Christ's Doctrine of Faith: A Study of "Believing" in John's Gospel (John 10:37)

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The fifty-fourth time the idea of believing occurs in John’s Gospel is in John 10:37. There, the Lord Jesus Christ says: “If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not” (KJV). So, what is the context of this passage, and what are truths about faith from this passage?

First, what is the context? Right after Christ says that the Jews He is addressing do not believe because they are not of His sheep, as He told them, He gives three characteristics of His sheep: 1) they hear His voice, 2) He knows them, and 3) they follow Him. Then, He states that He gives eternal life to His sheep, that they will never perish, and nothing will pluck them out of His hand. After this, He declares that His Father, who gave His sheep to Him, is greater than all, and that nothing is able to pluck His sheep out of His Father’s hand. As if the parallel He is making hasn’t been clear enough up to now, He says that He and His Father are one, which provokes these unbelieving Jews to take up stones to stone Him. Jesus responds by reminding them that He has showed them many good works from His Father and asking them for which of those works they stone Him. Trying to justify their hostile response to Him, these Jews claim that they do not stone Him for a good work but for blasphemy instead, because He, being a Man, makes Himself God. Attempting to make them think, the Lord asks them if it is not written in their Law “I said, Ye are gods?” (quoting from Psalm 82:6). Elaborating on what He means by this seemingly strange quotation, Jesus goes on to ask that, if God called them gods to whom the Word of God came, and the Scripture cannot be broken, how can they say of the One whom the Father had set apart and sent into the world that He is blaspheming because He said “I am the Son of God”? Then, He says not to believe Him if He does not do His Father’s works. This is the context of John 10:37!

Second, what are some truths about faith from this passage? Right now, the only fact I can think of that’s somewhat new in this series (“somewhat,” because we covered it slightly in our post on verse 25 in this chapter) is that, when interpreted rightly (that is, through the lens of God’s Word), Jesus’s miracles are powerful supports for faith. Because the Lord Jesus is bold enough in 10:37 to say that, if He does not do the works of His Father, that the Jews He is addressing should not believe Him. However, we have seen Him do these works all throughout this Gospel and, as we will see in our next post, these Jews witnessed enough of Jesus’s works that they were without excuse in their unbelief in and rejection of Him. This is one fact about faith that can be drawn from John 10:37!