The Case for Christ
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 NASB
No one – Given this statement, it is remarkable that Western Christianity believes in apologetics. Over and over Christian authors and theologians have offered “proofs” for the faith, arguments that are aimed at convincing any rational person that Yeshua is the savior and the Church is his bride in the world. And it’s not just Lee Strobel. The effort goes all the way back to Augustine. The operating assumption is that evidence demands a positive conclusion in favor of Christian doctrine.
But Yeshua himself seems to suggest something else; something borne out by countless human experiences. Faith just isn’t ultimately rational. It isn’t a matter of logical conclusions. It might involve evidence (though not essentially) but it seems to get started on an entirely different basis.
I had a conversation with my rabbi friend, the son of Holocaust survivors. His father and uncle were nearly sent to the concentration camps but they jumped off the train and spent the next year hiding in hospitals, running from the police, and living by their wits. The rest of the family perished. The rabbi’s father came to America where he continued to be a Torah observant teacher in a Yeshiva. His brother went to Australia where he gave up any belief in any god at all. The same experience produced two entirely different reactions. And so it was for many survivors. Why? What was it that kept one man’s faith alive and killed the faith of the other? And it doesn’t take a Holocaust to see this happen. Siblings, children, parents—why does one believe and the other not? It’s almost enough to make you into a Calvinist.
The Greek verb here is hĕlkuō. Its nuances include “to pull, to drag,” and it’s close to another Greek verb which means “to take for oneself,” i.e., to choose. According to Yeshua, faith isn’t a matter of rational decision. It’s a matter of God dragging you into belief. It’s something you just can’t help. It’s either there or it isn’t, and if it’s there, you just can’t let it go because to do so would deconstruct who you are. You might fight it. You might try to run away. You might struggle with the ups and downs of living it out. But it has a hold on you, and like Jacob, it won’t let go. There’s no explaining this, no rational argument, no conclusive evidence. It’s just a “fact of your life,” and that’s the end of the story. What you do with it might vary according to culture and history, but once God gets you, well, you never really go to that place that’s so lost it’s too hard to find.
I was about to write, “wouldn’t it make more sense to say that God somehow leaves His fingerprints on us,” but I have argued that it doesn’t have to make sense—and, in fact, human experience seems to show that it doesn’t make sense. God somehow has His fingerprints on some of us. Maybe He has them on all of us but we just can’t recognize it because we are looking for the wrong things. At any rate, it seems that God is able to find us in a lost place. We don’t know how. Maybe there are times when we don’t even know why. But we are still grateful.
Topical Index: lost, find, drag, draw, hĕlkuō, Holocaust, John 6:44
Yes!… grateful indeed! Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!
As a follower of Yeshua, I am one who, at one moment understood, and now experientially knows him to be “the Christ,” The “sense” (or “understanding”) I have of how God makes it “sensible” has come by way of my acceptance of God’s Spirit given as response to the particular and concrete plea of my own spirit… desperate that he might demonstrate his actual reality as a necessary reason for continuing my own existence. My sense was that he had his fingerprints on me; but I didn’t possess an understanding that allowed me to make sense of why, nor a certainty in fact. Moreover, I was oppressed under a spirit of depression and hopeless disillusionment— and possessed by an ultimate sense of despair such that I considered and planned suicide as a “reasonable insanity.”
Yes, it does seem like God is able to find us in a lost place, even when we don’t ask, because his love searches out the “deep things” to be found in the mess of debris of our lives… things merely bearing an appearance of being hidden from any possible divine regard.