Steve Lemke: “For example, hear again Jesus’s lament over Jerusalem: ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem! [The city] who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her. How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, yet you were not willing!” (Matt 23:37 HCSB, emphasis added; cf. Luke 13:34). What was Jesus lamenting? He was lamenting that despite God’s gracious love for ‘Jerusalem’ (by metonymy including all Jews, not merely the leaders) and his desire to gather them to eternal security under his protection, and the many prophets and messengers he sent them with his message, they rejected the message that was sent them and ‘were not willing’ to respond to God. In fact, the Greek sets the contrast off even more sharply than the English does because forms of the same Greek verb thelō (to will) are used twice in this verse: ‘I willed … but you were not willing.’ Gottlob Schrenk described this statement as expressing ‘the frustration of His gracious purpose to save by the refusal of men.’*
Even so, the greater issue is that if Jesus believed in irresistible grace, with both the outward and inward calls, his apparent lament over Jerusalem would have been just a disingenuous act, a cynical show because he knew that God had not and would not give these lost persons the necessary conditions for their salvation. His lament would have been over God’s hardness of heart, but that is not what the Scripture says. Scripture attributes the people’s not coming to God to their own unwillingness, that is, the hardness of their own hearts.” Steve Lemke, “Is God’s Grace Irresistible? A Critique of Irresistible Grace,” in D. L. Allen & S. W. Lemke (Eds.), Calvinism: A Biblical and Theological Critique. B&H Academic. Quotation from pp. 139-140.
*Gottlob Schrenk, s.v. “theō, theleōma, theleōsis,” in TDNT, 3:48–49.
