A Diagram of SalvationHow anyone comes to Christ, and why none is lost

The diagram comes from a sermon, and the sermon began with a meal.

A crowd that came for the bread

John 6 opens with the largest crowd of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee. He fed about five thousand men from five barley loaves and two fish (John 6:9-11), and that night He walked across the sea to His disciples (John 6:19). Apart from the resurrection, the feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle that all four Gospels record (Matthew 14:13-21, Mark 6:30-44, Luke 9:10-17), and John alone goes on to give the sermon that followed it. The next day the crowd tracked Him down in Capernaum, and He told them plainly why they had come: “you seek Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled” (John 6:26).

In the synagogue there (John 6:59) He offered them Himself: “I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me will not hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst” (John 6:35). They wanted another meal and another sign. He offered eternal life, and they grumbled. Then He named what stood between them and Him: “But I said to you that you have seen Me, and yet do not believe” (John 6:36).

The verses that follow are His answer to that unbelief, and they are also the plainest account in Scripture of how anyone comes to Him at all. They run from verse 37 to verse 44, and the two ends of the passage answer each other. It opens with the Father giving and closes with the Father drawing, and both ends turn on the words “come to Me.” Three times inside it Jesus promises to raise up on the last day those who come (John 6:39, John 6:40, John 6:44).

That promise answers the one appointment no one escapes: “it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). Death does not end a person’s existence. When this age closes, Christ will call the dead out of death, and to be raised up by Him on the last day is to rise into a life that will never end, in the presence of God. He said it to Martha on His way to the grave of her brother Lazarus: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies” (John 11:25).

One way in, no way around

Drawn as a diagram, the passage is a single line with one way in. The Father draws and gives; the Son receives, keeps and raises, and brings home to the Father those the Father gave Him. Every route that would skip one of those steps is shut, and Scripture names each one. The diagram reads from left to right, the way a sinner travels it, and each entry in the key under it leads to the part of this article that explains it.

Every sinner starts outside the line.

No one comes on his own

The diagram has one way in, and no sinner can open it. “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him” (John 6:44). Jesus did not say that no one will come, or that few want to. He said that no one can. Later in the chapter He said it a second time, so that no one could miss it (John 6:65).

Sin has left the sinner unable and unwilling

The reason lies in what sin has done to the sinner. Sin is more than the wrong things a person does. It is a condition every person is born into: “through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned” (Romans 5:12). It has turned the whole of human nature away from God. Paul gathers the verdict of the Old Testament on the entire race: there is none righteous, not even one, none who understands, and none who seeks for God (Romans 3:10-11). Left to himself, no sinner goes looking for the true God.

Paul calls a person in that condition the natural man: a human being as he is born, with no life from the Spirit of God in him. “But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised” (1 Corinthians 2:14). He may be intelligent, educated and religious, and the gospel will still sound foolish to him, because it is understood only with the help of the Spirit of God, and the natural man does not have the Spirit. He has not examined Christ and found Him wanting. He cannot see Him at all, for “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel” (2 Corinthians 4:4).

Scripture goes further still. The sinner is not sick but dead: “And you were dead in your trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1). Dead does not mean that he has stopped existing. It means that he is cut off from the life of God (Ephesians 4:18), and as unresponsive to Him as a corpse is to the voices around it. He still walks, works and chooses, but he walks “according to the course of this world” (Ephesians 2:2), and nothing in him answers to God. A dead man takes no first step. Life has to be given to him, and that is what God does: “even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:5).

Unable is only half of it. The sinner is also unwilling. “You are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life,” Jesus told the men who knew the Scriptures best (John 5:40), and John explains why: men loved the darkness rather than the Light, because their deeds were evil (John 3:19). The sinner is not standing outside, wishing he could get in. Left to himself he does not want to.

