Milk Goats

Imagine if you will a man who cared for goats in order to sell their milk in the market. Everyone in the market loved his milk and even felt that it gave them a little extra boost of energy for the day when they would drink it.

This man had two sons. A wise son and a lazy son. Each morning the man would call his two sons and they would divide the milk so that each one would have a portion to take to market.

The wise son would carefully strain the milk, and place it in clean clear bottles so that the milk would be as delicious and healthful as it could be when the people came to buy it.

But the lazy son was not interested in working hard, he would dump the milk into any container he could find, add water to his milk to make it go further, and then he would put just a touch of sugar in the milk to make it taste a little bit sweeter.

For a time the people would come and buy milk from both sons, but as time went on they realized that the lazy son was watering the milk down and adding sugar. They realized that they never felt quite as good after drinking the lazy son's milk, as when they would drink the wise son's milk. In fact the people that drank the lazy son's milk were often given to bouts of sickness.

In that same way we are doing eisogesis if we treat stories as a hermeneutical discipline rather than a homiletical discipline.