Parable Of Sheep And Goats Quotes

Christ’s fourth indirect claim was to judge the world. This is perhaps the most fantastic of all his statements. Several of his parables imply that he will come back at the end of the world, and that the final day of reckoning will be postponed until his return. He will himself arouse the dead, and all the nations will be gathered before him. He will sit on the throne of his glory, and the judgment will be committed to him by the Father. He will then separate men from one another as a shepherd separates his sheep from his goats. Some will be invited to come and inherit the kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world. Others will hear the dreadful words, 'Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.' Not only will Jesus be the judge, but the criterion of judgment will be men’s attitude to him as shown in their treatment of his 'brethren' or their response to his word. Those who have acknowledged him before men he will acknowledge before his Father: those who have denied him, he will deny. Indeed, for a man to be excluded from heaven on the last day, it will be enough for Jesus to say, "I never knew you.

The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, far from providing a template for an “us and them” brand of theology, actually provides us with the opposite. For the goats found themselves peering into the windows of the Kingdom from the outside, precisely because of their devotion to this “us and them” mindset. They did not perceive Christ in the poor, wandering stranger, or in the condemned man locked behind prison bars! They could not perceive His presence in the least of the least, and it was this inability that landed them on the “goat list”. They could not believe that Christ had “other sheep” from a Gentile flock, and so treated them with contempt and hostility.

his parable of the weeds describes the true sons of the kingdom separated from the wicked false sons who are intended for the flames of purging; the parable of the dragnet has fishermen separating fish, the righteous from the evil, who are thrown into a furnace of fire. He told a parable of virgins awaiting the bridegroom, and another wedding story only to end in tragedy as certain invitees are rejected and judged; a parable about separating sheep and goats leads to eternal life for sheep and eternal destruction for the goats. I could go on, but you see my concern. He does seem to indicate that the end of this age and the inauguration of the age of Messiah results in as much destruction as it does redemption and atonement. And the separation unto judgment is led in all of the parables by his angels.

A parable is a story taken from real life (or a real-life situation) from which a moral or spiritual truth is drawn. Examples are many: the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32), the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37), the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9–14), the wedding banquet (Matt. 22:1–14; Luke 14:15–24), the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31–46), and others, including the parables of the kingdom that will occupy our attention in this first set of studies. By my count there are about twenty-seven parables, though some are closely related and may simply be different versions of the same story.