One of the greatest metaphors God uses to comfort His people is that of the Shepherd and His sheep.
In all this, the metaphor refers to sheep being scattered, wandering away, and fleeing due to fear. These are pictures of the sins of the Lord's people, that cause them to disobey Him and leave Him.
Yet God is tenderly disposed to His sheep! He promises to appoint a faithful shepherd, the Lord Jesus, to rescue and protect His flock.
In John 10, Christ suddenly extends this metaphor in a startling way – He promises to save His sheep by dying for them!
The Father gave the sheep to Christ. The sheep have no say in the matter! They are assigned to Christ by God.
But they are changed, so that they follow the Good Shepherd, they hear His voice, they obey Him, where once they had wandered away from God.
God gave the sheep to His Son, because He determined to save them from death! They follow Him with changed hearts, because of His kindness toward them!
Normally, in this world, all sheep ultimately lose their lives, but not so for Christ's sheep! The goodness of our Shepherd is that He dies to save us, and thereby gives us eternal life, so that we never perish.
There is a special pathos in this metaphor, in this death of the Shepherd to save His sheep. The night Jesus went to Calvary to die for us, He recalled the promise of olden times, that God would smite the Shepherd, and the sheep would be scattered. It was God who smote our Lord Jesus, in our place, and for our crimes, on the cross.
Nowhere is this drama more poignantly expressed than in Isaiah 53. There, the substitution of Jesus in our place, to suffer God's wrath against our sins, laid upon Jesus, is described. |
