Believe the Works

Jesus had just told them that He and the Father are one, and they understood Him perfectly well, because the men standing around Him in Solomon’s colonnade bent down and picked up stones again (John 10:30-31). They’d done it once before, when He said He existed before Abraham (John 8:58-59), and they were about to do it a second time for the same reason.

John 10:31-33 — For which good work?

He didn’t run, and He didn’t soften what He’d said. He asked them which of the many good works He’d shown them from the Father they were stoning Him for (John 10:32). It’s a fair question: He’d healed a man who’d been lame for thirty-eight years, fed thousands, and opened the eyes of a man born blind (John 5:8-9; John 6:11; John 9:7), and every one of those works came from His Father.

They told Him the works had nothing to do with it. They were stoning Him for blasphemy, because He was only a man and He was making Himself God (John 10:33). That’s the same charge they’d brought when He called God His own Father (John 5:18), and they were right about what He claimed even while they were dead wrong about who He is.

Notice what they got backward. He wasn’t a man trying to climb up into God’s place; He was the eternal Word, who was God and who took on flesh to live among us (John 1:1; John 1:14) (Philippians 2:6-7). Nobody needed to make Him God, because He already was, so the only question left on the table was whether they’d bow to Him or throw rocks at Him.

John 10:34-36 — Their own Law

Then He took them into their own Scriptures. He reminded them that in their Law God had called certain men gods (John 10:34) (Psalm 82:6). The men in that Psalm were Israel’s judges and rulers, men God had put in His seat to judge in His name, and they bore that title because God’s word came to them and set them over His people (John 10:35). Even so, the same Psalm says those unjust judges would fall and die as mortals do (Psalm 82:7), so the title was never a compliment to their nature.

His argument runs from the lesser to the greater. If God’s word could put that title on mere men who’d been handed a commission, how could they charge Him with blasphemy when the Father had set Him apart and sent Him into the world, and He called Himself the Son of God (John 10:36)? The One the Father consecrated and sent is far more than a judge with a commission, because He’s the Word Himself (John 1:1) (Hebrews 1:1-3).

Don’t read this as Jesus backing off from what He’d just claimed, and don’t read it as Scripture teaching that we’re all little gods. He was shutting their mouths with their own Scripture, and in the very next breath He told them again that the Father is in Him and He is in the Father, which sent them reaching for Him a second time (John 10:38-39). They didn’t hear a retreat, and neither should we.

And look at what He said along the way: Scripture can’t be annulled (John 10:35). He rested His whole argument on a single word in a Psalm, because He knew every word of it was His Father’s (Matthew 5:18) (2 Timothy 3:16). If the Son of God treated the Bible that way, the man who reads it this morning has no business treating it as a suggestion.

John 10:37-39 — Believe the works

He told them that if He wasn’t doing His Father’s works, they shouldn’t believe Him, but if He was, then even if they wouldn’t believe Him, they should believe the works (John 10:37-38). The works were meant to drive them to know, and to keep knowing, that the Father is in Him and He’s in the Father (John 14:10-11).

That isn’t a second, easier road to Heaven for men who can’t manage faith in Christ. The works point to Him, and the man they don’t bring to Christ hasn’t believed them at all (John 5:36; John 20:30-31). The evidence was never thin, but evidence alone doesn’t give a man a new heart, which is why He’d already told them they don’t believe because they aren’t His sheep (John 10:26). God wasn’t waiting on them to be persuaded, and every one the Father had given Him would come (John 6:37; John 6:44).

So they tried again to seize Him, and He went out of their hands (John 10:39). A few verses earlier He’d said no one would snatch His sheep out of His hand (John 10:28), and now He walks right out of theirs, because His hour hadn’t come and no hand was laid on Him before the Father’s time (John 7:30; John 8:20). When He did go to the cross, He went because He laid His life down, not because the mob caught up with Him (John 10:18).

John 10:40-42 — Where John told the truth

He went back across the Jordan to the place where John had first baptized, and He stayed there (John 10:40) (John 1:28). It’s a quiet ending after a loud chapter, and it brings us back to where the whole story of His public ministry started.

Many people came to Him there, and they said John never did a single sign, but everything he’d said about this man had turned out to be true (John 10:41). John had pointed to the Lamb of God and said He’d come after him and rank before him (John 1:29-30), and now the people who’d heard him could see it for themselves. Many believed in Him there (John 10:42).

There’s a lesson in that for ordinary men. John never opened a blind eye or fed a crowd, but he told the truth about Christ, and God used that faithful word long after Herod had locked him up (Matthew 14:3). You may never see anything spectacular come of your life, but if what you say about Jesus is true, God can make it bear fruit in someone’s heart long after you’ve said it (Isaiah 55:11) (1 Corinthians 3:6-7).