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If you’ll please turn with me in your Bibles to John chapter 6, beginning at verse 32.
And Jesus then said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.’ They said to him, ‘Sir, give us this bread always.’
And Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me.
And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me but raise it up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.’
So the Jews grumbled about him because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ They said, ‘Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?’
Jesus answered them, ‘Do not grumble among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day.’
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Lord God, Father, we pray that You open our hearts to see and to hear and to receive You and therefore believe. Help us to trust You with the eyes of our hearts, to know that You are God and to accept Your will and the salvation You have brought for us. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So back to the start of this conversation. Jesus accused the people who were chasing him around Galilee of only seeking him because he gave them their fill of the loaves, because he had given them a free meal instead of seeking him because of who these signs declare him to be—the Lord God. His charge against them led us to ask ourselves: Why do we seek Jesus? Do we seek him because of what we believe he can give us, or do we seek him because of who he is, so that we may glorify and honor him?
As Jesus continues to teach, he will explain the core reason why those who truly seek Him do so, but it will not be because of our personal motivations. First, Jesus reminded them that it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven, reminding them that Moses neither convinced nor commanded the Lord to give Israel their daily bread. Moses had no divine authority or power within himself, doing only what the Lord commanded him and enabled him to do.
Although Moses possessed no authority within himself, he proclaimed the Lord’s divine decrees as his mediator and messenger, relaying and conveying God’s authoritative word to Israel. But Moses did not perform the miracle or provide the manna himself; it was the Lord God who fed Israel with the manna every single day as from His omnipotent hand.
Next, Jesus explained that the true bread from heaven is something more than just bread. It is something much more and far greater than what you get when you mix flour and oil and water and salt together, for the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. But based on the Jews’ response, I cannot help but think that they intentionally misunderstood everything that Jesus was saying, because they next said, ‘Sir, give us this bread always.’
A conservative and Orthodox first-century Jewish interpretation about he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world could only have been the Lord, because only God can give life to the world. Yet asking Jesus to give us this bread always demonstrates that they were not thinking theologically or spiritually but carnally and worldly. What they wanted—what they really, really wanted—was the same thing that the Samaritan woman had believed: she wanted a never-ending eternal supply for their daily provision.
See, the Jews were only thinking carnally, thinking with their flesh, both in physical being and in their sinful, selfish nature. That attitude is what caused them to grumble against and then later abandon Jesus, because their hearts had not yet been transformed from dead stone to living flesh.
But then Jesus said something explosive and shocking; something which they would be correct to understand as blasphemy unless it were true. Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.’ He said, ‘AO me, I am the Lord!’
Finally, after having performed five miraculous signs demonstrating that he is the Lord God, Jesus makes his first clear ‘I am’ statement, making an outright clear and undeniable claim to be Yahweh, the Lord. Although he had declared himself to be God’s Son previously, a statement that the Jewish leaders interpreted as him claiming equality with God, this declaration did not claim a Father-Son relationship with the Lord.
Because by the use of the divine name implied within ‘AO me,’ Jesus plainly asserted himself as the Lord. Not only did he claim the name of God for himself, but by saying, ‘I am the bread of life,’ he plainly claimed to be the Creator and sustainer. By saying, ‘whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst,’ he claimed to be their great provider.
By saying that the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and claiming to be that bread, he again claimed to be Daniel’s son of man, possessing power and dominion over all peoples and nations, claiming to be the sovereign over all creation. If untrue, these were outrageous and blasphemous claims. These claims would have been enough to warrant and justify Jesus being stoned by those who heard him, unless they believed him or were believing the evidence of the signs.
However, their ultimate response at the conclusion of this teaching will prove their willful self-deluding denial of the truth and their implicit recognition and affirmation of it. Then Jesus further accused them, ‘But I say to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe,’ accusing them of disbelieving the observable evidence that testified to the truth about Christ. They had either witnessed or knew about several signs, but although many of those who were present had eaten and enjoyed the miraculous abundance of loaves and fish just the day before, they still did not believe.
I mean, if seeing is believing, then we should expect that even more so, eating is believing. They had no reasonable excuse to not believe the truth about Jesus except simply because they didn’t want to. They were exercising their sin-corrupted free will to disbelieve the truth and deny the deity of Jesus Christ, choosing to disbelieve.
