God created the Heavens and the Earth, the plants and the animals, all of the angels, and caused everything in the entire universe to come to existence. However, out of all of creation, only humanity was blessed to be made in the image of God. From the beginning, God intended us to be in a close relationship with Him and live in harmony with all of creation. However, we sinned against our creator and we were scattered from our homeland.
We had everything when we were with our Master, but we decided that we wanted more and to do things according to our own plans. Our sin wasn’t only disobeying God’s instruction to not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but also the pride we had in attempting to make ourselves to be gods. The serpent said, “God knows well that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, who know good and evil.” When we sinned, we were like a flock of lost sheep cut off from the Master’s source of eternal life. We needed a shepherd to lead us back home.
Our Master sent Jesus, the good shepherd, into the world to lead us back to Him. He came in the form of one of us sheep in order to better lead the whole flock to the Master. Jesus says He is the good shepherd because He cares so much about His flock that He would lay down His life for them. Jesus is also often called the sacrificial lamb because He gave up His life for the good of the whole flock. As stated in Acts 4:11, “The stone that the builder’s rejected has become the cornerstone.”
We should work towards becoming better listeners. Our eternal destiny depends on us following the voice of our shepherd. We all have a tendency to repeat the sin of Adam and Eve and promote ourselves to be the judge of what’s moral and immoral, good and bad, right and wrong. Not only did Jesus always speak the truth during His earthly life, He left the truth with the Church that He created and in the traditions that He helped pass on in the Church. The more people that follow Jesus, the easier it will be for the rest to find their way. We like to go with the flow and follow the crowd, but we should periodically ask ourselves if the crowd we are following is following the good shepherd.
