John 10:4 Commentary and Bible Study

The church of Christ comes about ‘for they know his voice’, and that text still applies. We know his voice. We do not hear it audibly. We do not hear it in the form of a mystical, secret, inner light to us personally. We know his voice in the Scriptures, in the word of God. The Scriptures have become everything to us. We know they are the divine word, we know they are infallible, revealed from God. We know they are the voice of God to us, his standards, his commands, his explanations of all things, his plans for the future. Everything that we need to know is revealed to us, and we follow Christ in the Scriptures. The Eastern shepherd goes before his sheep ‘and the sheep follow him: for they know his voice.’ What a picture of how Christ, even though he was rejected by so many, the true children of God (those who were converted, those who loved him) they would be led out, and on the Day of Pentecost, the formal beginning of the Christian Church when the Holy Spirit came down and those Jews who were truly converted were now in the Church of Jesus Christ. Of course, the leaders of the Jews who were hearing this did not understand it. The idea that Israel was at an end, and that those who belong to God would now be led out of it, that’s the last thing that they would ever countenance or accept.