Four Psalms XXIII. XXXVI. LII. CXXI. / Interpreted for practical use

by George Adam Smith

I PSALM XXIII: GOD OUR SHEPHERD

II PSALM XXXVI: THE GREATER REALISM

III PSALM LII: RELIGION THE OPEN AIR OF THE SOUL

IV PSALM CXXI: THE MINISTRY OF THE HILLS AND ALL GREAT THINGS PSALM XXIII

GOD OUR SHEPHERD

The twenty-third Psalm seems to break in two at the end of the fourth verse. The first four verses clearly reflect a pastoral scene; the fifth appears to carry us off, without warning, to very different associations. This, however, is only in appearance. The last two verses are as pastoral as the first four. If these show us the shepherd with his sheep upon the pasture, those follow him, shepherd still, to where in his tent he dispenses the desert's hospitality to some poor fugitive from blood. The Psalm is thus a unity, even of metaphor. We shall see afterwards that it is also a spiritual unity; but at present let us summon up the landscape on which both of these features—the shepherd on his pasture and the shepherd in his tent—lie side by side, equal sacraments of the grace and shelter of our God.

A Syrian or an Arabian pasture is very different from the narrow meadows and fenced hill-sides with which we are familiar. It is vast, and often virtually boundless. By far the greater part of it is desert—that is, land not absolutely barren, but refreshed by rain for only a few months, and through the rest of the year abandoned to the pitiless sun that sucks all life from the soil. The landscape is nearly all glare: monotonous levels or low ranges of hillocks, with as little character upon them as the waves of the sea, and shimmering in mirage under a cloudless heaven. This bewildering monotony is broken by only two exceptions. Here and there the ground is cleft to a deep ravine, which gapes in black contrast to the glare, and by its sudden darkness blinds the men and sheep that enter it to the beasts of prey which have their lairs in the recesses. But there are also hollows as gentle and lovely as those ravines are terrible, where water bubbles up and runs quietly between grassy banks through the open shade of trees.

On such a wilderness, it is evident that the person and character of the shepherd must mean a great deal more to the sheep than they can possibly mean in this country. With us, sheep left to themselves may be seen any day—in a field or on a hill-side with a far-travelling fence to keep them from straying. But I do not remember ever to have seen in the East a flock of sheep without a shepherd.

On such a landscape as I have described he is obviously indispensable. When you meet him there, 'alone of all his reasoning kind,' armed, weather-beaten, and looking out with eyes of care upon his scattered flock, their sole provision and defence, your heart leaps up to ask: Is there in all the world so dear a sacrament of life and peace as he?

There is, and very near himself. As prominent a feature in the wilderness as the shepherd is the shepherd's tent. To Western eyes a cluster of desert homes looks ugly enough—brown and black lumps, often cast down anyhow, with a few loutish men lolling on the trampled sand in front of the low doorways, that a man has to stoop uncomfortably to enter. But conceive coming to these a man who is fugitive—fugitive across such a wilderness. Conceive a man fleeing for his life as Sisera fled when he sought the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite. To him that space of trampled sand, with the ragged black mouths above it, mean not only food and rest, but dear life itself. There, by the golden law of the desert's hospitality, he knows that he may eat in peace, that though his enemies come up to the very door, and his table be spread as it were in their presence, he need not flinch nor stint his heart of her security.

That was the landscape the Psalmist saw, and it seemed to him to reflect the mingled wildness and beauty of his own life. Human life was just this wilderness of terrible contrasts, where the light is so bright, but the shadows the darker and more treacherous; where the pasture is rich, but scattered in the wrinkles of vast deserts; where the paths are illusive, yet man's passion flies swift and straight to its revenge; where all is separation and disorder, yet law sweeps inexorable, and a man is hunted down to death by his blood-guiltiness. But not in anything is life more like the Wilderness than in this, that it is the presence and character of One, which make all the difference to us who are its silly sheep; that it is His grace and hospitality which alone avail us when we awaken to the fact that our lives cannot be fully figured by those of sheep, for men are fugitives in need of more than food—men are fugitives with the conscience and the habit of sin relentless on their track. This is the main lesson of the Psalm: the faith into which many generations of God's Church have sung an ever richer experience of His Guidance and His Grace. We may gather it up under these three heads—they cannot be too simple: I. The Lord is a Shepherd; II. The Lord is my Shepherd; and, III. if that be too feeble a figure to meet the fugitive and hunted life of man, the Lord is my Host and my Sanctuary for ever.

