A Surprise Dividing Line! John 6:44-45, John 6:65: Exegesis and Application

Well, surprise, surprise, surprise. Remember that? Go over to Pa. Surprise, surprise, surprise.

I miss him.

He was a great singer. He was a really great singer. Anyway, Jim Neighbors, I don't know. The old folks are sitting around talking about old folk stuff. Don't worry about it, if you're not one of those old folks.

But when did we become old folks? Did you even notice it happening? About five years ago? He has a specific date in mind. Yep, well, anyway. Surprise, surprise, surprise. Here we are on a Friday. We said we weren't gonna do this, but I got up at 2 .20 this morning and I got my ride in and ripped that sucker.

Let me, I'm gonna tell you. Now, I should tell you, just briefly, that listening to a debate on hyperpreterism does not exactly elevate your heart rate, you know, and make you just wanna slam those pedals down, spin those, spin the crank, whatever.

So I was listening. So yesterday was the first of the two-part debate on Iron Sharpens Iron on hyperpreterism. And so I listened to the first exchange on the ride this morning. And then when I got done with that, then I switched over to music.

And yeah, that helped a lot. It really, really did. It's amazing the difference that that will make. It's, there is something to that. Anyway, but did most of the ride in the dark, which means I did not run into any rioters, looters, anything.

It was very quiet. I saw a couple of cats out and about. That was pretty much about it. When I went through the underpasses on the canal, I woke up the homeless people who have turned that into a hotel down there.

But other than that, there you go. And so I looked at the clock and I'm like, so are you going in this morning? Well, for a while. And it's like, all right, let's just do a one-hour program. We'll get it done and make some advancements and do something beneficial.

Law, Order, and the Collapse of Social Cohesion

I've always wondered what would finally break the stranglehold of the COVID -19 virus on the news cycle. And if you burn down a major city, that finally was enough to get people to talk about something other, even though this, when historians look back on video and pictures of this experience, they are going to be going, how odd that they're all wearing face masks.

Now, because when looters loot stores, they've always practiced proper social distancing, right? They're putting stuff over their face all the time. So now they just look like everybody else. In fact, I saw a white woman running out of Target with some items and she did not have a face mask on.

And I'm like, you obviously, you didn't get the memo about how this is supposed to work. Everyone's supposed to show up in their face masks and that way, all the video being taken, they don't come and get you six months from now, which would be a good thing, but it won't happen.

And on the way in, I was listening to the news conference and they had various representatives from Arizona, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Minnesota state representatives and Keith Ellison, attorney general, he was in the house, wasn't he?

Right, amazing because he's first Muslim congressman, but he's an ultra leftist, just an ultra, it's just a commie, just a communist. And listening to him talking about, he starts off, as Martin Luther King said, riots is the voice of those who cannot be heard in any other way.

And I just wanted to lose my breakfast because these people who are burning down buildings and looting and stuff like that, they have no connection with what happened. There is no connection here. These are just lawless, evil people doing lawless, evil things.

This is what they do. A lot of money from around that area, they've been brought in to cause more difficulties and break societal cohesion down even more. And it was really sad if you saw the video of the black man whose sports bar had been burned down.

All his life savings was in that. And you just, lawlessness is never, ever justified. Not in that, now, of course, you sit there and you go, yeah, well, that's what China's gonna say once they crack down on Hong Kong, which they're going to, because they're gonna renege on their agreement and they're going to obliterate Hong Kong.

And many people will die in the process, but they don't care because they're communists. And that's what communists do. Communists kill people. That's what communism is all about. If you've not read a history of the last century,.

It wasn't that long ago.

It really wasn't that long ago. Then you might want to do so, because around 120 to 150 million people were killed by communists just in the last century. And we're actually talking about putting people like that in power here in our own country.

And some of us just sit around going, I don't even know how this happened, but it sure is happening quickly. But Keith Ellison, he's up there doing his level best to just be so politically correct. But then eventually they get one of the guys who is the head of the state cops or something like that.

And he's like, these people out there at three o 'clock in the morning, they don't have anything to do with the murder that took place. And he says, that's my call. I think that was a murder that took place, but they're not protesting that.

