Jesus' point in John 6:44 is that people cannot come to Him unless they are compelled to come by the Father--unless God drags them. If you are in Christ, that is exactly how you came to Christ. The Holy Spirit dragged you there.

He did not drag you kicking and screaming against your will, because He had changed your will before you came. Had He not changed the disposition of your heart, had He not put into your heart a desire for Christ, you would still be a stranger and an alien to the kingdom of God, because your will, while free from coercion, is still in bondage to sin. That will that you think is so free is, in fact, a slave imprisoned to yourself. You are your own slaveholder. Your will is enslaved to your dispositions, to your desires, which, the Bible says, are wicked continually, prior to conversion.

Before conversion, we are free to sin; after conversion, we are free to sin or to obey God. In heaven, when we are in glory, we are free only to obey. That is what we call royal freedom, the most wonderful freedom, where our choices will only be good. We will have no inclination whatsoever to do anything wicked or evil.

The humanistic view, that true freedom means that we have an equal ability to go to the left or to the right, to do what is sinful or what is righteous, is a myth. It it not only unbiblical, but irrational. We must rid our minds of that notion and realize that at the heart of this matter is original sin. Prior to our conversion, we are enslaved to wicked impulses. But when the Spirit sets us free from bondage to sin, then we are truly free.

What, then, of human freedom? To answer that question we must distinguish between "free agency" and "free will." To say that man has free agency is to say that he is free to do what he wants. If he wants to reject Christ, he can. If he wants to accept Christ, he can. In brief, the human will is free to choose whatever the heart desires. However, apart from the interposition of divine grace, no one wants or will to have Christ in his thinking or in his life.

On the other hand, to say that a person has free will is to say that he has equal ability or power to either accept or reject the gospel. It is to say that he is as able to believe as to disbelieve, and that this ability springs from his own making and is native to him...a person is no more free to act or to will or to choose contrary to his nature than an apple tree is free to produce acorns.

Note well. I am not saying that, when confronted with the gospel, a person cannot exercise his or her will. All of us have a will and are capable of exercising it in the making of choices. What I am saying is that, when confronted with the gospel, we cannot will well. We are not kept from believing against our wills. "Whoever comes to me," declares Jesus, "I will never cast out." (John 6:37). The problem, however, as Jesus goes on to say, is that "no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him." (John 6:44)

Why is it that no one can come to Jesus unless the Father draws him? Is it because the Father prevents him from doing so? Is it because the Father or the Son or the Spirit has put an obstacle or a barrier in his way to keep him from coming when he urgently desires to do so? God forbid! Neither is it because the person lacks the requisite volitional and intellectual faculties to make a positive choice. It isn't because of some physical defect that he repudiates the gospel.

The reason no one can come to Jesus is that it is not in our nature to come. It is our nature, and therefore our will, to flee from Christ, not come to him. The fact is, and a sad fact at that, we do not want to come. We are delighted not to come. We willingly and freely and voluntarily choose to stay in our sin and unbelief, because we find nothing at all in Jesus that is alluring, appealing, truthful, or in any way an improvement on what we already are and have on our own. Were we ever to come to the point of wanting to come to Christ for life, we could do so. Indeed, Jesus say we most assuredly will! But such "wanting," such "coming," is not of our own making. It is of God. It is of the Father who in eternity past "gave" us to the Son and now in time "draws" us to faith. Simply put, no one, of himself or herself, wants to be saved. But whoever, by God's power, is made willing shall be saved!

God the Father "chose us in Him [Christ] before the foundation of the world." (Eph. 1:4) Before creating anything, the Father chose people to belong to Him. Why does Paul speak concerning the timing of predestination? For the same reason that he introduces a time element in Romans 9:11-12: "Though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad—in order that God's purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of His call—she [Rebecca] was told, 'The older will serve the younger.'" Paul says that God chose Jacob over Esau before either one was born in order to accentuate the fact that election is based on the free will of God, not that of human beings. God's choice of the twins before birth shows that God did not base His choice on anything they did but on His own sovereign purpose.

Similarly, when Paul says that God chose us before the creation of the world, he emphasizes God's purpose in election. We obviously did not even exist before the creation of the world and could not, therefore, contribute anything to our predestination. Paul teaches the same truth in 2 Timothy 1:9, where he describes God's grace as that which "He gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began."

We conclude, then, that Paul's locating election before creation flies in the face of the Arminian concept of conditional election: the idea that God chose us based on His forseeing our faith in His Son. To the contrary, God chose us before we were in order that, after He had called us to Himself in salvation, we would praise Him for His free grace.

It is the glory of God and His essential nature mainly to dispense mercy (but also wrath) on whomever He pleases, apart from any constraint originating outside His own will. This is the essence of what it means to be God. That is His name. ... In choosing unconditionally those on whom He will have mercy and those whom He will harden God is not unrighteous, for in this "electing purpose" He is acting out of a full allegiance to His name and esteem for His glory. ... God is our creator and as such has as much right to make of us what He wills as a potter has over his clay to make from the same lump a vessel for honor and a vessel for dishonor. We have no right to dispute with God our maker.