I. The Lord is my Shepherd: or—as the Greek, vibrating to the force of the original—The Lord is shepherding me; I shall not want. This is the theme of the first four verses.

Every one feels that the Psalm was written by a shepherd, and the first thing that is obvious is that he has made his God after his own image.

There are many in our day who sneer at that kind of theology—pretty, indeed, as the pearl or the tear, but like tear or pearl a natural and partly a morbid deposit—a mere human process which, according to them, pretty well explains all religion; the result of man's instinct to see himself reflected on the cloud that bounds his view; man's honest but deluded effort to put himself in charge of the best part of himself, filling the throne of an imaginary heaven with an impossible exaggeration of his own virtues.

But it is far better to hold with Jesus Christ than with such reasoners. Jesus Christ tells us that a man cannot be wrong if he argues towards God from what he finds best in himself. If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children: how much more shall your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him? What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? Either what woman having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece, doth not light a candle, and sweep the house, and seek diligently till she find it? … Likewise, I say unto you, There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.

That is a true witness, and strikes Amen out of every chord of our hearts. The Power, so evident in nature that He needs no proof, the Being so far beyond us in wisdom and in might, must also be our great superior in every quality which is more excellent than might. With thoughts more sleepless than our thoughts, as the sun is more constant than our lamps; with a heart that steadfastly cares for us, as we fitfully care for one another; more kingly than our noblest king, more fatherly than our fondest fatherhood; of deeper, truer compassion than ever mother poured upon us; whom, when a man feels that he highest thing in life is to be a shepherd, he calls his Shepherd, and knows that, as the shepherd, whose the sheep are, shrinks not to seek one of his lost at risk of limb or life, so his God cannot be less in readiness of love or of self-sacrifice. Such is the faith of strong and unselfish men all down the ages. And its strength is this, that it is no mere conclusion of logic, but the inevitable and increasing result of duty done and love kept pure—of fatherhood and motherhood and friendship fulfilled. One remembers how Browning has put it in the mouth of David, when the latter has done all he can do for 'Saul,' and is helpless:

Do I find love so full in my nature,
God's ultimate gift,
That I doubt His own love can
compete with it? …
Would I fain in my impotent yearning
do all for this man;
And dare doubt he alone shall not
help him, who yet alone can?
Could I wrestle to raise him from
sorrow, grow poor to enrich,
To fill up his life, starve my own out,
I would—knowing which
I know that my service is perfect.
Oh, speak through me now!
Would I suffer for him that I love?
So wouldst thou—so wilt thou!

Thus have felt and known the unselfish of all ages. It is not only from their depths, but from their topmost heights—heaven still how far!—that men cry out and say, There is a rock higher than I! God is stronger than their strength, more loving than their uttermost love, and in so far as they have loved and sacrificed themselves for others, they have obtained the infallible proof, that God too lives and loves and gives Himself away. Nothing can shake that faith, for it rests on the best instincts of our nature, and is the crown of all faithful life. He was no hireling herdsman who wrote these verses, but one whose heart was in his work, who did justly by it, magnifying his office, and who never scamped it, else had he not dared to call his God a shepherd. And so in every relation of our own lives. While insincerity and unfaithfulness to duty mean nothing less than the loss of the clearness and sureness of our faith in God; duty nobly done, love to the uttermost, are witnesses to God's love and ceaseless care, witnesses which grow more convincing every day.

