The Historical Metzger
Related MediaAs is my annual custom, I attended the annual Society of Biblical Literature conference in 2007. It was held in San Diego. One of the sessions was dedicated to the memory of Bruce Metzger (who died in February, 2007, just four days after his 93rd birthday), a man who taught New Testament at Princeton Seminary for nearly five decades. There were four presenters, the first of whom was Bart Ehrman, Professor Metzger’s last doctoral student.
Ehrman relayed the famous ‘squirrel story’ that anyone acquainted with Metzger lore knew about: One day, while walking with an unnamed student across the campus at Princeton Seminary, Metzger and student stopped to see a squirrel racing up a tree. The squirrel jumped from the tree to another that was out of its reach. Suddenly, the squirrel fell to the ground and died. Metzger turned to the student and said, “I know what the Greek word for squirrel is.”
Ehrman went on to note that the story had some features to it that simply didn’t ring true: Metzger was a compassionate man who would hardly have made such an insensitive comment at the demise of the furry little creature; Metzger was a humble man, not given to bragging about himself to the effect of using the occasion to parade his knowledge; and squirrels, as a rule, do not die if they miss their target: they simply get up and keep on scampering.
After several years of hearing many variations on this story (I have heard at least two quite different variations myself), Ehrman finally found the occasion to get to the truth of this seemingly apocryphal tale. He began to tell Metzger the story and when he came to the part about the squirrel’s unfortunate end, Metzger interrupted: ‘poor little squirrel.’ This was proof that the story was a myth since Metzger’s attitude was obviously at odds with what he was supposed to have said years earlier.
From this, Ehrman offered an analogy to the SBL crowd: getting to the truth of the historical Jesus is a tricky task, and legends about him would often spring up without any genuine historical base. In other words, Ehrman saw in the apocryphal story about Metzger a parallel with the stories about Jesus that are recorded in the Gospels.
There are some difficulties with Ehrman’s analogy, however. First, the squirrel story only involved one unnamed eyewitness at an undefined period. In fact, several different names were given for the student (including Ehrman’s!) in different versions of the tale. The period in which it supposedly occurred spanned decades. This is unlike the Gospels in that most of the stories involve more than one eyewitness and are stated as occurring at relatively specific times.
Second, the story has had many versions that often widely diverged from each other. (For example, one version that I heard but which was not mentioned in Ehrman’s telling of the tale: Metzger was walking across the campus of Princeton Seminary when he saw a squirrel acting quite erratically. It ran up one tree, then down again. Up another tree, then down again. It repeated the same acts a couple of times. Metzger stopped to observe its behavior. A crowd of students gathered around him to see what was so interesting. The squirrel continued its behavior then suddenly stood up, looked around, and keeled over. The students were waiting for some profound comment to come from the lips of the revered professor. He looked puzzled for a moment, then said, “Does anyone know the Greek word for squirrel?” I like that version of the story!) But here’s the problem: the many varieties immediately create suspicion about its historicity. What is most analogous is not the Gospels en toto, but the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11). That passage has more variations than any other pericope in the Gospels. It is not without reason that most New Testament scholars reject the authenticity of the story. And a large part of the reason is that the story has multiple versions, and is located in several places in the Gospels.
Third, the oral tradition about Metzger and the squirrel spread without controls, spanning the globe and cutting across decades. But it was oral tradition created in a time when the printed page had come to replace memory. We are not like the ancients whose memory was far more acute; unlike the ancient world, ours is a written culture, not an oral one.
Fourth, Ehrman is a devotee of Metzger. Almost anyone touched by Metzger’s life was. But Ehrman was especially so. He called Metzger his Doktorvater. He described Metzger as the greatest living textual critic in his book Misquoting Jesus. And he dedicated the book to him. Yet, in spite of his obvious fondness for Professor Metzger—or, more accurately, because of it—Ehrman was unwilling to perpetuate the myth. Instead, he did historical research and determined that the story was a myth. He set things right in a public setting (SBL) and spoke the truth about its roots. Now if Ehrman was a Metzger devotee and a good historian, it should not surprise us that he wanted any memory of Metzger to be accurate. The man was a giant among scholars who needed no embellishment; the truth about him was already astounding.
