties, simply celebrate their movement’s “diversity” while trying to avoid all controversy, embracing every theological renegade, and elevating orthopraxy over orthodoxy? Was Jesus’ meek-and-gentle mildness of that sort?

I’m convinced we can answer those questions with confidence if we first ask a slightly different question: What did Jesus do? How did He deal with the false teachers, religious hypocrites, and theological miscreants of His time? Did He favor the approach of friendly dialogue and collegial disagreement, or did He in fact adopt a militant stance against every form of false religion?

Anyone even superficially familiar with the gospel accounts ought to know the answer to that question, because there is no shortage of data on the matter. Jesus’ interaction with the Scribes, Pharisees, and hypocrites of His culture was full of conflict from the start of His earthly ministry to the end. Sometimes the Pharisees provoked the conflict; more often than not, Jesus did. Hostile is not too strong a word to describe His attitude toward the religious system they represented, and that was evident in all His dealings with them.

Jesus never suffered professional hypocrites or false teachers gladly. He never shied away from conflict. He never softened His message to please genteel tastes or priggish scruples. He never suppressed any truth in order to accommodate someone’s artificial notion of dignity. He never bowed to the intimidation of scholars or paid homage to their institutions.

And He never, never, never treated the vital distinction between truth and error as a merely academic question.

Excerpted from John MacArthur’s The Jesus You Can’t Ignore.

Bonds

Doulos (δοῦλος) is not an ambiguous term. It suggests a very specific concept, which — while repugnant to our culture and our natural minds — should not be toned down or backed away from. It is the main Greek word that was used to describe the lowest abject bond slave — a person who was literally owned by a master who could legally force him to work without wages. In other words, a doulos (δοῦλος) was a person without standing or rights. According to Kittel’s definitive dictionary of New Testament expressions, words in the doulos (δοῦλος) group

serve either to describe the status of a slave or an attitude corresponding to that of a slave. . . . The meaning is so unequivocal and self-contained that it is superfluous to give examples of the individual terms or to trace the history of the group. Distinction from synonymous words and groups . . . is made possible by the fact that the emphasis here is always on “serving as a slave.” Hence we have a service which is not a matter of choice for the one who renders it, which he has to perform whether he likes or not, because he is subject as a slave to an alien will, to the will of his owner. [The term stresses] the slave’s dependence on his lord.

Unfortunately, readers of the English Bible have long been shielded from the full force of the word doulos (δοῦλος) because of an ages-old tendency among Bible translators to tone down the literal sense of the word — translating it as “servant,” or “bond servant” rather than “slave.” The practice goes back hundreds of years, even before the King James Version. The Geneva Bible, the main Bible of the Puritan era, consistently translated doulos (δοῦλος) as “servant” (though in the distinctive spelling of the time, it appears as “seruant”). Murray Harris surveyed twenty major translations of the New Testament in English and found only one, E. J. Goodspeed’s The New Testament: An American Translation (1923) — where doulos (δοῦλος) was consistently rendered “slave.”  No doubt that reflects our society’s longstanding discomfort with the practice of slavery and the severe abuses that have always occurred in institutionalized versions of human slavery.

Still, service and slavery are not really the same thing, and it is extremely unfortunate that the full impact of the expression doulos (δοῦλος) has been obscured in our English translations for so long.

There are at least six Greek words for “servant,” and doulos (δοῦλος) is not one of them. For example, diakonos (διάκονος) (from which our word deacon is derived) means “servant.” Oiketes (οἰκέτης) speaks of a domestic servant. Pais (παῖς) denotes a young boy who runs errands. Huperetes (ὑπηρέτης) (usually translated “minister”) literally signifies a low-level servant who pulls an oar on the lower deck of a large ship. Leitourgos (λειτουργὸς), also meaning “minister,” designates someone who performs some kind of religious ser vice. Therapon (θεράπων), used of Moses in Hebrews 3:5 (“faithful in all His house as a servant”), refers to a dignified kind of high-level ser vice. And there are several more specific Greek words that describe service in terms far loftier and more respectable than doulos (δοῦλος).

Doulos (δοῦλος) speaks of slavery, pure and simple. It is not at all a hazy or uncertain term. It describes someone lacking personal freedom and personal rights whose very existence is defined by his service to another. It is the sort of slavery in which “human autonomy is set aside and an alien will takes precedence of one’s own.”5 This is total, unqualified submission to the control and the directives of a higher authority — slavery, not merely service at one’s own discretion.

For example, in Matthew 6:24, Jesus said, “No one can be a slave to two masters” (literal translation). That translation is much stronger (and actually makes better sense) than what you will find in most versions: “No one can serve two masters.” An employee with two jobs could indeed serve two masters. But slavery — not merely service — is what the word doulos (δοῦλος) and all its derivatives speak of.

There is an important difference. A servant gives service to someone, but a slave belongs to someone.  It is not merely a nuance. Scripture repeatedly and emphatically places Christians in the latter category: “Do you not know that . . . you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price” (1 Cor. 6:19 – 20). We have a Master who purchased us (2 Peter 2:1). To be specific, we were purchased for God with the precious blood of Christ (Rev. 5:9). This is the very essence of what it means to be a Christian: “For not one of us lives for himself, and not one dies for himself; for if we live, we live for the Lord, or if we die, we die for the Lord; therefore whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living” (Rom. 14:7 – 9).

Excerpted from The Gospel According to Jesus by John MacArthur