Riding Herd on Sinners

I really appreciate Jack’s review of my teaching. Some of you may notice his answers aren’t precisely the same as mine, and you will already know that it doesn’t matter to me. I can’t recall when it came to me, but it was my conviction during most of my six decades of life that no two of us should come up with the same answers to eternal questions.

That said, Jack’s post raises an issue I may have neglected to some degree: the symbolism of goats versus cattle versus sheep. The first thing I have to do is remind readers that I don’t think you should make a parable walk on all-fours, as the southern American expression goes. That is, parables are always contextual. Choose wisely when you decide to use a parabolic image outside the context in which it appears in Scripture. Always make room for improving your use of imagery like that, because your understanding is not written in stone.

The business of sheep and goats shows up in one parable Jesus told (Matthew 25:31–46). It appears in the context of explaining how the nations of the world will be judged by God. Don’t get hung up on the term “nations” — in Jesus’ dialect of Aramaic it refers to people in general, not discrete political entities. And the whole point of needing to separate sheep and goats is something not lost on His audience.

A shepherd will include goats in his flock. Sheep are the “cash crop” with their wool and meat. Goats do produce more and better milk, and their was their primary value, but that was just a side benefit of having them along. Goats are far better at self-protection. They pay a lot more attention to the surroundings. If a goat moves away from a risky situation, the sheep have a tendency to follow, often without a clue why. Keep in mind that the modern habit of using dogs to herd sheep would have never been possible in the Ancient Near East. The only dogs there were more like hyenas, predatory and dangerous. No Israeli would ever consider for a second trying to domesticate those nasty creatures.

But having a few goats worked out fine. The shepherd could never be everywhere at once, so the goats took care of the balance of protection, allowing a flock to be herded and guarded without having to hire a large staff of humans. Goats would actually fight some predators. It was very efficient.

The implication for believers is not the inherent nature of sheep and goats, but their function together in a single herd. The issue here is the natural difference in focus both animals have. Sheep are very narrowly focused on eating, growing wool, and making more sheep. They just don’t pay a lot of attention to what’s going on around them. Goats are more alert, even playful as adults, but what they offer individually isn’t worth nearly as much to the shepherd. So at shearing time, the sheep are gathered into one pen and the goats are sent back out to near pasture.

The goats of this fallen world pay more attention to worldly things. They aren’t evil in any particular sense, just not that profitable to God’s eternal purpose. The sheep of His pasture are called to higher things, a different and frankly impractical focus in this world. God has appointed goats to work alongside His sheep so that things will hold together and run smoothly until it’s time to harvest the spiritual fruit of this life. But at the Final Judgment, goats will not make it into Heaven.

Don’t mix this with the image of sinners as cattle. You cannot herd cattle and sheep together; it will not work. The sheep cannot tolerate too much exposure to cows, and will run away from the lumbering rowdy beasts. This is a different image for a different context. There is a sense in which God herds cattle one way, and sheep in a different way. You can sleep next to sheep, but you cannot invite cows into your family enclosure. The latter simply have no understanding of what makes life comfortable for people.

What binds all of this together is that God still uses sinners one way or another. How He uses them is difficult to explain precisely, but it can be depicted in contextual symbols.