The Shepherd’s Psalm
Psalm 23:1–6
The Lord is my shepherd. Psalm 23:1
Psalm 23 is a masterpiece throughout. But if ever a psalm could stand almost on a single line, it is this one, and the line it can stand on is the first. In fact, it can stand on only part of a line, the part which says, “The Lord is my shepherd.”
What an amazing juxtaposition of ideas! The word Lord is the English translation of the great Old Testament personal name for God, first disclosed to Moses at the burning bush, as told in Exodus 3, and then repeated more than four thousand times in the pages of the Old Testament. The name literally means “I am who I am.” It is an inexhaustible name, like its bearer. Chiefly, it refers to God’s timelessness, on the one hand, and to his self-sufficiency, on the other. Selfsufficiency means that God needs nothing. He needs no wisdom from anyone else; he has all wisdom in himself. He needs no power; he is all-powerful. He does not need to be worshiped or helped or served. Nor is he accountable to anyone. He answers only to himself.
Timelessness means that God is always the same in these eternal traits or attributes. He was like this yesterday; he will be like this tomorrow. He will be unchanged and unchangeable forever.
He is the great “I am.”
On the other side of this amazing combination of ideas is the word shepherd. In Israel, as in other ancient societies, a shepherd’s work was considered the lowest of all work. If a family needed a shepherd, it was always the youngest son, like David, who got this unpleasant assignment. Shepherds had to live with the sheep twenty-four hours a day, and the task of caring for them was unending. Day and night, summer and winter, in fair weather and foul, they labored to nourish, guide, and protect the sheep. Who in his right mind would choose to be a shepherd?
Yet Jehovah has chosen to be our shepherd, David says. The great God of the universe has stooped to take just such care of you and me. This is an Old Testament statement, of course. But Christians can hardly forget that the metaphor was also taken up by Jesus and applied to himself, thus identifying himself with Jehovah, on the one hand, and assuming the task of being the shepherd of his people, on the other.
“I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep” (John 10:14–15). So we are not stretching the twenty-third psalm to see Jesus as our shepherd and to apply the psalm to ourselves.
Taken from Come to the Waters by James Boice ISBN 9798887790954 used with permission from P&R Publishing, Phillipsburg NJ 08865
Scripture quotations are from the ESV (the Holy Bible English Standard Version) copyright 2001 by Crossway a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. All rights reserved.