03 - Sheep

CHAPTER III

SHEEP The Bible has more to say about sheep than any other animal. There were no cats in Palestine, and the dogs were outcasts. Horses were very few and exotic. Asses, sheep, and oxen were the domestic animals, and of the three the sheep were by far the most numerous, and came closest to man. The way in which the prophet Nathan speaks of the poor man’s ewe lamb, which ’’grew up together with him, and his children,” and which “did eat of his own morsel, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom,” is an indication that sheep were household pets in the place now filled by cats, dogs, and other animals. The apostle Paul, indeed, never mentions either sheep or shepherds; but he was born and brought up in Cilicia, where goats took the place of sheep, and where he was taught to make tents from the coarse cloth made from goats’ hair. The sheep played a very important part in the history and discipline of the elect people. From the time of Abel down to the giving of the law at Mount Sinai, the keeping of sheep was their work. When any of them turned aside from this to tillage of the soil, trouble always followed. So it came upon Noah, after he made his vineyard; and on Jacob, after he built his house on the parcel of ground he bought in Shechem. Through those centuries, whether spent in Palestine or in Egypt, the Hebrews were shepherds and nothing else, depending upon the animal which supplied them with both food and clothing, and for whose support they must move from place to place in most of the localities where they sought a home. Even when they obtained possession of their own country, and became a people of city-dwellers, with fields and vineyards of their own, the care of sheep remained a chief industry. The tribes who settled beyond Jordan had no other employment; and as much of the hill country of Judaea was unfit for tillage, but supplied grazing for sheep and goats, the majority of the people even west of the Jordan seem to have been sheep-owners, if not shepherds.

There was a wise purpose in this. The keeping of sheep exercises a refining influence upon character. The life of the hunter, which Esau preferred to it, tends to make men savage and cruel. The shepherd’s work teaches them to be humane and kindly. He who is to live by sheep must care for sheep. He must keep them on his mind at all times, as their protector against wild beasts, and their provider, to lead them to the green pastures and the still waters. In more northern countries he must plan to protect them against sudden storms, and burial under the snowdrifts. It is well known. The London Times once said, that those who invest in sheep simply to make money out of them are sure to lose money. They must have another motive if they are to get on with them, or at least they must employ as shepherds those who have that motive, and who will be always planning for the sheep, often against the indifference of the owner.* The mere hireling, who does not make the sheep his own in his interest in them, is useless in every way. The calamity of America before Columbus was that it had no sheep, except one wild and untamable species of mountain sheep. Not only was the refining influence of the shepherd’s life wanting to the aborigines, but they had nothing to carry them over the transition from the life of the savage hunter to that of the settled farmer. When

* It illustrated this from the experience of those who employed convicts on the big Australian sheep-walks. The pickpockets made the best shepherds, because they had been accustomed to watch closely those they meant to rob. Men of better education, who had been transported for forgery and similar crimes, were of no use at all.

General Miles, in 1886, brought the hitherto untamable Apaches to terms, he secured for them from the national Government a supply of sheep and cattle. They soon became shepherds and cowboys, and never went on the warpath again.

God had a further purpose in keeping his people to the work of the shepherd. It enabled them to understand better his own relation to them, as their Shepherd. Just as they had to keep on their minds the flock of silly sheep they, tended, so he was caring for them, providing for their wants, defending them against their enemies, and showing them his goodness through all their lives. He was teaching them to say, “The Lord is my shepherd,” and to recognize him as ’’the Shepherd of Israel,” as well as of each single soul among them. That is the meaning of that wonderful Twenty-third Psalm, in which the shepherd’s care of his sheep is recognized as a parable of God’s care of his people. Alongside it stands the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to John, in which our Lord takes the place of the Jehovah of the Old Testament as the Shepherd of the spirits of men.

It is, however, not the shepherd, but the sheep, that is my subject. There are points about this animal which are suggestive, in connection with the use made of it in Bible teaching.

I. The sheep is a mountain animal. Man has brought it down to the plains for his convenience; but it belongs to the hills, and it acquired its habits there. Its thick fleece was given it as its defense against the cold winds of the hills. It still shows an instinct to seek the hills. If you turn a number of lambs loose in a field, which has a hillock in it, they will make for that hillock, and fight each other for possession of it, and find happiness in perching on it. The mountaineering habits of their remote ancestors find vent in this. As God’s sheep we also belong to the hills. We are native to a higher level than that on which we find ourselves, and all that is best in us yearns for that level. In our noblest moments we have glimpses of it, and we know that there the pulse beats more strongly, and we breathe quicker and more joyfully, than in the damps and mists of the lower plains of life. Like the lambs, we climb joyfully any petty hillock that suggests our rightful height. Even our worldly ambitions are often an expression of our restlessnesss on the plains, and our eagerness for what corresponds to our origin on the heights, however mistaken the means we use for this.

