The Gospel of John

Hearing His Voice

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 32- 70

Genre:

Track: 032

Dictation Name: RR197S34

Location/Venue:

Year:

Let us worship God. One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after. That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to enquire in His temple. Wait on the Lord, be of good courage and He shall strengthen Thy heart. Wait I say, on the Lord. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God unto whom all the ends of the earth shall come. We thank Thee that Thou art the judge of all things, the creator, the redeemer, the savior. And so our Father we come into Thy presence again to cast our every care upon Thee. We know Thou carest for us. Do Thou undertake for us against all enemies, against all evils, and make us victorious in the face of the ungodly. We thank Thee that our times are in Thy hands and in this confidence we come crying Abba, Father, Thou art our shield and defender. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture si from the gospel of John the tenth chapter, verses one through six. Our subject: Hearing His Voice. John 10:1-6.

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.

2 But he that entereth in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep.

3 To him the porter openeth; and the sheep hear his voice: and he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out.

4 And when he putteth forth his own sheep, he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him: for they know his voice.

5 And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him: for they know not the voice of strangers.

6 This parable spake Jesus unto them: but they understood not what things they were which he spake unto them.”

We come now to a section of John wherefore a time we are taken apart from the unrelenting conflict between Jesus and the religious leaders. Their attempts to find some excuse to kill Him. Here He talks to the disciples and what He has to say is of very, very great interest but not immediately apparent in its meaning to us because we are an urban people overwhelmingly. When we are not urban we are a ranching or a farming people and sheep have become a minor part in our culture. So much of the Bible is a closed book to us because we are unfamiliar in many cases in its use of rural images, especially concerning sheep. Sheep are not highly regarded by cattlemen and there is a reason for that, sheep have their liabilities. First sheep are dirty and smelly. They are not the lovely little things that you see portrayed on magazine covers, little lambs freshly cleaned gambling about on the grass. Their wool catches pebbles, twigs and dirt and usually becomes quite filthy if they are pastured in the hills and mountains. Sheep cannot clean themselves, they stink. We are called sheep because like them we cannot clean ourselves of our sins and offenses. Then sheep, second, lack the intelligence to be free. If you are in mountain country with sheep the last thing that the shepherd wants to see is a trail because the minute the sheep see a trail they’ll hit and start going endlessly. The grass may be lovely on both sides but they are on a trail so they just move along.

They will do this even if the trail leads over a cliff, they’ll go to the edge and then they’ll push each other because they’re going to go on the trail. Sheep in other words need a shepherd, someone to care for them and lead them and so do we. That’s the point of the analogy. God in calling us sheep is not paying us a compliment and when we say the Lord is my shepherd we are acknowledging the facts of life. Then third sheep are defenseless. They need to be protected or predatory animals will kill them at will. We need God’s shepherding care to avoid destruction. Fourth sheep are not only dirty, also not intelligent, nor capable of defending themselves but they are also great complainers. They are constantly complaining. If you go by a few penned sheep who have been well fed they will bleat at the sight of you or sound of you for more. They are always bleating because they want you to do something for them. In verses one through five we have a clear account of the life of shepherd and sheep. My father’s experience as a boy echoes these verses. In the summer or beginning in the spring as soon as grass was available but not too green the sheep were parceled out to the young boys in the family or clan, a few to each boy, half a dozen or so. At night the sheep were either taken to the nearest stone corral or to the home base if they were close enough. The stone corral was built high enough to keep out predatory animals. The entry way was only wide enough for the sheep to enter and for the shepherd to unfold his bed roll length wise in the door way.

The porter was the man in charge of the boy shepherds. David very early was such a shepherd. The boy shepherds called their little bands, six or more sheep by the names they gave them. The sheep quickly learned the shepherd’s voice, they recognized their own name. If its boys who have a little band to take care of so that each one of the sheep responds to the shepherd’s voice and to the name given them. The boy shepherds would enjoy calling the sheep by name and the lambs were very playful companions. The sheep therefore followed their shepherd because they knew his voice, they would not respond to the voice of a stranger or a thief. The bible repeatedly speaks of God as our shepherd, as witness Psalm 23 and other passages in the Old and New Testaments. When Jesus declared Himself to be the good shepherd which He does several times it is also to reveal that He is God incarnate because one of the most ancient images or names for God was the good shepherd. Pagan rulers often spoke of themselves as their people’s shepherd, they thereby asserted that they were gods and rulers over their people. In J. Campbell Morgan’s words:

“The shepherd always represented kingship, full and final authority. It was homer who said all kings are shepherds of the people, that saying embodies the eastern idea. The shepherd is the king, the king is the shepherd and his authority is based upon his care for the sheep.” Unquote.

