I and the Father Are One, Part 2 B

This is the claim of Christianity. All the fullness of deity dwells in Him in bodily form. He is God. And that is why when He speaks, He speaks with such authority. People in our world don't want to hear anybody speak with authority, especially the Lord Jesus Christ with the standards that He has. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Robert Louis Stevenson said, People have a grand memory for forgetting. And he's certainly right.

It's easy to forget. That's why reminders are so important, especially when it comes to truths about the person of Christ. So stay here as John continues his series on the Bible's central character. John has titled our study, Rediscovering the Christ of Scripture. And now, before the lesson, John, as of last month, Grace to You has been around for 52 years, and you are as energized about studying and preaching God's Word as ever, maybe more so. So let me simply ask, what is it that keeps you so engaged in the work of Bible teaching ministry? I think, first of all, it's the inexhaustibility of Scripture.

Yes, I've studied the Bible pretty intensely for almost 75 years, three-quarters of a century. And it never, ever grows old. It is literally a mind that you just keep digging down and digging down, and it just yields up more and more and more riches. You know, its divine character creates this inexhaustible reality of truth. And no matter how much I study, even the same passage, there's a freshness every time as new truth becomes apparent and obvious to me. The second thing that energizes me is that the world continues to need to hear the message.

But we're looking at a world today that I would say, in my lifetime, is in the most desperate condition. There are more atheists in America than there have ever been. There are more unbelievers in America than there have ever been. There's more anti-Christianity in America than there's ever been. That means there are more people who are alienated from the gospel than there have ever been in our culture.

It's out of the public mind. And yet what we're seeing as a result of that is just the total, complete collapse of society in a moral free fall. So both the character of Scripture compels me, and the power of Scripture is the only answer. What do we say to this generation? You always hear people asking nowadays, you know, how do we fix this country? What do we do to fix this nation?

Well, there's only one answer to that question. That is, you don't fix a nation. You advance the gospel one soul at a time, and God transforms individuals.

Politics isn't going to fix a nation. Only Christ is going to do that. And the Word of God gives us the view of everything from God's perspective. So our time is needed, and the inexhaustible glory of Scripture compels me. If this ministry has meant something to you by opening the Word of God the way we have for all these years, we would love to hear from you, and, you know, we want you to think about and pray about supporting us as we spread the word of the gospel across the world. Yes, friend, this ministry would not exist without your generosity. We've heard countless testimonies of lives being changed by John's verse-by-verse Bible teaching.

We've been able to reach those people because friends like you stand with us. If you'd like to partner with us in this Bible teaching ministry, go to gty.org, but wait until after the lesson. Now, stay tuned as John MacArthur continues his study, Rediscovering the Christ of Scripture.

Turn to the 10th chapter of the gospel of John, John chapter 10. I want you to go back to verse 26, and let's pick that up for a few moments. But you do not believe.

That's where we end it. But you do not believe. Then verse 26 says this, because you are not of My sheep.

What a statement. That's the divine side. You don't believe, and you're fully culpable for that unbelief, and you will be held responsible eternally for that unbelief, and you will receive a just punishment for that unbelief. But the divine side is you don't believe because you are not of My sheep. Really a stunning statement.

You don't belong to Me. Back up into chapter 10 to verse 4. Remember the paroimia, the analogy, the metaphor symbol e, the metaphor symbol e, word picture of the shepherd? Verse 4, when he puts forth all his own sheep, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. Well, that's true of shepherds. We saw that when a shepherd goes into a fold in the morning, the sheep have been held there. The village sheep, there are many shepherds who put all their sheep together collectively in one fold overnight and in the morning come and get their own sheep, and each sheep knows the voice of his own master.

That was something they were familiar with. But to what does that refer? Go down to verse 14. I am the good shepherd, and I know my own, and my own know Me. I know my own, and my own know Me, and you're not of My sheep.

How do we know they're not his sheep? Because back in chapter 8 and verse 43, Jesus says, Why do you not understand what I'm saying? It's because you cannot hear My word. You can't hear Me. You don't know My voice.