They're just lawless people that want new TVs. They want to sell them. The contrast between the law and order guy and Keith Ellison is why the system ain't working anymore. Because when you have the law and order guy, and then you have a law and order guy as the attorney general, I mean, in California, they're literally electing attorney generals that go, we don't care what the law says.

Law's irrelevant. We will not enforce it. It's just, when law breaks down, folks, God gave us law. Law is a good thing, as long as it represents what God has revealed to us about who we are, who he is, and how we're to relate to one another.

But folks, law that comes from a lawless heart is going to destroy everybody. Wow, it's amazing how we are being forced to think through stuff that was theoretical only six months ago, or even more so 20 years ago.

Stuff that scholars were writing papers about. Now, all of a sudden, everyone has to talk about this in the pew. Because the old style, ah, we're not allowed to run to grace, leaves you with nothing but nebulous platitudes when it comes to, hey, look, our society has abandoned the Judeo-Christian roots that gave it so much of the structure of its law, and now it's all falling apart because there's nothing consistent.

To replace it with. Well, okay, I'll take that back. There is something consistent to replace it with. Consistently rebellious anti-law, which results in the destruction of things called personal freedoms and liberties, because personal freedoms and liberties require you to view man as being made in the image of God.

If man is nothing but a highly evolved creature, liberty, freedom has no meaning. Has no meaning. We're slowly discovering this, and yeah, probably a little late on that level, but all of us need to be the ones proclaiming to all around us, there is a better way.

There is a better way. And so obviously, I would imagine two weeks from now, things are gonna be rather peaceful in Minneapolis. And the left will go back to hawking, we're all about to die of COVID -19 again, until the next thing happens.

But each time, there's been a chipping away at, a subversion of the very thin layer of commonality that holds this civilization, this culture together. And yeah, when it comes apart, I am not a prophet nor a son of a prophet, and I can tell you what's gonna happen, but it's gonna be, yes, sir.

The thing that struck me about what I saw this morning on the news, all of those burned out buildings, when we think about, what was it, the Safeway at,.

Was it called? Yeah.

At Northern and 35th.

No, right.

You drive by there every day.

It's still.

And it's just blight.

Yeah, it just sits there.

And what has happened to this neighborhood now.

It's gonna stay the same.

Is it's going to stay that way, and all these people are now going to live in the middle of even more blight.

Yep.

And the self-destruction, the deconstruction.

Yeah, calling that protest, it's actually self-destruction.

Yeah, it really is. These are all, as they said on the news I was watching, all self-inflicted wounds.

Very, very self-inflicted.

You know, you punish yourself because of what you saw somebody else do.

Did you see, I saw it on Twitter. Oh man, I wish I could find that. Did I retweet that? No, I don't think I did. And then, the one thing about social media is, if you want to find something again.

Oh, forget it, especially on that.

Every time you hit refresh, who knows what's gonna come up there.

I gotta help you get on Parler.

Like I said, it simply would, it had the Captcha thing, filled in the Captcha thing, hit it, gave you a new Captcha thing. And then would send the code to the phone. But there was no place to put the code.

It just went into a loop. And there were other people who said, yep, happened to me too.

Well, see, I was using an Android, so it was working fine.

You were using what?

An Android.

It could be. It could be they have problems with iPhones. It's possible. I mean, it wouldn't be the first time something like that happened. But there was a, I'm getting closer. Oh, did you see this picture?

Oh my goodness. My daughter posted this picture. If you go to at summer writes, S-U-M-M-R writes. She posted a picture. It's a tweet from Corey A. DeAngelis. A glance at what some schools might look like after reopening in Arizona.

Did you see this?

Here.

Oh, I'm looking. Oh my word.

Look at that. Look at that.

Oh my goodness.

I was like, you've got to be kidding me. I mean, literally, the radical homeschoolers have taken over.

We invaded. You gotta move it over to your main screen so I can show that.

That's crazy. Okay, all right, yeah. Let me, let me, let me, let me, let me do.

Blow that up full screen, that picture.

There, that's as big as I can get.

All right, let me see if I can zoom in on it a little bit better.

