If you would please turn within your Bibles to the book of Ezekiel, chapter 34, beginning at verse 17. Ezekiel writes, ‘As for you, my flock, thus says the Lord God, behold, I judge between sheep and sheep, between rams and male goats. Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture that you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture, and to drink of clear water? That you must muddy the rest of the water with your feet? And must my sheep eat what you have trotten with your feet, and drink what you have muddied with your feet? Therefore, thus says the Lord God to them, ‘Behold, I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep, because you push with side and shoulder and thrust at all the weak with your horns till you have scattered them abroad. I will rescue my flock. They shall no longer be a prey, and I will judge between sheep and sheep. And I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them. He shall feed them and be their shepherd. And I, the Lord, will be their God. And my servant David shall be prince among them. I am the Lord. I have spoken.
And I will make with them a covenant of peace and banish wild beasts from the land so that they may dwell securely in the wilderness and sleep in the woods. And I will make them and the places all around my hill a blessing. And I will send down the showers in their season, and they shall be showers of blessing. And the trees of the field shall yield their fruit, and the earth shall yield its increase, and they shall be secure in their land, and they shall know that I am the Lord. When I break the bars of their yoke, and deliver them from the hand of those who enslave them, they shall no more be a prey to the nations, nor shall the beasts of the land devour them. They shall dwell securely, and none shall make them afraid. And I will provide for them renowned plantations so that they shall no more be consumed with hunger in the land, and no longer suffer the reproach of the nations. And they shall know that I am the Lord their God with them, and that they, the house of Israel, are my people, declares the Lord God. And you are my sheep, human sheep of my pasture, and I am your God, declares the Lord God.
From there, we return to John chapter 10, beginning at verse 11. Jesus is again speaking: ‘I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees. And the wolf snatches them and scatters them. He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me. Just as the Father knows me and I know the Father and I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice, so there will be one flock, one shepherd. For this reason, the Father loves me because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father.’
There was again a division among the Jews because of these words. Many of them said, ‘He has a demon and is insane. Why listen to him?’ Others said, ‘These are not the words of one who is oppressed by a demon. Can a demon open the eyes of the blind?’
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, you are the one who opened the eyes of our hearts to see you, to know you. You are the one who fills us with love for you. Open our ears to hear you speak. Make us joyful and glad to see your face and to receive and hear your promises. We pray all these things in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Jesus Christ is the good shepherd. He is our good shepherd. Christians, everyone who trusts in Jesus for their salvation by faith alone, everyone who willingly and obediently submits to his sovereign authority as the Lord, and everyone who loves the Jesus that is revealed by scripture are Jesus’s sheep. We are his flock and he is gathering us to himself to dwell within the security of his pasture. He intimately knows us. He knows everything about us, about who we are, about all of our hopes and all of our dreams.
While we also know him and we may recognize him because of how he has revealed himself to us through sacred scripture, through the written revelation that his Holy Spirit confirms within every Christian’s heart, therefore, we can believe and understand that Jesus knows his own and his own know him. Just as God the Father knows God the Son and the Son knows the Father, Jesus’s sheep know him. We recognize him for who he is and we appreciate our relationship with him as our good shepherd.
We know that he loves us and we understand that that is why we love him in response. We believe and trust that because he has laid down his life in our defense that his love is truly honest and real. A love of the highest quality and the greatest capacity, infinite and unchanging. We know that he is our provider and our rescuer, facts that we are and should be wholly and entirely grateful for.
But there are questions, questions of substance that still remained for each of Jesus’s sheep to more rightly understand. How may I know that Jesus Christ truly is my shepherd? How may I know that the shepherds I am following, that the shepherd I follow is the true Jesus? Unfortunately, the answer to that first question is somewhat difficult to answer. It is challenging because it is entirely subjective and utterly absolute. It is a matter of knowing it surely and certainly for Christians today.
Our knowing is a matter of simple faith because we do not have access to any of the firm proofs or evidences. We cannot eat the loaves and fishes with the 5,000 and more that were broken by Jesus’s hands. We cannot speak with all of the countless people who were healed miraculously at Jesus’s word and touch. We did not witness Jesus walk upon the waters of the Sea of Galilee as if it were dry land. Instead, we must trust the testimony of those who actually did taste and actually saw.