Why? Because you're of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, does not stand in the truth because there's no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he's a liar and the father of lies. But because I speak the truth, you do not believe Me. Verse 47, He who is of God hears the words of God. For this reason, you do not hear them because you are not of God. Another way to say you're not My sheep. That's a stunning statement.

You're not My sheep. We started to see this sovereign purpose of God in salvation very early in the gospel of John. Back in chapter 3, when Jesus is talking to Nicodemus, and Nicodemus has this question about eternal life and how that's going to happen, and Jesus explains to him that it's a supernatural, heavenly miracle.

Heaven has to come down and make that happen. It is like a birth. It's a creation, and nobody can create himself. And so the question arises, well, how does that happen? And Jesus says this, the Holy Spirit comes and goes as He wills. It's not at your discretion.

It's at His discretion. These are profound realities, and look, I believe fully in the sinner's responsibility to repent and believe, but I believe as well fully in the sovereign purpose of God who has chosen His sheep, knows His sheep, calls His sheep. They hear Him.

They come. Christ receives them and keeps them and raises them. I confess that I have never been able to comfortably harmonize those two realities, but I will not destroy either by coming up with some bizarre, humanly devised middle ground. The people who crucified Jesus were fully responsible for doing that.

They were judged for doing that, condemned for doing that, and yet Peter in his sermon on the Day of Pentecost said that whole act was done by the predetermined counsel and foreknowledge of God. And again, I don't know how all that works together. It seems to me to have elements of contradiction, but God is not contradictory to Himself.

That's an impossibility. So I chalk it up to my feeble mind. Verse 27, He says, My sheep hear My voice, and I know them and they follow Me, and I give eternal life to them, 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. That is so airtight and absolute that there's just no escaping the reality of that chain of sovereign purpose and divine intention. My sheep hear My voice.

You don't hear Me because you're not My sheep. This is for the comfort of the Redeemer. Amazing. This is the end of the line for Him.

He's done virtually three years of ministry. This is where it ends. You do what you do by the power of hell, not heaven. He says, You don't believe. You don't believe.

You don't believe. You'll die in your sins because you don't believe. And then He backs into His own place of comfort by saying, But you're not My sheep because My sheep hear My voice, and I know them.

And as we saw earlier in chapter 10, they will not follow a stranger. They follow Me, and I give them eternal life, and it is eternal. They will never perish, and no one will ever take them out of My hand or My Father's hand. This is essentially the grand overview of divine sovereign salvation. God chooses, draws, holds, raises, and nobody's lost in the process. My sheep hear My voice. True sheep are eager to hear the Master's voice. Go back for a moment to verse 3.

To the shepherd, the doorkeeper opens, the porter, the guy who kind of watched the flock at night, and the sheep hear His voice, and He calls His own sheep by name and leads them out. Verse 4, as we read, they follow Him. Verse 5, a stranger, they simply will not follow, but will flee from Him because they do not know the voice of strangers. The sheep who belong to God will never follow a stranger.

They'll never follow a false teacher. They'll follow the voice of their Master. This is where our Lord found His encouragement. If one is chosen to be a sheep, if one is designed to be a love gift from the Father to the Son, to love and serve Him forever in eternal glory, He is secure in that...listen...choice. He is secured in that choice, which is then worked out in redemptive history. Eternal life is eternal.

Does that seem like a stretch? People say, can you lose your salvation? What kind of life is it? Temporary life?

Temporal life? It's eternal life. And just in case that's confusing, Jesus says, and they will never perish. So you have a positive, I give them eternal life, and a negative, and they will never perish.

Never. To perish is to be separated from eternal life into eternal death. No one will be separated from eternal life who possesses it.

No one. All that the Father gives Him, He will come to Me. All who come to Me, I receive.

I don't turn any away. I raise them all to glory. Your eternal salvation rests in God's eternal decree. You will live forever because God chose you to live forever. You will never perish because God designed salvation that way, to give to you a salvation that is eternal that is literally born along by a faith that cannot die. Somebody will say, well, okay, it's eternal life. Okay, they will never perish. But somebody might come along, somebody might come along and grab them.

Oh, really? No one will snatch them out of My hand. No one. My Father who has given them to Me.

