Psalm 23 and Luke 15

Our devotional text for this morning is a familiar one to us all, I’m sure. It is the Shepherd Psalm of King David, .

Psalm 23 ESV

A Psalm of David. 1 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. 2 He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. 3 He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. 4 Even 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. 5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. 6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

A couple things to note here:

David describes God as his Shepherd–a Good Shepherd Who goes after His lost sheep, as we will see.

“He restores my soul.” When we hear this, we often think of things like maybe you were feeling depressed and the Lord revived your soul so now you feel better. That’s not really what David is getting at here. Instead he writes נַפְשִׁי יְשׁוֹבֵב (naphshi yeshovev) which come from the Hebrew words נֶפֶשׁ (nephesh), which means “soul” or “self,” and שׁוּב (shuv), which means “to turn back” or “return.” שׁוּב is the great Hebrew word used throughout the Old Testament for “repentance.” And so what David is saying about God, his Good Shepherd, is that He “brings me back” or “causes me to repent.”

This fits very well with David’s next statement: He leads me in paths of righteousness, which implies that he was wandering the paths of unrighteousness before God brought him back/caused him to repent.

When David writes “and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever,” he is saying “and I shall return to the house of the Lord for the length of my days.” He uses again the great word שׁוּב (shuv).

Ezekiel 34:11-24

Okay, fast forward some hundreds of years and we have the prophet Ezekiel on the scene. And God says through His prophet Ezekiel, after chastising the shepherds of Israel who were faithless shepherds, God says,

“Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock when he is among his sheep that have been scattered, so will I seek out my sheep, and I will rescue them from all the places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness.” ()

God also says through Ezekiel,

“I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured...”

And then God says something very interesting. He says,

“And I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd.”

But wait, didn’t God say that He would be Israel’s shepherd? Yes, He did. But then He says that His servant David will be the shepherd of Israel. So…this servant David must be divine, if God is going to be Israel’s shepherd and this David will be the shepherd of Israel. A divine shepherd from David’s house who will search for His lost sheep? Sound familiar?

Luke 15

It should. Hundreds of years after Ezekiel, God came down to earth in human flesh. And this God-man, Jesus, tells a parable in about how He is the divine Good Shepherd who goes after the lost sheep.

In this parable in , the emphasis is on the price that the shepherd pays in order to bring his sheep back to his house. And so we learn something about what the suffering and death of Jesus meant: it was the price He paid to bring us safely back to Himself.

Connection

So what does this have to do with ? Well, both speak of a Good Shepherd Who goes after His lost sheep. Both picture repentance as being found by the Good Shepherd and brought back by Him. Both David and the lost sheep of are returned to the house of the Shepherd.

David sings in of the comfort that he has in knowing that if in his weakness he should stray, his Good Shepherd will come after him and bring him back. And because this is true, he can confidently say, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will return to the house of the Lord for the length of the days…or all the days of his life.”

Application

I don’t know about you, but sometimes the thought of my weakness and inability to keep myself saved terrifies me. And I wonder, what happens if in my weakness I wander off? Well, David tells me in : Jesus, the Good Shepherd, will come after His sheep and bring them back to the paths of righteousness so that they may return to His house forever.

And the same comfort is there for you, too. Fear not, fellow sheep, for your Good Shepherd comes after you, too, to bring you back to His house. It is the sheep’s greatest comfort to know that its shepherd will come after it if it strays. It is our great comfort, yours and mine, to know that our Good Shepherd will come after us, too, and return us to His house forever.

Peace be with you. Amen.