I’ve always loved how fluffy and cute sheep are. When I heard of sheep in the Bible, I always assumed it meant Christians are as innocent as those cute animals. I’m a city girl so I’ve only interacted with sheep at petting zoos. I had no idea how stubborn and stupid sheep really are. I just finished the book “A Shepherd Looks At The 23rd Psalm” by Phillip Keller. The author spent years as a shepherd in Africa, one of the few places that still did free-range grazing, similar to what David did as a child. I’ve always heard the twenty-third Psalm explained as how things will be in heaven, so it is interesting learning how literal and down to earth that Psalm is.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.
Psalm 23:1 is a simple statement that Jesus is a Good Shepherd who takes care of his followers and provides them with everything we need. It does set Psalm 23 up in the reader’s mind. This Psalm is written from the point of view of a sheep, talking to other sheep. In David’s time, and Jesus’ time, being called a sheep was not a good thing. Being a shepherd meant providing the sheep with food and water, that’s true. But most of the time, being a good shepherd meant knowing how stupid your sheep are and saving them from themselves.
As I learned as I read this book, sheep are stubborn and curious. If they think something is better than what they have, they will happily leave their flock and their shepherd to find a “better” patch of green. Being a great shepherd is a lot of work, but David bragged about how perfect God is as a shepherd.
He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul.
This seems pretty easy. There are green pastures everywhere in the middle of America where I’ve grown up. Every farm has green pastures and clean water these days. I forget that the Good Shepherd Psalm was written almost two thousand years ago in the arid Middle East. Green pastures for grazing was hard to find. It involved moving the flock every week, at least, to new pastures as sheep overgraze land if they stay in an area too long.
Clean water in open fields was not easy to find. Sheep don’t really drink from moving water, so rivers didn’t work unless they were diverted into a pond. Many ponds were full of bugs or dung and stuff left behind by other animals who drank there and would make the sheep sick. Keller tells a story of one shepherd he saw that was doing the backbreaking work of taking buckets of water out of a tiny spring to put in a nearby trough. The sheep got to drink their “still water”, probably unaware of how much work their good shepherd was putting into that water.
As an example of how stubborn sheep can be, Keller has an example of a shepherd leading his flock into a crevice where a clean stream of water ran, perfectly clear and healthy. Some of the sheep decided to drink the water left in hoof prints of previous flocks. Instead of waiting for the water the shepherd was taking them to, some stubborn sheep thought the muddy, bug-filled water was the best they would get that day. Those sheep probably got sick and would need extra care for a while. All because the stubborn sheep couldn’t be bothered to wait until they got where they were being led.
As a note on Psalm 23:3a (he restores my soul), sheep are very nervous and sensitive. The only way a sheep will relax is if it is fully fed, not thirsty, not scared, and not bothered by bugs. For a sheep to meet all those check marks, it takes a lot of planning and focus for a good shepherd to do. (The bug part will be explained in Psalm 23 :5b later on.)
He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Sheep are also creatures of habit. If a smart shepherd doesn’t lead the flock to a new pasture at the right time, the sheep will stay where they are. Over-grazing the pasture will ruin it for future years. The good shepherd knows how much pasture their flock eats in a given time and looks ahead of time for the perfect next spot. Bugs also follow the flocks around and a shepherd knows how long it takes in that climate before the bugs and parasites in the fields catch up to thee flocks. Moving on before the bugs get too bad and the sheep start eating roots means that the shepherd can come back to that pasture later in the year or the next year when the bugs won’t still be there.
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.
Phillip Keller says that this is where the Psalm changes a little. The first part of the Psalm is about the flock’s winter and spring pasture near the shepherd’s home. During the summer and fall, the flock is moved into higher, cooler lands, often part way up nearby mountains.
To travel up the mountains, they have to travel through paths cut by rivers into the mountain side. These paths had enough space for the flocks to travel and water along the way, but had steep walls on both sides. Animals, like big cats, could climb those walls and attack the flock from above. A good shepherd would guide their flock through the path, but their rod and staff were on hand to fight any predators or guide sheep that wanted to wander from the flock.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
I’ve always read Psalm 23:5a as being served good food at a table while my enemies looked on, unable to stop my celebration. Keller suggests a very different interpretation. He says that shepherds often had to leave their flock somewhere to prepare the next pasture for his sheep. In areas where there weren’t mountains, there were plateaus, called tables by some people. The shepherd would go up to the table before the flock and check the pasture for the sheep, often pulling weeds the sheep were too stupid not to eat. The wild animals, predators to the sheep, could watch the shepherd prepare the pasture, but there was nowhere for them to hide and attack.
You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
Whenever I’ve read this, I’ve seen the image of kings or prophets being anointed as a promise that God was appointing them. Here again, Keller has a different interpretation. Shepherds have a mix of oil and herbs that they put on their sheep to keep the bugs from biting or buzzing around the sheep’s only visible skin, its head. A sheep that is pestered by bugs is too distracted to follow his shepherd, so a good shepherd tries to keep the bugs away.
Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Psalm 23:6 is a great closing verse for this Psalm. It leaves us all happy and comforted, doesn’t it? Keller has an interesting thought on this Bible verse as well. He talks about how destructive badly managed sheep can be compared to the good well managed sheep can bring. He once bought a sheep farm that hadn’t been managed well for years. The pasture was spotty, the overgrazed land was eroding or full of weeds. The water the sheep had over used was full of parasites. Obviously the previous owner had been a bad shepherd that didn’t put in the work to be a great shepherd. He said that just three years of careful land management and good shepherding had brought the property to blooming health. Sheep graze down grasses and leave dung behind. Carefully managed, flocks bring nourishment to the land. Badly managed, the dung will have parasites and overgrazing strips the land.
That is a lot of work for Jesus our Good Shepherd to do!
This book really opened my eyes to the reality of Jesus as our Good Shepherd. There is so much that God does for us, so much I take for granted and I’m sure we all do. As sheep we are stubborn, stupid, and so easily distracted from God. It really is a good representation of all sinners.
Book Review
I very briefly explained what “A Shepherd Looks At The 23rd Psalm” by Phillip Keller says. He goes into so much more detail and is very good at writing visually and explaining things. He also ties each section into what the line means to a shepherd and how the section applies to modern Christians. I learned a lot reading this book and I highly recommend this to everyone who wants to understand the Bible imagery better. Christ as the Good Shepherd and us as sheep is used so much in the scriptures. This book will show you that concept in a whole new light.
I read this book as part of Phillip Keller’s “The Shepherd Trilogy” which included “A Shepherd Looks At The Good Shepherd” and “A Shepherd Looks At The Lamb Of God.” Both books were good, he is an awesome writer! However, I found the second book to deep for me to enjoy. It’s a book looking at John 10 and is written for pastors so it is a bit too complicated and academic for me to enjoy. I do plan to come back and reread it later when I might have a better understanding, but for now it was too much.
The third book was a much easier read and showed how the fact that Jesus would be the sacrificial lamb was built into the Bible from the very beginning of Genesis and how hard Jesus’ ministry must have been, knowing he would be deserted and die on a cross. I plan to reread that during Lent this year.
Overall, I think Phillip Keller is a great teacher with a very different view of the world than me. I learned a lot from his books and will continue to reread them. I found the Trilogy book on Amazon.