Provided that they persisted in their obstinate disbelief proves a person’s reprobation, because they are like those whom John elsewhere says, ‘they went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out that it might become plain that all are not of us.’ Or those of whom the author of Hebrews warns: ‘For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.’
How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the one who trampled underfoot the Son of God and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified and has outraged the Spirit of grace? You see, these are those who have seen, experienced, and know the truth and yet stubbornly refuse to believe it.
But also remember this choice is the only decision a person enslaved to sin is able to make. They are bound by their sin and are therefore restrained against making the choice for Jesus, being blinded to the light of Truth in Christ.
By considering these people who sought Jesus only because they ate their fill of the loaves and who saw him and yet did not believe, we are led to ask ourselves: why do we seek Jesus? If they did not believe because that was their only possible choice, then what hope do we have of being any different from them?
Why do I and why do we believe Jesus when they did not? Asking ourselves that question makes what Jesus says next the best news that we could hear. He declares his promise: ‘All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.’
Jesus first promised that everyone who comes to him has already been given to him by our Father in heaven. And since they’re already given to him as a possession to be treasured—being treasured by the Father—Jesus promises that no one who comes to him will be rejected or cast aside. We are his; therefore, he loves us because the Father whom he loves also loves us and has given us to Christ for the Father’s divine purpose.
Then he declares his purpose: ‘For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me.’ Jesus secondly confidently declares the purpose of descending from heaven: the definite purpose of God, the Son, the Logos who is Theos and Andross’s Incarnation.
He descended and has come as the Lord’s authoritative representative, his perfect image. He has come to do the will of him who sent him. God the Son did not come to satisfy his own will and good pleasure as a man, but to do what the Lord has commanded—to obey all that God the Father wills God the Son to do.
And he declares his power: ‘And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me but raise it up on the last day.’ For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.
Thirdly, Jesus plainly explains what the will of God the Father is, that the Son will lose nothing and no one from all those whom the Father gives to him. Everyone whom the Father has transferred his ownership to the Son—all whom the Lord has predestined unto salvation—all those whom the Father has given the Son shall, therefore, look on the Son and believe in him so that they shall have eternal life.
See, Jesus is primarily speaking here about our spiritual resurrection, our spiritual rebirth of being born from above (anathan), saying that once believing in the Son and possessing eternal life, God the Son, Jesus, will raise them up on the last day—raising them up to the resurrection of life and therefore delivering them from the resurrection of judgment, because through their faith in him they have been passed from death to life.
But he’s also speaking about our physical bodily resurrection and the promise of our living in the restored and renewed creation. Although these resurrections are treated separately, they are both necessary and connected.
So this Evangel, this good news that Jesus plainly declares here, is the doctrine of predestination and a scriptural reputation of the false assumption that sinful man has an inherent capacity to choose God by an exercise of our free will. Jesus describes here the Lord’s sovereign and monistic disposition of his positions, where some are chosen to be redeemed and preserved by God the Son, while the rest, according to logic and reason, are not chosen.
This is what we call double predestination, referencing the two destinations that come from the Lord’s binary choice. Because some are predestined to eternal life with the Son, the rest are therefore predestined to eternal condemnation and damnation.
This declaration by Jesus about our election, though, is good news for us because it affirms that the Lord will override our incapacity and inability to choose him because of our bondage to sin and will give us the ability and desire to come to Christ through our regeneration.
Instead, when we are born again. So to rightly answer the question of why we seek Jesus now, since God has given us to Jesus: first, we are drawn to him, and therefore we come to him freely. Now we choose to come to him because our blinders of sin have been removed by the Holy Spirit, opening the eyes of our heart to the light of his truth and giving us a desire for him greater than all the temptations of the world.
Now we seek Jesus because the Lord wills us to do so, so that we may enjoy eternal life with Christ in the Kingdom to come. See, this is really good news for us, and every Christian should be glad of it. Rather than wrongly seeing it as some kind of infringement upon our personal rights or our free will, as some people do, we should see this as a glorious opportunity and the best alternative to any choice that we could otherwise make.
Instead of taking offense at it, we may know that our salvation is secure because the ultimate decision is resting in the hand of God, who is faithful and who will not change his sovereign and omnipotent mind because he has already declared that you are his.
