Following Blindly

 Isn’t it amazing how you can almost always identify the decade a picture was taken by the hairstyle or fashion of the person in the picture? We humans do love to follow the trends, don’t we? That’s all well and good when we’re talking about the length of someone’s hair or the shape of their glasses, but not so much when we’re talking about sin.

The prophet Isaiah summed it up perfectly when he wrote, “All of us, like sheep, have strayed away. We have left God’s paths to follow our own” (Isaiah 53:6). Sheep don’t pay attention to where they’re going, they just follow the sheep in front of them. Unfortunately, we are very much like sheep, just as Isaiah said. Even more unfortunately, the lead sheep we have all been following is Adam (and Eve – why does she not get more blame?) and they wandered far off the path they were supposed to be on. Then we, just like sheep, followed blindly after.

Thankfully, God knows all about sheep, both the actual sheep and the human ones. He knows that we need a shepherd to follow. Ezekiel wrote, “For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I myself will search and find my sheep. I will be like a shepherd looking for his scattered flock” (Ezekiel 34:11-12). Then Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd” (John 10:11).

We may be sheep, prone to going astray and following the wrong path, but Jesus is our shepherd. If we follow Him, we’ll be going the right way.