The LORD is My Shepherd
The LORD is My Shepherd
Valley of the shadow of death.—In order to explain this figure De Wette cites from Morier’s second journey to Persia, p. 179: “In the vicinity of Ispahan is a remarkable valley, barren, gloomy and destitute of water, which is called the valley of the angel of death.” [It is unnecessary to go beyond the Holy Land itself. The Psalmist refers to those deep wadies or wild and gloomy ravines, which abound in the mountains of Palestine, the rocky sides of which are filled with caves and caverns, the abodes of wild beasts of prey. It is often necessary for the shepherd to lead his flocks through these wadies and across these ravines, and it is always perilous even to the shepherd himself. There is no reference here to death itself, but to the peril of death go often experienced in life.—C. A. B.].—
In the Orient the host was obligated not only to entertain the guest but to protect him from his enemies, and when once the meal of hospitality had been partaken all the power and strength of the host became assured to the guest. He was now safe and secure, and his enemies were powerless to injure him, for from this time forth he was the guest and friend of the host and would be protected and defended by him. Thus the idea is not of a hasty meal upon a battle-field, after which the fight was to be renewed, but of a calm and secure repose at the table of the host, with the assurance that all danger was past and the enemieswere no longer to be regarded or feared.—C. A. B.]
Beneath the burning skies and the clear starry nights of Palestine there grew up between the shepherd and his flock a union of attachment and tenderness. It is the country where at any moment sheep are liable to be swept away by some mountain torrent, or carried off by hill-robbers, or torn by wolves. At any moment their protector may have to save them by personal hazard. …And thus there grows up between the man and the dumb creatures he protects a kind of friendship. …You love those for whom you risk and they love you; therefore it is that, not as here where the flock is driven, the shepherd goes before and the sheep follow him. They follow in perfect trust, even though he should be leading them away from a green pasture, by a rocky road, to another pasture which they cannot yet see. He knows them all—their separate histories, their ailments, their characters. … Alone in those vast solitudes, with no human being near, the shepherd and the sheep feel a life in common. Differences disappear; the vast interval between the man and the brute, the single point of union is felt strongly. One is the love of the protector: the other the love of the grateful life; and so between lives so distant there is woven, by night and day, by summer suns and winter frosts, a living network of sympathy. The greater and the less mingle their being together: they feel each other. “The shepherd knows his sheep, and is known of them.”. Try to feel, by imagining what the lonely Syrian shepherd must feel towards the helpless things which are the companions of his daily life, for whose safety he stands in jeopardy every hour, and whose value is measurable to him not by price, but by his own jeopardy, and then we have reached some notion of the love which Jesus meant to represent, that eternal tenderness which bends over us—infinitely lower though we be in nature—and knows the name of each and the trials of each, and thinks for each with a separate solicitude, and gave itself for each with a sacrifice as special and a love as personal, as if in the whole world’s wilderness there were none other but that one.”—SPURGEON: Sweet and full are the doctrines of the Gospel; fit food for souls, as tender grass is natural nutriment for sheep.—These twin guardian angels (goodness and mercy) will always be with me at my back and my beck. Just as when great princes go abroad they must not go unattended, so it is with the believer. Goodness and mercy follow him always—the black days as well as the bright days, the days of fasting as well as the days of feasting, the dreary days of winter as well as the bright days of summer. Goodness supplies our needs and mercy blots out our sins.—C. A. B.]
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