As much as I respected John MacArthur, his ministry Grace To You was not just a misnomer, a Galatianism, or a syncretism, it was a complete theological irony since he did not understand biblical grace accurately and instead tried mixing parts of the Old Covenant in with the New Covenant, like trying to mix oil with water. Jesus explicitly warned against this using the analogy of New Wine and Old Wineskins (Luke 5:37–39). He said if you put the new wine (the New Covenant of grace) into old wineskins (the Old Covenant of law), the skins will burst, and the wine will be ruined. By trying to fit the radical freedom of the New Covenant into the rigid, performance-based frame of the Old Covenant, the pure message of grace is lost.
MacArthur would have benefited from paying attention to Martyn Lloyd-Jones or Charles Swindoll in their treatment of grace. MacArthur was worried about believers turning grace into a license for sin, and ended up watering down grace (true "cheap grace"). Here is just one thing MacArthur failed to understand about grace: if people are not misunderstanding you, misinterpreting you, and misrepresenting you, then you are not preaching biblical grace correctly. Read Romans 3. The religious individuals of Paul's day were worried about the same thing and accused him of teaching that we should just go wild with sin. After stating that "where sin abounded, grace hyper-superabounded all the more" (Rom. 5:20), Paul anticipated their pushback: "Should we continue in sin so that grace may abound? God forbid! May it never be! Should we continue in sin because we are not under Law but under grace? God forbid! May it never be!" (Rom. 6:1-2, 14-16). Do we have any evidence in the New Testament of those who misunderstood him, misinterpreted him, and misrepresented him? Of course we do: the Corinthians!
For 2,000 years, the religious legalists have been pressing that same argument as if Paul did not already deal with it. You do not need the Ten Commandments. Why? They already did their job. They directed you to Christ Jesus. Now you have the indwelling Holy Spirit to guide you. "Love is the fulfillment of the Law" (Rom. 13:8-10; Gal. 5:14). If you love the brethren, your neighbour, and your enemy, you are not going to lie to him, steal from him, sleep with his wife, or murder him. What did Paul tell Titus? It is "GRACE that teaches us to say "No" to ungodliness!" (Titus 2:11-12). The religious are going about it all backwards, like trying to swim upstream against the current.
The irony is that MacArthur's ministry Grace To You did not actually provide any biblical grace to anyone who heard his messages. It enslaved them in bondage to legalism and religion. From a practical, believer's perspective, New Covenant teachers would call it a spiritual bait-and-switch. The title Grace to You acts as the "bait"—drawing in weary, heavy-laden people with the promise of rest, forgiveness, and unconditional love. But once inside the system, the "switch" occurs: the believer is handed a heavy backpack of rules, continuous self-examination, and the terrifying fine print that if they do not perform well enough, they might not actually be saved.
The way his church constantly and consistently treated others is evidence enough that he was not extending grace to them in the least. He and the ruling elders of his church behaved more like Pharisees than Christ Jesus. Rather than discover what the Bible actually had to say, they taught their own opinions, preconceptions, and preferences as if they were the Gospel? When caught in wrong doing, they refused to make it right, instead doubling down in their error. That is not grace, by any stretch of the imagination or theological or linguistic gymnastics.