What do the Savior's words mean about the impossibility of coming to Him unless the Father draws a person? Absolute predestination?...
What do the Savior's words mean about the impossibility of coming to Him unless the Father draws a person? Absolute predestination? The futility of any human effort when it comes to the Christian life? Or something else?
Of course, there is no question of absolute predestination when it comes to a person's destiny. After all, Jesus tells us nothing about what guides the Father when He brings one person or another to Jesus, or how far He takes that person's intentions and desires into account. And the whole biblical context compels us to think that God still takes a person's free choice into account, so that He will not drag anyone to Christ or after Christ by force. But He can certainly make use of the sincere desire of a seeker to find the living truth.
But the point may not be at all what criteria guide God as He directs a person along one spiritual path or another. Jesus Himself appears to be speaking about something else. People do not understand Him; many leave, troubled by His words. A minority remains. These people cannot leave because they have nowhere to go. In Christ they have found that very living truth, the very meaning of their own life without which this life is no longer needed by them, without which it is simply unthinkable for them.
This vividly felt and experienced uniqueness of the only possible spiritual path, this impossibility of leaving not because someone or something is holding them from outside, but because spiritually there is nowhere else to go - this is the action of God. Such a result cannot be achieved by human effort; human nature is not inclined to drive itself into a trap, into a psychological dead end from which there is only one exit. By nature, a person always tries to leave an alternative open. When it disappears, we are almost always facing the result of an external spiritual influence on the situation or on the human soul. A dark influence, if the absence of alternatives becomes hopelessness that dooms to death. A light-filled influence, if it points to the only path leading into the Kingdom.