Putting all this together, the analogies with the historical Jesus that Ehrman suggested are inadequate. Most stories about Jesus involved multiple witnesses; most stories about Jesus were pinpointed in time (or at least narrowed considerably rather than fitting more than one decade); most stories about Jesus did not take on such a wide variety of forms; and oral tradition in Jesus’ day was substantially more stable than it is today. There is one analogy that fits, however: Ehrman was a devotee of Metzger and yet investigated the truth of the story; so also, the evangelists were devotees of Jesus. Should we not expect them also to have investigated the truth about Jesus stories?
It is always refreshing to put to bed myths about a great hero because such bubble-bursting displays honest research and scholarship. And now that Ehrman has set the record straight in a public setting, there is born memory in community (just as there was, from the beginning, about Jesus). Those of us who were at the meeting will tell the squirrel story as a fable and not confuse it with historical fact. Perhaps the evangelists could tell the difference, too.
Related Topics: Textual Criticism
NET, NIV, ESV: A Brief Historical Comparison
Related MediaRecently I received an email from a pastor about which translation is the best in terms of ‘scholarly lineage.’ His church has been using the NIV for years, but they are thinking of switching to the ESV. He wrote:
What I need to know is which version, the NIV or the ESV, has the best scholarly lineage of historical texts. This is really important for me, because I want to work with a translation that is true to our best known, most reliable manuscripts. Which of these two translations comes from the most reliable, historical texts available, and is truest, accordingly?
I filled in a little background on the two translations and also spoke a bit about the NET Bible. Below is my response.
Michael, you’re asking a tough question. In terms of solid scholarship, the ESV has behind it a long history: the KJV (1611), RV (1885), ASV (1901), and RSV (1952). Each of these was consciously in the tradition of Tyndale (1526, 1534) and was a revision of it to some degree. Beginning with the RV, the textual basis was updated from the Textus Receptus (the Greek text that stands behind the KJV) to essentially the Westcott-Hort text. The ASV was the American counterpart to the RV. In 1952, the RSV set the gold standard for translations for the 20th century. It still commands great respect. In 1989 it was updated to the NRSV. The scholarship was still solid, but it seemed to many that the translation now was bowing to egalitarian concerns by going too far in its gender inclusiveness. The ESV was an evangelical response to that. The elegance of the translation is excellent, and the translation is very good. I am happy to endorse the ESV, with the understanding that the scholarship, largely because it was restricted to evangelicals and was, within this realm, not as broadly based as some would like to see, took a downturn from previous iterations. (The translation committee, for example, used some irritating evangelical ‘trump cards’ in places where the text really does not say what they want it to say. No cardinal doctrine is involved in these places, but they nevertheless are problems in regard to accuracy.)
The NIV went in the opposite direction. The 1978 edition was a fresh translation, not based on any lineage. It doesn’t read like the KJV-RV-ASV-RSV-NASB-ESV because it is not consciously trying to emulate that tradition. It came out eight years after the NEB did; those two translations (one British and not evangelical, the other more international yet evangelical) were the first and second committee-produced English translations done in over 400 years that were not in the KJV tradition. About 100 scholars worked on the NIV. Frankly, I think that is too many, and the result is sometimes a text that seems to strike the lowest common denominator—that is, the least unsatisfactory rendering. But that makes for an uninteresting Bible, with language that is readable but not particularly memorable. This is a key complaint of many literary scholars: The NIV is too readable without having turns of expression, pithy statements, memorable phrases. In other words, the elegance factor is almost wholly missing from the NIV. As well, by shortening sentences and cutting out particles and conjunctions, I think the NIV can be misleading at times. I like the NIV very much and happily endorse it, but I think that it is not the best translation on the level of elegance or accuracy. For readability, it scores high marks.
