When I was growing up in Southern California, occasionally on a sunny Saturday, my father would wake me up early in the morning and say, “We are going to see the doctor today.” Unlike most children, when told they are going to the doctor, I would get all excited about the prospect. The reason was because my father’s statement was really a code phrase for something else. If I asked, “What doctor are we going to see?” my father would say, “Dr. Neydis.” I knew Dr. Neydis was really a reference to Disneyland.
I don’t think my father would ever admit where we were really going until we got there. However, the suspense would build as I knew we were moving in the right direction for Disneyland. Then I would see the top of the Matterhorn, and I would hope it was true. Finally, we would pull into the parking lot of Disneyland and I would practically leap out of the car for joy!
In the passage we are going to read today from the Gospel of John we see Jesus building a similar sort of suspense in the hearts and minds of his first century audience. However, Jesus was disappointed in his hearers who could not follow the clues or translate the code of his ministry that would have revealed where he, as Messiah, wanted to take them.
In this passage we learn that the failure of Jesus’ first century audience to understand the coded language of his message and ministry was due to the fact that some of them were not among his sheep. This suggests the whole teaching of God’s sovereignty in human salvation that is strongly emphasized in John’s Gospel. Whether or not we are among Jesus’ sheep depends upon God’s mercy. However, as we will see in this passage, whether we are among Jesus’ sheep also depends upon our response to Jesus. God’s choice and our choice are both very powerful.
Hear what John has to tell us on this subject from John 10:22-30…
At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” Jesus answered, “I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.”
The setting of Jesus’ discussions with his fellow Jews in this passage was the Festival of Hanukkah which takes place around the time of our Christmas. Hanukkah was a commemoration of the time when Judas Maccabaeus was victorious in battle over the Greek king of the Seleucid Empire, Antiochus Epiphanes; famously, Judas cleansed the Temple which Antiochus had defiled with an altar to Zeus. As a result of his heroic acts, Judas was made king, even though he was not of the Davidic line, and his descendants reigned after him for about 150 years until Rome installed Herod the Great. Herod married a princess from the line of Judas Maccabaeus to further secure his claim to the throne.
So, it is significant that Jesus was walking in the temple courts at this time. The people’s minds would have been focused on the Messianic figure of Judas Maccabaeus. Their hearts would have been filled with a feeling of suspenseful hope, wondering when God would send another leader like Judas who would, this time, deliver them from Rome. Some really wanted to know whether Jesus would be this leader. Others probably wanted to see Jesus get himself into trouble with his answer to their question: “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”
Jesus’ response to their question was simply to say, “Look, I have already answered your question. The very works I have done testify to my identity. The problem is: you haven’t read my coded message aright.”
And why weren’t Jesus’ fellow Jews able to read the coded message of Jesus’ preaching and practice? “The reason you do not believe,” Jesus says, “is because you are not my sheep.”
The Gospel of John, at a number of points, asserts the sovereignty of God in salvation. However, it is important to note that the New Testament always holds God’s sovereignty in tension with human freedom. God chooses and we choose. How are we to reconcile God’s sovereignty and human freedom? One way to answer that question is to think of life like a play. For example, in Shakespeare’s plays, everything happens the way Shakespeare wants it to happen. However, at the same time, everything happens in the play because of the actions of the characters.
That is not a perfect illustration because God is able to give to his creatures, to us human beings, something Shakespeare could never give to one of his characters. God is able and has given to us real freedom.
The problem comes in when we start using words like PRE-destination and FORE-knowledge. The Bible uses those words to refer to God’s sovereign choice of whom he will save, but we need to remember that those words are an accommodation to our human way of looking at things.
We as human beings live in time, and we understand everything in terms of past, present and future. However, God is outside of time. Everything is NOW for him. There is not past, present or future. So, what we call PRE-destination and FORE-knowledge is simply God knowing in his eternal NOW what we are choosing in the present and destining us to become like Jesus. Thus Jesus, as the Son of God, knowing the hearts of the people speaking to him says: “You are not of my sheep.” However, at the same time, Jesus gives them the opportunity to change their mind, and if they change their mind, then he will accept them.
Jesus says, in effect, if you want to be among my sheep then you will listen to my voice and follow me.
David Gibson tells the following story…
My friend bought a 19-foot jet boat and invited me along for her maiden voyage. The boat is made of steel and fitted with a V-8 engine. We put the boat in the North Fork of the Snake River. The water was quite low because of a drought and heavy irrigation. We eased the throttle up until we were going 35 miles per hour. We grinned at each other as we raced across the water’s surface. Suddenly we hit a hidden sandbar, and the boat came to an abrupt stop. We stepped onto the sandbar, barely covered with one inch of water. Another boater came along, and after three hours of digging and pushing, we once again had my friend’s boat floating in the open channel. The boater who rescued us offered to lead us back to the landing since he knew the river well. He instructed us to follow exactly behind him so we would avoid hidden sand and gravel bars.