We must trust that their experiences and understandings were recorded faithfully and accurately. We must trust that across the generations of copies made from copies made from lost originals that no falsehoods, errors, or mistakes of substance have been introduced to the text, whether by accident or bad intention. I mean, children have probably played the game of telephone since before Alexander Graham Bell ever invented the device, and they can tell us, we know that it is not easy to transmit and reliably preserve information through that many touch points, logically and according to ordinary reason.
The idea that the words of scripture have been perfectly and accurately preserved across history is statistically improbable. For many people, the idea is entirely unbelievable unless there is a supernatural and divine influence in preserving it. But we as Christians, we actually believe that that is true. And that is something which all of the faithful of the church have believed throughout the past 2,000 years of church history and even across the 1,400 years before that as well. The church has believed this fact and we have known it to be true even without the confirming evidences that have been uncovered within the most recent 100 years.
Evidences like a shepherd who discovered a cave in 1947 near the Dead Sea that contained clay jars filled with documents written over a period of about 300 years between 200 BC and 100 AD. Included within this library was a nearly complete copy of the book of Isaiah, a manuscript copy that was transcribed somewhere around 125 years before the birth of Christ. This copy is functionally identical to the oldest existing Jewish manuscripts of the Hebrew scriptures, only missing the vowel points that were created and added around the sixth and seventh centuries. This 2,000-year-old copy demonstrates the fidelity of the copiers to the text and the incredible accuracy of their copying practices, confirming justification for our confidence.
Meanwhile, there’s also P66 or Papyrus 66, which is the oldest nearly complete copy of John’s Gospel. This manuscript was discovered in 1952 in Egypt. Although there are numerous opinions over exactly when, scholars are confident that it was transcribed somewhere between 150 and 400 AD. The accuracy of that manuscript is more evidence demonstrating and affirming our confidence in the faithful transmission of the New Testament.
So the faith and confidence of generations of Christians and the reliability of scripture are proven justified even against the reasonable expectations of logic. But how are Christians so confident about the truthfulness and rightness of scripture without having physical confirmation? It cannot be attributed to just our own wishful thinking or to the fervent and dogmatic assertion of rightness made by the church.
Nor is it entirely attributable to the evidences and testimonies written within scripture, those that attest to it being God’s word, but rather our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, who is bearing witness by and with the word in our hearts. See, Christians know Jesus and we believe him to be true because the Holy Spirit, who is dwelling within the heart of every Christian, testifies to it and so strengthens our faith and confidence. Whatever spirit dwells within any particular person, that spirit testifies to who their shepherd is.
Now, the second question is much easier to answer because Jesus is much more simple than we like to give him credit for. Scripture plainly and clearly tells us who he is, what he is about, and what he expects from his sheep. Knowing Jesus and knowing that we are following the true Jesus is easy to do when we know the scriptures well, when we study them diligently and faithfully apply them to our lives.
That is why the evangelist tells us elsewhere to test the spirits to see whether they are from God because many false prophets have gone out into the world. We test the spirits so that we may discern between good shepherds and bad shepherds, between Jesus and between false Jesus’s by comparing what they say and do against what scripture plainly teaches and says.
This is why it’s so important for Christians to know and understand the relevant and appropriate contexts: the narrative context, the literary context, and the historical contexts of scripture. That’s why it’s so important for us to study whole passages of scripture rather than just singular verses and studying them within their context, not removed from. Otherwise, our sinful hearts, hearts that are naturally prone to twist God’s word, will try to make verses like, ‘Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love.’ We’ll take these verses and twist them and make them seem to mean whatever we want or like absolutely nothing at all.
Or we might intentionally isolate verses such as, ‘The law came in to increase the trespass. But where sin increased, grace abounded all the more,’ and use them to justify our unrepentance and continuation in sin, intentionally ignoring what Paul writes two verses later: ‘What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means. How can we who died to sin still live in it?’ Clearly refuting such antinomianism. Or we over-contextualize whole books like Paul’s letters to Timothy and Ephesus so we can justify ignoring them as authoritative scripture, arguing instead that they were meant just for that one particular time and place and lacking any lasting relevance or importance.
Problems, false prophets, false Christs, and false gods are all easily refuted and rebuked when we know and understand scripture well, when we know Jesus as well as he knows us.
Then, while concluding his explanation of this parable, Jesus said something else that would have been received as shocking, but it really shouldn’t have been. He said, ‘I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice,’ so that there will be one flock, one shepherd.
Now, this statement by Jesus is easy to misinterpret and misapply by those who are motivated by false interpretations of love as excessive charity, tolerance of everything, and an overabundance of human grace. Such classically liberal perspectives and attitudes encourage people to think that we are more loving, more gracious, more charitable, more forgiving, and more merciful and tolerant than God. They build self-righteousness up into a false sense of superiority to Jesus Christ himself.
