A Hog is in the Well

I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure. He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord. Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust, who does not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after a lie! (Psalm 40:1-4 ESV). The call came into the house one Sunday afternoon. I was resting after preaching that morning and scheduled to preach again that evening. The call was from two of my friends who had gone out earlier in the afternoon to hunt hogs on a catfish farm we had found earlier in the year. The owner was losing some of his fish to the hogs who ingeniously figured out that when they tore down the dams in the ponds the fish would come floating out like a vending machine. The voice of my friend sounded distressed as he said, “Help, preacher! My ox is in the ditch!” I steadied him a bit and said, “What happened?” Well, the story was much longer than we have room to relate here, but the end of it was that they had gone to the catfish farm just to look around and scared the hogs into a small stampede and one of them had fallen into an abandoned well. They needed me to bring a gun and help them kill it and extract it from the well. Against the protests of my wife, I loaded up and drove out there. When I arrived they hurried led me into the brush to the well. There was this 200 pound wild hog holding on to the rim of the well with both front hooves and its head resting exhausted on top. It was really pretty pitiful. The difficulty was that it began thrashing around violently when we tried to approach it. I actually just wanted to get a rope around it and drag it out to let it run off. I didn’t have time to clean a hog before church! Well, the story didn’t end well for the hog or us. We did have to kill the hog and when it sunk to the bottom we had quite the time getting it out. I couldn’t help but relate that experience to our reading today. All of us, including the hog, were severely “mired” in our trouble. The spiritual illustration was striking. Like all of humanity we were all in trouble. Some people may seem upright; others are obviously bent; still others seem irreparably damaged. Our trouble has different looks, yet we all need help. In fact, I was the only one with a solution of sorts. I had a rope, a gun, and a truck to pull with. Notice the truth here. Like Jesus, in order for me to help friends (and strangely the hog as well), I had to get into the mud surrounding the well. Jesus Christ did not stay on the high, safe ground of heaven (cf. Philippians 2:6-8). He did not merely extend a long arm that we could grab on to. He came down, slipped underneath us, lifted us up, carried us to safety, and sent us on our way. Lent is a good time to thank Jesus for lifting us out of the mud and giving us a firm place to stand. The great news is he died instead of us, unlike the hog and me.