Introduction

I have been blessed with an opportunity to have my cake and eat it. I’m a farm boy from southern Minnesota and have enjoyed many life experiences, which I’ll humbly share here. I believe these many experiences turned out to be preparatory for this calling to be a pastor and to be an under-shepherd of Christ Jesus’ sheep.

When we (my wife and three daughters) moved to my first call, we politely balked at the parsonage offered by the congregations that called me and bought a five-acre farmstead (with the church folks’ blessings) and started raising meat goats. So in the middle of my life (God willing) I find myself living with Christ’s sheep and Boer goats.

Generally in matters of Christian understanding sheep are good and goats are…well…not good. We get this from the prophetic words of Jesus that he will come again and separate the sheep from the goats: “³¹ When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: ³² And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: ³³ And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. ^[1]”~Matt. 25:31-33

The sheep are the ones who believe and serve Christ and the goats are the one who served their self-interest and not Christ’s. The sheep go into eternal life and the goats to eternal punishment. So…to be a goat is a bad thing….or is it? Jesus says he will separate the unrighteous from the righteous JUST AS a shepherd in the days when he walked among us divide these two species.

Goat or goats in the KJV are cited 132 times and most of it is good. Goats served God’s people for sustenance and played a major part in their worship to God. Good quality goat kids were offered as sin offerings and during Yom Kipper the priest would place the sins of the people on a goat and that goat would be banished into the wilderness as payment of the people’s sins – we know that as the scapegoat.

A couple of years ago I was introduced to a name for Jesus that I never knew, “The Goat of God”. Much like the scapegoat of Yom Kipper, Jesus took on the sins of the world and died on the cross of Calvary as the propitiation of our sins. Unlike the scapegoat, he took ALL of our sins (the ones committed, the ones we are committing and the ones we will commit in the future) once and for all AND took on our sinful nature, which contaminates humankind since the fall in Eden to deliver us from the righteous wrath of God.

I cherish the image of Christ Jesus as the Goat of God.

The Scapegoat by William Holman Hunt, 1854. Hunt had this framed in a picture with the quotations "Surely he hath borne our Griefs and carried our Sorrows; Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of GOD and afflicted." (Isaiah 53:4) and "And the Goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a Land not inhabited." (Leviticus16:22)

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^[1]The Holy Bible : King James Version. 1995 (Mt 25:31). Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.