Alone With the Shepherd

The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.

He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters.

He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.

Yea, 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 runs over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life;

and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Psalm 23

I am not a shepherd.  I raise goats, and while they are substantially different from their wooly cousins, they can still provide their keeper with a good hands-on understanding of this familiar psalm by David the shepherd.  Recently, I took notice of the words David uses in this psalm to refer to God.  He opens with beautiful statements in the third person about the Good Shepherd’s daily care for His sheep.  The picture is a white-on-green pastoral of contented sheep walking along a wide, smooth path behind their Shepherd without a care in the world.  But suddenly, the picture changes to a dark and narrow path where the sheep is alone and afraid.

As a shepherd, David likely dealt with sickness and injuries in his flock on a regular basis.  In my herd, I’ve also seen my share of deviations from the usual food and water routine of keeping animals.  A year ago, one of my goats became deathly ill with what appeared to be a case of tetanus.  I separated her from the rest and showered her with attention, shots, and medicines.  Miraculously, she made a full recovery from that usually fatal disease, and learned to trust me in the process.  David would have known that the first thing to do for an ailing animal is to get it alone so it can be treated according to its individual needs.  Perhaps this is why, when his psalm turns to darker matters, he changes the language to the second person and focuses directly on God Himself.  God is no longer “He”, but “You”.

Sometimes life is all green pastures and still waters for us as God’s sheep.   We appreciate the Shepherd and talk about Him to other sheep, but somehow, we generally tend to get busy grazing and playing with our fellow lambs, and spend less time with the Shepherd Himself.  That is, until we find ourselves in some calamity.  No more chewing our cud on the warm sweet grass, no more running around with fellow sheep.  That’s when the Shepherd steps in, faithful to the least of his flock.  He takes us off by ourselves and gives us the best of everything – though we don’t often feel that shots, medicines, splints and bandages are best.  But the Shepherd’s skillful care brings us back to health, and in the process, we learn to trust Him and love Him more than ever.  Then He restores us to the flock, and we can say with new understanding to our fellow lambs that we will belong to the Good Shepherd forever.

David closes this beautiful psalm by speaking of God in the third person once again, declaring to others his assurance that because of his time alone with God, the future will be blessed, and he will spend eternity with Him.  Let us never be afraid to go through the valley alone with our Shepherd, for it is there that we best learn the blessing of belonging to His flock.