As big as I can get.

Yeah, cause that's, that's just crazy.

I'm just like, are you, you're actually gonna, gonna send your kids.

Right there.

Yeah, check that out guys. There's, there's the future. There's the classroom of the future in your public schools.

In all of our Twilight Zone memories, we never saw that.

Nope, nope, nope. The, the poor little munchkins who are the least likely to be affected by any of this, but hey, panic is panic and, and you, you literally think the kids are gonna learn something and they're gonna sit there with face masks on.

Yeah, oh yeah. That's not gonna happen. And the only reason you'd be doing this, obviously, is to teach them. Submission to Big Brother.

If that is a submission, I don't know what is.

If that's not submission to Big Brother,.

I don't know what is.

But, and of course, everyone in the picture, the two people in the picture, are dutifully hiding behind face masks. So yeah, there you go. That, I was like, no, seriously? Anyways, what I was trying to find, to scroll through here, is early this morning, one of my friends posted, oh, this is, Summer also posted, did you hear the report that the cop and the guy he killed worked at the same place last year?

Yep.

I heard it, but I'm, there's, you know, we've seen so much flying around.

Maya Santamaria was interviewed and she runs a rather large restaurant type thing, where they, nightclub, and used both of them as security, one inside, one outside. Now they didn't know if they knew each other because they won, but they're working at the same place for quite some time.

I can't imagine they would not have known each other.

Something's really broken here.

Isn't that, there's, something's gonna come out of this. Something, there's gonna be more. There's just gonna be more. Anyways, Black Community News that I follow, your BCN had posted a video of Black business owners and store owners standing outside their businesses in Minneapolis, fully armed with AR -15s, protecting their businesses.

And I'm like, more power to you. Too bad that other businesses didn't do the same thing. I can't find it, but they posted it. I thought that was, there you go. So yes. So you're gonna get me on Parler, huh?

Not on my phone, unless they fixed it. Obviously, since I tweeted about it and linked them, I would hope they've fixed it by now. That was a few days ago. So I'll give it another shot, but it was not an auspicious start.

You don't start advertising yourself, and then when people do it, you're supposed to do it. Just goes into an infinite loop. That's not real good. Okay, anyway. Have you ever noticed if you have your, if you have your Greek New Testament with you, I suppose it would be good to bring this over so that we can, so I can show you this.

One of the, I was looking, since we did this quickly, I apologize, I wanted to be able to bring this up. I'll try to remember to do this before we go into the conclusion stuff on the Wilson dissertation, that is reading through the conclusion.

And by the way, if someone out there, this is a funny request to make. One of the, see, sometimes when I work through a text or something like that, I can't remember whether I'm remembering my working through it or actually presenting it on the dividing line.

So sometimes I've done work and then never presented it, which is a waste of time, obviously. Did I discuss Athanasius' writings about foreknowledge, or at least the assertions that Wilson makes about Athanasius and foreknowledge?

Maybe Chris would know, because Chris has been writing the articles and stuff, so maybe he's been keeping up with what I've covered. Because I have a whole section in my notes, and it's from the conclusion, so I'd be hitting it early on.

But did I already talk about that? Did I already go back through and read? Because I pulled a bunch of Athanasius into the text to read it, and I just don't remember doing it on the program.

I might've.

And it's harder to go back and find that kind of stuff than you might think that it is. Someday computers will be able to do the voice-to-text thing so well. Because see, text-to-voice works really well.

I mean, I use that constantly. Voice-to-text, not so much, at least not a couple years ago when I tried it. Maybe it's getting better. But Rich, can you imagine how useful it would be if we had a program that did voice-to-text, trained it on me, trained it on my voice, and then had searchable transcripts of the dividing lines?

Yeah, yeah, that would be really, really awesome. And you're sitting there going, man, that'd be huge. Actually, in comparison to the video and audio files, it wouldn't be. It'd be tiny. But 1984? Oh, what the government would do with that?

Well, it's already out there. There's no hiding from that, especially the way we do things. It's already out there. If they want evidence that I'm a Christian that believes God's law is righteous and good and that Jesus is Lord over all, including the Chinese Communist Party and the United States government and all others because he's king of kings, they've got all the information, they've got all the evidence that they could possibly ever need.