I don't have time to go back over all that. Do you understand that every saved person is a love gift from the Father to the Son, every single one? And that the reason you're a believer is because God chose you before the foundation of the world, wrote your name down in a book, to be a love gift to His Son, a part of the composite bride that the Father sought in this world to redeem and give to His Son, to bring Him to glory for a wedding and a wedding feast and a bridal city to live forever to honor and glorify the bridegroom.

The whole of redemptive history is God gathering a bride for His Son. My Father who has given them to Me is greater than all. Who's going to snatch them?

Who's it going to be? There's no one greater than God, no one. So, no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand. My hand, in verse 28, My hand becomes My Father's hand in verse 29. If you question My ability to hold My sheep, then you question My Father's ability to hold His sheep. Sacrilegious violence may nail My hands to a cross. The sword will smite the shepherd, but none can outwit, surprise, or conquer My Father. And so, none can affect the security of the sheep. In John 17, Jesus prays that while He goes through the horrors of separation from God, that the Father would keep the sheep.

Keep them, He says. There is no stronger passage in the Word of God guaranteeing the absolute security of every true child of God. If we just kind of spread it out a little bit, we are secure because we are chosen by God for His flock. We are God's sheep. Christ is our shepherd, and His duty is to receive us, to care for us, to protect us, to feed us, and to suggest that He can't fulfill that is to blaspheme the good shepherd and to blaspheme the ultimate shepherd, who is God Himself, because they do this together. We are secure because we follow Christ.

No exceptions. We don't follow strangers. When you see somebody who was around for a while, then they disappear.

It's 1 John 2 19. They went out from us because they were not of us. If they had been of us, they would have continued with us.

But they went out from us that it might be made manifest they never were of us. We are secure because we have been given eternal life. To say it has an end is a contradiction in terms and makes nonsense out of the promise. We are secure because eternal life is given. It's given.

I give eternal life. We didn't merit it. We can't forfeit it.

We didn't do anything to receive it. We can't do anything to forfeit it. The Lord Himself declares they will never perish. No one who is a sheep of His will ever go to hell. And if they do, Christ is a liar, and if Christ is a liar, then we're all on our way to hell. We're secure because we're doubly held by the Father's hand and the Son's hand, and no one approaches their power. I mean, that's the whole point of Romans 8, isn't it? Who shall separate us from the love of God and Christ? Nothing.

No one. Christ and God hold us together. If one soul who belongs to Christ should be missing in heaven, if there's one vacant room in the Father's house, if there's one unused crown, then God is not God. It is this very statement that He and the Father are in perfect harmony, in agreement, in power and purpose, in securing His sheep that gives Jesus another opportunity to declare who He is. And in verse 30, the claim comes with strength. I and the Father are one.

He transitions from just showing how they are one in the securing of the redeemed, the elect, and now He makes the statement in an unmistakable fashion. We have equal sovereignty, equal love, equal divine power to secure the sheep because we are equal, because we are one in essence. In the 17th chapter, verse 10, Jesus speaking to the Father in that prayer said, all things that are mine are yours, and yours are mine. All the sheep that belong to the Father belong to the Son.

We share it all. Verse 20, I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those who believe in Me through their word, that they may all be one, even as you, Father, are in Me and I in you, that they may be in us so that the world may believe that you sent Me. The glory which you have given Me, I have given to them that they may be one just as we are one. What it's saying is that the unity that Christ has with the Father is a unity of essence that is divine, supernatural, eternal, and holy. And we will, as glorified humans, not becoming God, but glorified humans, share in that reality. That's what Scripture means when it says we'll be like Christ, for we'll see Him as He is. We'll be conformed to His image. So when our Lord says, I and the Father are one, He's talking about the essential nature. I mean, you have to understand, they're looking in the face of a Galilean carpenter. Pretty staggering claim.

You'd have to have a ton of verification, and they just had three years of it. The apostle Paul in Colossians says, see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception. According to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. Don't be wrong about Christ.

Don't let any professor, or any writer, or any pundit, or any philosopher confuse you. All the fullness of deity dwells in Him in bodily form. All the fullness of deity dwells in Him in bodily form. He is God. This is the claim of Christianity, and that is why when He speaks, He speaks with such authority. People in our world don't want to hear anybody speak with authority, especially the Lord Jesus Christ with the standards that He has. That was all they could take, verse 31.

