STUDIES IN THE PSALMS No. 8
Psalm 23
February 29, 2004
We have considered psalms of the lament or petitionary type and, last time, with Psalm 8, a psalm of praise. Now we take up a psalm that belongs, in a way, to both classes of psalms, the immortal 23rd Psalm. You remember that we said a characteristic feature or division of the petitionary or lament psalms was the expression of confidence in God. At some point in such psalms the writer expresses his confidence in God’s character and faithfulness. That confidence is the basis of his turning to God in petition. Well, there are some psalms that are simply and entirely an expression of the believer’s confidence in God, which contain neither lament nor petition, and the 23rd is perhaps the most famous exemplar of psalms of that type. It is, to be sure, on the lips of the church, a psalm of praise, for it describes both the goodness of the Lord to his people and their love for him and trust in him on account of his goodness.
The psalm begins in the third person, descriptively, but in v. 4 it changes to the second and addresses the Lord directly and personally.
Read Psalm 23
v.1 The first verse is something of the thesis of the psalm, the statement of its subject. “Shepherd” is not the usual way of speaking of the Lord in the Psalter. Much more often we find him referred to as “king” or “deliverer” or, even by such impersonal metaphors as “rock” and “shield.” The shepherd is a very personal and personalizing metaphor, for shepherds lived with and shared the life of their flock, providing for the animals and protecting them from harm.
As I have often mentioned to you, faith resides in the personal pronouns. Luther is said to have said, “many are lost because they cannot use possessive pronouns.” [Ryle, Practical Religion, 7] It is not enough and it does no help to say that the Lord is the shepherd. The church is full of those who say only that much. It does not mean very much to a man or woman who says simply that the Lord is the shepherd. But, to say that the Lord is my shepherd is to realize immediately how much that must mean, what a great difference it must make in our lives, what an immeasurable privilege it is to be a Christian. It is this intensely personal interest on the Lord’s part that Augustine expressed this way:
“O thou God omnipotent, who so takes care of every one of us as if there were none but he alone.” [Confessions]
The person who can pray Psalm 23 in faith is the person who knows that his relationship with God is the supreme fact of his existence and will determine the meaning and the importance of every other fact.
v.2 The thesis is followed by two pictures – lying down in green grass and walking beside quiet waters – which, in turn, in the first line of v. 3, are followed by another thesis: “he restores my soul.” The shepherd is concerned for and he sees to the welfare of his flock. He takes them where there is the best food and drink and the greatest safety from adversaries.
v.3 “Restore” can mean “bring back” as in the case of a wandering sheep the shepherd must find and return to the flock. In this extended metaphor of sheep representing men the “return” or “restoration” would be spiritual conversion or recovery. “Paths of righteousness” now makes the metaphor more explicit: it is not merely in green pastures that we walk, but in ways that are congenial to our holy God. He chose us in Christ, Paul says, to be holy.
v.4 The peace and contentment of this psalm is not escape or complacency. The valley of the shadow of death is also one of the paths along which our shepherd leads us! But, however dark the road, his presence enables us to overcome the sharpest afflictions of life. Here the “he” becomes “you” because the shepherd is not ahead of us, leading us, but walking beside us. [Kidner, i, 111] The worst part of our trouble is the fear. We can face anything if we are not afraid of it, even death. And it is Christ’s own presence that calms our fears. We wonder if this psalm too was written during Absalom’s rebellion. It has a lot in common with psalms we know to have come from that time. It would make the presence of David’s “foes” particularly poignant.
v.5 The shepherd imagery is now left behind and we have men explicitly in view, not sheep standing for men. Here again is the honest recognition of the difficulties of life. We have enemies. But the Lord not only preserves us in our trouble, but gives us victory over our enemies. That triumph is pictured by the feast spread before our enemies. The oil here is festive as in Psalm 104:15: “wine that gladdens the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread that sustains his heart.” So too the overflowing cup.
v.6 It is good to be a sheep if the Lord is your shepherd; it is better to be a guest in the palace, but still better to be a child and at home with God. In those days the temple was the symbol of heaven on earth, so we are right to understand the “forever” literally.
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“Every line, every word of it, has been engraven for generations on [Christian] hearts, has accompanied them from childhood to age, from their homes to all the seas and lands where they have wandered, and has been to a multitude no man can number, the rod and staff of which it speaks, to guide them and guard them in dark valleys, and, at last, through the darkest. … Its history sparkles to the daylight in numerous records, and it would be longer if we could follow it into all the secret, but not sunless, resting-places in hidden hearts, which only the day of God will declare.” [Ker, The Psalms in History and Biography, 40-41] So we read in one very fine book on the Psalms. And we know it is so. I have myself many times recited this psalm in the very shadow of death of which it so eloquently speaks. I have recited it at the grave of a six year old girl and a teenage boy, at the graves of babies and of old men and women. I have recited it in the face of sudden and tragic death and at the graves of those who have lived long in this world. I have, depending upon the group gathered at the grave, recited it myself in the hearing of the people, or asked them to say it with me, confident that any group of Christian people will be able, by and large, to recite it by memory. To know this exquisite psalm by heart and to believe every word, to think to recite it in times of trouble and to find great comfort from it, comes very near to what it means to be a Christian.