II. As the sheep comes from a level on which mud and mire are unknown, it is a clean animal. On the plains it often falls into the mire, but it never stays in it. It always struggles to be out of it and to be clean again. The pig belongs to the lower level, and has no dislike to mud and mire. It enjoys them, and returns to its wallowing, if you clean it (2 Peter 2:22). As God’s sheep we yearn for cleanness. We also may fall into the mire of sin and uncleanness, but we find no rest there. We struggle to get out of the filth, and long to be clean again, as did David, when he wrote the Fifty-first Psalm: —

Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean, Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

He was badly defiled when he wrote that, having fallen into two of the worst sins a man can be guilty of. But by the help of God’s Spirit he was taught the way and the speech of a true repentance, and has been teaching these to the world ever since. An American poet, the Rev. John B.

Tabb, gives expression to this truth in a poem he calls “The Difference”: —

Unc’ Si, deHoly Bible say, In speakin’obdejus’, Dat he do fall sebben times a day:

Now, how’s desinner wuss?

Well, chile, deslip may come to all; But den dediffe’nce foller, — For ef you watch him when he fall, De jus’ man do not waller.

III. The sheep, as a mountain animal, found safety on those craggy heights, and escaped from its foes by the swiftness of its leap from rock to rock. When brought down to the plains it leaves behind it its means of safety, and becomes the most helpless and defenseless of animals. It has almost no courage, no means of swift flight, and generally no weapon of defense. It must find its safety in the shepherd’s care for it; and he must be one who takes all the risks for it, even to laying down his life for it if need arise.

God does not pay us the compliment of saying we are either wise or resourceful, when he calls us his sheep. He knows we are always in peril on the lower levels of life, and must lift up our eyes to the hills to seek our safety. We must find it in him who came down to take us into his care, and to lay down his life for his sheep.

“Of all the sheep that are fed on earth,” says Frederick Pease, “Christ’s sheep are the most simple. Always losing themselves; doing little else in this world but lose themselves; never finding themselves; always found by Some One else; getting perpetually into sloughs, and snows, and bramble thickets; like to die there, but for their Shepherd, who is forever finding them and bearing them back, with torn fleeces, and eyes full of fear.”

IV. It was from the heights that the sheep brought the habit of following its leader. On the hills the leader must see for all, and if any do not jump where he does, they are likely to go headlong down some chasm. So if you hold a stick before the bellwether, and make him jump it, every sheep in the flock will jump when it comes to that spot, even though the stick has been taken away.

“Like a flock of sheep,” has become a proverbial expression for the way in which a crowd or mob of men do just as their leaders do, without any thought of their own. A class of little girls were asked, “If there are six sheep resting under a wall, and one of them gets up and jumps over it, how many will be left?” Most of them said there would be five left, but one girl, a farmer’s daughter, said: “There will be none left. If one goes, all the rest will follow.” In those also whom God calls his sheep there is the instinct to seek a leader and to follow him. It often leads to perverse and foolish choices of a leader. It makes us run after quacks and misleaders, if we have not found the right Master.

Some sort of master we must have. We were not born to be masterless and independent beings. “It is always a choice of masters,” says Phillips Brooks, “to which Christ is urging men. It is not by striking off allegiance, but by finding your true Lord, and serving him with a complete submission, that you escape from slavery.” Some one we must serve and follow, and we often show it by submitting to a yoke which is bondage. ’’Other lords have had dominion over us,” because our hearts craved the true, wise, liberating leadership of the True Shepherd, who goes before his sheep and calls them by name. But it is to no blind following that he calls men as his sheep. They are children of light, and of the day, and are called upon to judge of themselves what is right (Luke 12:57). What he asks of us is not thoughtless acquiescence in authority or tradition, but the roused and active exercise of our powers of intelligence, in the assurance that the more men think the more they will thank — the more they use their powers of discrimination, the more they will discern the truth of his claims to their allegiance. The Scriptures, as Coleridge says, distinguish themselves from all other books which claim to disclose the mind of God to men by the frequency and the urgency with which they call upon us to exercise our powers of thought, and by their assurance that this will bring us not to denial or rejection of the truth, but to acceptance of it.