Not a problem on that. Anyways, that'd be a great thing to do. But that would also make it easier for me to go back and go, did I talk about that? And then just search for the last occurrence of Athanasius and boing, there it is.

And I go, oh yeah, I did. So one of the things that I want to track down is because I know I got to the end of a program and I didn't do this. I had it queued up. I had the reference up. I didn't get to it.

At least I don't think I got to it. Out of any remembrance of doing it was a section from the dissertation where Wilson is saying that John Chrysostom had refuted this duped interpretation of John 644.

It might've been 665. And I was trying to grab it real quick before we got started and I wasn't able to do so. I apologize, I'll try to get to it for next week. But that did get me thinking about the relationship of John 644 and John 665.

And what's important, I think, for all of us, whether you have interest in the provisionists or anybody who has argumentation against reformed theology, we know how important John 6 is. We have worked through it.

I've lost track of how many times we have dealt with some new hyper-dispensational reading of John 6 or whatever. We've spent a lot of time on this kind of stuff. And one thing I assume everyone is aware of, but want to make sure we're aware of, is how John 665 being a restatement of John 644 helps us to establish a consistent, and I really think unquestionable, exegetical conclusion as to what is being said in the text.

We've walked through it before. I'm not going to do it again. But we have a flow of the text that takes us from verse 37 through verse 39, emphasis upon the sovereignty of God. Verse 40 is the result of that in time.

That is the result of God's work in man is that we are looking to Christ, we're believing in Christ. Then you have the grumbling of the Jews through verse 43. And then in verse 44, we all know the text.

"'No one is able to come to me "'unless the Father, the one who sent me, draws him, "'and I will draw him, same him, "'I will raise him,' sorry, "'raise him up on the last day or in the last day.'". And the reality is that I think most of my Reformed, a lot of my Reformed brothers who are maybe younger in holding this particular position, it's always important to remember that any quote-unquote proof text we use is probably gonna be even stronger in its testimony when you know the text in its context.

This is especially true in John chapter six because 644 does not just sit there standing on its own. And when you see its relationship to the next verse, this greatly enhances our argumentation because when we talk about, "'No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me "'draws him,' and we emphasize the power "'of the Father to draw to the Son,' what we need to see is that verse 45 then expands that definition and helps us to understand with greater clarity.

So verse 45, it is written in the prophets, and then you have the quotation, "'They shall all be taught of God. "'Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father "'comes to me.'". So, comes to me is a concept that was already mentioned all the way back up in verse 37.

All the Father gives me will come to me. So God's teaching, they shall all be taught of God the passive actions of hearing and learning from the Father. These are all expansions and explanations of how the drawing of the Father works.

No one has the ability in and of themselves to come to Christ unless the Father draws him. Well, how does the Father draw him? Well, verse 45 tells us there is teaching, there is hearing, there is learning.

And mankind is so focused upon defending our, how would I describe it? Our autonomy and our abilities and our powers that when we hear this, we take everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me and we endow hearing and learning with autonomous capabilities.

Rather than recognizing these are passive things. People are taught by God, they hear. When I hear something, I'm not, you know, I suppose I could hear myself talking, but in this context, everyone who has heard from the Father, you didn't produce that revelation.

And yet mankind will go, yeah, but I had to hear. And of course, in John, we know hearing, seeing, these are words that John uses regularly. Remember John chapter nine? The one who can't see is the one who can see, the people who can see, can't see.

It's meant to be that way. John chapter eight, Jesus is gonna say, why can't you hear me? Because you're not of God. So hearing is passive. Learning is passive. It's taking in knowledge from another source.

Being taught by God, passive. So what do you have in verse 45? You have actions of God. God teaches, God speaks, He reveals knowledge, and we simply hear and learn. And everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.

So there is, this is descriptive. Now, we often ask questions. What does regeneration involve? What does it look like? We want real specific scientific answers. So does the soul weigh a little bit more after regeneration?

