Dirty Dogs

There once was a man living in a very nice house that he kept perfectly clean. His yard, however, had been dug up by wild animals and was a cold, muddy mess.

The man had a son that he loved very much.  He bought a dog for his son.   After a time, he noticed the dog was lonely so he got him a mate.  That led to many more dogs as they had puppies.  The son loved the dogs very much and trained them to stay indoors where it was clean and dry and all their needs were met.

One day a raccoon looked into the house and taunted the dogs with a piece of hot dog it had found in the trash.  One dog got excited and ran outdoors to chase the raccoon and eat the piece of hot dog, and all the others followed.  The son came looking for his dogs and saw them through the window rolling in the mud.

The son grieved, and told them ‘Now you are all muddy and filthy. My father will never allow you back into the house like that.’

The son told his father the bad news.  Then they agreed that the original plan they’d made for something like this had to be put into motion.

Setting up a wash tub on the back porch, the son started bathing the dogs who came to him, one at a time.  He removed ticks and fleas as well as the mud.

Some dogs refused to come to the bathwater thinking it was too much fun in the muddy yard and they’d learned to eat from the trash like the raccoon so weren’t hungry.

Others saw that the only way to get back in the warm house where there was good food and other comforts was to go to the son and let themselves get bathed.

As the dirt came off the dogs, it got onto the son’s skin and clothes until all the son’s clothes were filthy and ruined.

When the last dog who had come to the son for its bath was clean and back in the house, the father laid fresh clothes on the porch for the son to change into.  The son went back in the house with the dogs who had allowed him to bathe them and grieved over the ones who had chosen to stay in the mud.

The rebellious dogs that refused to get bathed were then attacked by the raccoon and died.

 

No, this isn’t a perfect analogy of Christ’s sacrifice for us. A more perfect story might have involved the raccoon attacking the son while he bathed the dogs, and him bleeding to death as the last one was cleansed.  The father would then restore life to the son in three days.  He would have only started out with one breeding pair who got out into the yard, then bathed them only when there were generations of puppies out there along with the original pair.  A perfect story would have had another character representing the Holy Spirit, calling the dogs to the son to get bathed.

Such attempts to perfect the analogy would have only complicated the basic story unnecessarily, and distracted the reader from the point.  If those details had been included, then why not others, until the story was no longer a lesson, but an exercise in trying to force an analogy to be perfect.  The reader can take the basic lesson and fill in the rest.  All analogies eventually fail.

The point of course, is that Christ took all your dirt, smell, and shame onto himself when you couldn’t do it for yourself, just as the dogs in our story could not apply soap to themselves, nor scrub their own skin in a satisfactory manner to be allowed back into the perfectly clean house.  The Son was in fact, killed by the ‘raccoon’ who rules the outdoors, and did in fact, bleed to death.  And his father did indeed bring Him back to life and will do the same for all who believe in Him.