In John 10:1-18 of which our text is the first six verses our Lord states very clearly that He is the good shepherd. That His status is given to Him by God, His Father. He is thus both king and God. In our text there is a stress on the shepherd’s voice and the thief’s voice.

According to Paul E. Kretzmann actual tests have demonstrated that the sheep do not follow the shepherd’s scent nor his clothes nor his dog, only his voice. The implications are clear: the faithful sheep, the true members of Jesus Christ follow the called under shepherds of Christ who faithfully proclaim the shepherd’s word while those who are not of Christ will follow the hirelings. In our time in countries like Australia and the United States men have sheep by the hundreds and thousands and they are unfamiliar with the sheep as were the shepherds of the near East or of Scotland in much of its history including today the parable tells us that if men do not have Christ as their shepherd they will have thieves and murderers as their shepherd. We are also told that the false shepherds use devious means. We are not given any shades of grey between the good shepherd and the thieves. Men are either Christ’s under-shepherds or pastors or they are the devils. The word pastor can mean shepherd in Latin and it comes from the verb meaning to feed. No man is a pastor under Christ who does not feed people from the word of God. Now there is an important point here around a word and not all translations have the translation accurately because translators are scholars and they don’t know much about sheep. A fold of sheep is a number of sheep under one shepherd or with one boy like David when he was young or my father. A flock is the totality of all the sheep under their great shepherd. A church is thus a fold, the flock will be all the faithful.

The bluntness of the gospels, their plain speaking is very much in evident in John’s gospel. The Christian is plainly defined as one who hears Christ’s voice. In verses two to five we have the repeated statement that the true sheep hear His voice. This means that they do not quibble over God’s word, they accept it as it is. They do not regard certain texts as not meaning what they say nor do they bypass certain doctrines because they dislike them. His sheep hear His voice. Their authority is not their own verdict concerning God’s word but God’s word as it is. We are told that the only true approach to the sheep is through the shepherd who is the door and Jesus Christ declares that He is the door because there is no way in to the sheep corral except over His body. He is our protector. We have in this county or in this area, three such stone corrals, modified in recent years for use by cattle but used in the early days for sheep and the shepherd would roll out his bedroll in the doorway and no coyote, wolf, mountain lion, or bear could get in except over their body. There is one perhaps you’ve seen it as you’re going towards [unknown] on your right out of Senora, maybe five six miles. There’s another on Highway 59J about five miles as you go towards [unknown]. Well saying that there is only one way to the sheep that was legitimate was certainly a provocative statement by our Lord. Because the religious leaders held that the only true shepherd was God alone, not Jesus Christ, and no one else had a right to interpret God except themselves.

They had the keys to the kingdom which meant the power to interpret God’s word. This statement therefore no doubt reported to them very early because our Lord made it so often only strengthened their resolve to kill Him. To say that those who harkened to His voice were the only true sheep of God was a further affront since the leader’s rejected our Lord. This denied to the religious leaders the status they claimed, namely that they were the true and elite people of God. Our Lord makes clear that God’s true people hear and recognize His voice in Him, Jesus. J.H.C. McGregor commented and I quote:

“Sir George Adam Smith gives a good illustration. Sometimes we enjoyed our noonday rest while in the holy land, a century ago, beside one of these Judean wells to which three or four shepherds came down with their flocks. The flocks mixed with each other and we wondered how each shepherd would get his own again, but after the watering and the playing were over the shepherds one by one went up different sides of the valley and each called out his peculiar call and the sheep of each drew out of the crowd to their own shepherd and the flocks passed away as orderly as they came. They will not follow a stranger, they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers. Plumber tells the story of the Scottish traveler who changed clothes with a Jerusalem shepherd and tried to lead the sheep but the sheep followed the shepherd’s voice and not his clothes.” Unquote.

