The restoration cost Him dearly, so now our shepherd wants to share the joy

Pastor-Teacher
John Farley
Wednesday,
February 17, 2010

The restoration cost Him dearly, so now our shepherd wants to share the joy

God’s plan throughout all the ages is that He might be glorified by the grace that He dispenses to undeserving creatures.

the lost sheep, LUK 15:4-7,
the lost coin, LUK 15:8-10,
the lost sons, LUK 15:11-32.

(1) the audience
(2) the conflict or the problem
(3) the unity of three stories provides one response to the problem at hand


The Pharisees and scribes were in much worse shape spiritually than the tax collectors and the sinners and they did not know it!

The Pharisees as the shepherds of Israel are confronted by Jesus with the truth that they have lost their sheep and they are responsible.

So when a sheep is lost, the shepherd is at fault, but the lost sheep also got himself into that predicament.

So you have a bad shepherd who loses his sheep, and then a good shepherd who goes after it.

In Eze 34, we have:

• the bad shepherd - the leaders of Israel.
• lost sheep.
• the good shepherd, the Lord.
• repentance and restoration.

And all the work is done by the Lord, the good shepherd.

ἔρημος
Kittel
The reference of the group is to "abandonment," and it thus denotes a desolate or thinly populated area, and then a "waste" in the stricter sense.

"lonely place"

the wilderness

the desert place

The desert wandering of Israel is stressed in the NT as an instructive time of disobedience (Heb 3:8-9; Acts 7:41 ff.), yet also of God’s gracious working (Acts 7:36; John 3:14; 6:31,49) and speaking (Acts 7:38).

A city or country may be devastated by enemy action (Matt 12:25) or divine wrath (Matt 23:38; Rev 17:16; cf. Isa 6:11; Lam 5:18, etc.). Yet there is also promise for waste places, according to the OT (Isa 32:15-16; 35:1 ff.; 41:18-19, etc.)

ἔρημος
Thayer:
adjective- solitary, lonely, desolate, uninhabited
deserted by others; deprived of the aid and protection of others, especially of friends, acquaintances, kindred; bereft";

of a flock deserted by the shepherd, Homer, Iliad 5, 140)
of Jerusalem, bereft of Christ’s presence, instruction and aid, Matt 23:38

As a substantive -

a desert, wilderness

desert places, lonely regions

As a Palestinian story, no shepherd would leave ninety-nine sheep alone in the wilderness without some provision for them.

The ninety-nine are left in the wilderness, the place of isolation and testing.

The ninety-nine sheep in the first story are linked with the elder brother in the third story.

The lost sheep is found, rescued and brought home.
The ninety-nine are still in the wilderness.

The elder brother remains outside in the courtyard, estranged from his father, shouting at his father, and refusing to come inside to the celebration.

“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make them appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience.”

“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures.”

Matt 13:13
“Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.”

The only one who really comes home is the one who was restored by the costly, extravagant love of his father.

Here in this first parable both the one and the ninety-nine are in the wilderness.

Hebrew parallelism recognizes patterns in Bible passages that match how an ancient Jewish speaker or writer would have organized his material to aid the hearer in understanding the meaning.

The main concept in Hebrew parallelism is repetition.

The main concept in Hebrew parallelism is repetition.

The main concept in Hebrew parallelism is repetition.

The other device (and it complements repetition) is to have small bites of information that come one after the other and are structured the same way to make it easier to receive the new information.

ABC ABC
“step parallelism”

ABC CBA
“inverted parallelism” or “chiasm”.

It is an important literary form to master, because it is used a lot in the Bible.


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