1 Peter 2:25

1 Peter 2:25. For ye were going astray as sheep. Continuing Isaiah's strain, Peter adds a reason for what he has just said of a restoration to righteousness, or soundness of life. The figure passes from that of sickness into that of error. As the better-sustained reading gives the participle in the masculine (not in the neuter, as if qualifying the ‘sheep'), it is necessary to put the comparison otherwise than it is given in the A. V. The readers are compared simply to sheep, not to wandering sheep. That is to say, they are said themselves to have been once wanderers, and in that state of estrangement from God to have been like sheep, helpless, foolish, and heedless. Thus the figure stands in Isaiah 53:6, and so here it connects itself at once with the subsequent idea of returning to a Head. The use of the sheep as a figure of man in his natural alienation from God is one of the commonest in the Old Testament (e.g. Numbers 27:17; 1 Kings 22:17; Psalms 119:176; Ezekiel 34:5; Ezekiel 34:11). So in the New Testament (Matthew 18:12-13; Luke 15:4, etc.); although it is used also as a figure of docility, etc. (John 10:4-5, etc.).

But ye turned yourselves now. On the ground of such instances as Matthew 9:22; Matthew 10:13; Mark 5:30; Mark 8:33; John 12:40; John 21:20, it seems necessary to give the verb the middle sense here, although it might seem more in harmony with the context to render it ‘are returned,' so as to bring out more clearly what had been done for them. It is in the past, too, as referring to the definite act of turning, once accomplished. He to whom they turned is Christ (not God here), who is designated both the Shepherd of their souls and the Overseer of their souls. The title ‘Shepherd,' indeed, is used of God in the Old Testament (Psalms 23:1; Isaiah 40:11; Ezekiel 34:11-12; Ezekiel 34:16). But it is also applied to Messiah there (Ezekiel 34:24), while in the New Testament it is not only claimed for Himself by Christ (John 10:11), but is given to Him again by Peter (1 Peter 5:4). The use of the title ‘Bishop,' or, as it simply means ‘Overseer' or ‘Guardian,' may be due to the fact that, like ‘Shepherd,' it was a name given to the ‘presidents of the churches, who were, so to speak, the representatives of the One Shepherd and Bishop, the Head of the whole Church' (Huther), or, as others suggest, it may have risen from such Old Testament usages as the ascription to the Lord God (in Ezekiel 34:11-12) of the action of ‘seeking out' the sheep; which action is expressed by the verb cognate to the title. The two designations are closely akin. The early Greeks spoke of their princes as shepherds of the people, transferring the name not from the pastoral function of feeding the flock, but rather from that of tending, protecting, and directing it. In the New Testament, too, the ‘pastors' in Paul's enumeration of functionaries in the Church (Ephesians 4:11) are ‘shepherds,' and the cognate verb which our A. V. renders ‘feed' in such passages as John 21:16; Acts 20:28; 1 Peter 5:2, has the wider sense of ‘shepherding' or ‘tending.'