One of the phenomena I’ve encountered in the portion of the blogosphere I regularly visit is an absolute mania for all things John MacArthur. In my post about Jack Hayford, I noticed that I, too, uttered the name that crops up everywhere I turn.

Now John MacArthur seems to be a nice man who honestly loves the Lord, a solid preacher, and a prolific author with some good books, but I have to wonder, What is the obsession with him that I see on blog after blog after blog? Is it just that so much of the message we are getting today from other sources is so ridiculously poor that MacArthur’s receives adulation for merely being good?

Here’s my dirty, little secret: I’ve heard him speak on his “Grace to You” radio program and read a few of his books, yet I’m left curiously unmoved. Never once has his radio program or his writing driven me to my knees or made me want to lift my hands in spontaneous worship. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never been happy with his cessationist views or the fact that he took on the fringes of the charismania out there and painted it as the rational middle, gutting the whole of it in the process. Nor do I support his dispensationalist eschat0logy. Still, there are preachers I disagree with far more whom I resonate with more than I do MacArthur.

So I don’t get it. I’m glad we have him out there, but he barely registers in my library or in my listening. As for me, I’ll stick with Tozer, Ravenhill, Lloyd-Jones and their like. In fact, just the other day I saw a Ravenhill video that has still got me all scrambled up inside trying to work through the depth of it. I’m not sure the entire collected works of MacArthur could do the same for me.

Readers, please tell me why so many can’t stop talking about MacArthur because I feel like I must be failing to understand something that everyone else knows intrinsically.