Jesus Christ compared his own adherents to sheep, and himself to their shepherd. Being compared to a sheep is a serious insult in our culture, especially in the “free thinker” and “alternative media” spaces. This makes perfect sense. Sheep are known for being gullible, defenseless, and trusting to a fault. They are natural “followers”. They will even follow each other around, including in a loop, because none of them bother to check where they are going, and everyone assumes the sheep in front of them is leading them somewhere:
In 2022, for example, one flock of sheep was recorded by a security camera following each other in a circle for twelve days straight, somewhere in the Mongolian steppes of China. They might have died from exhaustion if a human didn’t intervene. The fact that none of them could simply turn their heads and realize that they were going in a circle, or recognize the familiar scenery they kept walking past, is a testament to just how content they are with following whoever is in front of them.
The metaphor was not lost on commentators. Many saw it as a metaphor for Christianity, or weak-minded people in general, who follow along with the herd and lack independence. Being a stickler for allegory, I see something slightly different.
In the New Testament, sheep are not used as a metaphor for Christians per se, but for humanity at large. The “lost sheep” includes all the sinners who are vulnerable to being exploited. Jesus was sent to find and rescue those sheep who (secretly) belong to the Father, leading them to the correct path. Those who “belong to him” will recognize his voice, and come to him when they are “called”. He says there will be many false shepherds and many false paths, and predators everywhere waiting to attack. In this allegory, humanity was already a mixture of predators and prey, with various herds and leaders trying to control them. Christians are therefore not uniquely sheep-like, we are just the ones who admit we need help; that we are weak, lost, and we cannot find the Father on our own. We accept the need for a shepherd.
This language fascinates me. Did you know the term “pastor” is borrowed directly from Latin, where it simply means a shepherd? Really, if it weren’t for our need to constantly honor the terminology of the Roman Catholics and their Latin, we’d just call our church leaders “sherpherds” in plain English.
Paul also tells the elders of Ephesus that the Holy Spirit himself has made them overseers of God’s sheep, responsible for protecting them:
(Acts 20:28-31) Keep watch over yourselves and the entire flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the assembly of God, which He purchased with His own blood. I know that after my departure, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. Even from your own number, men will rise up and distort the truth to draw away disciples after them. Therefore be alert and remember that for three years I never stopped warning each of you night and day with tears.
Divisions were a huge concern from the beginning. Ideally, Christianity would have been one inseparable movement, united in doctrine. Those who led others away from the flock/assembly were compared to savage wolves, and it was the job of the elders to fight them off. It’s marvellous how deception of Emperor Constantine exploited this concern. His “ecumenical councils” sought to reconcile differences between different church leaders to create the “catholic” (that is, “universal”) and “orthodox” (that is, “customary”) tradition. In the end, the savage wolves won, and the flocks were left to endure in the margins, as so-called heretics. What really blows my mind is that even this must have been Christ’s plan, because it fulfills the Revelation propehcies of the Beast and its ability to wage war on the saints with blasphemy and worldly authority.
Breaking Away
To break away from the herd is dangerous, and it always has been. It can be seen as an act of courage—a risk worth taking in order to find the True Path—or literal heresy. The word “heretic” comes from the Greek hairetikós which literally means somebody who divides the group, or diverges from others. Going your own way means being easily targeted, isolated, and unprotected, but it also creates a “schism” or division, and other sheep follow. This creates a secondary danger.
Trusting and following the herd is good if you are on the right path, but it will lead to a tragic death if you are being misled.
And we know that the job of Satan is to make it as difficult as possible to know which path is correct, and therefore which herd is heading the right way. Worse yet, we can’t simply retrace the steps and go back to an earlier tradition, because Satan’s deceptions began in the first generation of Christianity, and then quickly hijacked the institutions. Tares were quickly sown among the wheat (Matthew 13), and they are required to grow up in parallel until the very end. What we can say for certain is that the true path is not the most popular and established traditions; the biggest flocks are misguided. The Winter Christian is prepared to even walk alone, if necessary. But this raises a troubling point about what it means to break away.
The Goat
To further explore this allegory of shepherds and followers, I want to introduce the metaphor of goats from the New Testament. Check it out:
(Matthew 25:31-34, 41) “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on his right [ie. sheep], ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. … “Then he will say to those on his left [ie. goats], ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
Unlike sheep, goats are by nature independent, curious, exploratory, and daring. In some ways this bothers me, because I fit the description of a goat much more than a sheep in my personality.
I’m the kind of person who writes a book called Maybe Everyone Is Wrong, and creates a Substack about anticipating the great Falling Away and trying to not get attached to any given herd. From the youngest age, I always hated being “part of the crowd” and never trusted the people in front of me, no matter how confident they sounded. Instead, I wanted to climb up onto things, look around, and question what’s happening, which is very goat-like. I don’t want to end up going in a circle for twelve days!
