Blasphemy is NOT simply refusing to heed the call. I'm not sure why you would change the words of Jesus to somehow fit this conversation.
A couple of thoughts. First, in all good charity I know this line of thought very well, as many I grew up with, including myself at one point, used it routinely in arguments with Calvinists. I do not think there is any willful intent to misrepresent the words of Jesus, and I know you didn't say that. I'm just leaning on the point to make it clear.
But yes, the problem with it is that it connects dots that don't belong together. Jesus in John 6 is declaring that all that the Father gives Him will come to Him. There is no accommodation in the Greek for ideas like they "might come if they feel like it," or "have the possibility of coming." That presumes everyone is equally drawn. But that's just not how He says it:
All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.
(John 6:37)
No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me.
(John 6:44-45)
Go back and read it in context, MHGinTN. Pay special attention to the symmetry. There is no sense of conditionality. Yes, I know this must be balanced with all the other passages which touch on this subject, but this is a critical passage because Jesus is doing more than just talking about being drawn to Him in some general way. He is setting up a contrast
for the express purpose of explaining how this works. The crowd was insisting on a materialistic understanding of His Bread of Life metaphor. They were spiritually dead, flat out incapable of reaching the lesson of the metaphor, which was that to have eternal life they must believe in Him. This passage is incomprehensible without seeing that contrast. Some believe. Why do they believe? Because they were given to Jesus by God the Father. How does God bring this about? He draws them to believe in Jesus. They are the "taught of God" ones. That's the good news.
What's the bad news? Those who didn't believe (the ones rejecting His metaphor) didn't believe because nobody can come to Jesus unless the Father has drawn them. They do not believe because they are not the sheep. So that destroys the idea that everyone is drawn equally, such that the only difference is who responds and who doesn't. CB is right. That is a distortion of Jesus' teaching. I know it is very common. As I said, I grew up believing it. But it's not right.
BTW, I don't think this is at all easy for us "puny humans" to wrestle with. Try as we might, I don't think any of us fully grasps what it means for God to be sovereign. All our pitiful little analogies break under scrutiny. About the only one that is slightly better (at least it works for me) is resurrection. What freedom does a corpse have? Like Lazarus, it just lays there in the tomb, rotting, no matter how nice you dress it up. Then Jesus speaks into the dead darkness, and the corpse suddenly inhales, and starts to breath. It opens it's eyes, gets up, and walks out of the tomb, just what Jesus said to do. Impossible while dead, inevitable if truly alive. No one forced Lazarus to live against his will. But he did not choose to start breathing again either. Once alive, he simply acted as living persons naturally do. As it is in the nature of the spiritually dead to ignore and resist God, it is in the nature of the spiritually alive to seek and love God. Life is from God. How else could it be? This is not a force against the will. It is prior to that. It is two different kinds of being. And it is the creative act of God that makes the difference. We call it grace.
Peace,
SR
i>All our pitiful little analogies break under scrutiny.
There are two sides here and they seem to by mutually exclusive. I see lots of scripture that says God does it all but in my experience, I make choices all the time. Analogies are different than the original or they wouldn't be analogies and while man's analogies may break down under scrutiny, God's analogies blossom as you look closer.
MHGinTN's tagline reminds me of one analogy that may fit here. We say that distance = velocity x time and we say that the speed of light is constant. The contradiction may not be apparent but Einstein spent a lot of time trying to explain it. He called it the theory of relativity and if true it means that distance and time are subject to the absolute properties of light. We would describe events differently depending on our perspective and our relative speed.
The reason this analogy is significant is because God is light and the reason it works well is because God designed it to work well. How many times in the book of Revelation does John use the past tense to describe something that has not yet happened? From God's perspective things may already be finished from the beginning. I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away. Isn't it possible that God created the past, present and the future all at once?
Yet we are forced to make choices all the time. Shall we accuse God of making them for us because he knows what decisions we will make? I don't like the analogy of a puzzle, but for me there are still some pieces missing.