Anyone truly seeking God is already being drawn

So the first crossed-out arrow in the diagram, a sinner making his own way in toward God, stands for something Scripture says outright. People seek a great many gods, and build whole religions to do it (Romans 1:21-23). But if none seeks for God, then everyone who truly seeks the true God is already being drawn. Wherever a sinner is looking for God at all, the Father has begun the work.

Drawn by the Father

The Father does what the sinner cannot do: He draws. The verb Jesus uses in John 6:44, ἑλκύω (helkuo), is a word for a strong pull that brings its load all the way in. John uses it for the disciples who could not haul in a net for the great number of fish, and for Peter dragging the same net ashore with a hundred and fifty-three large fish in it (John 21:6, John 21:11). Luke uses it for the men who seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the market place (Acts 16:19). The Father’s drawing is more than an invitation issued and left to the sinner to take up. It is the power of God laid on a sinner who cannot move himself.

He draws by teaching, never against the will

Strong as the word is, the Father forces no one into the kingdom. Jesus explains the drawing in the next breath. He cites Isaiah’s promise that they would all be taught of God (Isaiah 54:13), and adds: “Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father, comes to Me” (John 6:45). The Father draws by teaching. He takes the truth about His Son and presses it into the mind and heart until the sinner sees it, and what he once thought foolish becomes the thing he most wants.

That teaching does not come by private visions, for no one has seen the Father except the Son (John 6:46). It comes through the Son and through the word about Him: “faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17).

When it takes hold, the will that refused is made willing. “Your people will volunteer freely in the day of Your power” (Psalm 110:3). The sinner does not come under protest. He comes because, for the first time, he wants to. Through Jeremiah the LORD described His drawing this way: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness” (Jeremiah 31:3).

That is why the Father’s drawing never fails. Everyone the Father gives will come (John 6:37), and the one He draws is the one the Son raises on the last day (John 6:44). Theologians call this irresistible grace, and the phrase is easily misheard. It does not mean that God overpowers a sinner who is fighting Him off. It means that God gives the sinner new life and opens his eyes to who Christ is, and from then on Christ is the one he cannot help wanting.

The Father’s drawing often begins as a hunger. A man grows sick of his sin and of the emptiness of his life. He finds himself thinking about Christ when he meant to think about something else. The gospel he once laughed at begins to sound true. None of that is his own achievement. It is the Father at work.

Every believer was a gift before he was a believer.

Given by the Father to the Son

Between the Father’s drawing and the Son stands the arrow in the middle of the diagram: the Father gives. “All that the Father gives Me will come to Me” (John 6:37). In that sentence the giving comes first, and the coming follows from it. Everyone the Father gives will come to the Son, and no one comes to the Son whom the Father has not given.

Who are these that the Father gives? Jesus answers in His prayer on the night before the cross, where He speaks of His people again and again as the Father’s gift to Him.

They were the Father’s before they were the Son’s. He chose them before anything was made, and He chose knowing every heart and every choice ahead of time (Romans 8:29): “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4).

The names of those the Father gives were written in the Lamb’s book of life from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8, Revelation 17:8). At the last judgment that book is opened (Revelation 20:12), and anyone whose name is not found written in it is thrown into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:15). No wonder Jesus told His disciples to rejoice in their names more than in any power they had been given: “rejoice that your names are recorded in heaven” (Luke 10:20).

A gift of the Father’s love to the Son

Why would the Father give a people to the Son? The same prayer gives the reason: “for You loved Me before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24). Before there was a world, the Father determined to give His Son a redeemed people who would be with Him and see His glory forever. Every believer belongs to that gift. Salvation is first an expression of the Father’s love for the Son, and only then of His love for the sinner.

That is why the gift is safe. A gift is kept for the sake of the one who gave it, not because the thing given is especially fine. No one who comes to Christ is kept for what he is worth in himself. He is kept because he is the Father’s gift, and the Son will not refuse what the Father has given Him.