With the TNIV, the translation reached new heights in this respect: excellent scholars worked on it. The language went toward gender-inclusiveness, but it was certainly not as developed in this regard as was the NRSV. There are a few verses that I don’t care for in the TNIV, but on the whole I think it’s a very good translation. Still, the elegance factor is missing. As well, the TNIV has an excellent textual foundation. Many translations nowadays are satisfied with translating the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament. But the TNIV had Gordon Fee on the translation committee, an outstanding textual critic. There are places where the TNIV has taken some bold moves away from the Nestle text—places that I think they have made the right choice.
So, you have the ESV which was done by a pretty decent group of evangelical scholars but who were standing on the shoulders of giants, and the NIV which was done by a multitude of scholars (and far more than really should have been used for a Bible translation), launching out on their own. The TNIV has better scholarship than the NIV but its tendency toward gender-inclusiveness (rather than a gender-neutral position) at times gets in the way of accuracy.
An alternative to either of these is the NET Bible. One of the chief goals of the NET Bible has been to combine the three historic objectives of English Bible translation: accuracy, readability, and elegance. These goals are not entirely compatible and it proved almost impossible to try to satisfy each. However, the editors did something that is unique among Bible translations: tens of thousands of notes. The notes help to ensure accuracy where the wording would be cumbersome or inelegant. Thus, both readability and elegance can be maintained to some degree without sacrificing accuracy. Solid scholarship, readable and elegant, and more notes than any other Bible in history. It’s not a major seller but that’s only because it hasn’t been strongly marketed. It is significant that this translation is what that the translators of the ESV and TNIV used to help them with the hard places. It has become the Bible that thousands of people use to grasp better what their preferred translation is doing. That is, the ESV or TNIV might be interpretive in a given place (all translations are interpretive), and they might come out on different ends of an issue. The NET Bible will have a note that explains the two views; no other Bible does this even close to the extent that the NET does. And it really pioneered the idea of having serious interpretive, textual, and translation notes. It’s available at www.bible.org.
Ultimately, whatever translation your congregation uses should be one that they can trust, one that they will read, and one that they will memorize from. On those three fronts, I think the NET Bible may be the best. But the ESV, RSV, and, to an extent, NIV and TNIV also fit the bill. My own recommendation to English-speaking Christians is to own more than one Bible. In fact, I usually recommend the KJV (for historic and literary reasons), the NET (for accuracy especially, but also for elegance and readability), and a Bible of their choice (which could be either for reading [NIV, TNIV] or memorizing [RSV, ESV]).
Related Topics: Text & Translation
4. The Lord’s Conquered Servant (2 Cor. 2:12-17)
Related MediaRelated Topics: Character of God, Issues in Church Leadership/Ministry, Pastors, Scripture Twisting, Soteriology (Salvation), Spiritual Life, Suffering, Trials, Persecution, Teaching the Bible
Graveside Service 7
This was the funeral of a very lovely 94-year-old woman in our church, who was a believer. I sought to point out that our comfort (and hers) in the face of death was not based upon her age and physical condition, but rather in Christ.
The Difference Between Assumption and Assurance
13 Now we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve like the rest who have no hope. 14 For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so also we believe that God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep as Christians. 15 For we tell you this by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will surely not go ahead of those who have fallen asleep. 16 For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a shout of command, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are alive, who are left, will be suddenly caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord always. 18 Therefore encourage one another with these words (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, NET Bible).
This well-known text in 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 is one that gives the Christian great encouragement when dealing with the death of a Christian. Paul makes it very clear that those who have died as Christians will be raised from the dead, to be united with Christ and with other saints. It is a verse that gives us great comfort as we commit our friend's body to this grave.