The second, third and fourth verses give the details. Each of them is taken directly from the shepherd's custom, and applied without interpretation to the care of man's soul by God. He maketh me lie down—the verb is to bring the flocks to fold or couch—on pastures of green grass—the young fresh grass of spring-time. By waters of rest He refresheth me.[1] This last verb is difficult to render in English; the original meaning was evidently to guide the flock to drink, from which it came to have the more general force of sustaining or nourishing. My life He restoreth—bringeth back again from death. He leadeth me in paths of righteousness for His name's sake, not necessarily straight paths, but paths that fulfil the duty of paths and lead to somewhere, unlike most desert tracks which spring up, tempt your feet for a little, and then disappear. Yea, though I walk in a valley of deep darkness, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me. Thy rod and Thy staff are not synonymous, for even the shepherd of to-day, though often armed with a gun, carries two instruments of wood, his great oak club, thick enough to brain a wild beast, and his staff to lean upon or to touch his sheep, while the ancient shepherd without firearms would surely still more require both. They will comfort me—a very beautiful verb, the literal meaning of which is to help another, choked with grief or fear, to breathe freely, and give his heart air.

[Footnote 1: The Greek reads: epi hudatos anapause˘s exethrepse me]

These simple figures of the conduct of the soul by God are their own interpretation. Who, from his experience, cannot read into them more than any other may help him to find? Only on two points is a word required. Righteousness has no theological meaning. The Psalmist, as the above exposition has stated, is thinking of such desert paths as have an end and goal, to which they faultlessly lead the traveller: and in God's care of man their analogy is not the experience of justification and forgiveness, but the wider assurance that he who follows the will of God walks not in vain, that in the end he arrives, for all God's paths lead onward and lead home. This thought is clinched with an expression which would not have the same force if righteousness were taken in a theological sense: for His name's sake. No being has the right to the name of guide or shepherd unless the paths by which he takes the flock do bring them to their pasture and rest. The other ambiguous phrase is the vale of deep darkness. As is well known, the letters of the word may be made to spell shadow of death; but the other way of taking them is the more probable. This, however, need not lead us away from the associations with which our old translation has invested them. It is not only darkness that the poet is describing, but the darkness where death lurks for the poor sheep,—the gorges, in whose deep shadows are the lairs of wild beasts, and the shepherd and his club are needed. It stands thus for every dismal and deadly passage through which the soul may pass, and, most of all, it is the Valley of the Shadow of Death. There God is with men no less than by the waters of repose, or along the successful paths of active life. Was He able to recover the soul from life's wayside weariness and hunger?—He will equally defend and keep it amid life's deadliest dangers.

II. But the Psalm is not only theology. It is personal religion. Whether the Psalmist sang it first of the Church of God as a whole, or of the individual, the Church herself has sung it, through all generations, of the individual. By the natural progress of religion from the universal to the particular; by the authority of the Lord Jesus, who calls men singly to the Father, and one by one assures them of God's Providence, Grace and Glory; by the millions who have taken Him at His word, and every man of them in the loneliness of temptation and duty and death proved His promise—we also in our turn dare to believe that this Psalm is a psalm for the individual. The Lord is my shepherd: He maketh me to lie down: He leadeth me: He restoreth my soul. Lay your attention upon the little word. Ask yourself, if since it was first put upon your lips you have ever used it with anything more than the lips: if you have any right to use it: if you have ever taken any steps towards winning the right to use it. To claim God for our own, to have and enjoy Him as ours, means, as Christ our Master said over and over again, that we give ourselves to Him, and take Him to our hearts. Sheep do not choose their shepherd, but man has to choose—else the peace and the fulness of life which are here figured remain a dream and become no experience for him.