To consider the message of this famous psalm I need to begin by saying a word about its language and the language of the psalms in general. C.S. Lewis says in his great work, Reflections on the Psalms [2-3]:
“The Psalms are poems, and poems intended to be sung: not doctrinal treatises, nor even sermons. Most emphatically the Psalms must be read as poems; as lyrics, with all the licences and all the formalities, the hyperboles, the emotional rather than logical connections, which are proper to lyric poetry. They must be read as poems if they are to be understood; no less than French must be read as French or English as English. Otherwise we shall miss what is in them and think we see what is not.”
Now that is an important observation and one that applies directly and importantly to Psalm 23. We are inclined to interrogate the psalm and ask it just how the Lord leads us by quiet waters when our lives are as turbulent as they sometimes are, or how it is that he sets our table before our enemies, when it can seem to us that our enemies are feasting and we have been left with the table scraps. But sorting out such questions and providing precise explanations is not the purpose or the nature of a hymn such as we have in this great psalm. It is, as Lewis says, more emotional than logical. I don’t say that it is any less true, by no means, but what we have in this psalm is the assertion of the believing heart, not a doctrinal treatise on the providence of God or an explanation of the interplay of affliction and spiritual comfort in the Christian life. Take all the psalms together and you can perhaps write such a treatise, but not out of a single psalm and certainly not out of Psalm 23. This is a lyric confession of God’s love and mercy as experienced in our lives, sometimes in quite mystical ways that defy simple explanation. Everything is true, but it is hardly all the truth. Still, it needs to be said and said by itself and the truth of it and the power of that truth go a long way in explaining the sacred place this psalm has always occupied in the Christian heart.
We are talking, in a way, about what linguists call “register,” that is, the style and level of language used. [Collins, Syllabus, 20] The psalms are written in a “high” register. They are not folksy. There is emotional intensity in the psalms, to be sure, but there is also “high liturgical sublimity,” C.S. Lewis’ phrase.
In Jack Collins’ Syllabus for his Psalms course at Covenant Seminary, he includes in an appendix a review of Eugene Peterson’s The Message: Psalms. Peterson, some of you may know, has published a folksy and informal paraphrase of the New Testament which is called The Message. This larger work is now his similar effort to render the Psalms in everyday language. The review was written by a friend of mine, Ray Ortland, Jr. In the review Ortland asks the question:
“Is bringing the language of Holy Scripture down to the level of common American discourse a worthy goal to begin with?”
And he answers his questions this way:
“Lovers of the Hebrew Psalter will agree with C.S. Lewis’ observation that the Psalms evoke both raw emotional intensity and high liturgical sublimity. They conjure up in our imaginations not only the cries of elemental human passion but also the voices of the Anglican boys’ choir. I believe that the choirboys should be allowed to be heard in our reading of the Psalms. The Hebrew Psalter is intense but not pedestrian. What is there in the English language more elegant, more sublime, that Psalm 23 in the King James Version, a literal translation? Being earthy and rough may feel psychologically authentic to us modern people, but Bible translators should risk sounding remote when biblical beauty demands it. It then becomes the responsibility of pastors to lift modern people up to the level of Scripture, so that they can love higher and grander things than modernity has conditioned them to expect or even desire.”
Jack also includes in that same appendix some of the letters to the editors that appeared in a subsequent issue of the same magazine in which the review appeared. They all took umbrage at Ray Ortlund’s criticism of Eugene Peterson’s homespun and earthy rendering of the Psalms and, as Jack points out in his Syllabus, they all entirely missed his point, as modern people, deeply influenced by egalitarianism and secularism as they are, are wont to do.
The fact is, the Psalms are not homespun literature and they are not earthy. They are in fact written in the high register, are real and intense but elegant literature. Psalm 23 was no more the way the ordinary Israelite talked than it is the way the ordinary American talks. But it is the Word of God, the text of the hymns the church is to sing to God and from which she is to learn to express her faith. We must move up to them not bring them down to us. Otherwise things wonderful and terribly important are lost, chief among them the vision of higher, grander, nobler, more majestic and wonderful things than we can easily see in our pedestrian world. It is this higher vision that is so grandly captured in the poetry of Psalm 23, a vision so surpassing, so other-worldly, that it can draw the soul up to God and heaven even in the midst of life’s crushing burdens.