But unfortunately hearing all this caused the Jews to grumble about him because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ So they said, ‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?’
There’s two things to note about their grumbling. The word that John uses here is ‘Gango,’ the same word used in the Greek Old Testament to describe the Israelites grumbling and murmuring against Moses and the Lord, marking a change in attitude towards discontent and dissatisfaction. They grumbled because Jesus claimed a heavenly origin, claiming that he came down from heaven, prompting them to argue, reminding Jesus they knew where he really comes from because they know his parents.
But from their perspective, Jesus could not have descended from heaven, because they knew who birthed him. What they could not know, as Paul Harvey used to say, was “the rest of the story”—everything concerning Jesus’s birth and the spiritual work involved in the Son’s Incarnation. They took offense at the apparently impossible, unreasonable, and insane claim that Jesus had personally descended from heaven.
But not his claim of divinity or his assertions concerning God predestining some for salvation and the rest for condemnation. Those Jews were more upset over a less important interpretation that they could not really comprehend: Jesus’s origin. They were more concerned over that than they were over his alleged blasphemy or his assertion about God’s sovereignty.
Then why do some believe in Christians take such offense at the doctrine of predestination today? Why do some Christians fight with one another over whether God chose us or we chose God? Does the distinction really matter? Is it really that important?
Yes, it does, and yes, it is, because even the first-century Jews knew, remembered, and understood the necessity for God’s sovereignty in both election and salvation. Because if God had not first chosen and called Abraham from Ur of the Chaldeans and out from Haran, then he would not have had the opportunity to believe the Lord and be accounted righteous.
If God had not first chosen and delivered the Israelites from their bondage in Egypt, then they never would have come into the promised land. So they understood that Israel is God’s chosen people and that because of his special favor given at his gracious initiation, the Lord will always preserve and save Israel by his sovereign grace.
So, if that is what Christians believe Jesus does and will do for the church, the fullness of Israel, then reasonably how can any Christian say now that God saves me because I have decided to follow Jesus? Since God doesn’t change his mind; he does not waft and waver; he is steadfast and sure; he is immovable and unchangeable. Therefore, he will not change either the order or means of his salvation.
That is why the doctrine of predestination can give us an assurance of his grace, the forgiveness of our sins, and our justification by the righteousness of Christ. Predestination is how we know that we have been saved; otherwise, our faith in Jesus Christ would be in vain because God might suddenly revoke our salvation like Lucy pulling a football away from Charlie Brown.
But if the only sovereign God has declared that you are his and that he has forgiven you of your sins, then you cannot deny it, and you cannot thwart it because you are not God, and you are not greater than he. That is why this doctrine matters: because people are notoriously fickle; we are pliable, changing our mind at the slightest wind. We are inconstant and undependable; we are not steadfast or steady. The most reliable thing about humanity is the fact that we are so unreliable.
We could never choose Christ and commit ourselves wholeheartedly and unreservedly to him as our Lord and Master by our own power, because our sinful nature would rebel at the first opportunity.
But Jesus responded to their grumbling by saying, ‘No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.’ We are only able to positively, earnestly, truly, and completely respond to Jesus and the free grace he offers on account of the Holy Spirit’s effectual call. Nobody can come to Jesus except that God moves them to—except that first, God draws them, drags them, and brings them to Christ.
The salvation of individuals—any and every individual—literally requires an act of God. Now those of us who tend to feel most strongly about the question of whether God chose us or whether we choose God do so because we view the opposite position as an attack upon either the sovereignty of God or the alleged sovereignty of man’s free will.
Calvinists see it as an attack on God’s sovereignty, because requiring or allowing a person to choose Jesus before God can or may save them makes God’s work of salvation contingent upon man’s will, thereby elevating man’s will and preference over God’s.
Arminians see it as an attack on man’s freedom of will, because they presume that the Lord is such a respecter of our freedom to choose that he will not force any single person to do anything. But I wonder what Jonah might have to say about that. They believe God loves the world so much that he would not choose to condemn anyone to hell, regardless of how much they deserve it.
They disagree with the Calvinist view because this lack of autonomy and personal choice is offensive to our sinful nature. The idea of losing our self-governing authority terrifies us. Scripture, by asserting that we are not in absolute control over either our lives or our eternal destination, offends us, and it can make us mad.
