The Lord of Psalm 23: A Seven Day Devotionalનમૂનો

How He Leads

Up to this point, the sheep in Psalm 23 have been passive. They are being made to lie down and being led and being restored, but now there is the actual movement of the sheep in their walking and going somewhere. The journey that one might expect to be making while walking in paths of righteousness (v. 3) is not the movement the psalm actually focuses on in verse 4. Our great familiarity with this psalm as a whole might cause us to miss the stunning way the shepherd leads the sheep for his name’s sake.

The unexpected development in the story of Psalm 23 is that the good shepherd’s paths of righteousness sometimes include the valley of the shadow of death. If I find myself in the valley of deep darkness, it is because he has led me there.

It is simply unwise to assume—as some do, unthinkingly—that we have a shepherd who leads us to peace and tranquility but has no say over how sheep come to find themselves in a threatening gorge. No, the valley of the shadow of death, the days of deep darkness, do not mean we have left the paths of righteousness; in fact, they are where the shepherd’s paths of righteousness are sometimes located. This is how he leads.

Reflecting on this valley, Peter Craigie observes that “the expression may have been used deliberately to convey the threat of death.”2 The metaphorical idea of deep darkness is very clearly tied to a place of no return: the world of the afterlife. This is death, not simply described but poetically depicted, with a choice of (non)color and a concentration that speaks immediately to our emotional sense of what dying means. It is a journey away from the light of the known into the obscurity of the unknown, away from the warmth of the sun to the cold of the shade and the shadow. The valley’s deep darkness is a perfect metaphor for death’s encroachment on life.

From the moment of Adam’s fall, “death began its reign in him.”3 But the fact that death is so clearly introduced into the world by God himself means that we may say, I think, that the curse of death in the world is God’s curse, in the same way, that Martin Luther is reported to have said that the devil is God’s devil. In other words, God is in charge of them, not they in charge of him. He is not part of the curse, and he is not implicated in the evil works of the devil, yet God is the one ruling the world completely and perfectly.

It is not possible for the sheep to have an encounter with either death or its advanced shadow that is outside God’s decree and his loving, fatherly care.

My prayer for you as you read these lines is that you come to know the valley you are in to be God’s valley and your good shepherd to be the one who has led you there. At this very moment, you might feel more lost than ever, in deepest darkness like a shroud, but your Lord Jesus is not standing there beside you, lost or scratching his head, wondering what to do. It may not yet be part of your theological framework that all things, including each valley, come from God’s fatherly hand. But it needs to be. For if God is not in charge of the valley, how do you know he can get you through it?