Do not say that this talk of surrender to God is unreal to you. Happiness, contentment, the health and growth of the soul, depend, as men have proved over and over again, upon some simple issue, some single turning of the soul. Lives are changed by a moment's listening to conscience, by a single and quiet inclination of the mind. We must submit ourselves to God. We must bring our wills under His. Here and now we can do this by resolution and effort, in the strength of His Spirit, which is nearer us than we know. The thing is no mystery, and not at all vague. The mistake people make about it is to seek for it in some artificial and conventional form. We have it travestied to-day under many forms—under the form of throwing open the heart to excitement in an atmosphere removed from real life as far as possible: under the form of assent to a dogma: under the form of adherence to a church.

But do you summon up the most real things in your life—the duty that is a disgust: the sacrifice for others from which you shrink. Summon up your besetting sin—the temptation which, for all your present peace, you know will be upon you before twenty-four hours are past. Summon up these grim realities of your life,—and in face of them give yourself to God's will, put your weakness into the keeping of His grace. He is as real as they are, and the act of will by which you give yourself to Him and His Service will be as true and as solid an experience as the many acts of will by which you have so often yielded to them.

Otherwise this beautiful name, this name Shepherd, must remain to you the emptiest of metaphors: this Psalm only a fair song instead of the indestructible experience which both Name and Psalm become to him who gives himself to God.

Men and women, who in this Christian land have grown up with this Psalm in your hearts, in all the great crises of life that are ahead shall this Psalm revisit us. In perplexity and doubt, in temptation and sorrow, and in death, like our mother's face shall this Psalm she put upon our lips come back to us. Woe to us then, if we have done nothing to help us to believe it! As when one lies sick in a foreign land, and music that is dear comes down the street and swells by him, and lifts his thoughts a little from himself, but passes over and melts into the distance, and he lies colder and more forsaken than before—so shall it be with us and this Psalm.

But if we do give our hearts to God and His Will, if day by day of our strength we work and serve, live and suffer, with contented hearts—then I know what we shall say when the day of our darkness and loneliness comes down, whether it be of temptation, or of responsibility, or of death itself. In that day we shall lift our faces and say: Yea, though I am walking in the Valley of the Shadow of Death I do fear no evil, for Thou art with me, and Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me!

III. But some one may turn round upon all this and say: 'It is simple, it is ideal, but the real man cannot reach it out of real life. For he is not the mere sheep, turned easily by a touch of the staff. He is a man: his life is no mere search for grass, it is a being searched; it is not a following, it is a flight. Not from the future do we shrink, even though death be there. The past is on our track, and hunts us down. We need more than guidance: we need grace.'

This is probably what the Psalmist himself felt when he did not close with the fourth verse, otherwise so natural a climax. He knew that weariness and death are not the last enemies of man. He knew that the future is never the true man's only fear. He remembered the inexorableness of the past; he remembered that blood-guiltiness, which sheep never feel, is worse to men than death. As perchance one day he lifted his eyes from his sheep and saw a fugitive from the avenger of blood crossing the plain, while his sheep scattered right and left before this wild intruder into their quiet world,—so he felt his fair and gentle thoughts within him scattered by the visitation of his past; so he felt how rudely law breaks through our pious fancies, and must be dealt with before their peace can be secure; so he felt, as every true man has felt with him, that the religion, however bright and brave, which takes no account of sin, is the religion which has not a last nor a highest word for life.

Consider this system of blood revenge. It was the one element of law in the lawless life of the desert. Everything else in the wilderness might swerve and stray. This alone persisted and was infallible. It crossed the world; it lasted through generations. The fear of it never died down in the heart of the hunted man, nor the duty of it in the heart of the hunter. The holiest sanctions confirmed it,—the safety of society, the honour of the family, love for the dead. And yet, from this endless process, which hunted a man like conscience, a shelter was found in the custom of Eastern hospitality—the 'golden piety of the wilderness,' as it has been called. Every wanderer, whatever his character or his past might be, was received as the; 'guest of God'—such is the beautiful name which they still give him,—furnished with food, and kept inviolate, his host becoming responsible for his safety.

