Book Review

The Jesus You Can't Ignore by John MacArthur

The goal of this book was to dispel the myth that some Christians have about Jesus. Many people seem to think Jesus was a nice guy. While they are right in saying He is a nice guy, that doesn't mean He didn't say things that might offend people. He spoke the truth out of love.

MacArthur reviews several key confrontations that Jesus had with religious leaders of His day. From these confrontations we see that Jesus was not the happy-go-lucky many people envision Him as.

Overall, I was not too interested in this book.

When I first got the book I thought MacArthur would have some valuable insight into these confrontations. Most of what MacArthur wrote can be easily understood from Scripture itself.

Although, I guess if people did understand the Scripture there would have been no need for MacArthur to write this book. That is his intended audience for this book, not me.

This book also seems as thought the editor, Phil Johnson, spent many days and nights flipping through a thesaurus. I had to look up several words in almost every chapter.

Here are some examples from one chapter of words that I wasn't sure of the meaning:
pedantic
polemic
satiety
jeremiad
casuistry
sophistry
tawdry
diatribe

So my question is, if people can't understand the confrontations of Christ from Scripture, how are they going to understand if from this book when the author uses words that the average person probably doesn't know?!

If you think Jesus was a nice guy and never said or did things to offend others then read this book. Otherwise you can probably skip this one.




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