For those who, like myself, confess Romans 9 as Holy Scripture and accord it an authority over our lives, the implications are profound. We will surely not fall prey to the naive suggestions that we cease to pray or that we abandon evangelism. If we did that, we would only betray our failure to be grasped by this theology as Paul was who "prayed without ceasing" (1 Thess. 5:17) and who labored in evangelism "harder than any of the other apostles" (1 Cor. 15:10). On the contrary, we will be deeply sobered by the awful severity of God, humbled to the dust by the absoluteness of our dependence on His unconditional mercy, and irresistibly allured by the infinite treasury of His glory ready to be revealed to the vessels of glory. Thus we will be moved to forsake all confidence in human distinctives or achievements and we will entrust ourselves to mercy alone.

Scripture teaches that we are justified through faith, yet even this act of faith was graciously determined by the triune God before the creation of the world.

Purposes are different from their fulfillment; determinations are different from their accomplishment. God has determined not only the ends but the means by which He will achieve them. God may have determined our life span and where we would live (Acts 17:26), but these hidden purposes are fulfilled through our planning and investigation, real estate agents, moving companies, employers, and so forth. Even in our salvation, God fulfills His electing decree through myriad means--the prayers of friends and relatives, a neighbor who brings us to church or shares the gospel with us after work, and many other influences and events of which we are not even aware.

In neither Calvin's writings nor the Reformed confessions does predestination occupy a central place, and especially on this topic warnings abound against speculation (Dt 29:29). Consideration of God's predestination is of inestimable benefit if we find our election in Christ as He is offered to all people in the gospel, but a dangerous labyrinth if we presume to investigate God's secret counsels.

Sometimes people take "foreknowledge" to mean that God simply foresees the faith that we produce by our own self-determination. Then on the basis of what we do He predestines us to sonship. That makes the whole glorious chain of salvation hang ultimately on our act, not God's.

But this interpretation will not work. It assumes that faith is something we produce by the power of self-determination rather than being a work of God's sovereign call in our lives. That does not fit with Romans 8:30: "Whom He called, these He also justified." If all the called are justified, then the call of God is not a mere invitation to people with the power of self-determination. Rather it is an act of creation in people who are spiritually dead. What the call creates is faith. Therefore when God looked forward into history from His standpoint in eternity He did not see free people using powers of self-determination to believe; He saw people enslaved to sin and spiritually dead, whose only hope was that the sovereign call of God would create the faith He commands.

God alone is to be praised for our salvation because it comes to us without any human cause. Going back before creation (Eph. 1:4) to identify the source of that love reveals the God chose before any national, family, or personal achievements would warrant His love.

Some commentators debate whether the election in Ephesians 1:4-6 is corporate (a group is elected) or individual (each person is chosen). While a corporate dimension should not be ruled out, to insist that election is merely corporate would be to overlook the way that the personal blessings of being "chosen" and "predestined" (Eph. 1:4-5) are part of the larger picture of spiritual blessings Paul describes in Ephesians 1:3-14; and these other spiritual blessings undoubtedly have individual dimensions (e.g., redemption, forgiveness, sealing of the Holy Spirit).

Paul uses the assurance of predestination to strengthen the church for her struggles against evil and discouragement. This perspective does not solve all our logical questions about predestination; however, understanding Paul's purpose helps us properly contextualize our presentation of this precious doctrine when we talk to others. Predestination was never meant to be a doctrinal club used to batter people into acknowledgments of God's sovereignty. Rather, the message of God's love preceding our accomplishments and outlasting our failures was meant to give us a profound sense of confidence and security in God's love so that we will not despair in situations of great difficulty, pain, and shame.

Now then it is no marvel that some men think this doctrine to be strange and hard, for it does not fit in at all with man's natural understanding. If a man asks of the philosophers, they will always tell him that God loves such as are worthy of it, and that, since virtue pleases Him, He also marks out such as are given that way to claim them for His people. You see then that, after our own imagination, we shall judge that God puts no other difference between men, in loving some and in hating others, than each man's own worthiness and deserving. But, at the same time, let us also remember that in our own understanding there is nothing but vanity and that we must not measure God by our own yardstick, and that it is too excessive a presumption to impose law upon God so that it would not be lawful for Him to do anything but that which we could conceive and which might seem just in our eyes.

The matter here, therefore, concerns the reverencing of God's secrets which are incomprehensible to us, and unless we do so, we shall never taste the principles of faith. For we know that our wisdom ought always to begin with humility, and this humility imports that we must not come weighing God's judgments in our own balances or take it upon ourselves to be judges and arbiters of them. We must be sober because of the smallness of our minds, and since we are gross and dull, we must magnify God and say, as we are taught by Holy Scripture [Ps. 36:6], Lord, thy counsels are as a great deep, and no man is able to give an account of them.