Psalm 23:2-3 — Green Pastures, Quiet Waters

FRANK EDWARDS: Two verses today, and no rush to get through them. Psalm 23, verses two and three. 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. LINDA BROWN: Welcome to Dig Deeper. I'm Linda Brown, here with Frank Edwards, and this is step four of our sixteen steps through Psalm 23. On step one we heard these two verses inside the whole psalm and touched on a few of their words. Today we slow right down and stay with them, because they describe what the Shepherd actually does, day by day, for the sheep. FRANK EDWARDS: On step one we counted the verbs in these lines: four of them, and the Shepherd is the subject of every one. Today the question is what each verb means, and why they come in this order. One thing to add to the count: the Hebrew verbs are in a form often used for what someone does as a matter of habit, again and again. This is not one good afternoon in the pasture. It is what the Shepherd is always doing. LINDA BROWN: The setting is quieter than I expected, too. Green pastures, quiet waters. Before the psalm says anything about where the sheep is going, it puts them somewhere to stop. FRANK EDWARDS: Look at the word green. In Hebrew it is deshe, fresh, new grass, the tender shoots that come up after rain. It is the word in Genesis 1 when God says, "Let the earth bring forth vegetation." Grass like that does not last in dry hill country, so the sheep lie down in the best of it only because the shepherd knew where it was and brought them there. The word for pastures, ne'ot, comes from a root used for a settled place to stay, a homestead. It can even describe a dwelling. The picture is of a flock settled in good land with time to lie down in it. LINDA BROWN: The second line moves them on. He leads me beside quiet waters. Grass first, then water. FRANK EDWARDS: Step one gave us the literal sense of "quiet waters": waters of rest, menuchot. What is worth adding today is where else that word turns up. In Numbers 10, as Israel set out from Sinai, they went with "the ark of the covenant of the LORD traveling ahead of them for those three days to seek a resting place for them." Resting place is menuchah, the same word. God went ahead of his people to find the place to stop. In verse two the sheep does not find the quiet water. It is led there by someone who went ahead. LINDA BROWN: "Leads" and "guides" sound like the same thing to me in English. Is the psalm saying the same thing twice? FRANK EDWARDS: In English they blur, but in Hebrew they are two different verbs, and the difference is worth having. The one in verse two, leads, is nahal. It is gentle leading, often toward water or a place to rest. Isaiah 40 uses it for the shepherd who "gently leads the nursing ewes." It is the pace you set for the weakest animal in the flock. The verb in verse three, guides, is nachah, to lead someone along a route, to get them where they are going. And here is the striking thing. Moses' song after the crossing of the Red Sea, in Exodus 15, uses both verbs side by side about the exodus: "With loving devotion You will lead the people You have redeemed; with Your strength You will guide them to Your holy dwelling." LINDA BROWN: David borrows the words Israel used for the biggest rescue in its history, and uses them for one sheep and its shepherd. And that song ends somewhere. "Your holy dwelling." Is that the same word as the pastures in verse two? FRANK EDWARDS: Your ear is good. The word in Exodus is naveh, and it is the root behind ne'ot, the pastures. Moses sings of God leading his people gently and purposefully to his own pasture-dwelling, his holy home. Psalm 23 is often read as a private, gentle psalm, and it is personal. But the vocabulary is national history. The God who led a whole nation out of slavery, gently and then purposefully, is the God David calls "my shepherd." The great exodus verbs have been brought down to the size of one life. LINDA BROWN: The psalm ends at a dwelling too. "I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever." So the exodus song and Psalm 23 have the same shape: led out, led on, and brought home to where God lives. FRANK EDWARDS: Underneath all the pasture language sits that destination, and you have put your finger on it. Verse six uses a different word for dwelling, but the direction is the same. The Shepherd is not leading the flock in circles. Every pasture and every stream on the way is part of a road that ends in his house. LINDA BROWN: The middle line sits between the rest and the road. He restores my soul. Rest comes before it and the road comes after it. Is that order deliberate? FRANK EDWARDS: I think it is, because it is the order of the Shepherd's care. It begins with stillness, lying down and quiet waters. It ends with walking, paths and a purpose. And in between sits the turning point, "He restores my soul." The sheep is restored before it is guided anywhere. A tired, scattered sheep is in no state to follow anyone far. Rest, then restoration, then the road. LINDA BROWN: The word restore keeps showing up in the Bible in some very different situations. What does it actually mean here? FRANK EDWARDS: We met the verb on step one: shuv, to turn or bring back. The noun deserves a closer look. Soul, nefesh, starts with breath and throat and runs out to the whole living self: breath, appetite, desire, life. So a tired body, a drained heart and a worn-out faith are all nefesh. What gets restored here is the whole person. And restoration in Scripture has two sides to it. A soul can wear thin from exhaustion. God promises in Jeremiah 31, "I will refresh the weary soul and replenish all who are weak." And a soul can wander off through its own choices. LINDA BROWN: David knew the second kind from