Let me illustrate this for you, if I can. Last weekend, my hosts in Greensboro, N.C. drove me to Asheville to show me Biltmore House, the grand mansion build by George Vanderbilt and opened in 1895. It is the largest home in America, four acres of floor space under roof. And it is grand, grand, grand! It evokes another world, another era, and the life of another class of people. Grand sweeping staircases, an enormous formal dining room, banquet hall really, with walk-in fire places at one end and an organ loft at the other, 100 bedrooms (of course, many of those for the small army of servants necessary to staff such a house), elegant family bedrooms and guest bedrooms, 46 bathrooms, sitting rooms on every floor, a music room, a library that is the image of what you imagine a library to be in a great house, an indoor swimming pool (in 1895!). The tour takes you to the basement where the servants worked, where some of them slept, where the food was prepared for the entire house and sent to the upper floors on dumb-waiters. There you also find the changing rooms that enabled the guests to don their swimming suits or their riding habits without walking through the house itself improperly dressed. The entire house is magnificently appointed, a Renoir hanging there, Napoleon’s chess set and table over there, tapestries from France here and an Italian desk over there. And the entire home set on a hill overlooking a grand vista, with the Smoky Mountains in the distance and rolling, tree-covered hills nearby, with gardens and fountains surrounding the house. The landscape architect was the man who designed Central Park for the City of New York. The architect of the house was America’s most famous architect at the time. It really is remarkable. It is tasteful, elegant, and undeniably beautiful. I think only an ideological Marxist would regret the existence of a home so impressive, so beautiful in our land.
Now, here is my point. That Biltmore house is a house! It is, in a real and an important way, the house of which all our homes, tiny and unprepossessing, are pale imitations. It is the genuine article of which our homes are the cheap replicas. We don’t have servants quarters because we have no servants. We can’t sit 40 or 50 people at a great table for a feast because our dining rooms, if we have a dining room, only hold a small fraction of that number of diners. We don’t have immense bedrooms that are as large as our living rooms and have more furniture in them than our living rooms do and, if we did, we would have to spend a great deal of our time keeping them clean. We don’t have richly appointed and immense sitting rooms and music rooms. We have to fit our sitting – our book-reading, our conversation, our game-playing – as well as our piano playing and violin practice into rooms that have to serve other purposes as well.
Hundreds of people lived on that estate. It was a working farm, a ranch, and a dairy. Much of the food consumed in the house was raised on the thousands of acres that belonged to the estate. They, as it were, belonged to Biltmore house. Mrs. Vanderbilt was a very generous mistress by all accounts. Whenever a baby was born on the estate, she was there with baskets full of clothes and other things necessary for a baby. She was always handing her expensive clothes down to the women who worked for her. If someone fell ill she was at the doorstep to see what needed to be done. But what if one of those families, living in one of the neat little homes on the estate, what if a dairyman or a gardener, knew that he and his family were not only employees of the Biltmore Estate, but much, much more?
What if they knew that they would someday live in that house themselves? What if they knew that they were in the Master’s will! And someday the home would be theirs! And what if they knew that the Master loved them already as his own children and was always inquiring about their welfare, always working behind the scenes to ensure that they were properly cared for? You have to have a Biltmore house, you have to have the vision of that surpassing beauty and elegant life to know, to understand what that would mean, what that inheritance would mean!
Well, in the mess and the turbulence and the distress and the terrible hard work of life, you have to have a vision, a beautiful, entrancing vision of green pastures and quiet waters, of a great feast set in the very presence of your enemies, of oil and overflowing cups of wine, and of the Father’s house, to know what it means to live on the Lord’s estate and to have an inheritance in the house. Make the vision too commonplace, too plain, too folksy, and it no longer has the power to transform your view of your own life, your circumstances, your troubles. And so we are given in this immortal psalm a transcendently beautiful view of our lives as Christians, an elegant and insupportably grand sight of what life is really like when it is lived in fellowship with God. It may not be all of that in our sight and our sense until the end of days, but in principle and in many, many wonderful anticipations it is already the father’s great house, the palace, the unending rooms, the servants, the cheery fire places lighting the great feasts, and it is already the Master always knowing where we are, always caring that we are safe, always wanting to be sure that we are cared for. The valley of the shadow of death, to be sure. But looming above, on the hill in the distance, the great house, our house forever. Psalm 23 is the sight of faith, the sight faith gives us of our lives as they really are – not as they seem, but as they are!
Craig Des Jardins brought me a copy of an epitaph that he found on a plaque near the cloister of Canterbury Cathedral. It reads this way:
SACRED
To the Memory
Of Three amiable
And beloved Children,
Who all died
Within eight Months of each other;
This Tablet is erected
By their deeply afflicted Parents,
ROBERT and ANNA MARIA Le-GEYT,
Of the Archbishop’s Palace.
MARIA LE-GEYT, an only Daughter,
Died in April 1795; Aged 20.
WILLIAM LE-GEYT
Of the Royal Artillery,
At St. Lucia, in May 1795; Aged 18.
JOHN MONINS LE-GEYT,
Perished in the Leda Frigate,
Off the Madeiras,
In December 1795; Aged 17.
THY WILL O GOD, BE DONE
What is that but a bereaved and heart-broken couple opening their front door to find the Lord of the manor on the porch with a basket of necessities in his hand, and above and behind him, in the distance, the sight of the great house, so soon to be their own and everlasting home.