But in this passage Paul also reminds us that it is not to be misunderstood or misrepresented as a comfort to everyone. Paul distinguishes between those who grieve in hope and those who grieve without hope. As we reflect on the life and death of our friend, we must also reflect on our own death. The most dangerous thing a person can do is to assume that he or she is going to heaven when their assumption is without proper basis. I want to draw your attention to a story Jesus told which warns us about assuming that we are going to heaven. It is found in Luke chapter 16:
19 "There was a rich man who dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. 20 But at his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus whose body was covered with sores, 21 who longed to eat what fell from the rich man's table. In addition, the dogs came and licked his sores. 22 "Now the poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried. 23 And in hell, as he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far off with Lazarus at his side. 24 So he called out, `Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in anguish in this fire.' 25 But Abraham said, `Child, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things and Lazarus likewise bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in anguish. 26 Besides all this, a great chasm has been fixed between us, so that those who want to cross over from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.' 27 So the rich man said, `Then I beg you, father-send Lazarus to my father's house 28 (for I have five brothers) to warn them so that they don't come into this place of torment.' 29 But Abraham said, `They have Moses and the prophets; they must respond to them.' 30 Then the rich man said, `No, father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.' 31 He replied to him, `If they do not respond to Moses and the prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead'" (Luke 16:19-31, NET Bible).
There is much that could be said about this parable, but I must only briefly call attention to the fate of the "rich man." While Lazarus the "poor man" went to heaven, the rich man went to hell. The Jews of Jesus' day made a number of false assumptions. They believed that those who were righteous were blessed, while those who were sinners suffered (compare John 9:1-3). They thought that piety could be measured in terms of one's bank account. Because of this, they assumed that this "rich man" would have 50 yard line tickets in the kingdom of God. And because Lazarus was poor, and he suffered in life, they assumed that he would be sent to hell. And yet just the opposite happened. The rich man made a very wrong assumption. He (and many others) assumed he was going to heaven because he was rich.
If the rich man had made certain assumptions, the Bible speaks of others who had great assurance of salvation. Let me read just three texts which reveal this kind of assurance.
25 As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and that as the last he will stand upon the earth. 26 And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God, 27 whom I will see for myself, and whom my own eyes will behold, and not another. My heart grows faint within me (Job 19:25-27, NET Bible).
4 Even when I must walk through a dark ravine,
I fear no danger, for you are with me;
your rod and your staff keep me calm.
5 You prepare a feast before me in plain sight of my enemies.
You refresh my head with oil; my cup is full of wine.
6 Surely your goodness and faithfulness will pursue me all the days of my life,
and I will live in the Lord's palace for the rest of my life (Psalm 23:4-6, NET Bible).
21 For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain (Philippians 1:21, NET Bible).
What is the difference between "assumption" and "assurance"? I can sum it up very simply. Assumptions are made when men trust in themselves (their wealth, their good deeds) for salvation; assurance of eternal life is always based upon the work of Jesus Christ on our behalf. Assumption trusts in our righteousness; assurance rests in His righteousness.
As we have come face to face with death today, I urge you to reflect on your eternal destiny. Is it an assumption, which will surely prove false, or is it an assurance which rests on the sacrificial death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ? May you experience the same calm assurance that our friend had as she faced death.
Lesson 35: A Lesson in Witnessing to Skeptics (John 6:41-47)
Related MediaNovember 17, 2013
When I’ve received training in how to share my faith, the instruction has often been along the lines of showing unbelievers how easy it is to trust in Christ. Give them examples of how every day we trust in people we don’t even know: “You trust the companies that make your food. You trust your doctor and the pharmacist. You trust the mechanic who fixed the brakes on your car. So now, just trust in Jesus. It’s easy!”
Some of these evangelistic methods also advise not to focus on the person’s sin and his need of repentance or on God’s wrath and the judgment to come. That might scare away a potential convert. Rather just tell them about God’s love and faith in Christ. Keep it positive: focus on how Jesus will meet his needs for a happy marriage, a successful career, and a life free of trouble and pain. After you “close the deal,” you can talk about the hard stuff.
