Irresistible Grace

I remember when I was a seminary student, we had a professor who was teaching New Testament, and the man was also the president of this Presbyterian seminary. And in class one day, one of the students raised his hand and said, “Do you believe in the doctrine of election?”

And the professor exhibited a little bit of irritation at that question. And he said, emphatically, that he did not. Because he did not believe that God dragged people, kicking and screaming, against their will into the kingdom of God, people who didn’t want to be there, and at the same time prevented others from coming who desperately wanted to be in the kingdom.

And I was astonished, not only that this was such a serious distortion and caricature of historic Reformed theology, but that it would be uttered by a man who should have known better, a man who had been steeped in the confessional standards of the church and so on. But I thought, “If a person of this status in the church, and this experience, and this education, has this misconception about irresistible grace, then how many other people must labor under the same misconception?”

The idea of “irresistible” conjures up that one cannot possibly offer any resistance to the grace of God. Now, beloved, the history of the human race is the history of relentless resistance by human beings to the sweetness of the grace of God. And what is meant by “irresistible grace” is not what the word suggests, that it’s incapable of being resisted.

Indeed, we are capable of resisting God’s grace, and we do resist God’s grace. But the idea here is that in spite of our natural resistance to the grace of God, that God’s grace is so powerful that it has the capacity to overcome our natural resistance to it. That’s why I prefer the term effectual grace rather than irresistible grace because this grace that is irresistible effects what God intends to effect by it.

Before a person exercises saving faith, before they believe in Christ, before they exercise their wills to embrace Christ, God must do something for them and in them. John tells us the words of Jesus in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, where Jesus said, “Nobody can come to me unless the Father draws him.” And the way many Christians interpret that text is to say that the drawing has to do with God’s external wooing, persuading, enticing, luring, whatever. And that God gives this drawing influence to many, many people. Some respond positively to this drawing; others say no to the drawing.

So God draws everybody, presumably, with an equal persuasive power. And in the final analysis, those who acquiesce to the drawing are saved, and those who do not acquiesce are lost. I once had a debate on this subject in an Arminian seminary in the Midwest and had an interesting exchange with the head of the New Testament department there as he cited this verse.

And I was quick to say to him, “You realize that the same Greek word here that is used by John is used frequently elsewhere in the Scriptures, notably in the book of Acts, where Paul and Silas are dragged into prison.” And I suggested that the idea there in the book of Acts was not that the jailer went into the jail cell and tried to woo, entice, or persuade Paul and Silas to get in there behind bars.

I said, “The word has more force than that.” And then I called attention to the lexicographical study of that Greek word in Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, where the preferred rendering of the word draw is the word compel.

Now, that changes everything. If you read the text and Jesus is saying, “No one can come to me unless the Father compel him,” that’s much stronger than to use the weaker word draw, which could be left to be interpreted as this wooing-type of concept that is a mere external suasion.

And at that point in our debate, the professor threw me a curve that I wasn’t expecting. He said to me, “Yes. But do you realize that this same Greek word is used in one of the Greek poets?” And he cited a citation from Euripides or somebody, I don’t remember, where the verb was used for the action of drawing water from a well.

And he looked at me in triumph and he said, “Dr. Sproul,” he said, “You don’t compel water to come out of a well, do you?” And I said, “No sir, you don’t, you have me there. And I confess that I was not aware of that reference in the Greek language.” And I said, “But how do you get water from a well? Do you stand up at the top of the well and call down, “Here, water, water, water?” Do you try to woo it, entice it, or lure it? Or do you have to go down there with a bucket and pull it out?”

I said, “I’m perfectly happy with the allusion to getting water out of a well, because that’s what God does with us. We’re buried in the water and we need to be drawn out by somebody else’s power, not by our own.”