The Jews picked up stones again to stone Him again. There they are at that lowest level of conflict. This is the lowest level. So low, you can't make an argument. You can't make a case.

You can't even think about it. You just want to kill your opponent. Chapter 5, verse 17, Jesus says, My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working. I do what the Father does when the Father does it. I don't pay any more attention to your Sabbath laws than God does. For this reason, the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him because He was not only breaking the Sabbath, but He was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God.

That's all the way back months earlier. Months and months earlier, they knew exactly what He was saying. He was claiming to be God. Chapter 7, verse 1, After these things Jesus was walking in Galilee. He was unwilling to walk in Judea because the Jews were seeking to kill Him. Chapter 8, verse 59, He had just declared that before Abraham was, I am. Therefore, they picked up stones to throw at Him, but Jesus hid Himself and went out of the temple.

Now we have the fourth attempt to kill Him in verse 31, and there will be a subsequent effort down in verse 39. By the way, the temple was always under construction, and so there were lots of rocks lying around. And it is true that according to John 18, 31, the Romans took away from the Jews the capital punishment.

The Romans maintained the right to take a life, but this was not some form of jurisprudence. This was not some legal procedure. This was vengeance and anger by a religious mob, and if they could have, they would have killed Him on the spot. But why such hostility? I think Jesus gave us the clue. Go back to John 7. His brothers, not any of them were believing in Him. So Jesus said to them, my time is not yet here, but your time is always opportune. The world cannot hate you.

Why? They're not believers. They're not believers. This would have been true of the disciples as well who did believe, but didn't yet really confront in preaching, but you're part of it. He says to His unbelieving brothers, but it hates Me.

Why? Because I offer heaven, because I offer eternal life, because I offer eternal joy. No, because I testify of it that its deeds are evil. That is the direct path to persecution. I don't think anybody has ever been persecuted in the name of Christianity for offering people heaven.

I don't think so. I don't think people get persecuted for telling people that Jesus loves them and wants to forgive their sins, which is what people say. I don't think anybody's ever been persecuted for saying God has a purpose for your life, then why don't you find out what the purpose is? Any sentimental approach to preaching Jesus will avoid persecution, but when you tell sinners that their deeds are evil and damning, you will receive persecution. So, the confrontation is a hypocritical inquiry.

Why don't you tell us who you really are? The claim is an unmistakable, clear claim to deity, and they react like a mob wanting to crush out His life, but He stops them because His time is not yet and because He will not die that way, and He confronts the real blasphemers. Lord, we thank You that You have chosen us to be Your sheep. You have called us by name. You have enabled us by the Holy Spirit to hear Your voice and follow You and never follow a stranger. We thank You that You lead us to green pastures and still waters. You provide for us. You protect us.

You secure us. You bring us to the flourishing joys of the everlasting kingdom. We thank You that all of this is possible because the Shepherd gave His life for the sheep.

The Good Shepherd gave His life for the sheep. You're listening to Grace to You with the verse-by-verse Bible teaching of John MacArthur. Today's lesson is part of John's series, Rediscovering the Christ of Scripture. Now, going back to what John talked about before the lesson, Grace to You is committed to strengthening believers and reaching the lost through the faithful preaching of God's Word. If you'd like to be a part of that vital ministry, consider making a donation when you contact us today. You can mail your tax-deductible donation to Grace to You, Box 4000, Panorama City, California, 91412. You can also express your support online at GTY.org, or you can call us at 800-55-GRACE.

And thank you for standing with us, especially for praying for us. Again, to make a donation, call 800-55-GRACE or go to GTY.org. And remember, at GTY.org you'll find thousands of free Bible study resources. If there's a passage in the New Testament that has always confused you, John has a sermon on it. You can check out our blog. You'll find articles on compelling topics like glorifying God in the gray areas of life, or the doctrine of election, moral purity, and all kinds of subjects. And if you've benefited from John's current radio series, let a friend know and encourage him or her to tune in to Grace to You on this station. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson, encouraging you to watch Grace to You television this Sunday and be here tomorrow when John continues his study, Rediscovering the Christ of Scripture, with another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace to You.