Our Shepherd God

Over 50 years ago, I started my ministry in a small Highland village.

One morning, a wee boy in the village was lost.

He had been last spotted near a particularly treacherous stretch of coastline where the ground was rough and the sands became quick sands after the tide receded.

Everyone in the village stopped what they were doing in a frantic effort to locate the wee boy until he was found safe and well.

That is how our Father God desperately searches for his people.

Last week, we saw how the

Exile (586-538 BC) reduced the independent and sovereign Jewish nation to a puppet state dominated by foreign powers.

We also saw how the prophet we call Second Isaiah provided the Jewish people with the most wonderful and glorious vision of

God.

Ezekiel was another prophet who lived during the period of the Exile.

Ezekiel cared for his people so much that he accompanied them into exile in Babylon.

In his book, he employed the religious language of his day and that makes his book difficult to understand.

The passage with the valley of dry bones is a good example of his style (Ezekiel 37.1-14).

But there is one section where the language is clear and the meaning explicit. The passage describes God as the shepherd of his people.‘Thus says the Lord, I myself will search for my sheep. I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered. I will feed them with good pastures on the mountains of Israel I will seek the lost and bring back the strayed. I will bind up the crippled and strengthen the weak’(Ezekiel 34.11-16) Read the whole passage, it is wonderful.

What a wonderful picture of God’s eyes searching for his lost children.

God’s heart yearning for their welfare, God’s soul wanting his people to come home.

God did search for his people and did find them in Jesus.

Jesus used the parable of the shepherd with 100 sheep to tell how God finds his lost children. The shepherd searched for the lost animal and when he found it he rejoiced (Matthew 18. 12-14).

Nowadays, the numbers should be reversed.

It is 99 who are lost and only one who appears safe.

Not in a parable, but in his life, Jesus told a deeper story.

He said:‘I am the Good Shepherd’.

Then Jesus takes us into a more serious dimension,‘The Good Shepherd lays down his life for his sheep’ (John 10.11).

That is the way God looks for the lost soul of humanity.

That is the intensity of God’s yearning for you and I.

God gave us Jesus, who laid down his life for us.

‘God so loved the world that he gave us the crucified Jesus’(John 3.16).

‘All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all’ (Isaiah 53.6).

This profound verse tells us how Jesus is our Good Shepherd.

In Jesus, our Good Shepherd God looks for us and finds us.

In Jesus, God sees we are hungry and feeds us.

God knows we are wounded and heals us.

In Jesus, God enters the dark world of broken moral lives to set us free.

In Jesus, God shares his holy life with us and takes our broken life into his very soul.

But God could only do that in and through the Cross, the Cross of Calvary. That was where God laid on Jesus, our Good Shepherd the‘iniquity of us all’(Isaiah 53.6).

Then Jesus, our Good Shepherd, becomes for us all‘The lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world’(John 1.29).

Let Ezekiel have the last word. Ezekiel declares to us that God makes us new. God accomplished this in Jesus our Good Shepherd ‘A new heart I will give you and A new spirit I will put within you’(Ezekiel 36.26)

A little prayer – Gentle Father God Thank you that you found us in Jesus, for we were lost.

We were wounded, but you healed us. We were wrong, but you forgave us.

All this in Jesus, our Good Shepherd.

In his name, Amen.