The Son receives every one

The second half of John 6:37 turns from the Father to the Son: “and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out.” The Greek doubles its negative, οὐ μή (ou me), the strongest way the language has of saying never. Whoever comes, whatever he has done, is received.

The Son receives them because receiving them is the reason He came: “For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me” (John 6:38). He has no plan of His own that might differ from the Father’s. The Father gives, and the Son receives. He would no more turn away one of the Father’s gifts than He would turn away the Father.

Whoever looks to Him and believes

Then Jesus states the Father’s will from the sinner’s side: “For this is the will of My Father, that everyone who beholds the Son and believes in Him will have eternal life, and I Myself will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:40). The verb for beholds, θεωρέω (theoreo), means more than a glance. It is to look intently and keep looking until you see. The sinner’s part is to look at the Son and believe, and a few verses later Jesus puts it in the plainest words of the chapter: “he who believes has eternal life” (John 6:47).

Earlier, when the crowd asked what work they must do to do the works of God, He told them there was only one: “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent” (John 6:29). There is nothing to pay and nothing to earn. The offer is free.

No one lost on the way

The last crossed-out arrow in the diagram drops from the outlet toward the word “Lost.” Jesus states it as the Father’s will: “This is the will of Him who sent Me, that of all that He has given Me I lose nothing, but raise it up on the last day” (John 6:39).

That crowd had heard Jesus use the word the day before. When the five thousand had eaten all they wanted, He told His disciples: “Gather up the leftover fragments so that nothing will be lost” (John 6:12). The verb in both verses is ἀπόλλυμι (apollumi). The Lord who would not let a crust of barley bread go to waste will certainly not lose one person the Father has given Him.

In John 6:39 the gift is “it”: the whole company the Father gives, given as one. In the next verse the promise is “him”: each one who believes. The company arrives whole because every one in it is raised.

Kept by the Son all the way

Between the day a sinner is drawn and the last day lies a whole life, with its sins, failures and doubts. Jesus does not leave the believer to keep his salvation by his own grip. He holds him: “I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand” (John 10:28). He is the Shepherd who leaves with a hundred sheep and comes home with a hundred. Paul sets out the same unbroken chain: those whom God predestined He also called, those He called He also justified, and those He justified He also glorified (Romans 8:30). No one drops out between one link and the next.

Peter is the proof. At supper on the night of the arrest, Jesus told him that Satan had demanded to sift him like wheat, “but I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:32). In the garden, when the soldiers came, Jesus put Himself between them and His disciples “to fulfill the word which He spoke, ‘Of those whom You have given Me I lost not one’” (John 18:9). Before morning Peter denied Him three times, and he was not cast out. After the resurrection Jesus restored him by the sea and gave him His sheep to tend (John 21:15-17).

The promise does not stop at death: “I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:44). Death cannot keep one of those the Father gave. How God will do it, Scripture leaves largely unsaid, and John says so while giving the promise: “it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is” (1 John 3:2). Only then is the Father’s gift delivered whole.

And the line ends where it began, with the Father. He drew sinners to the Son, and the Son brings them to Him: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me” (John 14:6). Christ died for sins “so that He might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18), and those the Father gave Him will be with Him where He is, in the Father’s presence, forever (John 17:24).

Many try to come to the Son without the Father, or to God without the Son.

No way around the Father or the Son

One crossed-out arrow in the diagram passes the Father by and runs straight to the Son. Plenty of people in John 6 tried that route. They came to Jesus by the thousand, followed Him around the lake and found Him in Capernaum. They had meant to take Him by force and make Him king (John 6:15). Yet they had come without being given, and the chapter shows what became of them. Pick a card to see it.

A Jesus of their own choosing

The route is still crowded. Many people admire Jesus as a teacher, a reformer, a man of compassion who healed the sick and blessed children. That Jesus offends no one. The Jesus who speaks, who says that He came down from heaven, that He alone gives life, and that only His death can save a sinner, offends many, and they turn away as the disciples did. Admiring Jesus from where you stand is not coming to Him.

