Parable of the sheep and the goats

“Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

— Matthew 25:40 (ESV)

The parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31-46) is Jesus’s description of the final judgment. When the Son of Man comes in glory, he separates everyone gathered before him as a shepherd separates sheep from goats, setting the sheep at his right hand and the goats at his left. The King welcomes the sheep into the kingdom because they fed, clothed, and visited “the least of these my brothers,” declaring mercy shown to them was mercy shown to himself; he sends the goats away for withholding that same mercy. The sheep inherit eternal life; the goats, eternal punishment.

Biblical Basis

Matthew places the parable at the close of the Olivet Discourse, immediately after the parables of the ten virgins and the talents (Matt. 25:1-30). Jesus describes his own return “in his glory, and all the angels with him”: “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” (Matt. 25:31-32).

To those on his right, the King says, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matt. 25:34), and names the reason: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me” (Matt. 25:35-36). When the righteous ask when they ever did any of this for him, the King answers, “as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:40).

The same six deeds recur in reverse for those on his left, who are sent “into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matt. 25:41) for withholding them (Matt. 25:42-43); Christ answers their protest with the negative form of the same identification: “as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me” (Matt. 25:45). The parable closes with the two destinies stated side by side: “these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matt. 25:46). The parable belongs to the wider body of Jesus’s parabolic teaching treated at parables of Jesus.

Confessional Witness

The Reformed confessions address the scene this parable depicts, a day of universal judgment, in their own chapter “Of the Last Judgment”: Christ will “judge the world in righteousness,” and “all persons that have lived upon the earth shall appear before the tribunal of Christ… and receive according to what they have done in the body, whether good or evil.”¹ The 1689 shares this chapter’s wording almost unchanged with the Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration, the wider Reformed family’s own confessional statement on final judgment.

This parable’s own specific angle is not the fact of judgment but the criterion the King names: deeds of mercy done to “the least of these my brothers” (Matt. 25:40). The confession addresses exactly this in its chapter “Of Good Works”: such works, “done in obedience to God’s commandments, are the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith,” through which believers “manifest their thankfulness” and “glorify God, whose workmanship they are.”² The same chapter forbids reading the sheep’s deeds as meritorious: believers “cannot by [their] best works merit pardon of sin or eternal life at the hand of God, by reason of the great disproportion that is between them and the glory to come.”³

Doctrinal Significance

The King’s answer to both the sheep and the goats rests on a single claim: mercy shown to “the least of these my brothers” is mercy shown to Christ himself (Matt. 25:40, 45). Neither group recognized him in the people they served or ignored; the shared surprise, “when did we see you…?” (Matt. 25:37-39, 44), shows the deeds were not calculated acts aimed at a reward but the unreflective fruit of who the sheep already were. The identification itself belongs to the doctrine of union with Christ: Christ so identifies with his people that what is done to them is done to him.

The parable is also a paradigm case of Scripture’s language of judgment “according to works,” language a sola fide theology has to account for without collapsing into a doctrine of merit. Aaron O’Kelley’s survey of the Reformed debate over this language reports one standard answer: at the final judgment, works “only have significance for believers… in so far as they result in rewards that are not essentially related to justification.”⁴ On this reading, the sheep’s deeds are what the King publicly cites as evidence of a faith and standing already theirs, not what secures that standing.

Opposing Views

Reformed expositors have read the scope of “all nations” (Matt. 25:32) differently.

Gill: judgment of the professing church

John Gill argues the passage describes a judgment of “members of churches, professors of religion, good and bad,” not the whole human race.⁵ His case is threefold: the passage explains, without a parable’s figurative cover, the two parables just before it (the ten virgins and the talents), both of which concern people already within “the kingdom of heaven, or gospel church state”; the wicked are condemned for failing people they had “dwelt among… and been associates with,” which could not describe those who never heard of Christ; and the sentence against them matches the sentence Christ elsewhere pronounces on false professors specifically (Matt. 7:22-23; Luke 13:26-27).⁵ Gill reads “all nations” as restricted by context, meaning professing Christians “in all nations of the world,” not literally every human being.⁵

Hodge: judgment of all nations

Charles Hodge reads the same “all nations” language as literal and universal. Introducing the passage as a description of how “Matthew xxv. 31-46 sets forth the whole process of the judgment,” he lists it alongside other texts teaching that the final judgment “is absolutely universal; it includes both small and great; and all the generations of men.”⁶ Hodge’s reading is the majority position among Reformed expositors; on it, the parable depicts the judgment of the entire human race, not a judgment internal to the visible church.

Objections and Responses

Does the sheep’s admission to the kingdom on the basis of their deeds teach salvation by works, against justification by faith alone? Good works are never the ground of acceptance: believers “cannot by [their] best works merit pardon of sin or eternal life at the hand of God, by reason of the great disproportion that is between them and the glory to come.”³ What the sheep’s deeds supply is evidence, not merit: they are “done in obedience to God’s commandments” and are “the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith,”² which is why the King’s sentence can rest on them without their functioning as its basis. O’Kelley’s survey of the wider Reformed debate over judgment “according to works” states the same distinction in contemporary terms: works are significant for believers at the final judgment “in so far as they result in rewards that are not essentially related to justification.”⁴

If “the least of these my brothers” names anyone in need, does the parable reduce Christian mercy to general humanitarianism, with no reference to the gospel? The confession defines good works narrowly: they are only those “God hath commanded in his Holy Word, and not such as without the warrant thereof are devised by men out of blind zeal, or upon any pretence of good intentions.”⁷ Their doer’s “ability to do good works is not at all of themselves, but wholly from the Spirit of Christ.”⁸ On this confessional account, the deeds the parable rewards are the fruit of a faith the Spirit has already given, offered to Christ’s “brothers” because Christ himself is the one being served in them (Matt. 25:40).

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 32, “Of the Last Judgment,” para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 16, para. 2. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 16, para. 5. ↩ ↩²
Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 159-207, at 200. ↩ ↩²
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book 7, chap. 9, “Of the Last and General Judgment.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Charles Hodge, “The Concomitants of the Second Advent,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 834-877, at 845-846. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 16, “Of Good Works,” para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 16, para. 3. ↩