Neville Goddard Lectures: “John 10: The Shepherd”

03 Mar Neville Goddard Lectures: “John 10: The Shepherd”

6/17/68

If tonight you had a personal problem, regardless of the nature of the problem, were it financial, some social problem, regardless of the nature of it, the chances are you would wish that I would discuss a certain technique by which you could overcome it…and I would not blame you. But may I tell you, if you listen attentively to the Word of God and completely forget the problem while you listen in the hope that you will understand it, that problem would solve itself to the degree that you simply grasp the Word of God. You see, man does not really understand who he is, he doesn’t. Tonight I hope I can to some extent convince you of your greatness…of who you really are.

The New Testament only fulfills the Old; without the Old Testament there would be no New, none whatsoever. The fulfillment of the New is personified for us as Jesus Christ. Now let us go back to the Old Testament to the Book of Numbers. You’ll read this in the 27th chapter: “And Moses said to the Lord, ‘Let the Lord, the God of the spirits of all flesh, appoint a man over the congregation, who will go out before them and come in before them, who will lead them out and bring them in; that the congregation of the Lord may not be like sheep which have no shepherd.’ And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Take Joshua the son of Nun, for in him is this spirit, and lay your hand upon him” (verses 15-18). Now, the word Joshua is the Hebrew for Jesus, the same word. It was Moses who changed his name from Hosea to Joshua. So take Joshua, who is the son of Nun and the word Nun in Hebrew means “fish.” It’s the primitive symbol of Christ. Nun means “fish,” the fourteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. So here, you take this, the deliverer, the savior of the world. Here is his son, for he is now the son and his father is Nun. But the father and the son are one (John 10:30).

Now, if the New only fulfills the Old, where is it in the New? Here we are told, “Do this that the congregation of the Lord may have a shepherd.” Well now, the 10th chapter of John is the story of the shepherd. When you read it, do this for me…if you read it tonight and …see the ninth chapter begins with the state of a blind person and they said to him…they met a man who was blind from birth, and they said, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?” And he said, “Neither this man nor his parents, but that the works of God be made manifest” (John 9:2). The entire chapter is devoted to blindness, but when it ends on blindness it’s now mental blindness. It begins with physical blindness and it comes to mental blindness, where one is the symbol of the other. When it comes to the end, the Pharisees…he said to them, “Now you say that you see, your guilt is still with you because you do not’” (verse 41). They say that they know…they know the law backwards, so because you claim that you see, your guilt is still with you. If you had not claimed that you saw, I would open your eye…I would show you the Word of God, but because you know it all—oh, yes, you know everything, all the rituals, all the outside paraphernalia of orthodoxy. So you know it all, so you say “We see, we know” and therefore your guilt remains with you.