But have you ever noticed how Jesus often took the opposite approach? When the rich young ruler asked what he needed to do to inherit eternal life, Jesus simply could have said, “It’s easy: God loves you, man, and I love you too! Just believe in Me and you’ve got it.” Instead, He told him to keep the commandments. When the young man claimed that he had done that, Jesus replied (Luke 18:22), “One thing you still lack; sell all that you possess and distribute it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” Not so easy!
Jesus told the unbelieving crowd (Mark 8:34-35), “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it.” Death to self! Not so easy! Jesus often seems to have made it hard to believe. He never softened His demand for total commitment in order to win more followers.
To understand John 6:44, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him,” we have to view it in its context: Jesus is talking with unbelieving skeptics. They ate the miraculous bread and wanted to make Jesus king. But He didn’t come to be the kind of king that they were looking for, so He withdrew from them. They later sought Jesus in Capernaum, but for the wrong reason. They wanted Him to be the new Moses, who could provide them with a lifetime supply of bread. They had a wrong expectation for who the Messiah should be and what He should do for them. So Jesus corrected their errors and asserted that He is the true bread out of heaven who could satisfy their spiritual hunger.
Then Jesus confronted their unbelief (6:36): “But I said to you that you have seen Me, and yet do not believe.” He then brought up the sovereign plan of God, who had given some to Jesus, whom He would certainly save and keep for all eternity (6:37-40). His mission would certainly succeed even if these Jews rejected Him, because Jesus came to fulfill the Father’s sovereign will. In this context these Jews were grumbling about Jesus (6:42-43): They thought that they knew His origin as the son of Joseph and Mary. How then could He be the bread of life that came down out of heaven? They challenged Jesus’ claims.
Sometimes Jesus followed the principle of not casting your pearls before swine (Matt. 7:6) by just ignoring such critics. But here, He witnesses to them, although not in the way many modern evangelism courses would advise. Rather than defending Himself or correcting their misunderstandings or telling them how much God loved them, Jesus restated His teaching about God’s sovereignty over our salvation. He showed them their inability to come to Him apart from God’s sovereign grace. That’s a subject which, as I said last week, some pastors won’t bring up at all, but especially they would advise that you never bring it up with skeptical unbelievers. But Jesus breaks that rule here by telling these skeptical Jews that they cannot come to Him unless the Father who sent Him draws them. In so doing, Jesus gives us a lesson in how to witness to skeptics:
Christ witnessed to skeptics by confronting their attitude, showing them their spiritual inability, and pointing them to faith in Himself as their only hope of eternal life.
1. Christ witnessed to skeptics by confronting their attitude (6:41-43).
John 6:41-43: “Therefore the Jews were grumbling about Him, because He said, ‘I am the bread that came down out of heaven.’ They were saying, ‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does He now say, “I have come down out of heaven”?’ Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Do not grumble among yourselves.’”
John uses the word “Jews” consistently to refer to those who were hostile toward Jesus. In this context, he also may want us to think back to the Jews who grumbled in the wilderness under Moses and brought judgment on their own heads (Exod. 15:24; Num. 11:1; 14:2-5, etc.).
The cause of the Jews’ grumbling here was Jesus’ claim to be the bread that came down out of heaven. They thought that they knew Jesus’ origin as the son of Joseph and Mary. So they couldn’t understand how He claimed to come down out of heaven, which He repeats over and over in this chapter (6:32 [implied], 33, 38, 50, 51, 58). So they were setting themselves up as capable of judging Jesus’ repeated claim because they did not know about His virgin birth. John is again using irony here, because he has already told us that the eternal Word became flesh and dwelt among us (1:14). If these Jews only knew the truth (as we, the readers, do), they would have known that Jesus’ claim was absolutely true.
