John 10:22 The God Who Works in Silence

Silence can feel like the cruelest answer. You pray, you wait, you try to stay faithful, and heaven feels quiet while real life gets louder. So we slow down and sit with one “blink and you miss it” verse, John 10:22, where John tells us it’s winter and Jesus is at the Feast of Dedication. That detail is not trivia. It’s the key to seeing what God is doing when you can’t hear Him.

We walk through the history behind the Feast of Dedication, what most Christians only know as Hanukkah. That means stepping into the 400 years between Malachi and Matthew, the rise of empires, and the violent attempt of Antiochus Epiphanes to erase Jewish worship by outlawing Torah and desecrating the temple. Then we follow the Maccabean revolt and the rededication of the temple in 164 BC, a public reminder that God preserves His covenant even when everything looks unstable.

Here’s the moment that lands: Jesus arrives at that very feast, in that very temple, as the true dwelling of God among His people. The building they celebrate was always pointing to Him. And once you see God’s preserving hand in history, you can start to trust His hand in your own life, including the season where prayer feels unanswered. We also explore how God can be preparing far more than you can see, forming endurance, depth, and even the “infrastructure” for future gospel fruit.

If you’ve been asking, “What is God doing in this?”, press play, then subscribe, share with a friend who needs hope, and leave a review so more people can find the show. What part of the quiet season is hardest for you to trust right now?

Transcript

When God Feels Quiet

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Have you ever found yourself wondering where God is? You've prayed, you've waited, you've searched the scriptures, yet heaven feels quiet, and the silence leaves you asking questions that every believer wrestles with at some point. Is God listening? Has he forgotten? Why does it seem like nothing is happening? The Bible records seasons just like that. In fact, there was a period of nearly 400 years when no prophet spoke, no new revelation was given, and it appeared as though God had gone silent. But what seemed like silence from earth's perspective was in reality one of the greatest periods of preparation in redemptive history. In today's episode, Pastor Harry takes us to John 10, verse 22 and the Feast of Dedication to uncover a remarkable truth. And when we learn to recognize his hand in history, we begin to trust his hand in our own

One Verse With A Backstory

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lives. Here's Pastor Harry Behrens with today's message.

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I'm your host, Pastor Harry Behrens, and today we're going to be in John chapter 10, verse 22. And I want to tell you up front that this episode is going to feel a little different from what we've been doing. We are not going to be covering a long section of verses. We are just going to be sitting with one single verse today. One verse that most people read right past on their way to what comes next and opening up the history behind it because without that history, everything Jesus says in the rest of this chapter is going to land about half as deep as it should. But before we get into where we are in John, though, I want to ask you something. And I want you to actually sit with it before we move on. Have you ever been in a season where it feels like God has gone quiet, where you are praying and the prayers feel like they are hitting the ceiling and coming back down, where the storms keep coming one after another. And just when you think you've caught your breath, another wave crashes, where the air feels thick and heavy, and it seems impossible to get your footing, where you're watching what you built, what you love, what you were believing God for, and it's not moving, or it's falling apart, and you're sitting in the middle of it asking the question that every honest believer has asked at the same point. What is God doing in this? Why is he allowing it? If he loves me, why does it feel like he's not there? Now that question is not a failure of faith. It is one of the most honest questions a human being can bring to God. And today, before we look at a single verse, I want to tell you that we are going to look at a period in history of God's people where that question hangs over everything. 400 years where no prophet speaks, no miracle is recorded, no voice comes from heaven. 400 years of what looks like from the outside, like silence. And what we are going to discover is that God was not silent. He was working quietly, invisibly, with a precision and a purpose that would only become visible when the shepherd finally walked through the gates of the very temple that silence had preserved. And when we see what God was doing in that silence, what he was forming, what he was building, what he was laying in place for a fulfillment the people inside it could not yet see, I think it is going to change the way you interpret the quiet seasons of your own life. That is what we're going to be doing today. But before

