Psalm 23:5 — A Table Before My Enemies

FRANK EDWARDS: Psalm 23, verse five. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. The word I want to start with is the first one, "prepare." In Hebrew it is 'arach, and it is a battle word. It means to lay things out in order, to set them in rows. Armies use it when they draw up their lines. On step two we were in the Valley of Elah, where Goliath shouted across to Israel's army, "Why do you come out and array yourselves for battle?" Array is 'arach. David takes the verb for soldiers forming ranks and uses it for God laying a table. LINDA BROWN: So on one side, the enemy drawn up in battle order. On the other, a table drawn up just as carefully, with a guest sitting at it. Welcome to Dig Deeper. I'm Linda Brown, here with Frank Edwards, and this is step nine of our sixteen steps through Psalm 23. On step one we heard that the picture changes here, from shepherd to host. What does the word add to that? FRANK EDWARDS: Care, first of all. 'Arach is a word for arranging things deliberately, piece by piece. In Exodus 40, Moses "arranged the bread" on the table before the LORD in the tabernacle with the same verb. This is not a meal thrown together. It is a host setting everything in place, while the other side sets its ranks in place. And the word reaches somewhere else we have already been in this series. On step five we heard Israel's complaint from Psalm 78: "Can God really prepare a table in the wilderness?" In Hebrew that is the same verb and the same word for table as Psalm 23. Israel asked it as a taunt. David answers it as a fact. You prepare a table before me. LINDA BROWN: On step five Jesus answered it on the green grass, with five loaves. The question in Psalm 78 and the answer in Psalm 23 use the same words. FRANK EDWARDS: Mark shows the answer with bread in hand. The word for table, shulchan, is often a king's table in the Old Testament, and David knew what it meant to keep one. After he became king, he asked whether anyone was left of Saul's family, the man who had hunted him for years. He found Saul's grandson Mephibosheth, lame in both feet and frightened. Second Samuel 9 tells what David said to him: "Do not be afraid… you will always eat at my table." And a few verses later, "Mephibosheth ate at David's table like one of the king's own sons." LINDA BROWN: The grandson of his enemy, at the king's table, like a son. David had done for someone else what this verse says God does for him. FRANK EDWARDS: Mephibosheth had no claim on David at all, and David did it for the sake of Jonathan, his friend. That is the shape of the table in this psalm. The guest has not earned a place. The host gives it. Which brings us to the hardest phrase in the line: "in the presence of my enemies." LINDA BROWN: The enemies are still there. That is the surprising part to me. The psalm does not say the table comes after the enemies are gone. FRANK EDWARDS: Neged, in front of, facing, in full view. They are close enough to see the food and the guest. And the word for enemies, tsoreray, is related to the Hebrew word for a tight, narrow place. These are people who press David hard and hem him in. Step one touched on the host's duty to protect a guest. The Old Testament shows how seriously that was taken. When Abraham saw three travelers, he ran to them: "Let a little water be brought, that you may wash your feet and rest yourselves under the tree. And I will bring a bit of bread." And in Genesis 19, Lot refuses to hand his visitors to a mob because "they have come under the protection of my roof." A guest at someone's table was meant to be safe there. LINDA BROWN: Psalm 27 puts shelter and honor together the same way. "For in the day of trouble He will hide me in His shelter; He will conceal me under the cover of His tent." And then, "my head will be held high above my enemies around me." FRANK EDWARDS: Hidden in his tent, and then head held high: that is the guest of a host. The enemies are around, and the guest is under someone else's protection. Paul asks it as a question in Romans 8: "If God is for us, who can be against us?" And he does not pretend the enemies have gone. He names them: "trouble or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword." He even quotes a psalm about God's people being "considered as sheep to be slaughtered." Then he says, "No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us." Real enemies, standing around the table, and none of them able to take the guest from the host. LINDA BROWN: There is one thing missing from the verse that I would expect. Revenge. David names his enemies, and then he eats. He does not plan anything against them. Paul says something close to that in Romans 12: "Do not avenge yourselves, beloved, but leave room for God's wrath." FRANK EDWARDS: Your reading is stronger than it sounds, because David had every reason to want revenge, and he leaves it entirely with God. The meal is the answer to the enemies. And Peter says of Jesus, "When they heaped abuse on Him, He did not retaliate; when He suffered, He made no threats, but entrusted Himself to Him who judges justly." The guest at this table can eat, because justice is in the host's hands. LINDA BROWN: Is there a moment in David's life that looks like this verse? FRANK EDWARDS: The psalm never says when it was written, so we should not pin it to one night. But some readers think of the time David fled from his son Absalom. He went up the Mount of Olives weeping, crossed the Jordan, and came to a town called Mahanaim, with Absalom's army coming