But when Jesus said, ‘I have other sheep that are not of this fold,’ he meant the ethnic Jews and the Gentiles as being these different sheep. The sheepfold, remember, is the enclosure where they put the sheep for their safety. A sheepfold or a fold is what they called the corral that had that opening where the shepherd would lay across to sleep to serve as the gatekeeper and the door. Jesus’s use of fold here does not refer to the flock but the constructed enclosure that the sheep dwell within. His metaphorical use of fold referred to the social constructs of ethnicity and nationality, not religion.
Jesus was talking about gathering all of his sheep from out of everywhere, wherever they may be and from every kind of people group. He was not equating or identifying all of the Jews as his sheep, which would have upset them. The apostle Paul picks up this thread and reminds us that not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring. But through Isaac shall your offspring be named. This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are children of God, but the children of the promise who are counted as offspring.
So everyone that is ethnically Jewish is not necessarily a part of Jesus’s flock. Not everyone born into ethnic Israel are necessarily the children of God. Just as everyone born into a congregation of Christ’s church are not necessarily children of God. Only the children of promise are. But still, regardless anyways, we still treat every child as a child of promise in the faithful hope and expectation that in God’s merciful providence and grace, they are, as we saw earlier this morning with Eleanor and Elizabeth when they make their profession, proving themselves to be so.
Just as every male child in Israel was required to be circumcised, Christians should baptize their children, grasping hold of that same hope in faith. Similarly, Paul explains how the Gentiles, those who are not born ethnically Jewish, are grafted into and become part of Israel, become part of God’s people, being welcomed into Jesus’s flock and are numbered among his sheep.
So everyone who belongs to Christ, who are known by him and who know him from out of every nation and people group will hear and listen to his voice. They will obey his commands and they will respond to his call and come out from wherever they are from, wherever they were, to join his flock and be Jesus’s sheep. They will all, each and everyone, be united together as one people under the tender and loving care of our one good shepherd Jesus Christ.
But what this statement does not mean, although I’ve heard it strongly suggested and argued, is that Jesus has other folds, by which some will mean other supposedly Christian adjacent or ecumenical religions. But the Jesus of scripture does not accept the worship performed and offered by other religions. Jesus is the door, the only entrance, passage, and means of access to God our Father in heaven. He declared that anyone else who tries to enter or exit the sheepfold of God by any means other than Christ, other than himself, is a thief and a robber.
So just because someone may claim to worship, venerate, respect, or honor Jesus, it does not mean they are a Christian or that they belong to Christ. Everyone who worships him wrongly, worships him falsely and proves that they do not know him and that they do not belong to him. C.S. Lewis was utterly wrong on this point. The allegorical Aslan should not accept the worship offered to the demonic god Tash, as you see in the story ‘The Last Battle,’ because they worshipped the wrong god the wrong way and with the wrong intentions.
While many people may be and often are delivered out of false religion, no false religion or wrong worship is pleasing to God. Those are nothing except examples of strange and unauthorized fire. If you want to know more, ask Nadab and Abihu. Mormons are not Christian. They teach a false Jesus. They teach that Jesus is a creature, an angel, and not God the Son. Their extra scriptures, the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price, often directly contradict the Bible. Similarly, Jehovah’s Witnesses are not Christians. They flatly and plainly deny the deity of Christ. They believe that he was created and that there was a time when Jesus was not.
J. Gresham Machen divided Christianity from liberalism back in 1923, separating the idea of orthodox Christians from the modernists or progressives who wrongly claim the Christian faith. He argued that liberalism is an entirely different religion, one contrary to Christian truth. Many of these liberals deny the necessity of Christian fundamentals like the inerrancy of scripture, the virgin birth, the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, the physical bodily resurrection of Christ, and the full deity of Jesus. Their denials eventually led them to believe that the church is just an institution primarily concerned with social welfare rather than the salvation of souls. They promoted a social gospel instead of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
To them, Jesus was just a good teacher and a moral exemplar, not God the Son and our Savior. These attitudes and perspectives evolved and continue to infect both mainline and certain other evangelical denominations that favor emphases on issues of social justice, tolerance, and inclusion, or even forcing charitable works while putting the actual gospel to languish in the rear as a secondary concern or addition rather than being the primary motivator for our Christian response.