That the Psalmist had this custom in view, when composing the last two verses of the Psalm, is plain from the phrase with which these open: Thou spreadest before me a table in the very face of mine enemies; and perhaps also from the unusual metaphor in verse 6: Surely goodness and mercy shall follow, or hunt, me all the days of my life.

And even if those were right (which I do not admit) who interpret the enemies and pursuers as the mere foes and persecutors of the pious, it is plain that to us using the Psalm this interpretation will not suffice. How can we speak of this custom of blood-revenge and think only of our material foes? If we know ourselves, and if our conscience be quick, then of all our experiences there is but one which suits this figure of blood-revenge, when and wheresoever in the Old Testament it is applied to man's spiritual life. So only do the conscience and the habit of sin pursue a man. Our real enemies are not our opponents, our adversities, our cares and pains. These our enemies! Better comrades, better guides, better masters no man ever had. Our enemies are our evil deeds and their memories, our pride, our selfishness, our malice, our passions, which by conscience or by habit pursue us with a relentlessness past the power of figure to express. We know how they persist from youth unto the grave: the sting of death is sin. We know what they want: nothing less than our whole character and will. Simon, Simon, said Christ to a soul on the edge of a great temptation, Satan hath asked you back again for himself.

Yet it is the abounding message of the whole Bible, of which our twenty-third Psalm is but a small fragment, that for this conscience and this habit of sin God hath made provision, even as sure as those thoughts of His guidance which refresh us in the heat of life and comfort us amidst its shadows.

In Nature? Yes: for here too the goodness of God leadeth to repentance. There is nothing which the fifth verse so readily brings to mind as the grace of the Divine hospitality in nature. Thou spreadest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. How these words contrast the fever and uncertain battle of our life with the calmness and surety of the Divine order! Through the cross currents of human strife, fretted and stained, the tides of nature keep their steady course, and rise to their invariable margins. The seasons come up undisturbed by crime and war. Spring creeps even into the beleaguered city; through the tents of the besiegers, across trench and scarp, among the wheels of the cannon, and over the graves of the dead, grass and wild flowers speed, spreading God's table. He sendeth His rain upon the just and the unjust. And even here the display is not merely natural, nor spread only in the sight of our physical enemies; but God's goodness leadeth to repentance, and Nature is equipped even for deliverance from sin. Who has come out upon a great landscape, who has looked across the sea, who has lifted his eyes to the hills and felt the winds of God blowing off their snows, who has heard earth's countless voices rising heavenwards, but has felt: What a wide place this world is for repentance! Man does find in Nature deliverance from himself, oblivion of his past, with peace and purity! And yet the provision, though real, is little more than temporary. The herdsmen of the desert are not obliged to furnish to their fugitive guest shelter for more than two nights with the day between. Little more than two nights with the day between is the respite from conscience and habit which Nature provides for the sinful heart. She is the million-fold opportunity of repentance; she is not the final or everlasting grace of God. And, therefore, whatever may have been the original intention of our Psalmist, the spiritual feeling of the Church has understood his last two verses to sing of that mercy and forgiveness of our God which were spoken to men by the prophets, but reached the fulness of their proclamation and proof in Jesus Christ. He who owned the simple trust of the first four verses, saying, 'Thou art right, I am the Good Shepherd,' so that since He walked on earth the name is no more a mere metaphor of God, but the dearest, strongest reality which has ever visited this world of shadows—He also has been proved by men as the Host and Defender of all who seek His aid from the memory and the pursuit of sin. So He received them in the days of His flesh, as they drifted upon Him across the wilderness of life, pressed by every evil with which it is possible for sin to harry men. To Him they were all 'guests of God,' welcomed for His sake, irrespective of what their past might have been. And so, being lifted up, He still draws us to Himself, and still proves Himself able to come between us and our past. Whatever we may flee from He keeps it away, so that, although to the last, for penitence, we may be reminded of our sins, and our enemies come again and again to the open door of memory, in Him we are secure. He is our defence, and our peace is impregnable.