the inside. Psalm 51 is the prayer the heading ties to his sin with Bathsheba, and in it he asks, "Restore to me the joy of Your salvation." A man who had wandered about as far as a man can, asking to be brought back. FRANK EDWARDS: The verb there is shuv as well, the same word as in Psalm 23. So the man who wrote "He restores my soul" also prayed "restore to me" after his worst failure, and he used the same word both times. The Shepherd brings the soul back either way, whether it has worn thin or wandered off. LINDA BROWN: How does he do it, though? The psalm says he restores; it does not say how. FRANK EDWARDS: Another psalm gives one answer, and it uses the same pair of words. Psalm 19 says, "The Law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul." In Hebrew that is the same verb root and the same noun as "He restores my soul." So one of the ways the Shepherd restores is through his own word. It fits what we saw last time in Mark. The first thing Jesus gave a scattered, leaderless crowd was teaching, many things. The Shepherd feeds with his word. LINDA BROWN: The third line turns to the road. "He guides me in the paths of righteousness." Is a path of righteousness a moral path, or a path that goes somewhere? FRANK EDWARDS: Hebrew holds both together. The word for paths, ma'gal, is a track worn into the ground, possibly from the word for a cart's wheel. A clear, well-used way that actually leads somewhere. And righteousness, tsedeq, means what is right and true to the standard. So the phrase can be read "right paths" or "paths of righteousness," and the two meanings sit together. For a sheep, the right path is the safe one, the one that gets to water and back. For a person, the right path is also the one that is in line with God's ways. In Proverbs 4 a father tells his son, "I will guide you in the way of wisdom; I will lead you on straight paths," and the word for paths there is ma'gal again. LINDA BROWN: David would have known those wilderness tracks firsthand, long before he was king. FRANK EDWARDS: He knew them as a fugitive. For years he ran from King Saul. First Samuel 23 says, "David stayed in the wilderness strongholds and in the hill country of the Wilderness of Ziph. Day after day Saul searched for him, but God would not deliver David into his hand." That wilderness is mostly bare hills and steep ravines, crossed by narrow tracks. Knowing the path could mean the difference between finding water and wandering into a dry valley, or between escape and capture. Two of his psalms, 57 and 142, have headings that place them in a cave in those years. Psalm 23 gives no such setting, but for a man with that history, "He guides me in the paths of righteousness" was not a pleasant picture. It was something he had depended on. LINDA BROWN: Underneath all four verbs sits the reason. "For the sake of His name." We touched on that on step one. FRANK EDWARDS: We did, and it deserves more than a touch. In Hebrew thought, a name is a person's character and reputation. When God acts "for the sake of His name," he acts in keeping with who he is. Psalm 106 looks back on the exodus and says, "Yet He saved them for the sake of His name, to make His power known." The "yet" in that verse matters. The people had rebelled at the sea. He saved them anyway, because of who he is. LINDA BROWN: Ezekiel 36 says it even more bluntly. "It is not for your sake that I will act, O house of Israel, but for My holy name." That sounds cold at first hearing. Read again, it is the best news in the chapter, because if it depended on them, nothing would happen. FRANK EDWARDS: Your second reading is the right one. The Shepherd's own faithfulness is on the line every time he leads a sheep. And Psalm 31 turns that into a prayer, with the same two verbs we met earlier, nachah and nahal, side by side: "lead me and guide me for the sake of Your name." David asks God to do exactly what Psalm 23 says he does, and gives God's own name as the reason. LINDA BROWN: If the reason is his name, then the sheep's safety does not depend on how well the sheep is doing. FRANK EDWARDS: Psalm 106 is the proof of it. Because he leads for his name's sake, the weakest and most worn-out sheep can count on him. His character is the guarantee of the road. LINDA BROWN: One small thing about the sound of these lines. A few of the verbs seem to share the same ending in Hebrew. FRANK EDWARDS: The ending you are hearing is "-ni," meaning "me." Yarbitseni, he makes me lie down. Yenahaleni, he leads me. Yancheni, he guides me. Read aloud in Hebrew, that repeated ending keeps the attention on the sheep receiving and the Shepherd giving, line after line. The sound of the poem says what its words say. LINDA BROWN: Each step of this series pairs a line of the psalm with a passage from Mark. Where does this line go next? FRANK EDWARDS: Next time Mark puts these very verses into a scene. A crowd in a remote place, late in the day, nothing to eat, and Jesus has them sit down on the grass. Mark is the only Gospel writer who mentions that it was green. I will leave the rest for that episode. LINDA BROWN: For today, the psalm is not giving us a task. It is telling us what the Shepherd does. FRANK EDWARDS: Rest, restoration and a right road, all given, all done by him, and all guaranteed by his name. For everyone who belongs to him, that is solid ground to lie down on. Hear the two verses again. 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. [long pause] LINDA BROWN: If you want to take these verses into the shape of an ordinary week, the Apply This Today section in the app picks them up from here. Next time, the feeding of the five thousand in Mark chapter six. 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 slowing down with Psalm 23 today.