Why John Keeps Chapter 10

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we read that verse, let me bring you back to where we just were. And then I want to say something about how this chapter is structured because it matters how you read what follows or what comes next. We have just come through one of the most significant arcs in John's gospel. John chapters 8, 9, and 10. The argument that began with Jesus declaring himself the light of the world, continued through the healing of the blind man and everything that followed from it, and reached its completion in the Good Shepherd discourse. That entire arc closed at verse 21 of chapter 10. The blind man served as the living illustration of everything Jesus explained. The shepherd entered the fold, called his own, became the door, laid down his life, declared one flock and one shepherd. And then the division came. Some said he had a demon. Others said, Can a demon open the eyes of the blind? And the argument reached its natural end. And then John writes this at that time the feast of dedication took place at Jerusalem. It was winter. John 10 22. Now I want you to notice something before we go any further here. John has just shifted the scene entirely. He has told us it is a different time of year. It's winter, which places this roughly two months after the events of the previous scene, which took place around the Feast of Tabernacles in the fall. He has named the specific feast. He has moved us to a specific location. We learn in verse 23 that Jesus is walking in Solomon's porch in the temple. This is a new gathering, a new setting, and a different moment in time entirely from everything we have just been walking through, which raises a question we're spending a moment on. Why is this still chapter 10? If this is a new scene, why didn't whoever divided the text into chapters start a new chapter right here? The answer is actually instructive because the chapter and verse divisions in your Bible were not part of the original text. John did not write in chapters. The chapter divisions were added in the 13th century, and the verse numbers came later still in the 16th. They were added by people trying to help readers navigate the text. And most of the time they did a good job, but they are not inspired. And occasionally they land in a place that obscures something the original text was doing. Here's why whoever divided chapter 10 kept verse 22 through 42 inside the same chapter. The theme is consistent. Even though it is a new scene and a new time, the conversation that develops from verse 23 onward is essentially the same conversation that has been running since chapter 8. The same question is on the table. Who is Jesus? Is he the Christ? Are you going to receive him or reject him? And the same division keeps happening among the people who are listening. The chapter holder saw the thematic unity and kept it together, which is a defensible choice. But the scene change is real. And you need to know that it's here because Jesus is now speaking to a different gathering in a different season. And the backdrop of that season is the entire point of this episode. Chapter 11, on the other hand, is going to open with a genuinely new movement. We're going to see Lazarus is sick, a new set of characters enters, and the events that follow will force the confrontation that leads directly to the cross. That is why the chapter break falls where it does. The thematic unity of John 10 holds through verse 42, and then something new begins entirely.

What The Feast Of Dedication Means

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Now, the question that's at hand is what is the feast of dedication? And why does John name it right here? Well, to understand the feast of dedication, we have to go back to a period of history that most Christians know almost nothing about. The 400 years between the close of the Old Testament and the opening of the new, between Malachi and Matthew. The Old Testament closes with the prophet Malachi, and Malachi closes with a promise. In the final verses of the final chapter, the Lord says, Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes, and he will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and hearts of the children towards their fathers. Malachi chapter 4, verses 5 and 6. And then comes silence. No prophet arises, no word comes through an anointed spokesperson. For approximately 400 years, the voice of God through his prophets goes quiet. 400 years between the last word and the next one. Now, most people experience that silence as a blank page, a gap between testaments. But here is what is happening inside that silence, because it was not empty. It was some of the most violent, destabilizing, covenant-threatening times in Israel's history. And God was working through all of it toward a fulfillment that would not become visible until the morning the word became flesh. The silence of God is never the absence of God. And the 400 years between Malachi and Matthew are the proof of that written in history. Malachi's promise did not fail because no prophet came to confirm it. It was moving quietly and without stopping toward John the Baptist, the Elijah who would come. And it arrived on exactly the day the Father determined, not a single day late. And when Malachi closes, the Persian Empire controls the known world. The same empire that issued the decree allowing the Jewish exiles to return home that provided resources for the rebuilding of the temple under Ezra and Nehemiah. Israel is not independent here. They are a small province inside a vast empire, but they are in the land. The temple is standing, and the covenant community is still intact. Then everything shifts. Alexander the Great sweeps through the Persian Empire with a speed and completeness that reshapes the ancient world. By the time he is done, the Greek language and Greek culture have become the dominant force from Egypt to the borders of India. And Israel sits inside that Greek world, surrounded by its philosophy, its religion, and its way of life. Alexander dies young in 323 BC, and his empire fractures among his generals. The territory that includes Israel eventually falls under the control of the Seleucid dynasty based in Syria to the north. And then in 175 BC, a man named Antiochus comes to the power of the Seleucid Empire. And what happens next is the reason the feast of dedication exists. Antiochus calls himself Epiphanes. The word means God manifest. He believed himself to be the visible expression of the divine, and he governed accordingly. His ambition was not merely political control over Judea. It was the eraser of the Jewish identity at its root, the elimination of everything that made

