Good Riddance to the Strays?

Believers in growing numbers today have become restless with questions they feel they can no longer ignore, but must answer in order to continue in the faith. Often these involve what are euphemistically called "difficulties": Scriptures that appear to be contradictions; New Testament quotes from the Tanach (Old Testament) that seem irrelevant or mistaken; unsettling events in Scripture that no one seems able to reconcile with the G-d they have been taught to love. These are not difficult to find (see our article "Knowing the Word of G-d" for just a few examples). And yet the Lord's people are commonly expected to ignore them, or to be satisfied with assurances that in spite of the "difficulties", the Scriptures are "inerrant in their original autographs" (which does us no practical good, since we no longer have the "original autographs").

Believers who are uncompromising lovers of truth can become desperate enough to hunt for answers outside the bounds of the Christian or Messianic community. If such a questioning believer runs into anti-missionaries (Jewish antagonists dedicated to "rescuing the deceived" with "refutations" of the Gospel), and he fails to find coherent responses to their challenge in his own community, he can decide that he was simply mistaken about the reliability of the New Testament and relocate to the Jewish community, which seems to have a more honest approach. He shocks us all by announcing one day that he has come to the only right conclusion: Yeshua is not, could not be, the Messiah. How do the rest of us respond to these "traitors"?

...The scattered you have not brought back, nor have you sought for the lost.... (Ezekiel 34:4)

Yeshua gave us a parable about the one sheep that wanders away from the flock of a hundred. He spoke of the shepherd's readiness to go out and find that lost sheep as if the response was self-evident. No one but a "hireling" would question a shepherd's responsibility to put forth every effort to retrieve the stray, and no one celebrates unless he is successful in returning with that one bedraggled creature. In the spiritual parallel, our Lord explicitly says that Heaven centers its joy on the repentant, returned sheep ("repentance" and "return" are the same noun in Hebrew) rather than the faithful who were in no danger.

By our own actions, we create a different parable altogether. The 100th sheep proved by wandering off that it was never really part of the flock, and is in fact no better than a wolf. Yeshua's shepherd was well-meaning, but his zeal to recover the stray was unnecessary. We have concluded in our greater wisdom that once a sheep "abandons" the flock of the Lord, its shepherd is released from all obligation to it. His role is to stay put and guard the 99 faithful sheep, in case the wanderer returns to (heaven forbid) lead others away. If this shepherd calls for his friends to rejoice, it's because he still has 99 and only lost one in the ordeal. And good riddance to that "rebellious" one. The unanswerable questions were beginning to disturb flock and shepherds alike... who knows what group crisis would have broken out if the doubting one had stayed around?

Excerpted from Restoring Lost Believers at restorersofzion.org
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