So I have to ask, just who exactly does God consider the “goats” and the “sheep”? Can we tell from disposition, personality, or tradition? In the parable, Jesus says that the sheep are the one who fed the hungry and cared for the lowest in society, while the goats neglected the needy. But is that really the core issue here? Or is he just borrowing the sheep/goat metaphor to help a 1st Century herding community understand that there will be a Judgment Day where the righteous and wicked are separated?
You could be forgiven for thinking that a sheep-like mentality is what Jesus wants. He never gives credit to goats for their virtues! But does Jesus actually hate independent thinking, curiosity, and the willingness to challenge authority? I very seriously doubt it. He was himself a fierce critic of those in power—the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Romans alike—and was branded a rebel by traditionalists. He smashed their old ways, applied critical thinking instead of dogmatism, and remained stubborn until the very end, when he was tortured and murdered for daring to question the powerful. He was considered the ultimate “goat” by his own people. And yet he is the very Lamb of God!
Indeed, goats are known to be rebellious, disobedient, and unwilling to submit easily. But wait… aren’t we supposed to be rebellious against the world (and false religion), and stubbornly refuse to go along with the herd of the rest of mankind and the hypocrites? Aren’t our enemies going to be those in our own household (Matthew 10:36)? Aren’t we supposed to rebel against the evil spirits who rule society? Shouldn’t we wage spiritual warfare against false ideology? Those things all sounds quite aggressive and non-sheep-like! So what, then? To the world, and to the false churches, a devout Christian becomes like an obnoxious goat, while in the Spirit he is a loyal sheep of God, following the example of the Lamb, who was the ultimate rebel against the wicked world. Such a paradox must be from God.
Conclusion
What I am 100% certain of is that I was called by the voice of the Lord, and gave myself to his leadership long ago, but at the moment I did so, my heart was changed, and I became the enemy of this world.
(James 4:4) You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.
There was a time when I thought was a “Christian” who rejected the herd but followed my own way. I had confidence in my own leadership. When God convicted my soul, I had no choice but to sacrifice that arrogant independence and rebellion, and submit fully to His standards and leadership. For me, therefore, faith has never been about following traditions or other believers, but only submitting to the Word of God itself, despite what anyone thinks of me.
I do feel like a disrespectful, rebellious goat in this damned world, but I only want to be a follower of Christ. The more I study the Word of God, the more feel compelled to oppose the dogma and religious traditions of mankind, as he did. The more I search the Scriptures, the more convinced I am that we need goat-like curiosity to survive, with a bold awareness of the conspiracy against us. The wolves are everywhere, and they’ve been perfecting their disguises as sheep. (And yes, I am aware of the irony of my family name. God’s sense of humor knows no limits.)
To be a sheep in Christ’s flock—to follow his actual guidance—perhaps we need to break away from the herd and join the disruptive, subversive, contrary chorus of critical thinkers, exposing the dangers loudly.
In truth, it is the enemies of the Bible who are the gullible, confused, and ignorant “sheep”, staying safely in the unthinking herd in any direction they go. They are also the “goats” who rebel against God and defy instruction from good leaders. They are proud of being free from God, but they don’t realize they are slaves to sin:
(Romans 6:20-23) For when you were slaves to sin, you were free of obligation to righteousness. What fruit did you reap at that time, from the things of which you are now ashamed? The outcome of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin, and have become slaves to God, the fruit you reap leads to holiness, and the outcome is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
This is why Bible-believing Christians (not the false Christians who compromise in order to appease the world) are the #1 enemy today. The slaves of Satan are clustering, uniting, and even daring to pretend that they are Christians themselves(!) in order to lure us away from the true Shepherd, and bring us into their fold. We are always being invited to join their causes, their ideologies, and their movements. We are supposed to panic when they are terrified, and heed their calls to action. But those who follow Christ are immune from their terror and their hope alike.
Nothing they accomplish is impressive to us. Nothing they threaten scares us. We are the threat they fear; the risk to their system. Our hope is despair to them. They must silence, kill, and commandeer us. For sheep, we are treated as awfully dangerous.
It is a Christian's duty to be unimpressed
Those paying attention can see it everywhere, today. In the last year alone, the Aquarian Conspiracy has grown in strength and boldness, as Theosophical-Rosicrucian deception has been working overtime in the “alternative media”. The liars even pose as Christians, cherry-picking scriptures to fool the ignorant, while always pushing the same direction: emotionality, irrationality, and mystical thinking. They want you jumping to conclusions based on signs, wonders, omens, and
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I am still here! I made it through the great "women in heaven" debate of 2025. 2 things.
1. I think that the word "Hebrew" comes from "habiru" which was the Egyptian word for goat-herder. So we goats come from good stock.
2. God hates the stiff-necked. That's the goat description that strikes closest to home for me. We are also called to be holy, set-apart.
So I am to be unafraid of what people think, and think for myself and do what is right -- yet be submitted to my Lord Jesus and the convictions and leading of his Holy Spirit.
I have always related to the image of Jesus carrying the lamb on his shoulders. Given my own will I wander away from the Shepard all the time, out of curiosity for "the world". In His loving mercy He comes and retrieves me every time. Thank you for the article Terry.