Explore the Bible: The Shepherd

• The Explore the Bible lesson for June 18 focuses on Psalm 23:1-6.

It would be hard to prove any Scripture in the entire Bible has offered greater comfort to believers over the millennia than David’s 23rd Psalm. There is probably no Scripture more frequently read at gravesides or in moments of great personal trial than this one. Sometimes, it is read simply because, like the Lord’s Prayer, there is no situation in life in which its great promises don’t guide and comfort.

As a hospice chaplain, I’ve read this text at the bedside of the dying more than any other. In all honesty, I often read it to the dying because, when death comes close, I feel it too and need the reassurance.

There are good reasons many find this Psalm comforting and reassuring.

David talked about his personal experience with the Good Shepherd

For one, it is written as David’s confession in the first person. He is not speaking for anyone but himself. Not that he is being self-centered. He simply is doing the only thing any of us ever can do—give the confession that is ours and ours alone. 

In the early days of my youth, it was always tempting to mimic the great confessions I heard from speakers at youth meetings or summer camps. It wasn’t until my adulthood I realized the most powerful witness of my experience with God is the one that is uniquely my own.

The metaphorical reference to God as a Shepherd tells us David experienced God as his strong protector, his everlasting provider, his lifelong guide. At one time or another, all of us feel vulnerable, at the end of our resources and lost along the way, not knowing which way to turn. In those times, we often experience God more closely and personally than any other.

Years ago, a very dear friend of mine found himself in one of those giant grocery super marts. He had just been released from a rehab unit and had only begun his road to recovery from alcoholism. He was feeling very alone and lost.

Suddenly, over the intercom, the background music stopped playing, and a mother’s voice came over the speakers. Her little girl had gotten separated from her mother and was lost somewhere in the cavernous place. The manager of the store graciously gave the mother control of the microphone, and this is what the mother said, knowing her little girl would recognize her voice above all others: “Honey, I know you are lost and you can’t find Mommy. If you will just sit down wherever you are, I will come and find you.” 

My friend, still feeling very lost himself, heard the mother’s words as God’s words to him. He’d been running from God and then trying to find God on his own and was not succeeding. That’s when he heard God making the same promise to him the mother was making to her child.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” he heard God say to him. The same shepherd who leaves the 99 and goes seeking the one lost sheep (Matthew 18) was promising my friend not to leave him abandoned, no matter how or why he’d gotten lost. 

David knew that Shepherd personally. His report of the searching and protecting Shepherd was his first-person account of salvation.

God is faithful when we are not

All that sets in relief the second great promise of this psalm—the faithfulness of God in spite of our unfaithfulness. David, as much as anyone, had broken every rule in the book.  He was an adulterer and a murderer, among other things. Yet, David discovered nothing, not one thing, ever alters the faithfulness of God to God’s children. 

David could have easily written the words to the great hymn, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”  “Morning by morning, new mercies I see,” (Thomas O. Chisolm, 1923). Even the rising of the morning sun is yet one more promise that God is the God of second and third and fourth chances. God has not and will not give up on God’s creation, because goodness and mercy are the very heartbeats of holy God. 

We do not face death alone

Then, as life’s natural end draws closer and closer, we are not promised the avoidance of physical death. What we are promised by the same God who sent Jesus is that we will not walk through death alone.

From this vantage point, when a person’s eyes close in death, those of us who are left behind feel profound loss and loneliness. Even though our loved one, now deceased, may have trusted God and God alone for salvation, we wonder about their well-being in death.

There is no greater promise in all of Scripture than this: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me” (v. 4). We will all walk through death’s deep, dark valley. We simply will not walk there alone. Even though those who love us most will not be able to accompany us, the God who gave us life will walk with us all the way home to that holy, sacred, forever home where “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more” (Revelation 21:4).

That is not only David’s witness. It is the witness of every person who ever has lived or ever will live who calls upon Holy God to be their personal shepherd.

Glen Schmucker is a hospice chaplain in Fort Worth