Jesus did not correct their misunderstanding about His coming down out of heaven. Rather, He confronted their attitude (6:43): “Do not grumble among yourselves.” Grumblers invariably set themselves up as sovereign over God: “If God only saw things my way, we wouldn’t be in this mess!” “If God only took account of my insights, this problem would get cleared up right now!” Grumblers are not in submission to God’s sovereign rule. They want to tell God how to run the world so that things will go the way that they want. Grumblers arrogantly imply that they know more than God knows. These grumblers thought that they were competent to pass judgment on Jesus. So He confronted their grumbling attitude.
The point is, grumblers will not believe in Jesus even if they’ve seen Him feed 20,000 people with five loaves and two fish and they’ve watched Him heal the sick, unless they repent of their grumbling attitude. At the root of unbelief is not a lack of evidence, but an attitude that wants to tell God how to run the universe, at least my corner of the universe! In John 7:17, Jesus states, “If anyone is willing to do His [the Father’s] will, he will know of the teaching, whether it is of God or whether I speak from Myself.” At the root of correct understanding about Jesus that leads to faith in Him is whether we are willing to be obedient to God’s will.
As I’ve said before, a good approach when a skeptic raises an objection to the faith (evolution, the problem of suffering, errors in the Bible, etc.) is to reply, “Are you saying that if I can give you reasonable answers to that issue, then you will repent of your sins and follow Jesus?” Invariably, the skeptic will say, “Well, there are other issues, too!” In other words, the issues are not the issue. The issues are smokescreens to hide the fact that the skeptic doesn’t want to submit to the lordship of Jesus Christ. If he can “control” Jesus to provide him with what he wants out of life, he might profess to “believe.” But then he’s not believing in Jesus as Lord, but rather in Jesus as Aladdin’s Genie. So in witnessing to such grumbling skeptics, confront their underlying attitude of not wanting to submit to Jesus.
Before I move on to 6:44-45, I need to mention that grumbling is not just a problem for unbelieving skeptics. It’s also a problem for many that profess to know Christ (1 Cor. 10:10; Phil. 2:14). If you’re grumbling about your circumstances, you’re not giving thanks in all things. And if you’re not giving thanks, you’re not trusting in the Lord and submitting to His sovereign hand over your circumstances. So we all need to apply Jesus’ words in 6:43 to ourselves as often as needed: “Do not grumble among yourselves.”
2. Christ witnessed to skeptics by stripping them of all spiritual self-confidence (6:44-45).
John 6:44: “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day.” Note, also, that Jesus basically repeats verse 44 in 6:65, except that there He changes the Father’s drawing with His granting coming to Jesus as a sovereign gift.
Why would Jesus tell unbelieving skeptics that they are unable in and of themselves to come to Him? I can see why He would talk privately with His disciples about such a profound theological truth. But why would He bring this up with these skeptics?
A. Unbelieving skeptics need to be stripped of their proud self-confidence.
I think that this is the main reason Jesus tells these skeptics that no one has the ability to come to Him unless the Father who sent Him draws them. Skeptics invariably are proud of their mental ability. They view believers as uneducated simpletons: “If they had half a brain, they could see how unreasonable it is to believe that this carpenter from Nazareth came down from heaven!”
Skeptics think that their intellect is sovereign over God. They base their understanding of God (if He even exists) on evidence and logic. But if a skeptic were able to come to Christ through his own intellect or will-power or decision, he would come in pride, which is antithetical to gospel repentance. The Bible yanks the rug of pride out from under us all: “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” J. C. Ryle comments on 6:44 (Expository Thoughts on the Gospels [Baker], 3:385):
Our Lord … desired to magnify their danger and guilt and to make them see that faith in Him was not so easy an affair as they supposed. It was not knowledge of His origin alone, but the drawing grace of God the Father which they needed. Let them awake to see that, and cry for grace before it was too late.
The general lesson of the sentence … is one of vast importance. Our Lord lays down the great principle: “That no man whatsoever can come to Christ by faith, and really believe in Him, unless God the Father draws him so to come and inclines his will to believe.” The nature of man since the fall is so corrupt and depraved that even when Christ is made known and preached to him, he will not come to Him and believe in Him without the special grace of God inclining his will and giving him a disposition to come….