after him. Then three men met him there. One of them, Shobi, was an Ammonite, from a people who had fought Israel. Second Samuel 17 lists what they brought: "beds, basins, and earthen vessels, as well as wheat, barley, flour, roasted grain, beans, lentils, honey, curds, sheep, and cheese from the herd." And their reason: "The people have become hungry, exhausted, and thirsty in the wilderness." LINDA BROWN: A hunted king, an army on the way, and a table spread in the wilderness by hands he would never have expected. Whether or not David had that night in mind, it fits the verse. FRANK EDWARDS: The fit is close, and it shows what the verse means. God's provision can come in the middle of the danger, not only after it. Then the second line. You anoint my head with oil. Step one mentioned that the word here is not the word for anointing a king. Samuel anointed David with mashach, the root of messiah. Here it is dashan, to make rich, to refresh lavishly. LINDA BROWN: Oil on the head opens up a question of its own. What did it mean to a guest? It sounds strange to us. FRANK EDWARDS: It was ordinary hospitality, and a pleasure. Olive oil was rubbed into hair and skin dried out by sun and dust. Psalm 104 counts among God's good gifts "wine that gladdens the heart of man, oil that makes his face to shine, and bread that sustains his heart." Ecclesiastes 9 says, "never spare the oil for your head." A host could also fail to offer it. When Jesus ate at the house of a Pharisee named Simon, he said to him in Luke 7, "You did not anoint My head with oil, but she has anointed My feet with perfume." He was talking about a forgiven woman who gave him what his host had not. LINDA BROWN: Psalm 133 pictures oil poured out so freely that it runs, "like fine oil on the head, running down on the beard, running down Aaron's beard over the collar of his robes." And the word dashan has relatives in other psalms, too, doesn't it? Psalm 36 speaks of people who "feast on the abundance of Your house." FRANK EDWARDS: Abundance there is deshen, from the same root. Rich food, the best of the feast. Psalm 63, which its heading places in the Wilderness of Judah, uses it as well: "My soul is satisfied as with the richest of foods." David is in a dry land with no table anywhere, and he describes knowing God as a rich meal. So the oil in Psalm 23 is not a ceremony. It is a host's lavish welcome. And there is a royal echo too. Psalm 45, a psalm for a king's wedding, says, "God, your God, has anointed you above your companions with the oil of joy," and Hebrews 1 quotes that very line about the Son of God. The joy God pours on his guests comes through his anointed Son. LINDA BROWN: Underneath all of it sits the cup. My cup overflows. Is "overflows" a verb in Hebrew? FRANK EDWARDS: It is not, and that is lovely. It is a noun, revayah, abundance, a drink that soaks and saturates. Word for word, "my cup, abundance." It appears in only one other place in the Old Testament, Psalm 66: "we went through fire and water, but You brought us into abundance." Both times it is where God brings his people out the other side of danger. Through fire and water, into abundance. Through the valley, to an overflowing cup. LINDA BROWN: The verse builds as it goes. A table is spread, then oil is poured, then a cup does more than fill. And it keeps speaking to God directly, "You prepare… You anoint," the way verse four began to. FRANK EDWARDS: The "You" from the valley continues at the table. On step six we heard David turn and speak to God in the dark; he has not turned back. And you are right that each line gives more than the one before it. The last word of the verse in Hebrew is that noun, abundance. The psalm ends its picture of the table on the word for more than enough. LINDA BROWN: Psalm 16 makes the cup personal in a different way. "The LORD is my chosen portion and my cup." FRANK EDWARDS: In the psalms a cup can stand for what God hands a person as their portion in life. Psalm 16 says the LORD himself is that cup. But Scripture also knows another cup. Psalm 75 says, "a cup is in the hand of the LORD, full of foaming wine mixed with spices," a cup the wicked must drink down to the dregs. Isaiah 51 calls it "the cup of His fury." Later in this series we will be in Gethsemane, where Jesus prays, "Take this cup from Me. Yet not what I will, but what You will." LINDA BROWN: Two cups. One that overflows with good for the guest, and one that Jesus prayed would pass from him. FRANK EDWARDS: The guest's cup can overflow because the host drank the other one. Jesus did the same thing Psalm 23 describes all through his ministry. The religious leaders asked, "Why does He eat with tax collectors and sinners?" He kept that table with his enemies watching; early in Mark the Pharisees were already "plotting with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus." And the story ends at a table. In Revelation 19 the angel says, "Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb." The enemies are real, the table is set anyway, and for everyone who belongs to him, the host has already faced what threatened them. Hear the verse again. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. [long pause] LINDA BROWN: For a way to take this verse into an ordinary week, the Apply This Today section in the app picks it up. Next time, a very different table: King Herod's birthday banquet in Mark chapter six, a feast that ends with the death of John the Baptist. 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 pulling up a chair at the table in verse five.