follow Christ, for they know His Voice, and in vain would strangers seek to lead them
away, as the Pharisees had tried. It was not the known Voice of their own Shepherd,
and they would only flee from it.8
6. This is the proper reading: he who locked the door from within and guarded it.
7. This is the literal rendering.
8. St. John x. 4, 5.
We can scarcely wonder, that they who heard it did not understand the allegory, for they
were not of His flock and knew not His Voice. But His own knew it then, and would know
it for ever. 'Therefore,'9 both for the sake of the one and the other, He continued, now
dividing for greater clearness the two leading ideas of His allegory, and applying each
separately for better comfort. These two ideas were: entrance by the door, and the
characteristics of the good Shepherd - thus affording a twofold test by which to
recognise the true, and distinguish it from the false.
9. ver. 7.
I. The door - Christ was the Door.10 The entrance into God's fold and to God's flock was
only through that, of which Christ was the reality. And it had ever been so. All the Old
Testament institutions, prophecies, and promises, so far as they referred to access into
God's fold, meant Christ. And all those who went before Him,11 pretending to be the
door - whether Pharisees, Sadducees, or Nationalists - were only thieves and robbers:
that was not the door into the Kingdom of God. And the sheep, God's flock, did not hear
them; for, although they might pretend to lead the flock, the voice was that of strangers.
The transition now to another application of the allegorical idea of the 'door' was natural
and almost necessary, though it appears somewhat abrupt. Even in this it is p eculiarly
Jewish. We must understand this transition as follows: I am the Door; those who
professed otherwise to gain access to the fold have climbed in some other way. But if I
am the only, I am also truly the Door. And, dropping the figure, if any man enters by Me,
he shall be saved, securely go out and in (where the language is not to be closely
pressed), in the sense of having liberty and finding pasture.
10. vv. 7-9.
11. The words 'who went before Me' are questioned by many.
II. This forms also the transition to the second leading idea of the allegory: the True and
Good Shepherd. Here we mark a fourfold progression of thought, which reminds us of
the poetry of the Book of Psalms. There the thought expressed in one line or one
couplet is carried forward and developed in the next, forming what are called the
Psalms of Ascent ('of Degrees'). And in the Discourse of Christ also the final thought of
each couplet of verses is carried forward, or rather leads upward in the next. Thus we
have here a Psalm of Degrees concerning the Good Shepherd and His Flock, and, at
the same time, a New Testament version of Psalm xxiii. Accordingly its analysis might
be formulated as follows: -
1. Christ, the Good Shepherd, in contrast to others who falsely claimed to be the
shepherds.12 Their object had been self, and they had pursued it even at the cost of the