22 At that time the Feast of Dedication took place at Jerusalem. It was winter, 23 and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the colonnade of Solomon. 24 So the Jews gathered around Him and said to Him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.” 25 Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me, 26 but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep. 27 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.”
Verse 24 in the ESV tells us that the Jews gathered around Jesus. The NKJV says that the Jews surrounded Him, which is a more accurate translation of the original Greek. So the question they asked Him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly,” was not a polite request. They were demanding that He explain Himself.
It’s interesting that up until this point, Jesus had yet to publicly name Himself as the Messiah. The reason given by most commentators was that many people in Jesus’ day thought that the Christ or Messiah would be a political or military leader who would overthrow the Romans. However, when in private conversation with His disciples and others, Jesus clearly identified Himself as the Messiah. We see one example in John 4, where He has a conversation with the Samaritan woman at Sychar. “The woman said to Him, ‘I know that Messiah is coming (He who is called Christ). When He comes, He will tell us all things.’ Jesus said to her, ‘I who speak to you am He.’” (John 4:25-26)
In John 10, when questioned by the crowd, Jesus responds with one of the central truths about the grace of God by describing our problem of spiritual death. The Bible makes it clear that the fundamental problem sinners have is that we are unable to make the decision to turn from our sin, and the reason is that because we are spiritually dead, we can do nothing to save ourselves.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that there is this popular idea that if there are 100 steps between you and God, He has taken 99 of them, and all you need to do is take the final step towards Him in order to be saved, as if we form some kind of salvation partnership with God. This is not a Biblical teaching for the simple reason that dead men can’t walk. Paul writes in Ephesians 2:1-2, “You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked.” We cannot choose God. He chooses us, and as Jesus continues to use the analogy of Himself as the shepherd of His sheep in chapter 10, He again stresses the Biblical doctrine of election or predestination.
The first point Jesus makes is in verse 25. “I told you, and you do not believe.” He may not have publicly claimed the title of Messiah, but all He said and did made it clear who and what He was. Throughout John’s Gospel He repeatedly claimed that He was both the Son of God and the Son of Man the prophets had spoken about, and there are a number of references we can look at.
John 5:25-27, “Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son also to have life in Himself. And He has given Him authority to execute judgment, because He is the Son of Man.” 6:53, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.” 6:62, “What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where He was before?”
Jesus had referred to Himself as the bread of life and the light of the world. He repeatedly claimed to be sent from heaven, and had taken for Himself the divine name “I am.” This was enough for Jesus’ disciples to believe that He was the Christ, and by saying to the religious authorities in verse 25, “I told you, and you do not believe,” Jesus reveals their spiritual inability to believe. He continues in verses 25 and 26 by saying His works alone should be enough evidence: “The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me, but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep.”
What Jesus says in verse 26 is significant when it comes to understanding the doctrine of election. Notice that Jesus doesn’t say, “Because you don’t believe, you are not among my sheep.” Rather, He says, “You do not believe because you are not among my sheep.” There is a huge difference here. Their unbelief was caused by their not being among His sheep in the first place. Unbelief is not the cause of mankind’s separation from God. Instead, it is the result of that separation. They didn’t believe because their nature was darkened and hardened by their total depravity.
We must remember that salvation comes as a gift of grace from God alone. What this means is that we are not among Jesus’ sheep because we have chosen to believe in Him. God saves us through the gift of faith, as Paul teaches in Ephesians 2:8-9. “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” We believe because we have been saved. We believe because by grace we are among Jesus’ sheep, and this is all because of God’s sovereign mercy.
Because we were born spiritually dead, it was impossible for us to believe until we had been born again, as the Holy Spirit changed our hearts so that we became sheep who hear Jesus’ voice as He calls us to salvation.
And then we come to one of the most beautiful salvific verses, and sadly, one of the most misunderstood verses in the entire Bible. “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” (John 10:27)
Firstly, we need to look at what this verse does not mean. Who knows how many books have been written and how many sermons have been preached teaching that as Christians we are able to hear the voice of God through inner promptings and the so-called “still small voice.” This teaching comes from making 1 Kings 19:13 say what it does not say. Depending on which English translation you read, we are told in this verse that Elijah heard “a still small voice, the sound of a low whisper, a soft whisper, a sound of a gentle blowing, or a gentle whisper.” This was an external voice which Elijah heard. It was not an inner voice. He did not have to “tune in to hear God’s frequency,” yet an entire theology has been built on the way this verse has been so badly mangled by those who teach that God speaks to us through some mysterious inner voice.
Jim Osman writes in his book “God Doesn’t Whisper” that “1 Kings 19:13 has been so successfully hijacked and inserted into modern vernacular that most Christians probably believe it describes God’s normal means of communicating with His people.”
You often hear people saying that we can learn to recognise the voice of God. Osman continues by saying, “We don’t ever read of any one person ‘learning to recognise God’s voice.’ Scripture doesn’t teach this.”
It must be said that this does not mean that God will never speak to Christians audibly. He is sovereign, and He can do whatever He pleases, but if He were ever to speak to you, you will never need to ask, “Lord, is that you? Is it your voice I can hear?” If God speaks to you, you will know beyond any shadow of doubt!
How does God speak to us today? Hebrews 1:1-2 has the answer. “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed the heir of all things, through whom also He created the world.” God speaks to us through His Son, through the Word of God, revealed to us in the pages of Scripture. His primary means of speaking to His people today is through the Bible.
So what does John 10:27 really mean? “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.”