Antiochus And An Assault On Worship

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Israel distinct as the covenant people of God. He forbids circumcision. He outlaws the reading and the teaching of the Torah. He bans Sabbath worship and the temple sacrifices. He orders the Jews to offer sacrifices to Greek gods. And then in 167 BC, he goes even further. He enters the temple in Jerusalem, the house of God, the place where the presence of the Lord had dwelt, the building that had been rebuilt and dedicated after the exile, and he desecrates it. The altar of sacrifice is torn down and replaced with an altar dedicated to Zeus. Pigs, unclean animals, the very symbol of everything the law separated Israel from, are sacrificed on that altar. The temple treasury is looted, the sacred vessels are taken, and the worship of the God of Israel inside his own house is replaced with pagan religion. Now the prophet Daniel had seen something just like this coming. In Daniel 1131, he wrote of the abomination that makes desolate being set up in the sanctuary. Now I want to be clear about something here, because there are two different places on this, and both positions have serious scholarship behind them. One view is this, held by many in the Reformed and Historic Protestant tradition, sees the desecration of Antiochus as the fulfillment of Daniel's prophecy. The other view, held by many in the dispensational and the contemporary evangelical tradition, sees Antiochus as a foreshadowing with the ultimate fulfillment still coming in a future tribulation period. Now, this episode is not the place to resolve that question, and I'm not going to try because it is not what we are here for today. But what both views agree on is this Daniel saw it. It happened. And the God who watched it happen did not lose control of his purposes, not for a single moment. Whether this was a fulfillment or a type or something yet to come, the history is real. The preservation is undeniable. And the Jewish people who lived through it understood exactly what they were witnessing. Not just a political atrocity, but a direct assault on the covenant itself. Now, let's pause there for a second, because what Antiochus was doing was a direct attempt to sever the line of promise. From Genesis 315 onward, the enemy has been trying to destroy what God declared he would do, that the seed of the woman would crush the serpent's head. Now, every generation presents a new attempt. Cain kills Abel. Pharaoh orders the death of every Hebrew son. Haman plots annihilation of every Jewish person in the Persian Empire. And now Antiochus tries to erase the covenant at its source, the Torah, the temple, the worship, the identity of the people through whom the Messiah was still coming. Psalm 33, 10 through verse 11 says, The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing. He frustrates the plans of the peoples. The counsel of the Lord stands forever. The plans of his heart to all generations. Every generation presents the same pattern, and every generation reveals the same answer. God preserves what belongs to him. Now, the revolt begins with an old priest in a small town called Modin. A solucid officer arrives to enforce the decrees of Antiochus to compel the Jewish residents to offer pagan sacrifice. A priest named Mattathias refuses. When another Jewish man steps forward to comply, Matthias kills him and kills the officer alongside him, tears down the pagan altar, and flees into the wilderness with his five sons. It is a small act of defiance by an elderly man with no army and no military strategy, but it becomes the spark. Other Jews who had been unwilling to live under the decrees of Antiochus join them in the wilderness. And when Matathias dies, his son Judas takes command. He earns the name Maccabeus, which means the hammer, and he leads what becomes one of the most remarkable military campaigns in the history of the ancient world. The Maccabees, as they come to be known, are outnumbered, under-equipped, and fighting against one of the most powerful military forces of the air. Every reasonable assessment of the situation says they should lose, but they don't lose. Over a period of roughly three years, they fight their way back to Jerusalem, retake the city, and enter the temple. What they find inside is devastating. The altar of sacrifice is desecrated. The sacred vessels are gone or defiled. The temple that God commanded be set apart for his worship has been turned into a place of pagan religion. The Maccabees tear down the desecrated altar stone by stone. They build a new one. They cleanse the temple. And in December of 164 BC, exactly three years after its desecration, the temple is rededicated to the worship of God. That rededication is the feast of dedication. It's called Hanukkah, the eight-day celebration that the Jewish people have commemorated every year since 164 BC, right up to the moment Jesus walks into Solomon's porch in John

