The Lord of Psalm 23: A Seven Day Devotionalਨਮੂਨਾ

Who He Is

There are only four Hebrew words in Psalm 23:1—translated “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want”—and to my mind, their most astonishing aspect is passed over almost universally. Our eye and our spiritual sensibilities, it seems, are trained to be drawn more to the pastoral image of what God does in shepherding us than to the simple truth of who is doing the shepherding. But the identity of the shepherd is no small thing.

He is “the Lord.” Of all the beautiful words in the psalm, what David is claiming with these first two words is the most staggering. It is one thing to have a shepherd. That is wonderful. But everyone has shepherds.

To be told here, however, that it is “the Lord” who shepherds us should stop us in our tracks.

You will notice that “Lord” is in large and small capital letters. King David here calls God by his personal name. In Hebrew, it consists of four letters transliterated as YHWH, and in English, it is often written as Yahweh. This is God’s covenant name, the name God gave to Moses straight after the dramatic encounter with him at the burning bush in Exodus 3.

“By giving us his name, God lets us know who he is. But God’s name is so hard to comprehend—so inscrutable—that it forces us to admit that there are some things about God that we will never understand.”1 So, already, we need to add something to the easily understandable and very relatable image of God as a shepherd: the one who is my shepherd is one whom I cannot, in fact, ever fully understand.

If being able to say that the Lord is his shepherd is David’s personal testimony, then he expresses the meaning of that relationship with three great confessions of faith, three confidently expressed implications of knowing the Lord: “I shall not want”—for you are my shepherd (v. 1); “I will fear no evil”—for you are my companion (v. 4); and “I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever”—for you are my host (v. 6). The psalm is an expression of total trust in God’s total care.

It is quite something to be able to say, as David says, “I shall not want.”

Really? You shall not want? Honestly?

I want all the time. I’m sure you do, too. Want is all around us; in our hearts, we all want things.

So how are we to understand David’s confident assertion here? We need to do so in a way that is realistic and honest and that does not leave us singing tired clichés and empty platitudes about God being all we want when we obviously want so many other things, too.

Although made up of only four words in Hebrew, verse 1 contains an implicit logical flow: “The Lord is my shepherd; therefore I shall not want.” Because the Lord is my shepherd, I lack for nothing. If I have him, I have everything. He is mine, so I have all I need.

This is a profoundly God-centered view of life, the universe, and everything in it.

As part of this attentiveness to the words and flow of verse 1, we should also recognize the potential here for our English translations to lead us somewhat astray. Although not listed as a translation issue in the ESV footnotes for this psalm, the word for “want” would be better rendered as “lack.” Harold Kushner, a Jewish Rabbi, argues for a translation like this: “I shall lack for nothing.” The meaning, he explains, is that “God will provide me with everything I need. Or as a colleague of mine beautifully rendered it, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, what more do I need?’ The issue of whether I desire things beyond that is beside the point.”

The sense of this passage, then, as Richard Briggs puts it so well, is that “verse 1 points to letting YHWH decide what it is I need, in the very process of ensuring that whatever it is, I will not lack it. . . . Psalm 23 is partly in the business of training my sense of need to be better attuned to what God provides.” This psalm is a tool in God’s hand—we might say the tool is a staff—which he uses to recalibrate our desires.

Psalm 23 is an oasis in our materialistic wasteland. It invites us to stop and rest awhile and consider afresh who God is for us in the simple plenitude of his being and the endless riches of his covenant love. David, it seems, knew in advance what the apostle Paul would later describe as the ability to live “having nothing, and yet possessing everything” (2 Cor. 6:10).

1) Philip G. Ryken, Exodus: Saved for God’s Glory, Preach the Word (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015), 86.