Thus the point is an emphatic one: all hearing are governed by a moral factor. We either hear His voice or we are not His people, the sheep of His pasture. In this matter ignorance is no excuse. If we examine our own past we can recognize the times when however respectful we were became aware that we were not hearing our shepherd’s voice. Men want to reduce everything to an intellectual or an emotional basis. To reasoning or to feeling. We are told that Christ’s sheep hear His voice, not that of a thief or hireling. We cannot excuse people on the ground that they failed to grasp the intellectual content of a false gospel properly. The critical component in all decisions is the moral judgment. Our decisions reveal our character. In this parable our Lord denies implicitly to all who follow false shepherds the validity of their excuses. The voice they harken to was the voice of a false shepherd or a wolf. They revealed by their decision what they were, wolves in sheep’s clothing. Now in the verses that follow these six our Lord will deal with the hirelings, the wolves, the various problems that sheep face if they stray from the fold. And again in very, very telling and homely language He drives home points that are unforgettable. The bible used the language of the countryside, of sheep, of farmers and the like. Now there were great cities in the times that some of the bible was written, certainly the two great eras of urban development and of the concentration of population in cities was our Lord’s day when He was saying these words and our time.

After all, the records indicate that Jerusalem although modernists are always disagreeing with everything had a population of two million easily at the time of the Jewish-Roman War because of the many pilgrims who were there. Rome was a vast metropolitan complex of millions, it reached a point in the so-called dark ages of five hundred people which tells you what can happen. So our Lord was speaking at a time when a knowledge of farm life and of sheep and of the like was somewhat dim to all so as it is in our time. But the bible speaks in a kind of basic language, therefore our Lord falls back on the image of ancient times, shepherd and sheep, because here we have something that does not change and when explained immediately is understandable to all. This is the language of scripture. Let us pray.

Our Father we thank Thee for this Thy word. We thank Thee that our Lord spoke in such elemental language so that those who will hear His voice will know unmistakably that He is the Lord. Our God and our Redeemer. Make us joyful in His word, ever eager to hear and to grow and to know the greatness of His providential care. Our Father we thank Thee, in Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Unintelligible Question]

[Rushdoony] Yes. So many of these false leaders were so unmistakably false you had to say there was one reason why people followed them, they were following their own kind, being evil they followed after evil. Any other questions or comments?

I hope this makes it understandable to you the greatness of David and his truly godly inspiration when he wrote the twenty third Psalm, the Lord is my shepherd. That was in effect a confession as well as an expression of his faith. Because when we acknowledge ourselves to be sheep we are saying we are sinners, w are not the strong people we think we are, we are frail we are faulty. If I may take just a minute or two more to go into the implications of what David said because it is so closely related to our text: he said because he follows the shepherd I shall not want, he leadeth me beside the still waters, in green pastures, through the valley of the shadow of death. So he says I will fear no evil because he is leading me. But then there’s a shift in the imagery of the song. A very dramatic shift. From being a sheep led by the shepherd suddenly David describes himself as in the presence of mine enemies. And what happens there in the presence of all his enemies ready to destroy him? Thou prepares a table before me, my cup runneth over. Right in the presence of enemies who are out to destroy him God prepares a banquet table. That’s a figure of supreme confidence and then my cup runneth over.

Well we still have that on television when a team wins a championship or something and they take the champagne and pour it over each other. The idea of exuberance, super abundance. In the presence of mine enemies surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. It is a beautiful image, it begins by being something of an insulting one because God tells us what we are. But then it becomes a beautiful one because it sets forth His marvelous care. Well, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father we thank Thee that we are the sheep of Thy pasture. We thank Thee that Thou dost lead us through the very shadow of the valley of death. Through places wonderful and difficult Thou art ever there. Make us ever thankful so that we may know that we need not fear. Though the mountains shake and tremble, though the nations be shattered and failing, for Thou the Lord of Hosts are with us. Thou art our refuge and our strength. And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, Amen.