We start this week’s study of John 10 with Christ and His disciples still in Jerusalem at the Festival of Booths, still dealing with the Pharisees over the issue of a blind beggar being healed on the sabbath. These Jews had created rules for many things, and they had also set themselves up as enforcers of those rules. These rules were beyond what Moses had collated from God’s mouth to his ears and given to the people in the books of the Pentateuch. The first time the sabbath is mentioned in the bible is Genesis 2:3
“Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.” Interesting to note this passage of scripture: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” (John 1:1-5) When you study the scriptures, you’ll find all of it points to Christ. Our salvation points to Christ. From Christ’s own word “No one can come to the Father except through me” (John 14:6) As the hippies used to say, “It’s circular, man.”
God made the world and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Then God blessed the 7th day and sanctified it. This would be what the Jews called sabbath. Since the preincarnate Christ was the author of all that is, it was by his doing and authority that sabbath exists. Many millennia later, these Pharisees decide to add to the word. They had no authority to do so and are told not to do so in Deuteronomy 4:2 “You shall not add to the word which I am commanding you, nor take away from it, that you may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you.” These Pharisees consider their new rules for the sabbath to be a protective fence around God’s Law. “Is the LORD’s arm too short?” (Numbers 11:23) Is God not able to manage His affairs that He needs the help of man to keep His laws?
These Jews were furious with this Rabbi who violated their rules. Rules instituted by them to fence in He who sanctified that day. Jesus as the Word, and the Light, has dominion over what these Pharisees are claiming. And they refuse to listen to anything but themselves. This is clear in the scripture where the once blind man and now healed is confronted by these Jews, and tells them ‘If this man were not from God, He could do nothing.” They answered him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you teaching us?”’ (John 9:33) These Jews then turned from this man to Christ and asked “Are we blind too?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but since you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”
Christ continues trying to teach them, with a parable. “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter by the door into the fold of the sheep, but climbs up some other way, he is a thief and a robber. But he who enters by the door is a shepherd of the sheep. To him the doorkeeper opens, and the sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he puts forth all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. A stranger they simply will not follow, but will flee from him, because they do not know the voice of strangers.” (John 10:1-5)
The scripture tells us “This figure of speech Jesus spoke to them, but they did not understand what those things were which He had been saying to them.” (v. 6) What Jesus had told them probably stems from Ezekiel 34: “Then the word of the Lord came to me saying, “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel. Prophesy and say to those shepherds, ‘Thus says the Lord God, “Woe, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding themselves! Should not the shepherds feed the flock? You eat the fat and clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat sheep without feeding the flock. Those who are sickly you have not strengthened, the diseased you have not healed, the broken you have not bound up, the scattered you have not brought back, nor have you sought for the lost; but with force and with severity you have dominated them. They were scattered for lack of a shepherd, and they became food for every beast of the field and were scattered. My flock wandered through all the mountains and on every high hill; My flock was scattered over all the surface of the earth, and there was no one to search or seek for them.”’”
As religious authorities, they had failed their flock, and enriched themselves. They were judging Christ by the same standard that they had judged the man Jesus had healed. “You were born entirely in sins, and are you teaching us?”
We continue: “So Jesus said to them again, “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who came before Me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not hear them. I am the door; if anyone enters through Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” (vv. 7-10)
This part gave me some trouble and from what I have discerned, many other people too. Verse 1 is easy to understand. Christ is the door, as in the Word, the Light and the Living Water of Life. (John 1:1, 5, John 4:13-15) Verse 2 had me wondering. I immediately thought of Abraham, Moses and the prophets. They were men of God and not thieves, so what did this mean? When I get stuck, I go old school. I find the writings of men of the past that had greater wisdom in the scriptures than I do. We turn to Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers, written around 1878. I have used him in the past, he can be a bit wordy at times, but they all were as I’ve found. This is what he wrote on John 10:8:
What, then, do the words mean? Their force seems to be all-inclusive; and yet they cannot contradict Christ’s own words, which have excluded Abraham, Moses, the prophets, John the Baptist, from any possibility of such thoughts. (See John 4:22; John 5:33; John 5:39; John 5:45; John 7:19.) They cannot, on the other hand, be limited to false Christs, who did not come before but after our Lord. (Note on John 5:43.) Here, as often, the true meaning seems for the most part to have been overlooked because men have sought it elsewhere than in the words themselves, and in their place among other words. The thought which precedes and which follows is that Jesus is Himself “the door.” “All that ever came before Me” is in immediate contrast to this thought, and the sense is, “all professing to be themselves the door, to be the means by which men enter the fold, to be the Mediator between man and God.” The Old Testament teachers cannot be meant, because they witnessed to the true door. But there had been growing up since the return from the Captivity, and the close of the Old Testament canon, a priestly caste in the place of the prophetic schools, and these men had been in practice, if not in word, claiming for themselves the position of door to the kingdom of God.
I don’t know about you but that cleared it up for me. This priestly class, claiming to be the door. Abraham, Moses and others all looked to Christ as the door and that is clear scripture. Pride in themselves had corrupted them. Also this was prophesied to happen. (Isaiah 53:3, Luke 22:37) I go back again to John 1. The word was with God and the word was God. All knowing, all powerful, El Shaddai. The creator of all, then as in now. Put your whole trust in Him. Your concerns go to the cross. Know that your daily bread and any other good thing comes from above. Pray to Him daily, hourly is better even still. Repent your sins, live in obedience, and reap the blessings from our loving God.
I leave with little something from William Tyndale, who was a priest, scholar and translator and lived in the early 1500’s. William was, at this time of his life, a tutor to the small children of Sir John and Lady Anne Walsh. The story goes as follows:
Tyndale was engaged in a conversation with a fellow priest concerning the need for the Scriptures to be in the English language. At that time, because of the Oxford Constitutions enacted in the previous century, it was not permissible to own a copy of the Bible in the English language. Tyndale’s companion was not convinced of the need for the Scriptures in English. He is reported to have said that as long as people had the Bishop of Rome’s laws, the Scriptures were not needed.
To this Tyndale replied, “I defy the Pope and all his laws, if God spare my life, I will make a boy that driveth the plough know more of the Scripture than thou dost.”
What’s known as Tyndale’s Ploughboy is this.
Also you see the two things are required to be a Christian man. The first is a steadfast faith and trust in the almighty God, to obtain all Mercy that he hath promised us, through the deserving and merits of Christ’s blood only, without all respect to our own works. And the other is, that we forsake evil and turn to God, to keep his laws and to fight against ourselves and our corrupt nature perpetually, that we may do the will of God every day better and better.
William Tyndale was strangled and burnt at the stake in October 1536 for the heresy of translating the Lord’s words into English so that all might know what God wanted us to know.
Now may the Lord bless you and keep you. May His face shine upon you and give you peace.
For a great understanding into the sabbath laws and do they have any impact on us today:
https://www.gty.org/library/questions/QA135/are-the-sabbath-laws-binding-on-christians-today