The Maccabees And The Temple Restored

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10, 23. Now I want to be clear about the source of this history. This account comes primarily from the books of 1st and 2nd Maccabees, which are part of the Apocrypha. The collection of Jewish writings from this period that Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions include in their Bibles, but the Protestant tradition does not consider part of the inspired canon. Now, you do not need to resolve that question to receive what this history is showing you. The feast of dedication is real. The events that created it are real. Jesus is standing in the middle of a feast that commemorates all of this, and John names it deliberately because his readers would have understood immediately what it meant. The temple survived Antiochus. The covenant survived. The line of promise was not severed. And the reason, the only reason that accounts for it historically and theologically, is that God was preserving his redemptive plan until the Messiah arrived. The Maccabees did not win because they were a great army. They won because God refused to let the enemy have what he was after, because the temple still had a purpose to fulfill, and the morning was still coming when the word would become flesh and walk through the gates of that very building. And now we're back in John chapter 10, verse 22, the feast of dedication, and it's winter. Jesus is walking in Solomon's porch. The people around him are celebrating the rededication of the temple, the building God preserved through Antiochus, through the desecration, through three years of unlikely guerrilla warfare. They are remembering the faithfulness of God and keeping his house. And they do not recognize that the reason God kept his house is standing among them, walking in its porches. And now let's go back to John chapter two for a second, to the moment early in the gospel when Jesus entered the temple and drove out the merchants and the money changers. The religious leaders demanded a sign. What authority do you have to do this? And Jesus answered them, destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. John 2 19. And John tells us he was speaking about his body. The temple was always pointing to him. All of the feasts were always pointing to him. The Passover pointed to the Lamb, the feast of tabernacles pointed to the living water and the light of the world, and the feast of dedication, the commemoration of God preserving his dwelling place against the enemy's attempt to destroy it, points to the one in whom the fullness of God's presence would dwell permanently, not in a building made of stone, but in a body of flesh. John said in the prologue, in one of the most carefully chosen words in the entire gospel, in John 1 14, he writes, And the word became flesh and dwelt among us. The word translated dwelt there in the Greek means tabernacled, or pitched his tent, or set up his dwelling among us. The presence of God that filled the tabernacle in the wilderness, that descended on Solomon's temple at its dedication, that the Maccabees fought and bled to restore to its proper place, that presence has now taken up permanent residence in human flesh. The feast of dedication is being celebrated, and the true temple of God has arrived at its own feast. The irony is profound and deliberate. The people celebrating God's faithfulness and preserving the building

The True Temple Walks In

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are standing next to the fulfillment the building was always meant to announce. And now here is where the history becomes personal because the God who preserved the temple through the 400 years of silence and one generation of violent assault is the same God who is preserving you. There is a season that most believers go through at some point, sometimes it's more than once, that feels exactly like the 400 years. The voice that used to feel close has gone quiet. The prayers that used to seem to move things seem to be going nowhere. No miracle is visible. No prophet is speaking. The circumstances around you are not improving and may be getting even worse. And the silence feels less like preparation and more like abandonment. The feast of dedication is the answer to that season written in history. Four hundred years of silence did not mean God had stopped working. It meant the fulfillment was not yet visible. The enemy's assault on the temple did not mean God had abandoned his house. It meant the preservation was about to become undeniable. And the three years between the desecration and the rededication, those three years of fighting. Fighting in the wilderness of what looked from the outside like a hopeless cause, those three years were not God failing his people. They were God carrying his people toward a morning they could not yet see. Paul says it in Romans 8 28, and I want to read it slowly because it's one of the most frequently quoted and least deeply understood verses in the New Testament. He says, And we know that for those who love God, all things all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose. All things, including the silence, including the desecration, including the season where every reasonable assessment of the situation says you should be losing. God is working all of it together toward a purpose that is fixed and certain for people who are called according to that purpose. The Maccabees were called according to his purpose. The temple was preserved according to his purpose. And the morning Jesus walked into Solomon's porch during the feast of dedication, it was the visible proof that the purpose had never been in danger, even when everything looked like it was. And here's what this means for the rest of John chapter 10. When we pick up in verse 23, Jesus is going to say something about his sheep that lands entirely different now that we understand what God preserved to get to this moment. He is going to say, My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I