In this verse, Jesus teaches us how He calls His elect to salvation.
The Bible teacher Justin Peters has a wonderful way of explaining this verse. He says, “Before your conversion you and I are lost sheep, out there in the pasture of life and we’ve got our heads down and we’re minding our own business, but all of a sudden we hear a voice. We hear a voice and we perk our heads up and we see the shepherd and we go to Him. We go to Him in salvation when Jesus the Good Shepherd calls His sheep.”
The voice he is talking about here is very different to the voice Elijah heard in 1 Kings 19, but more on that in a moment.
It is because we are His sheep that we hear Jesus’ voice and follow Him. Now of course, we must believe in order to be saved, but our salvation does not depend on our faith, but rather on God’s grace. As God draws us to Himself, He gives us the gift of faith in order to believe in Him. This is an important point. We do not have the faith within us to believe. Rather, God grants us the gift of faith.
Salvation by grace means that God’s elect receive eternal life as a free gift from God. As Jesus says in verse 28, “I give them eternal life.” What this means is that before being saved, we do not have eternal life. We are born spiritually dead, and because of this we are not able to believe until we are first born again, as Jesus said to Nicodemus in 3:3. “Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Salvation is not something we earn or attain. It is a free gift given to us by the grace of God. God is not obliged to save us, but out of His grace He gives eternal life. James Montgomery Boice wrote, “If it were earned, it would be wages; if it were merited, it would be a reward. But eternal life is neither of these. It is a gift, which means that it originates solely in God’s good will toward men.”
We cannot earn salvation, we cannot buy it, and we have no right to salvation, yet we can receive it from Jesus as a free and unmerited gift of God’s grace. We have looked at the concept of the doctrine of election or predestination before, and I know that it remains a stumbling block for many, yet it is clearly taught in Scripture. Jesus’ words in John 10:27-29 spell it out very plainly: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.”
The “voice” Jesus talks about here is not what some believe to be the “still small voice” similar to what Elijah heard. It is what is known as God’s effectual calling. When God called the world into being, His desired effect of creation happened. We will be looking at the story of Lazarus in a couple of weeks. He was dead, but when Jesus called Lazarus out of his tomb, Lazarus responded with life.
So how does the effectual call of God work in the life of Christians? Just as God called creation into being, the effectual calling of God’s elect, “His sheep” as Jesus refers to Christians in John 10, is related to the power of God in regenerating the sinner from spiritual death. It is also called God’s irresistible grace.
Effectual calling is a call of God that by His sovereign power and authority brings about His designed and ordained effect, or result. Paul writes in Romans 8:28-30, “We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose. For those whom He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, in order that He might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom He predestined He also called, and those whom He called He also justified, and those whom He justified He also glorified.” Paul is referring to the effectual call of God here, just as Jesus is in John 10:27-29.
The effectual call of God is not an audible voice, but an inward call or prompting, in that it brings about a regeneration of the desire of the soul. We must remember that in our natural, fallen state, we have no desire for God. Romans 3:10-12 says, “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”
This means that before the inward effectual call of God is heard, before Jesus calls His sheep, no one is inclined toward God. But once the call comes and we hear His voice, our hearts are now inclined toward to God as we respond to Him in faith, and that faith to respond is itself a gift from God.
The effectual call of God is how we are given the gift of eternal life. It is something that God does in its entirety. He takes all 100 steps in bring His sheep to salvation.
Paul explains it all in Ephesians 2:1-5. “You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience - among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.”
We who were once children of wrath and were spiritually dead have been made alive in Christ as we respond to the effectual call of God. Jesus then makes this wonderful promise in verses 28 and 29. “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.”
This is the security of eternal life which we are promised. Those who truly belong to Christ not only possess eternal life, but also have the blessing of knowing that they can never lose it. By its very definition, eternal life cannot be lost. As everlasting life, it lasts forever. You cannot lose a life that is eternal.
Remember, eternal life is a gift from God, and since God cannot change, His gifts cannot be revoked. Paul wrote in Romans 11:29, “The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”
When Jesus says that no one can snatch us from His hand or the hand of the Father, He means what He says.
We read Romans 8:28-30 earlier, but in order to fully appreciate the wonderful truth of these words, we need to continue through to the end of the chapter.
“We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose. For those whom He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, in order that He might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom He predestined He also called, and those whom He called He also justified, and those whom He justified He also glorified. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died - more than that, who was raised - who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
In this passage, the effectual calling and eternal security of God’s elect is clearly spelled out. Our eternal security is based on God’s love for those whom He has redeemed. Our eternal security is purchased by Christ, it is promised by the Father, and it is sealed by the Holy Spirit. No one and nothing can snatch you out of the Father’s hand.
Homegroup Study Notes
Read John 10:22-29
When this passage is read in its entirety, it is very clear that Jesus was talking about eternal salvation and security, rather than the idea that as Christians we should be able to “hear the voice of God” for daily guidance.
Discuss this quote by Jim Osman in your group: “1 Kings 19:13 has been so successfully hijacked and inserted into modern vernacular that most Christians probably believe it describes God’s normal means of communicating with His people.”
What are the dangers of taking individual verses like verse 27 out of context in order to change their true meaning?
What other examples can you think of?
How would you respond if a fellow believer said to you, “God told me to tell you…?”
Read Romans 8:28-39
What is your understanding of the effectual call of God, or what is sometimes known as God’s irresistible grace?
Discuss the assurance of salvation and eternal security we see in John 10:28-29.
How can we know these promises for ourselves?