These perspectives may explain why John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’ may be the most popular anti-Christian song ever written. Muslims are not Christians. Their Allah is neither Jesus nor the Yahweh of the Old Testament. Even though Allah is the Arabic word used to refer to God, their Jesus was neither God nor a god. Their Jesus was just a prophet, but not even the greatest prophet. Their Jesus did not die on the cross, and their Jesus did not get resurrected, but their Jesus did ascend into heaven. They do expect that their Jesus will return someday to condemn us Christians for our idolatry of him for our failure to submit and believe in their Allah.
Likewise, Jews are not Christians because they fail to rightly understand the Hebrew scriptures, which they affirm as being God’s revelation, scripture that consistently and often and frequently and always points towards Jesus. They stubbornly refuse to accept the fullness of God’s testimony, his revelation, the person of Jesus Christ and the testimonies of his apostles. Instead, they accuse Jesus of being a sorcerer who tried to lead Israel into apostasy. They accuse Mary of being a prostitute and Jesus as being an illegitimate child.
While some Jews still continue to hope in a Messiah to come, others have transferred their messianic hope to the Jewish people as a whole and including national Israel. These examples and more that I will not take the time to list presently, none of them belong to Jesus’s flock, speaking corporately. They are not children of God. They are proven to not be Jesus’s sheep when their doctrines and practices and beliefs are compared against the Bible. Sadly, many people wrongly believe that they belong to Jesus, thinking that they are faithfully keeping his commands and rightly following him, but they’re really following the false Jesus instead.
All of those examples are spiritually blind, just like the Pharisees were. Meanwhile, Jesus’s sheep come to him from out of all the many different folds of the world. We come to him from out of every nation and from every ethnic people group. And despite our differences, we are united as one people and one flock under the lordship of Jesus as our good shepherd, as God’s children.
But while we are all equally members of this flock, we are not all equal within it. There are sheep numbered among Jesus’s flock who are better or worse Christians than other sheep. Some people are better or worse at following Jesus than others. Some people are more or less sanctified. Some are more or less loving and charitable. But none of these people, none of these sheep are any less saved. They are no less redeemed by God’s grace. We are each just at different points in our walk with Christ. But overall, we are slowly getting better. At least we are trending slightly upwards. And even though we still have our ups and downs, eventually each of us will be graded by Jesus, our good shepherd. We will be ranked, and we will be rewarded accordingly and differently.
Ezekiel tells us, ‘As for you, my flock, thus says the Lord God, behold, I judge between sheep and sheep, between rams and male goats. Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture that you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture and to drink of clear water? That you must muddy the rest of the water with your feet and must my sheep eat what you have trotten with your feet and drink what you have muddied with your feet?’
See, God is reminding us that he is speaking both to and about his sheep specifically. However, this is not the same imagery that’s used in Matthew 25 that describes the last judgment, where Jesus separates the righteous sheep from the wicked goats, where he divides them and sends them in opposite directions. Rather, this imagery is being used as more descriptive of Jesus separating the stubborn and/or wayward faithful from the gladly and happily obedient faithful.
So when we understand this, Ezekiel’s words should convict each of us because oftentimes Christians treat other Christians the worst. Presbyterians, Baptists, Pentecostals, we are all guilty of charging the others of not being real Christians simply because we might disagree upon certain non-essential points of doctrine.
But there are points of doctrine where we do strongly disagree about doctrines that we each deem to be essential that others may not. But really, most of those are not related to our shared faith in Jesus Christ. I mean, we disagree about what Bible translations should be used, whether KJV only or considering the NIV, NRSV, ESV to be acceptable. We disagree about our worship styles—something that can be non-essential so long as all of the essential elements of right worship are present and done right. We may disagree about dancing, drinking, smoking, movie going, or even clothing.
And so, you see, we are all guilty as denominations and as individuals of being arrogant and not humble towards our siblings in the faith, of being judgmental towards them. The sad and honest truth is we are all certainly wrong about something in our theology and our devotional practice. Some of us are more wrong, others less. But these relatively minor errors do not make us any less Christian. They and we are still Christians. They’re just Christians that are wrong. We are all guilty of muddying the waters of faith for others. We are each guilty of trotting down the pasture lands of our fellow believers.
Then thus says the Lord God to them, ‘Behold, I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep because you push with side and shoulder and thrust at all the weak with your horns till you have scattered them abroad. I will rescue my flock and they shall no longer be a prey, and I will judge between sheep and sheep.’
