Psalm 23 — The Lord Is My Shepherd

FRANK EDWARDS: The best-loved psalm in the Bible was written by a king, and in its very first line he calls himself a sheep. Not a shepherd, though he had been one as a boy. Not a king, though he became one. A sheep, with someone else in charge of him. LINDA BROWN: That is a humble way for a king to begin a song. Welcome to Dig Deeper. I'm Linda Brown, Frank Edwards is here with me, and today we begin a new series: sixteen steps through Psalm 23, with the Gospel of Mark and other Scripture beside it, one line of the psalm at a time. We start with the whole psalm, all six verses. FRANK EDWARDS: Psalm 23. A Psalm of David. The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul; He guides me in the paths of righteousness for the sake of His name. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever. LINDA BROWN: Most of us know that by heart, or close to it. The heading at the top is easy to skip. A Psalm of David. What does it tell us before the first line even starts? FRANK EDWARDS: In Hebrew the heading is two words, mizmor ledavid. Ledavid can mean written by David, or belonging to the collection linked with him, so I hold it with an open hand. But Israel heard it in David's voice, and his story gives the psalm its edge. When the prophet Samuel came to Jesse's house to anoint a king, David was not even in the room. Jesse said the youngest was out tending the sheep. That boy became king over all Israel, and God told him, "You will shepherd My people Israel." Kings in that world were routinely called shepherds of their people. So the line we began with is a shepherd-king's confession. Someone else is shepherding him. LINDA BROWN: A king putting himself in the flock. That changes how the first line sounds. "The LORD is my shepherd" stops being a soft pastoral picture and becomes a man with all the power in the land saying who actually leads him. FRANK EDWARDS: The word LORD, in capitals, is not a general word for God. It stands for the covenant name, the name God gave Moses at the burning bush, the God who bound himself to Israel by promise. David puts that name in the shepherd's place. Then watch where the name shows up again. The psalm opens with "The LORD is my shepherd" and closes with "the house of the LORD forever." Everything in between, the pasture, the valley, the table, happens inside that name. LINDA BROWN: Which brings up a question about the word shepherd itself. To us it is a greeting-card word. What did it mean to someone in Judah three thousand years ago? FRANK EDWARDS: It meant hard, unglamorous work in dry country. The hills around Bethlehem green up after the winter rains and then thin out through a long summer. A shepherd's whole skill was knowing where grass and water could still be found, and getting the flock there, day after day. The Hebrew word for shepherd, ro'eh, comes from a verb that means to pasture, to graze. A shepherd is the one who finds food. And he carried the cost. In Genesis, Jacob tells his uncle Laban what twenty years of keeping his flocks cost him: "I bore the loss myself... the heat consumed me by day and the frost by night, and sleep fled from my eyes." A good shepherd stood between the flock and whatever wanted it, with his own body. LINDA BROWN: "I shall not want," then, comes from someone who knows exactly how close a flock lives to wanting. Grass runs out. Water dries up. Lions come. FRANK EDWARDS: That is the right weight for it. The verb is chaser, to lack, to run short. Moses uses the same word looking back on forty years in the desert: "The LORD your God has been with you these forty years, and you have lacked nothing." Forty years in a wilderness is not a comfortable life. It was a hard life in which the provision never ran out. That is what David means. He is not describing a life without hardship. He is saying the Shepherd's care will not run dry. LINDA BROWN: Then the next lines are all verbs, and the Shepherd is doing every one of them. He makes me lie down, He leads me, He restores my soul, He guides me. I counted, and the sheep does not do a single thing in those two verses except get taken care of. FRANK EDWARDS: Your count is right, and the grammar backs you up. "He makes me lie down" is a causative form in Hebrew. The shepherd brings the sheep to rest; the sheep does not get there on its own. God uses the same verb through Ezekiel: "I will tend My flock and make them lie down." Even the rest is something given. Then "quiet waters" is, word for word, "waters of rest," mei menuchot. Hebrew poetry often says one thing twice, and the second line deepens the first: grass, then water; lying down, then being led to drink. And "He restores my soul" uses shuv, the verb the prophets used when they called Israel to turn back to God. Here the turning is done for David, not by him. The soul, nefesh in Hebrew, is the whole living person. A life that has worn thin or wandered off gets brought back. LINDA BROWN: For the sake of His name. Why would the psalm give that as the reason the Shepherd leads? It is not the reason most of us would expect. FRANK EDWARDS: His name is the safest reason there could be. If the Shepherd guided only