This is, no doubt, a very humbling truth, and one which in every age has called forth the hatred and opposition of man. The favorite notion of man is that he can do what he likes—repent or not repent, believe or not believe, come to Christ or not come—entirely at his own discretion. In fact, man likes to think that his salvation is in his own power. Such notions are flatly contradictory to the text before us. The words of our Lord here are clear and unmistakable and cannot be explained away…. Man never of himself begins with God. God must first begin with man. And this beginning is just the “drawing” of the text.
So Jesus is saying to them (in 6:44), “I know why you’re grumbling. I know why you don’t believe in Me. You’re got a desperate problem that only God can solve. You cannot come to Me unless the Father draws you.” He’s stripping them of their proud spiritual self-confidence, which is the opposite of trusting in Christ for salvation.
B. Unbelieving skeptics need to realize their inability to come to Christ apart from the Father’s powerful drawing.
Some who argue that God does not force Himself on anyone, but that we all must make our own decision to believe in Jesus, say that God’s “drawing” means that He woos sinners, much as a young man woos a woman to decide to marry him. But the Greek word is used in John 21:6 & 11 of the disciples dragging the net full of fish into the boat and then to the shore. They didn’t woo those fish to please decide to jump into the net and then to cooperate by wiggling their way onto shore! The word is also used of Paul and Silas being dragged to the authorities in Philippi after they cast the demon out of the slave girl (Acts 16:19). And, Paul was dragged out of the temple by the angry mob in Jerusalem (Acts 21:30). Obviously, they weren’t “wooing” him!
Leon Morris (The Gospel According to John [Eerdmans], p. 371, note 110) points out that there is always the idea of resistance with the use of this verb, but that there is not one example in the New Testament where the resistance was successful. He says, “Always, the drawing power is triumphant, as here.” A. W. Pink (Exposition of John, on monergism.com) describes this drawing:
It is the power of the Holy Spirit overcoming the self-righteousness of the sinner, and convicting him of his lost condition. It is the Holy Spirit awakening within him a sense of need. It is the power of the Holy Spirit overcoming the pride of the natural man, so that he is ready to come to Christ as an empty-handed beggar. It is the Holy Spirit creating within him a hunger for the bread of life.
Note that the drawing of which Jesus speaks here is effectual. It results in the sinner actually coming to Jesus in saving faith. Jesus states in 6:44 that He will raise up the one who is drawn to Him on the last day (6:40 shows that He means, “raise up to eternal life”). And, in 6:45 Jesus reinforces that this is effectual when He says, “Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father, comes to Me.” It is the same unbroken chain of redemption that Paul outlines (Rom. 8:29-30): “For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified.”
Jesus makes a third point here:
C. Unbelieving skeptics need to realize that the Scriptures are the only source for the truth about Jesus that leads to salvation (6:45).
John 6:45: “It is written in the prophets, ‘AND THEY SHALL ALL BE TAUGHT OF GOD.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father, comes to Me.” Jesus is referring to Isaiah 54:13 (and perhaps also to Jeremiah 31:34) to show these proud skeptics that their own Scriptures supported Jesus’ point in 6:44. The “all” in the quote refers to true believers, as the second half of the verse shows. God draws all whom He draws to believe in Jesus by teaching them through His Word. The Holy Spirit uses God’s Word to open blind eyes to see the beauty of Jesus so that formerly resistant sinners are drawn to Him. You can know that you’ve been taught of God when you lay aside all self-confidence and come in faith to Jesus as the Savior of whom all Scripture speaks.
Again, Jesus is stripping these proud skeptics of their own intellect or power of reason as the basis for salvation. If someone can reason his way to salvation, he will take pride in his reason. But Jesus is saying that the truth about Him is contained in God’s written Word and that no one has the mental capacity to understand that truth unless God teaches it to him. As John the Baptist said (John 3:27), “A man can receive nothing unless it has been given him from heaven.” Or, as Jesus told Peter after he made his famous confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God (Matt. 16:17), “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.”