However, many Arminians will try to explain the debate away, hoping to have their cake and eat it too by offering a halfway measure or compromise. They suggest that since God must first give sinful man grace, he gives everyone what they call prevenient grace.
But that grace is not saving grace; instead, it’s a special kind of grace that enables a person to choose Christ or not—grace enough to be allowed to use their will and choose Jesus if they want. But under this flawed view, although God does move first by giving this grace to everyone, he still leaves the final decision to us.
But if, as Jesus said, ‘No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him,’ then no one can come to Christ except that the Lord first draws them. Also, no one can successfully resist the omnipotent Lord drawing them, because man is not more powerful than God.
If God has chosen to save someone by giving them to Christ, then no man, and certainly not Satan, can prevent God, no matter what they will. Beyond this being a concern over sovereignty, this is also a concern about God’s glory—who gets the glory for our salvation?
Scripture teaches us that all the glory rightly belongs to God. But when confronted with the choice offered by these two sides of this debate—saying either, ‘I have accepted Jesus; therefore I am saved by him,’ or ‘Jesus accepted me; therefore he has saved me’—the difference between those statements becomes who gets the glory.
The first suggests that I am the active doer in salvation by accepting Christ, making Jesus our servant; whereas the second declares that Jesus is the sole active doer in salvation while I am merely the beneficiary. The first wrongly tries to steal God’s glory, while the second rightly gives God all the glory and the second rightly holds a higher view of God, while the first wrongly and idolatrously holds a higher view of man.
So the doctrine of predestination that Jesus so plainly teaches should be encouraging to us and fill us with newfound confidence and assurance of our salvation because we know that before regeneration, we all loved our sin so much that we were never going to give it up—that we were never going to let it go.
If we examine ourselves and are honest about who we really are and who we really were during our reprobation, then we must admit that we loved our sin more than life itself. If you pause to think, as I do, about all the stupid things that you have done in your life—some of which likely had a high probability of resulting in your death or disability—then you have to agree with me.
Just consider how many bad decisions you have made in your life and realize that apart from the power of Christ and the Providence of God, you have never made a good decision. You are incapable of doing so on your own, because your remaining fleshy sinful nature always makes bad and self-destructive choices, because sin is at war with godliness, and if you understand that, then would you really want to trust yourself with making the ultimate decision concerning your eternal and final disposition?
Knowing and understanding the grave danger our immortal souls were in of suffering eternally in the fires of hell, we should be filled with such a depth of relief at the Lord’s mercy, knowing that the king of the universe loves you so much that he saved you from yourself, and you are unable to save yourself.
See, the doctrine of predestination gives the Christian such assurance because we know what God has saved us from and what God has done for us. We know what doing so cost God: the death of Jesus Christ on a Roman cross as the atoning sacrifice for all of our sins. This doctrine demonstrates the depth of God’s mercy by choosing to save some when he is obligated to save none.
But what does this doctrine also say about those whom the Lord does not mercifully predestine unto the resurrection of life? What does it say about God? It does not suggest that the Lord loves them any less; only that he loves them differently. Because to the one, to the elect, he gives the fullness of his grace and mercy by our adoption and redemption, and a measure of his justice and discipline in this life.
While to the other, the reprobate, he gives a measure of grace and mercy in this life and the fullness of justice in his judgment and wrath. The Lord is merciful, and the Lord is just. But also, God is agape. So although some people, the elect, will receive his mercy, while all the rest, the reprobate, receive his justice—both are sovereignly given out of the fullness of his love.
So knowing and believing this, filled with assurance and the confidence of our faith, prompts our gratitude with thanksgiving and our obedience with gladness.
Therefore, finally, knowing that the elect Christian will seek Jesus because our Father is drawing them to him, we may know that we are numbered among the elect and enjoy the assurance of our predestination by how we seek Jesus. If you seek him for his sake and his glory, then you may know that you are elect.
If you seek him with thanksgiving and praise for what he has done for you, then you may know that you are elect. If you seek him by following and obeying his commandments with gladness, then know that you are elect.
So again, why are you seeking Jesus? Is it because you’ve seen his signs and are being drawn by the Father to him, or would you simply prefer to continue only receiving his blessings in this life? Amen.