So while we are each trying to find and make our own space and make ourselves comfortable within Jesus’s flock, we carelessly shove others around and we try to drive them out or away inadvertently, scattering those who rightly belong to Jesus. But still, because the Lord is good and he is just, he has, he will, and he does continue to rescue his sheep. And so, he must judge us between sheep and sheep.
Ezekiel explains that the Lord has set up over us one shepherd, his servant David, meaning the prophesied Christ, who will feed us and be our only shepherd while the Lord will be our God. So we have one Lord, one shepherd, and we are all part of one single flock of sheep belonging to Jesus as his sheep.
The Lord promises us that he will make a covenant of peace with us and banish wild beasts from the land, establishing us in peace and security. The Lord declares, ‘I will make them and the places all around my hill a blessing,’ that he will pour his blessings out upon us, promising to provide for all of our needs as the trees of the field yield their fruit and the earth shall yield its increase, and they shall be secure in their land.
But those blessings are not the end of God’s promises. They are not the be-all end-all. They are neither the fullness nor even the purpose of God’s providential love and favor. Ezekiel tells us that we shall truly know and we shall confidently believe, have faith, we shall entirely trust that he is the Lord God alone because he will break the bars of our yoke and he will deliver us from the hand, or the power, of our enslaver Satan, freeing us from the spiritual bondage of our sin and the tyranny of the devil. No longer will we be prey to the nations. No longer will the world be against us once Satan’s power, authority, and influence is finally broken and removed. We will be entirely safe and secure, dwelling in peace without anyone to make us afraid.
But that’s still not all. Not only will the Lord, not only does Jesus Christ remove these negatives, they add and increase our positives as well. God has, does, and will provide us with these renowned plantations so that we shall no longer be consumed with hunger in the land, satisfying our needs over abundantly. We will no longer suffer the reproach of the nations, and the whole world will look upon the blessed providence that Jesus’s sheep receive and will know. They will know that we are beloved and that we are the Lord’s favored.
Ezekiel relays and concludes, ‘And they,’ meaning the nations in the world, ‘they shall know that I am the Lord their God with them, and that they, the house of Israel,’ all of God’s children, his chosen peoples before the chosen before the foundation of the world, that we are his people, declares the Lord God. ‘And you are my sheep, human sheep of my pasture. And I am your God,’ declares the Lord God.
Christians truly are the Lord’s sheep. Jesus’s sheep, human sheep of his pasture. We are his people, and he is our God, just like he promised Abraham, Moses, and the Israelites in the wilderness, promising Jeremiah and the prophet Ezekiel.
And again, how does scripture teach us and prove why we should believe and trust Jesus? John reminds us that those who heard him still doubted and disbelieved while many of them said, ‘He has a demon and is insane. Why listen to him?’ While others said, ‘These are not the words of one oppressed by a demon. Can a demon open the eyes of the blind?’
Again, that miracle of the sixth sign back in John nine, when Jesus granted sight to a young man who had been born blind, proved and affirmed Jesus’s divine power and authority and confirmed the truthfulness of his message. So, how do we respond? I sincerely hope that everyone’s heart here simply wants to proclaim, ‘I just want to be a sheep,’ and be certain that they and we in each are counted and numbered among Jesus’s sheep.
And if that’s true, then I encourage you and implore you to take up your Bible and read it prayerfully. Read it from the beginning to the end. Read it over and over again. You will learn and you will understand something new or something better every time you do it. Beginning in January, the elders and I will be encouraging us all to join together in one Bible reading plan, the Murray McShane plan, so that we can all be together, united in scripture that we’re reading.
Improving our Bible literacy is the best way to get to know our good shepherd, to know and believe that he is who he says he is and to understand who and what he says that he is, and to better recognize and acknowledge the experience we have of his love for his children. Improving our Bible literacy will also help us to better be able to recognize and identify who all of our various shepherds, the shepherds in all of our different spheres of life, who they are following and leading us to follow as well.
So listen for and listen to the voice of Christ calling you. Heed and obey the drawing of the Holy Spirit towards Jesus. And when it seems uncertain or unclear, test the spirits against scripture. The Lord will not contradict or countermand his holy and inherent word. Lastly, pray for one another as you pray for yourself. Pray that none of us may stray. Pray that we will neither place ourselves nor drive others into places where we need to be rescued by the Lord. Again, pray that we shall all be gathered and remain together in our unity of faith in the one Lord, our Savior and good shepherd Jesus Christ. Amen.