No method can cut the Father out, either. A preacher can stir emotions, an evangelist can seat helpers in the crowd to start the walk to the front, and a church can market itself to every taste. What comes of it is people who walked an aisle, said a prayer and went home unchanged. Only the Father brings a sinner to the Son. The messenger plants and waters, and God causes the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6-7).

No one has the Father without the Son

The crossed-out arrow that runs from the Father past the Son shuts the opposite route: from the Father straight to salvation, leaving the Son out. Many take it. They believe in God, pray to Him and call Him Father, and want nothing to do with Jesus Christ. In Jerusalem Jesus answered men who said they had one Father, God: “If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and have come from God” (John 8:42). The Father is honored only where the Son is honored, for “he who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him” (John 5:23). John puts it as plainly as words allow: “Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father; the one who confesses the Son has the Father also” (1 John 2:23). A faith in God that refuses His Son does not reach God at all.

There is no second line beside this one

Nor is there another way to be saved that runs alongside this one and bypasses the Father and the Son together. Christ gives His flesh “for the life of the world” (John 6:51) because the world has no other bread. Peter, who stayed when the crowd went home, later stood before the council in Jerusalem and said it outright: “there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

No one can fake his way in

Could someone slip into the line without being drawn, pass for a believer, and enjoy its benefits without the Father’s work? John 6 answers before anyone asks.

⁶⁴But there are some of you who do not believe. For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were who did not believe, and who it was that would betray Him.

John 6:64 · NASB95

Jesus is never deceived. Early in His ministry many believed in His name when they saw His signs, “but Jesus, on His part, was not entrusting Himself to them, for He knew all men” (John 2:24). He knew who believed and who did not, and He knew it from the beginning.

Judas fooled the disciples, not the Lord

Judas is the proof. He was one of the Twelve, chosen by Jesus Himself. For three years he heard every sermon and saw every miracle. He kept the money box (John 12:6), and none of the other eleven suspected him: on the last night, when Jesus said that one of them would betray Him, each asked whether it was he (Matthew 26:21-22). Judas fooled the disciples. He never fooled the Lord, who had said of him long before: “Did I Myself not choose you, the twelve, and yet one of you is a devil?” (John 6:70).

Judas does not break the promise that none will be lost. He was chosen to be one of the Twelve, but he was never among those the Father gave to the Son, for he never believed (John 6:64). On His last night Jesus said so to the Father: “I guarded them and not one of them perished but the son of perdition, so that the Scripture would be fulfilled” (John 17:12).

Those who leave are not believers who lost their salvation. They were never inside: “They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us” (1 John 2:19).

What becomes of those who refuse

The diagram says one more thing by leaving it out. Whoever is not in the line stays where he was, and Jesus was plain about where that is: “he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God” (John 3:18). “He who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him” (John 3:36). No one needs to be sent into condemnation. Every sinner is under it already, and unbelief leaves him there.

Every one of them will be raised too, but not to life: “an hour is coming, in which all who are in the tombs will hear His voice, and will come forth; those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment” (John 5:28-29). The promise of John 6, to be raised up on the last day, is the resurrection of life, and it is made to those who come.

The heaviest judgment falls where the most light was given. Capernaum, the town where this sermon was preached, had seen more of Christ’s miracles than almost any town on earth, and Jesus said that on the day of judgment it would be more tolerable for the land of Sodom than for Capernaum (Matthew 11:23-24). To hear the gospel and turn away is a worse thing than never to have heard it.

Who does the choosing, God or the sinner?

Both sides are true

Anyone who reads John 6 for the first time runs into the same wall. If no one can come unless the Father draws him, how can anyone be blamed for not coming? Jesus never tries to settle it. He states both sides, often in the same breath, and leaves them standing side by side.