We wanna get out our scales and our microscopes and stuff like that and be all scientific about it. But here you do have something that helps us to understand when it says the Father who sent me draws him, what's that drawing going to include?

Well, we know that drawing is going to have certain results. And in this passage, they are infallible results. All, everyone who's taught by God, everyone who's heard and learned from the Father comes to me.

So this is a very specific, this isn't some general revelation. I mean, couldn't you argue on one level? Couldn't you say, well, everyone has learned from the Father because God created the universe and therefore there's general revelation and men know that God exists, but they suppress that knowledge, but still they've learned stuff.

And so, but that's obviously not what Jesus is referring to. He's referring to a specific, salvific, effective, divine action. This is why you can go to John 10 and what's Jesus gonna say? My sheep hear my voice.

My sheep hear my voice. There is a personal relationship there. There has been truth about who Jesus is that has been communicated to that person who is now a sheep. But that sheep was chosen by the shepherd.

The sheep didn't choose the shepherd. So the text is so clear in emphasizing the divine capacity, the divine power, that it is very, very educational to us to see how man will try to get around that and try to turn these texts into affirming human free will.

But we've seen people do it. We've seen Norman Geisler do it. We've seen John Lennox do it. Smart folks, but so wedded to human autonomy that they'll actually see texts that are talking about divine autonomy in explicit terms and somehow find a way to turn them into texts teaching human autonomy.

But don't forget, I think our conversations with others when we go to John 6, and John 6 is an extremely useful and effective text to go to. Our conversations will be greatly enhanced if we don't just stop at verse 44.

But then we explain that verse 45 then helps us to understand better what this involves, what this drawing of the Father involves, and that it's effective. It accomplishes that which God intends it to accomplish.

And the result of this communication of knowledge, in provisionism, remember, grace, as I understand how Leighton Flowers has expressed it, grace is found in the gospel. The gospel itself is gracious.

God did not have to do what he did, but he did. So that's where the grace is found. That's why you don't need prevenient grace is the grace is found in the gospel itself. Mankind has the capacity in and of itself.

There's no udice dunati in provisionism. Udice dunati means no one is able. There's no udice dunati in provisionism. Everyone has that capacity. Hence the gospel comes, and there is knowledge of what Jesus claims, and it's up to the human individual to make the decision one way or the other.

And then God acts based upon that, acts based upon his foreknowledge of what those human beings do. There's all sorts of theological problems with that, but that's the theory. Well, here's the problem.

In John 6, 45, everyone who is taught of God, everyone who hears the message, everyone who's learned from their father comes to Christ. So again, you're either universalist or you're reformed because this communication of knowledge is effective.

There is no one to whom the father has revealed this knowledge that does not come to Christ. So the only two logical results from that is you either need to recognize the existence of the elect or you become a universalist.

The autonomous choice just simply isn't there. It doesn't fit. So memorize verse 45 along with verse 44 are very, very important. But then, and this is what caused me to start thinking about all this.

In a number of the references in the dissertation, you would have, if it was a direct reference to John 6, 65, there'd be a comparison to 6, 44 or vice versa, or they'd both be cited together. And that's because they say so much of the same thing, but 65 is a summary statement later on.

After the discussion of eating the flesh and drinking the blood, which is not a separate discussion. This is the other thing. If, for example, you have Roman Catholic relatives, friends, coworkers, whatever, you're not going to be able, I don't believe you're going to be able to address in a contextual, consistent format what Jesus is talking about when he talks about eating his flesh and drinking his blood until you see how that is related to what came before.

Because what is in verses 37 and following, the high sovereignty of God, predestination, election, it's right there. That's the context of Jesus emphasizing his own centrality and what believing in him actually means, connecting it back to the Passover and giving of the bread, bread of life, et cetera, et cetera.

If you don't see that everything that God does, like in verse 45, is so that his people come to Christ and that eating his flesh and drinking his blood represents, communicates to us his absolute centrality.

We're not trying to join Jesus with a bunch of other things. That's what's so reprehensible about Union Theological Seminary and all quote-unquote inclusivistic deformations of the Christian faith. It's about Jesus.

