Faithbase

Hello and welcome to Thinking About the Bible. We are in the Advent season and so we're going to continue to talk a little bit about some of the things that happened at the birth of Jesus Christ. So in Luke chapter 2 we read about Mary and Joseph arriving there in Bethlehem and then in verse 8 it says, Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them. They were greatly afraid. The angel said to them, Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which will be to all people. For there was born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you. You will find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. Suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men. So when the angels had gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, Let us now go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has come to pass, which the Lord has made known. So they made haste, went to Bethlehem and saw Jesus and Mary and Joseph. So why shepherds? Again we don't have a lot of time in this shorter format, but shepherds in that culture, in that time period, were considered kind of low-life, blue-collar, but kind of not the not the best society, you might say. And certainly the religious leaders of the day, as we know from the New Testament text, with their uppity viewpoint, with their kind of snooty and arrogant point of view, would not have wanted to mix with shepherds. These smelly people who took care of livestock. But the Bible says that the Lord is our shepherd, that he cares for us and watches over us. And in that particular culture, the shepherd was much different than the shepherd of today. I remember several, many years ago, twenty-some years ago, I was passionate church in southern Idaho, and my children and I were out in the National Forest doing our exploration thing that we liked to do in those days. And we came around this corner on a forest service road, and this massive, I would call it a herd, it wasn't really a flock, about a thousand sheep were being driven across the road by men on horseback and dogs, and pushing all these sheep across the road. Of course we had to stop and wait. That's very different than what it was like a couple thousand years ago, and even now in the Middle East. But in the day that this happened, when Jesus was born and the shepherds were notified, those shepherds would have been very different than what we see today. They would have led their sheep, for instance. They would not have herded them around. They would have known their sheep. They would have had almost a pet relationship with their sheep. It's something much different than what we see today in the commercial raising of sheep today. So when it says that the Lord is our shepherd, we're thinking about somebody, we should think about someone who leads us, who watches over us, who cares for us, as the shepherds would have. That's what they would have been like a couple thousand years ago. And so I think that the angels were sent to the shepherds because they were part of this guild, if you will. David, the great king of Israel, was a shepherd, and his offspring, his prodigy, someday when the king of kings would come, he too would be a shepherd, a shepherd king, you might say. And so the shepherds received this message, I believe, because not only were they part of the guild, but God wanted to honor them as those who understood something about the character of the king who was born, and something that we need to realize too. So as we think about the Bible today, let's think about the shepherds of the ancient world and how they led their sheep, cared for their sheep, indeed loved their sheep, just as our Good Shepherd does today. I'll see you next time.