Interpreting Your Silent Season

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give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one, no one is able to snatch them out of my father's hand. Antiochus Epiphanes tried to snatch the temple out of God's hand. He failed. Every enemy who has ever attempted to sever the line of promise has failed. And the sheep the Father gave the Son before the foundation of the world, no wolf, no hired hand, no emperor who names himself God manifest, none of them can take what the shepherd holds. The feast of dedication is not backdrop scenery, it is the testimony of God's preserving hand written in the history of his people, displayed in the very feast being celebrated among Jesus as he makes the declaration that his sheep cannot be lost. So here's the question: this verse, just this one verse, leaves us with In the season you are currently in, the one where things are hard, where prayers seem to go unanswered, where what you built feels like it is being torn apart, what is God forming, not just in the world around you, but in you? Because here's what the 400 years between Malachi and Matthew actually show us. God was not just preserving the temple, He was building the infrastructure for the gospel. Alexander's conquest spread a common language across the known world so that when the New Testament was written, it could be read from Britain to Babylon. The Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, the Septuagint, became the Bible the early church used to show the nations who the Messiah always was. And Rome's road network connected three continents so that when Paul set out in Acts to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth, the roads were already there. Every empire that looked like the enemy winning was God laying another stone in the foundation of his purposes. What looked from the inside like chaos and oppression and unanswered prayer was from heaven's perspective, meticulous preparation for a fulfillment that would make everything that came before it make sense. And the question that history puts in front of you and I is this What is

God Builds Purpose Through History

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God forming in your life right now that you cannot yet see the purpose of? What road is he laying through your wilderness? What language is he developing in you through the hard season? A patience, a compassion, a depth of trust that will become the means through which his purposes move forward in ways you cannot anticipate from inside the silence. Here's what I think all of this is showing us. As long as we hold on to our own version of what a good life is supposed to look like, as long as we want God to serve our comfort rather than his glory, no matter what he does in us and around us, we will not find joy in it because we are asking the wrong questions. We are asking, when will this end? When will things get better? When will God answer? But the question the feast of dedication is asking us is different. It is asking, what is God accomplishing? What is he preserving? What is he building through this for a purpose that reaches further than I can currently see? And when we begin to ask that question, when we align ourselves with the will of the God who does all things for his glory, something changes. The silence does not necessarily end, the hard thing does not necessarily resolve, but joy becomes possible in the middle of it because we are no longer asking God to serve us. We are asking what it means to serve Him. And He promises. He promises to sustain those who abide in Him. He promises that His joy, the joy of a God who sees the end from the beginning, who has never lost a single thing he purposed to keep, that joy can be ours in what looks from the outside like the worst of times, when we are aligned with his will and his glory. The silence of God is never the absence of God, it is the sound of preparation. And the question is whether we trust the one doing the preparing. Let's pray.

Prayer And Next Steps

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Father, thank you that your silence is not abandonment. Thank you that what you have purposed, no enemy has ever stopped and no silence has ever delayed. Thank you that you are preserving us right now in the seasons we can see and the seasons we cannot. Give us the faith to trust your hand in the quiet places. In Jesus' name. Amen. Now I want to thank you again, as always, for joining us today. And I hope this message has helped you take a step closer in knowing just how much God loves you and wants you to know him. Now, if anything today resonated with you, or if you have any questions or comments, please visit us on our website at thetaway.faith. There you can send us an email or you can click on the text us link in the episode description. Either way, we would truly love to hear from you. Now, in our next episode, we're going to move into the rest of John chapter 10, beginning in verse 23, and the declaration Jesus makes about his sheep that what God has always preserved, he will never lose. God bless, and we'll see you next time on the takeaway.