the sheep who deserved it, you would have every reason to worry the day you stopped deserving it. "For the sake of His name" grounds all of it in his character. He leads you rightly because of who he is, and he does not stop being who he is. LINDA BROWN: Verse four changes something that is easy to read straight past. Up to now it is "He." He makes me, He leads me. And suddenly it is "You." "You are with me." FRANK EDWARDS: That is the turn the whole poem is built around. For three verses David talks about the LORD. Then he walks into "the valley of the shadow of death," and right there, in the darkest place in the psalm, he stops talking about God and starts talking to him. The word for shadow of death is tsalmaveth, the deepest darkness, a ravine the light does not reach. Job uses it for the gloom of the grave. And it is in that ravine that the psalm gets most personal. LINDA BROWN: That fits what grief actually does. It strips away talking about God. You either talk to him or you go quiet. If you are listening to this while carrying a loss of your own, that is the line the psalm saves for you: You are with me. FRANK EDWARDS: Look at what it does not promise. It does not say I will never walk through the valley. It says "even though I walk through" it. The promise is company. Then the comfort has two parts. The rod, shevet, was a club, the shepherd's weapon against wild animals. It is the same word used for a ruler's scepter. The staff comes from a root that means to lean on. Protection and support, both in the Shepherd's hands. LINDA BROWN: Verse five leaves the field entirely. Now there is a table, and oil, and a cup. Sheep do not sit at tables. FRANK EDWARDS: The picture changes from shepherd to host. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. In David's world, a host who took you in was responsible for you; you were safe under his roof. The enemies are still there. They can see the table. They just cannot touch the guest. And the word for anoint here is not the word for anointing a king. It is dashen, to make rich, to refresh lavishly. It is oil poured on a guest's head at a feast. Then the cup overflows. The sheep from the field ends up as the honored guest at the table. LINDA BROWN: Then the last verse, and its first verb. "Surely goodness and mercy will follow me." Follow sounds polite, like someone walking a few steps behind you. FRANK EDWARDS: Follow is gentler than the Hebrew. The verb is radaph, and radaph is a chase. It is the word Exodus uses when Pharaoh's horses and chariots pursued the Israelites to the edge of the sea. If the enemies are only watching the table, what is actually chasing David, all the days of his life, is goodness and mercy. The word for mercy is chesed, God's covenant loyalty, love that keeps its promises. The BSB often renders it loving devotion, as when God describes himself as "abounding in loving devotion and faithfulness." God's goodness does not trail behind you at a polite distance. It runs after you, and you cannot outrun it. In the psalm it has company, too: goodness and mercy, two pursuers, and both are on your side. We will come back to that chase on step fifteen. LINDA BROWN: Home is where the chase ends. "I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever." The walk through the pasture and the valley ends indoors, at home. FRANK EDWARDS: The name that opened the psalm closes it. That is the psalm's whole shape: the LORD at the start, the LORD at the end, a turn from He to You in the dark, and a shepherd who becomes a host. There is one more line worth saying today, and only one, because this series will take its time getting there. Centuries after David, a man stood in Jerusalem and said, "I am the good shepherd. I know My sheep and My sheep know Me." We will meet him in Mark soon enough. LINDA BROWN: Sixteen steps, and each one opens with a line of this psalm. Is there a reason to take it a line at a time like that, rather than all at once? FRANK EDWARDS: Because every line is something the Shepherd does, and each one deserves a step of its own. Over the next fifteen steps, each line is paired with a reading that shows it at work, in David's own life and in the life of Jesus. And there is a practical reason too. The app walks you through learning the psalm by heart, a verse at a time. By the last step, all six verses can be yours, ready for the days you need them most. LINDA BROWN: Today, then, there is nothing to do but hear it. Psalm 23 is a song of trust. It does not ask God for anything. It just says who is caring for you. FRANK EDWARDS: It rests entirely on him, not on how well you are doing. Hear the first line again, and the last. The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever. [long pause] LINDA BROWN: If you want to take Psalm 23 into the shape of an ordinary day, the Apply This Today section in the app picks it up from here. Next time, we meet the shepherd who wrote it, a young man standing in front of King Saul, explaining what he did when a lion came for his father's sheep. FRANK EDWARDS: Dig Deeper is a free app, and you can find it at dig deeper dot A I. LINDA BROWN: Thanks for listening, and for starting Psalm 23 with us.