Our leader pushed his boat up to 35 miles per hour, we fell in behind him, and once again we enjoyed the power of the machine as it skimmed over the water. After a couple of minutes, my friend steered our boat just a few feet to the right of where the lead boat had gone. Within seconds, we hit a gravel bar, and I was thrown into the windshield, injuring me and busting the windshield. When the lead boat came back, the driver reminded us, “I told you to follow me.”
Jesus invites us to listen to him and follow him precisely. When we fail to do so, we often hit sandbars and get stuck. However, we don’t have to stay there on the sandbars of life. Jesus comes along and helps us out of our stuck conditions and invites us to start following him again.
In this passage, Jesus makes three wonderful, interlocked promises to those who choose to follow him as his sheep. First, he promises to his sheep to give them the life of the ages. William Barclay puts it this way: “He promised that if they accepted him as Master and Lord, if they became members of his flock, all the littleness of earthly life would be gone, and they would know the splendor and the magnificence of the life of God.”
Secondly, Jesus promises to his sheep an indestructible life. He says that if we are his sheep, if we listen to his voice and follow him, then he will give us a life that will never end. Obviously, followers of Jesus still die physically. However, what Jesus is promising is that if we listen to his voice and follow him then we will never have to experience what the book of Revelation calls “the second death” which is separation from God.
This leads to the third promise Jesus makes. He promises a secure life for his sheep. No one can ever snatch us out of Jesus’ hand. All the temptations, trials and terrible events of this life are not enough to snatch one of Jesus’ sheep away from him. Not even the devil can do that.
Paul put it this way: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Steve Nickles tells the following story…
I bought my two-year-old daughter Sarah an aquarium. We went together to the pet store to pick out four fish to put in the tank. One of the fish died … when Sarah was at her grandparents’ house. My wife flushed it down the toilet and didn’t tell my daughter about it.
[Then] Sarah found one of the other fish dead. She found it caught up in one of the fake plastic bushes. My wife called me at the office and said that Sara had something to tell me. In her two-year-old way, she explained to me the fish had died, she found it in the bushes, and her and Mommy were going to have a funeral for it in the back yard.
I realized that this was the first of many losses she would experience in life. I broke into tears, however when the last thing she said to me before she hung up the phone was, “Daddy, keep me from getting caught in the bushes.”
Sadly, we cannot do that for our children. Even Jesus doesn’t promise to keep us from getting caught in the bush of physical death; after all, he got caught there too. However, he does promise that if we listen to him and follow him, then we will never have to be separated from him or his love; we will enjoy the life of the ages, the truly indestructible life.
The question naturally arises: how can Jesus make such a promise? Jesus answers that question before anyone can even ask. He says the reason that no one can snatch his sheep out of his hand is because they are given to him by the Father who is greater than all.
Then Jesus makes his greatest, clearest claim to deity. He says: “I and the Father are one.”
Jesus’ fellow Jews understood perfectly what he meant. That is why in the very next verse we read, “The Jews took up stones again to stone him.” Why? For blasphemy. They clearly understood that Jesus was claiming to be God.
That’s what some of Jesus’ first century audience wanted to do with him. But the choice is also presented to us—what are you and I going to do with Jesus?
The British theologian Leslie Newbigin once told the following story to illustrate how different cultures water down the claims of Jesus:
When I was a young missionary I used to spend one evening each week in the monastery of the Ramakrishna Mission in the town where I lived, sitting on the floor with the [Hindu] monks and studying with them the Upanishads and the Gospels. In the great hall of the monastery, as in all the premises of the Ramakrishna Mission, there is a gallery of portraits of the great religious teachers of humankind. Among them, of course, is a portrait of Jesus. Each year on Christmas Day worship was offered before this picture. Jesus was honored, worshipped, as one of the many manifestations of deity in the course of human history.
But this wasn’t a step toward leading people to faith in Jesus Christ. It was actually what Newbigin called “the cooption of Jesus into the Hindu worldview.” He explains:
Jesus had become just one figure in the endless cycle of karma and samsara, the wheel of being in which we are all caught up. He had been domesticated into the Hindu worldview. That view remained unchallenged. It was only slowly, through many experiences, that I began to see that something of this domestication had taken place in my own Christianity, that I too had been more ready to seek a “reasonable Christianity,” a Christianity that could be defended on the terms of my whole intellectual formation as a twentieth-century Englishman, rather than something which placed my whole intellectual formation under a new and critical light. I, too, had been guilty of domesticating the gospel.[1]
I wonder: have we done the same with Jesus? Have we tried to “domesticate” him? Jesus is sometimes called the lion of the tribe of Judah. Perhaps we would do well to remember that he is not a tame lion.
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