That's an exclusive claim. Try to add other stuff in there and you no longer have Christianity. When you are continuously coming to Christ, that's what you see in the supper because the supper, every time you partake of the supper, you're proclaiming the Lord's death until he comes, right?

Proclaim the Lord's death in what context? That this is your only hope, that only by union with him, only by his death, only by his resurrection, only by his broken body and blood do you have any hope at all.

That's what was so horrible about the syncretistic religion in Israel when they would build the high places, the Asherim, the Baals, is because so many of these people would offer the sacrifices at the tabernacle or the temple and then go to the bales.

We frequently do the same thing now, not seeing the absolutely exclusivistic nature of the message of the gospel itself. So that becomes very important in looking at the rest of that. But I want you to see this right here.

Udais dunatai elfain pros mei. So no one is able to come pros mei. Eon, unless, so we're in the subjunctive here, no one is able to come to me unless the father, the one who sent me, draws him. So eon mei, conditional form.

And so no one, dunatai, has the capacity, elfain, to come pros mei. And you may notice this little thing right here. That's just simply, there's a minor textual variant there where some manuscripts, specifically Vaticanus and a few other unseals, have a epsilon there.

It changes. This is, just in passing, this is one of those textual variants that has no impact on meaning, which is what the vast majority of textual variants are. That's just an alternate way of writing the direct object form of the pronoun here.

And so some people did. So there is an epsilon in some and not in others. That's all it is. But so many variants are exactly that. So do you see that? No one is able to come to me unless the father who sent me draws him.

Now, let's go down to the 665. So, now, this is after, but there are some of you who do not believe, for Judas knew from the beginning who they were who did not believe and who it was that would betray him.

Now, there's all sorts of stuff. We could stop right there. We could say, does that fit into a provisionist understanding or a Reformed understanding? Because, hey, he knew who would believe, so that's just simple divine foreknowledge.

But could they have not believed? And what about Judas? Isn't the role of Judas prophesied? And is that just simply God looking down the corridors of time? Is that what prophecy is? Or does Judas have, is he not laid, he is set out as the son of perdition?

Couldn't he have chosen to do otherwise? How do you answer that? Could he have chosen to do otherwise? Could he have invalidated divine prophecy? If you say that he has autonomous free will, you have a real hard time with this whole thing because that's why open theists will actually say, well, that's right, he could have.

He could have changed everything. Might not have been the cross, might have been some other way that God had to do it. Anyway, so then you have verse 65 and he was saying, saying, now what's interesting here is this is the imperfect.

And the imperfect is an interesting form in the original language. Syntactically, there are a couple of ways it can be, there's inceptive imperfects and aggressive and continuous and you start getting a little bit more of a subjunct, subjective thing, not subjunctive thing, that'll get really confusing.

A subjective interpretation at that point, we start getting the syntax, but generally what the imperfect is doing is talking about an action that was ongoing for a period of time in the past. It doesn't emphasize a start, it can, but it doesn't, that would be something that would be derived from the context or maybe the verb that was being used, something like that.

But the point is in this instance, Jesus repeated himself. He had said it in verse 44, he says it, and then 65 tells us he was saying this more than once. In other words, we know that his teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum lasted longer than it takes to read John chapter six beginning at verse 35 or verse 30 or so.

That doesn't take very long. So obviously there were many, many, many more words spoken in that context. So what we're being told is that there was a emphasized or repeated element to Jesus's teaching.

And that emphasized or repeated element was, for he was saying, dia tuta, for this reason, ireka. So he, I said to you, he's pointing back to that first reference in verse 44. So the point is Jesus himself teaches that he was repeating the emphasis that he made in verse 44.

Sometimes I'm told you put too much emphasis on John 6, 44. Well, Jesus did. Jesus repeated himself. So for this reason, I said to you, then look at what comes in. That, udice, dunati, elthine, pros, mei, eonmei.

Look familiar? It's identical from verse 44. Identical. No one is able to come to me unless eonmei. And now here's where we get a little more light shed on topic by having this repetition, this repeated element later on the chapter.

Because the rest of the verse is different than what you have in verse 44. So no one is able to come to me unless it has been given to him from the father. So can we learn something from the different way that John records these words?