John 5:19
John 5:19-21
Therefore Jesus answered and was saying to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner. For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that He Himself is doing; and the Father will show Him greater works than these, so that you will marvel.”
These words testify that if the Jews reject Jesus, they simultaneously reject the Father, whom the Son emulates. This is a powerful backdrop for the words of John 6:37 and John 6:44. For by invoking the name of the Father, Jesus implicitly states that the unbelieving Jews were not right with God.
Something else that is interesting is the idea that the “Son can do nothing of Himself,” which comes across as conveying a meaning of contrast or change in, otherwise, normal human behavior. Granted, Jesus’ point was to identify His actions as emulating God’s, but according to the High Calvinist doctrine of exhaustive Determinism, this statement would in no way be distinctive from normal human behavior, since according to that doctrine, we can never do anything of ourselves, but only what is scripted. Calvinism seems to rob Jesus’ expression of its startling intent.
