I and the Father Are One

The words He’d just spoken split the crowd (John 10:19). He’d named Himself the good Shepherd and said He lays His life down on purpose and takes it up again, which isn’t the kind of talk a man can shrug at. You either hear a Savior in it, or you hear a madman.

John 10:19-21 — A demon, or the Shepherd

Many of them said He had a demon and was out of His mind, and they asked why anyone would listen to Him (John 10:20). That’s an old charge, one they’d thrown at Him before when they couldn’t answer Him (John 7:20; John 8:48) (Mark 3:22). If you can call a man insane, you don’t have to deal with what He said.

Others wouldn’t go along. They said these weren’t the words of a man under a demon, and they asked whether a demon could open the eyes of the blind (John 10:21). They were thinking of the man who’d been born blind, because demons wreck men rather than giving them their sight back (John 9:32-33). The works were already telling the truth about Him, even while half the room reached for an insult.

Truth has always divided men this way (John 7:43; John 9:16). The same voice that calls the sheep sends others looking for a reason not to listen (2 Corinthians 2:15-16), so don’t be shocked when Christ’s words split a room; be shocked when they don’t.

John 10:22-24 — Winter, and a demand

John then jumps ahead, and this isn’t later that same afternoon. It’s winter now, and the Feast of Dedication has come to Jerusalem, the feast that marked the temple’s cleansing after a pagan king had defiled it, which many still call Hanukkah. Jesus is walking in the temple, in Solomon’s colonnade (John 10:22-23).

They close in around Him there and press Him, asking how long He’s going to leave them hanging and demanding that, if He’s the Christ, He say it in plain words (John 10:24).

It sounds like honesty, but it isn’t. He’d already been telling them who He is: the door, the good Shepherd, the One who lays His life down and takes it up again. The works He did in the Father’s name had been speaking too. What they lacked wasn’t a plainer sentence but new hearts (John 8:43; John 8:47; John 12:37-40).

Men still do this. They say, “I’d believe if God would just make it clearer.” Meanwhile the Shepherd has been talking, and the works have been piling up, and the real problem is that they don’t want the Christ they actually have.

John 10:25-26 — Not His sheep

Jesus told them He’d already said it and they don’t believe, and that what He does in His Father’s name has been telling the truth about Him the whole time (John 10:25). Then He gave the reason, and it isn’t that the evidence was thin. They don’t believe because they aren’t His sheep (John 10:26).

Sit with the order He gives. He doesn’t say they aren’t His sheep because they refused to believe; He says they don’t believe because they aren’t His. Belonging comes first, and hearing follows from it (John 8:47; John 10:3-4; John 10:14). A man doesn’t talk his way onto the Shepherd’s list by being a better listener, because he only hears once he already belongs.

That’s election without a chart, and it’s particular: not a nation or a type of person, but His sheep, the ones the Father gave Him. The ones who aren’t His can stand in the temple in winter, close in around the Christ, demand a plain answer, and walk away empty, because God isn’t waiting on their verdict so He can act (John 6:37; John 6:44) (Romans 9:16).

John 10:27-29 — Two hands

His sheep hear His voice, He knows them, and they follow Him (John 10:27). It’s the same voice from the fold, spoken again months later to men who still won’t hear it, and the mark of His sheep is that they know that voice and follow it (John 10:4-5; John 10:16).

And look what that belonging gets them. He gives them eternal life, so loss isn’t the last word over them. In His earlier picture the wolf snatches the hireling’s sheep and scatters them (John 10:12), but that same snatching dies here, because nobody tears these sheep out of His hand (John 10:28). Hirelings lose sheep, and this Shepherd doesn’t.

Then He takes it one step further. His Father, who gave them to Him, is greater than all, and no one can tear them out of the Father’s hand either (John 10:29). So the one flock rests in two hands, given by the Father and held by the Son, and the grip under both is stronger than every thief and every wolf (Romans 8:38-39).

You aren’t safe because your knuckles are white. You’re safe because both hands holding you belong to God. The Lord once said no one delivers out of His hand, and now the Son says the same about His own hand and His Father’s (Isaiah 43:13) (Deuteronomy 32:39).

John 10:30 — One

Then He said it straight: He and the Father are one (John 10:30).

That isn’t poetry, and it isn’t a loose way of saying they get along. He’d just spoken of His hand and the Father’s hand as two, because the Father gives and the Son keeps, and neither is the other. Then He said they’re one in nature, in purpose, and in power, so the sheep held by the Son are held by the Father with the same grip (John 1:1; John 5:17-23).

A mere prophet doesn’t talk like that, and no creature puts his hand next to God’s and calls the grip the same. That’s why nobody can snatch His sheep: they aren’t held by a gifted teacher but by God Himself.