The Gospel for Stray Dogs (and you)

The gospel isn’t something that makes us comfortable, really. When it comes to how we often rationalize the gospel of Jesus, and His saving blood being shed for everyone, we tend to think of ourselves as being bad, but not that bad. We look out into the world and think of people that have done horrific things, and it is easy to think that they are too far gone for Jesus to save them from the consequences of their actions. When we look into the world, we see a world full of people that have done bad things, and we tend to assume that those same bad things will deservedly bring bad—albeit just—consequences to everyone that has ever done anything wrong.

If I am supposed to love my neighbor as Christ loves me, how can I look at my neighbor as a pure summation of their actions? If that isn’t the way that Christ sees me, then how can I place such a burden on my neighbor? If I’m declared righteous before God because of Christ Jesus, why would I then look at anyone else differently?

Perhaps the answer can be found nestled between our love for the gospel when it saves us, and our proclivity towards loving the law when it comes to everyone else.

Whenever I was in college, I took a class about the idea of “total war,” particularly in World War II. Due to modern innovations and the industrialization of our world, it was really one of the first wars where everyday citizens were seen as active participants in war, regardless of whether or not they had been mustered into a single military unit in their entire lives. One of the things from that class that has stuck with me all of these years later is how we all viewed the footage of war.

As a class we would watch videos of entire cities being leveled by bombs, and then we would talk about it as a class. We were all saddened by it, but for some reason the tragedy of it all didn’t strike us at ur core. Then, and I’ll never forget this, we watched a video where soldiers were on horses and the horses didn’t survive. Oh how the entire class wept!

While the horses dying was indeed sad, I remember walking out of that class wondering why we all cried physical tears for the animals that lost their lives, but we didn’t seem to share that same reverence for human life.

I think, in part, we tend to see our neighbors as deserving of a bad punishment. Regardless of whether or not one believes in God’s law or the gospel, we somehow gravitate towards this notion that people are inherently bad, and thus they probably got what they deserved when bad things happened to them in turn.

How quickly we forget the gospel as it has been given to us!

The good news of the gospel is that though I am wretched and awful, because of Jesus I am declared righteous before God, as though I was an unblemished lamb—though it was He who was truly unblemished. Because of Jesus I can be seen as I was intended to be seen by God all along, before I went and did things my way.

The world looks at each of us as people walking on the side of the road, begging for help, yet nobody throws a single penny our way because they are guided by the thought that if they help us, we won’t get what we deserve. Because of Jesus, we are seen the same way most of us see a stray dog.

Though we don’t always have the means to take them into our own homes, we all tend to see stray dogs and want them to be okay. Why? Probably because they’re innocent, only being placed into bad circumstances by a “bad” person. We drive by, hoping that everything will be okay for them because they don’t deserve the life that they have been dealt. That is the way Jesus sees you and I. Though the world passes us by and declares us guilty, He passes by and gives life changing crumbs to those with faith. He looks down on us as though we did no wrong, and He looks up at the Father and declares us innocent in spite of ourselves.

The Kingdom of God is like an animal shelter with no cages. He saves us from ourselves and the world around us, and He nurtures us and shows us love that we don’t always know we deserve. We walk through the gates battered and beaten, but through Him we get glimpses of the life we were intended to live.

Love your neighbor.