Mathew 13, John Macarthur and the "mystery"

[Eoghan]

I was looking for a sermon on the reason parables were used as opposed to plain speech. What I got was two sermons from MacArthur putting chapter 13 in context.

What surprised me was that John took the view that "the mystery" is the gap between the first and second comings of Christ. The "gap" in which the kingdom has come but not in it's fullness is where we are living now.

Now it might be just me but I assumed that the mystery was firstly the Cross and only then, secondly, the interval in which the Gentiles are ingathered. Am I wrong? MacArthur seemed very certain this interval/gap was the primary meaning.

 

[hammondjones]

It is significant that Paul never uses the expression, “the mystery of the Church.” He does not tell us that the Church is a mystery. What he is concerned to tell us is that something about the Church is a mystery. This he states with great plainness and every emphatically. The mystery is, that the Gentiles are to enjoy, actually do enjoy, a status of complete equality with the Jews in the Christian Church.
Oswald Allis, Prophesy and the Church, pg. 92

 

[Peairtach]

MacArthur's apparently of a Dispensationalist background, although he's moved on, a bit.

 

[Eoghan]

His eschatology does seem a big part of this

 

[Jake]

MacArthur's apparently of a Dispensationalist background, although he's moved on, a bit.

If he had this would great news. I hadn't heard of anything since the "Why every self-respecting Calvinist is a [dispensational] Premillennialist" a couple of years ago.

 

[Bill The Baptist]

Macarthur refers to himself as a "leaky" dispensationalist, so this might be one of the leaks.