Perceptions and Reasonings

Excerpts from John Piper sermon Skeptical Grumbling and Sovereign Grace

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In this verse Jesus says, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:44). ...

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But instead of getting more and more clarity and more and more agreement, Jesus is getting more and more resistance. This resistance in verse 41 is called grumbling. And the content of their grumbling is that what he says doesn’t fit with what they think they know about him. “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” In other words, he can’t be from heaven, because he’s from earth. We know his parents.

So the words of Jesus about himself collide with human perceptions and human reasonings about what is possible. “You can’t be from heaven, because our eyes and ears and minds tell us you are from earth.” And so they resist what Jesus says. That’s the nub of their grumbling.

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One clue is that he says it in response to grumbling. Verses 43-44: “Jesus answered them, “Do not grumble among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” And the content of their grumbling according to verse 42 was, “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’?”

In other words, their perceptions and their reasonings were rising up to resist what Jesus was teaching them—that he was the Bread of God which had come down from heaven. And in essence what Jesus says to them is: You may as well stop this grumbling, because the perceptions and the reasonings of fallen human beings are never the decisive reason anyone comes to me. The decisive reason anyone comes to me is that my Father draws him.

So you would do better to stop grumbling and start praying that God would change your heart and open your eyes and draw you to Jesus. So the reason Jesus speaks this way (in verse 44) is to shake us out of our self-reliant, self-determining, self-exalting, self-absorbed presumptions about what our senses and our reason and our wills can do. One thing is certain: They cannot provide the decisive impulse to come to Christ. Only God can give that. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” We desire, we choose, we come because we want to. But sovereign, undeserved grace is behind it all.

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