If you’re proud of your spiritual knowledge, even if you are truly born again, you don’t know what you think you know. Genuine spiritual knowledge always humbles you in the presence of God and causes you to wonder why He ever chose to reveal Christ to your soul. The more you know, the more you realize how little you really know.
Thus Christ witnessed to these skeptics by confronting their attitude and by stripping them of all spiritual self-confidence.
3. Christ witnessed to skeptics by pointing them to faith in Himself as their only hope of eternal life (6:46-47).
Briefly, there are two points here:
A. Christ witnessed to skeptics by showing them that He is the only one through whom we can know the Father (6:46).
John 6:46: “Not that anyone has seen the Father, except the One who is from God; He has seen the Father.” This repeats the truth that John stated in the prologue (1:18), “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.” Jesus is the only one who can reveal and mediate the Father to us (Luke 10:22; John 14:6, 9). We cannot come to the Father through mysticism, philosophy, or human reason. We can only come to the Father through Jesus.
B. Christ encouraged skeptics with the promise that whoever believes in Him has eternal life as a present possession (6:47).
John 6:47: “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life.” (The earliest manuscripts omit “in Me” after “believes.”) By again saying, “Truly, truly” (6:26, 32), Jesus was calling their attention to His next words. He is describing those who have eternal life: They believe in Him. I agree with D. A. Carson (The Gospel According to John [Eerdmans/Apollos], p. 294),
Notwithstanding the strong note of predestinarian thought in the preceding verses, this is an implicit invitation to believe, and an implicit warning against unbelief. In this context, it strips the would-be disciple of all pretensions, of all self-congratulation, of all agendas save those laid down by Jesus himself. Those who believe … cannot approach Jesus as if they are doing him a favor …. They must believe—but they do so on his terms, and by his grace.
“Believes” is a present participle, which indicates that we don’t just believe in Jesus at the point of salvation, but as an ongoing, daily matter. The moment you believe you have eternal life (John 3:16). Jesus says of His sheep, who hear His voice and follow Him (John 10:28), “I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand.”
That invitation extends to you. You don’t have to put your brain on the shelf to believe in Jesus. But you do have to confront your arrogant, grumbling, skeptical attitude. You do have to be stripped of all self-confidence that you are able in and of yourself to make a rational decision to come to Christ. There is more than sufficient apostolic testimony to the truth about Jesus. But to come in faith to Him, you must cry out to the Father to do a sovereign work of grace in your heart. He must draw you to Jesus.
Conclusion
C. H. Spurgeon wrote (Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit [Pilgrim Publications], 6:259:
The doctrine which leaves salvation to the creature, and tells him that it depends upon himself, is the exaltation of the flesh, and a dishonoring of God. But that which puts in God’s hand man, fallen man, and tells man that though he has destroyed himself, yet his salvation must be of God, that doctrine humbles man in the very dust, and then he is just in the right place to receive the grace and mercy of God. It is a humbling doctrine.
Has God humbled your heart and drawn you to Jesus? If not, stop grumbling and start praying that He will do it soon!
Application Questions
- Discuss: Many modern evangelistic methods are much too influenced by American sales techniques than by biblical models.
- Some argue that unbelievers are able by themselves to believe in Christ; otherwise, God wouldn’t command them to do so. Why is this fallacious? Support your answer with Scripture.
- Have you ever tried to witness to a skeptic? What did you learn from the experience? What can you learn from our text?
- Why is grumbling such a serious sin (Exod. 15:24; Num. 11:1; 14:2-5; 1 Cor. 10:10; Phil. 2:14)? How can you overcome it?
Copyright, Steven J. Cole, 2013, All Rights Reserved.
Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture Quotations are from the New American Standard Bible, Updated Edition © The Lockman Foundation
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