Wednesday, October 19, 2016

When Wandering Sheep Come Home

                                                                                                  Wednesday, October 19, 2016

“In those coming days,” says the Lord, “the people of Israel will return home together with the people of Judah.  They will come weeping and seeking the Lord their God.  They will ask the way to Jerusalem and will start back home again.  They will bind themselves to the Lord with an eternal covenant that will never be forgotten.
“My people have been lost sheep.  Their shepherds have led them astray and turned them loose in the mountains.  They have lost their way and can’t remember how to get back to the sheepfold.  All who found them devoured them.  Their enemies said, ‘We did nothing wrong in attacking them, for they sinned against the Lord, their true place of rest, and the hope of their ancestors.’   Jeremiah 50:4-7(NLT)

I get this uneasy feeling during political seasons (okay, I get a lot crazy during political seasons), it’s like being a lost sheep on a journey.  Somehow we have lost our way, and it isn’t a pleasant thought to entertain the notion that we may never find our way back. 

Piled on top of that sickening lostness in the pit of my stomach is the noise of the talking (shouting) heads on the news broadcasts, picking apart every syllable of every candidate’s words, placed in every imagined scenario of doom.  The sheep are bleating in fear that all is lost and the shepherds are hollering over each other’s ideas on how to get the sheep back home.

It’s a four year cycle of madness that can only be described as mad-sheep disease (or would mad-shepherd sickness be more accurate?).

Enter Jeremiah – the weeping prophet.  Suddenly his gloom and doom message of warning becomes a welcome it will be alright ray of hope. 

The prophet pictures a sea of sheep wandering back to Jerusalem from exile among the Babylonians.  From conquered to free; from defeated to home.

I needed this.

I needed to remember God’s ways end like this.  There is a reason we sing songs like Victory in Jesus.  God is JHWH, the victorious, sovereign, omnipotent King of Kings and Lord of Lords. 

We may inaugurate a president next January, but he or she will never wear that crown!

For You Today

Come what may, because of the fear of bleating sheep stirred to a frenzy by the left and right, or the misdirection, non-direction, and confusion of the arguing, hollering shepherds, the Shepherd of Peace, that true place of rest, still rules.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road…have a blessed day!
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NOTES

[i] Title Images: By Jeroen Hellingman (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

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