Both are true, and neither cancels the other. If you are saved, it is because God chose you and drew you. If you are lost, it is because you would not come. The credit for every sinner who is saved belongs to God alone, and the blame for every sinner who is lost belongs to the one who refused.

God sees the whole of time at once

The two sides do not contradict each other, because God is not bound by time as we are. He declares “the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10). We live a life one day at a time and do not know what tomorrow will bring, or what we or anyone else will choose. God sees all of it at once, the way the ending of a film is already on the disc before anyone presses play.

Our choices are real. Every person who hears the gospel chooses, and is responsible for the choice. God knows every one of those choices before it is made, and His knowing does not make the choice any less ours. That is how a name can stand in the book of life from the foundation of the world while the person who bears it has not yet heard of Christ.

The questions everyone asks

These objections come up whenever this passage is read aloud, from believers and unbelievers alike. Each one opens to the answer Scripture gives.

Nobody knows who is next

The diagram has one feature an engineer would find strange: no one standing outside can tell who will enter it next. The names were written before the foundation of the world, but the book is closed to us. No one can look at a neighbor, a son or himself and say that this one will never come.

Scripture is full of people no one would have picked. Saul of Tarsus was dragging believers off to prison (Acts 8:3) when he was stopped on the Damascus road, and he learned afterward that God had set him apart before he was born (Galatians 1:15). Both criminals crucified with Jesus at first insulted Him (Matthew 27:44). In the last hours of his life one of them was drawn, and he changed his story. He rebuked the other for not fearing God, admitted that the two of them were receiving what their deeds deserved, and turned to the man on the middle cross: “Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom!” (Luke 23:40-42). The answer came at once: “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43).

No one enters heaven by being good

There will be many former criminals in heaven, and many people their neighbors thought good in hell. That makes no sense to anyone who measures people as good or bad, but that is not God’s measure, and He is the one who sets it. “No one is good except God alone,” Jesus said (Mark 10:18). By that standard every person falls short, and what divides the saved from the lost is not how much good a person has done, but whether he has turned from his sin and come to Christ. “He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy” (Titus 3:5).

Every religion that promises heaven to those who are good enough teaches the opposite, and it keeps its followers from the one way in while they feel sure of their place. Scripture names where that teaching comes from: Satan disguises himself as an angel of light, and his servants disguise themselves as servants of righteousness (2 Corinthians 11:14-15). A man who trusts in his own goodness is leaning on the one thing that cannot save him.

So the call goes out to everyone

“Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). “Let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who wishes take the water of life without cost” (Revelation 22:17). The Father draws through that call, for no one believes in Christ without hearing of Him, and no one hears unless someone tells him (Romans 10:14). When Paul was in Corinth, the Lord told him to keep speaking, “for I have many people in this city” (Acts 18:10). Many of them had not yet believed, and they were the Lord’s already. Paul stayed a year and six months (Acts 18:11).

That frees the one who speaks as well as the one who hears. The messenger does not carry the weight of producing conversions; the Father does that. His task is to tell the truth clearly and plead with sinners as though God Himself were pleading through him (2 Corinthians 5:20), and then to leave the outcome with God.

Is the Father drawing you?

If you are not a believer, this passage does not ask you to find out first whether you are chosen. Nobody can do that. It asks you to come. But it may help to know what the Father’s drawing looks like from the inside, because those who have come describe it in much the same words:

• ✓Your sin troubles you, and not only its consequences (John 16:8).
• ✓There is an emptiness in your life that nothing you have tried will fill (John 6:35).
• ✓The message of the cross, which once sounded foolish, has begun to sound true (1 Corinthians 1:18).
• ✓You keep coming back to Jesus Christ and want to know who He really is (John 6:40).
• ✓You want to be rid of your sin, and to belong to Him (Luke 18:13).

None of this is a reason to wait. These are not conditions to meet before you may come. They are signs that the Father is already at work. If you come to Christ, that settles the question: you were drawn, and you were given.