THE SHEEP OF DEATH by Expositor

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, January 29, 1880

FromThe Review and Herald, Vol. 55, No. 5

THE SHEEP OF DEATH.

By Expositor

In the 49th psalm there is one lesson which even the most cursory reader need not miss; viz., the vanity of mere wealth. The whole psalm pours contempt on wealth, pursues it with most incisive and biting irony. Its pictures of the man who devotes his whole life to amassing a treasure, of which, when he takes the inevitable journey of death, he cannot carry so much as a single shekel with him; of the man who calls his lands after his own name, as if to cheat death itself and to secure a bastard immortality, perpetuating his name on earth while he himself perishes in hades; and of the man who thinks it possible to bribe death, and buy the power “to live on forever,” are quick with a scorn beyond that of satire. They tremble with a fervid moral indignation and contempt for the folly which can mistake wealth for man’s chief good. Wealth is not man’s chief good; it is wrong and wicked, it is a profound and fatal violation of the divine law and order, to make it the governing and supreme aim of life. For all who do that, even though they violate no human law, and even though they acquire but little of the wealth they seek, the psalmist cherishes a pure unutterable scorn. To him, they are losing the very form and status of men. They are flinging away their divine birthright for a mess of pottage. They are sinking to the level of “the beasts that perish” (verses 10, 12, 14, 20, by their repetitions, show how strongly this thought had seized the poet’s mind); i. e., they are living as if they had no life but this, as if death were not, as if there were no land of light beyond the grave.

But there is one picture of them, still hidden from us by a thin veil of words, in which his scorn for these brutish persons culminates in a figure as terrible, perhaps, as any in the whole range of Scripture. In verse 14 he depicts them as “the sheep of death.” The opening clauses of the verse, rightly translated, run: “Like sheep they are gathered to hades; death is their shepherd” (he who feeds or finds pasture for them; not he who “feeds on them”). What the psalmist means is, that men who make wealth their ruling aim are not simply like the beasts that perish, but are in very deed the sheep of death; that it is death whom they have chosen for their shepherd, instead of God, the author and source of life, that it is death who finds pasture for them while they live, and who, when they die, drives them to his fold. Think of it! “The Sheep of Death,” men following that grim shadow to the darkness in which it dwells! and these the very men who “bless their souls” (verse 18), whom the world praises because they have done good to themselves, whose sayings the world quotes and approves after they have gone to their long dark home.

Was there ever a more grisly and dreadful metaphor? And yet is it one whit too dreadful? Is it not true that every man who trusts in riches, or longs for them, as his chief good, is pursuing death, not life, has taken for his shepherd “the dark shadow feared of man,” although he knows it not! Can we not see in that very trust or longing the very brand of death, the private and distinctive mark of that grim shepherd?

Man was not made to find the chief good and market of his time in gain, in growing rich, in founding families, and calling lands after his own name. And any man who puts that first which God did not mean to be first, so far forfeits his life, so far comes under the dominion of death; for what is death save the subversion of the true order of life? We truly live only as we fulfill the law of our being, as we live for what God meant us to live, and as he meant us to live. So far as we fall short of that, God ceases to be our shepherd; and of our own will and choice we become the “sheep of death.”

The Sheep of Death! Who could not resent the name, if it were applied to him? Go to any rich man rejoicing in his gain; tell him that on his stately mansion, his broad fields, his prosperous speculations, his accumulated treasures, there is hidden the fatal mark which proves him to be of the flock of death; and however wholly he may be living to himself, however little he may be doing for others, and though in comparison with wealth he despise wisdom, genius, righteousness, and would part with them all, if he had them, rather than lose his chief treasure, yet would he not be sincerely shocked, would he not indignantly resent the imputation, if at least he did not account you the “fool” which the psalmist calls him? And yet, after all, what has he acquired? what is he living for, that will outlast death? what that he can carry beyond the “bourne”? To live in and for the perishable, is not that to perish?

Little or much, what does it matter? If a man could inherit or acquire the whole realm of nature, or if he be content with a few houses and fields, or a few hundreds a year and what these will bring him, so long as he can be content to move within the limits of time and sense, and makes no provision for the spirit that is in him, or the eternity through which that spirit may endure, he is equally the bond-slave of death. So long as he sows to the flesh, whether on a larger or a smaller scale, he can only reap the inevitable harvest of corruption. He is of those of whom it is written, “Like sheep they are gathered into hades; for death is their shepherd.”—Expositor.