A Short Explanation of Irresistible Grace

Do you remember how last week’s explanation of total depravity ended? Here’s a hint: It was bad news. Doubly bad, really. We left things at an impasse with no hope of a way forward, at least humanly speaking.

Since the fall, every one of us is both naturally unable to submit to God’s commands and unable to come to Christ for salvation. Out of a natural hostility to God, we persistently refuse to do what pleases him, and we don’t have the will or the power to change ourselves. It’s obvious that any solution to the problem, if there is one, has to come from God’s action and not our own. And this is where irresistible grace comes in.

This is another name, by the way, that I’d change if I could, because like the term total depravity, the term irresistible grace confuses people. The grace half is okay, reminding us that this act of God does not happen to us because we merit it. We don’t do something to call out this work from God. But irresistible suggests a force causing people to act against their wills, and that is, I suspect, where the famous “kicking and screaming into the kingdom” caricature of the doctrine of irresistible grace originates. 

A better and more accurate name for this gracious solution to the problem of our natural inability is effective call. Effective because it gets the results, and call because that’s one of the words scripture uses for this work of God that overcomes our depravity.

For instance, call is what Paul calls it in 1 Corinthians 1:

For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.  (1 Cor. 1:22-24 ESV)

Paul’s message of the gospel, he says, is going out to Jews and Gentiles alike and there are two responses to it. Generally speaking, people reject it. The reasons for the rejection differ depending on the ethnic and religious background of the hearers, but the outcome is the same: They refuse to come to Christ for salvation. You probably recognize this as the second half of the double whammy of the inability of total depravity—the inability come to Christ for salvation.

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A Short Explanation of Total Depravity

The word total in the term total depravity means that the depravity that came to all of us as a result of the fall affects every part of our being. If I’d been naming the doctrine, I’d have called it “comprehensive” depravity, but no one asked me, so  we’re stuck with a name that many find confusing.

It all boils down to this: Post-fall, nothing in us works the way it was created to work. Our bodies have their faults. We get sick; our teeth decay; we have genetic imperfections; and we all eventually die. Our minds are imperfect, leaving our thinking powers warped. Our emotions run amuck, too. And this depravity extends to our wills, leaving us with desires that have also been corrupted. 

The corruption of our desires—of our will—puts us in a pickle when it comes to the demands God makes on us as his creatures. He commands that we obey him, but in our natural state, we don’t really want to, and even when we make an attempt to obey, we don’t do it for the right reasons. Ephesians 2:1-3 tells us that people in their natural post fall state—those who remain dead in trespasses and sins—are living out their lives in the cravings of their flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and the mind. They don’t care about pleasing God; but rather, they care about pleasing their own flesh. This problem of persistent warped desires is universal. Those who are not yet believers remain in that state and those who are believers were once in that state.

You see the predicament, right? God’s commandments are nothing more than what people ought to be doing, yet the corruption that came to every one of us through the fall warps our desires so that we just keep on indulging our twisted cravings instead of doing what God asks us to do. Fallen human beings are so intransigent in this disobedience that scripture tells us that the natural person—a person who remains as they are born post fall without any supernatural intervention—is unable to submit to God’s commands (Romans 8:7-8). 

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