Psalm 23 is perhaps the most famous portion of the Bible. It’s a psalm that has brought comfort to Christians throughout history. In this episode, Peter Orr speaks to David Gibson, who has released a book that walks through the psalm in detail—The Lord of Psalm 23: Jesus our shepherd, companion and host. David shows us that there are wonderful depths that are easy to miss, and how, in so many ways, this psalm encapsulates the entirety of the Christian life.
Links referred to:
- The Lord of Psalm 23: Jesus our shepherd, companion and host (David Gibson)
- A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23 (W Phillip Keller)
- Echoes of Exodus: Tracing themes of redemption through Scripture (Alastair J Roberts and Andrew Wilson)
- Our October event: Who am I? The search for identity with Rory Shiner (23 October 2024)
- Support the work of the Centre
Runtime: 28:35 min.
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been edited for readability.
Introduction
Peter Orr: Psalm 23 is perhaps the most famous portion of the Bible. It’s a psalm that has brought comfort to Christians throughout history. In this episode, I speak to David Gibson, who has released a book that walks through the psalm in detail. David shows us that there are wonderful depths that are easy to miss, and how, in so many ways, this psalm encapsulates the entirety of the Christian life. I hope you enjoy the episode.
[Music]
PO: Welcome to the Centre for Christian Living podcast! Today, I am joined by David Gibson. David is the minister of Trinity Church in Aberdeen. David, thanks for joining us on the podcast.
David Gibson: Thanks so much for having me, Peter! It’s lovely to be here. Nice to see you again after all these years and get to talk together.
PO: Great! I wonder if, just to start us off, you could, tell us a little bit about yourself, your family and how you became a Christian.
DG: Yeah, thank you. So I don’t know if your listeners will be able to tell, but I’ve got the same accent as you. I’m from Northern Ireland originally, but I’ve got a very mixed background: my mum is English, my dad’s Northern Irish, but I was born in the United States, where they were training to be missionaries with MAF—Mission Aviation Fellowship. Then from there, they took us to Africa. I lived in Tanzania until I was eight. Then we went back to Belfast to work on the accent for ten years.
From there, I went off to Nottingham University to study, where you also studied, Peter. From there, I ended up working for the British InterVarsity UCCF—the Christian student movement. I’d studied undergraduate theology and I just had this theology bug in my system. I think I had to get it out of my system by doing further study, so I did a Masters in London. I convinced my English wife to move to Aberdeen in Scotland. I promised her it would only be for three years [Laughter] and that was 2004. We’re still here in 2024! So she’s never believed a word I’ve said since! [Laughter]
PO: Wonderful.
The idea behind the book
PO: As well as being a very busy pastor/minister of a church, you do have time to write. Today we’re talking about your book, published by Crossway: The Lord of Psalm 23: Jesus our shepherd, companion and host. First of all, what prompted you to write the book?
DG: Yeah, thank you. It’s a really good question, isn’t it. Psalm 23: like, what does the world really need [Laughter] other than more on the world’s most famous Psalm!
PO: Another book on Psalm 23! [Laughter]
DG: That’s right! The prompt, very simply, was, like you mentioned there about my real work/day-to-day pastoral ministry, I visited a lovely guy in our church family, and a lot of things about visiting were just profoundly moving. He’s very able, young, he has a family, but he has suffered a huge amount and has had a life-changing operation. The operation was so traumatic, he really only able to read tiny bits of text for a long time.
He introduced me to a famous book on Psalm 23 by W Phillip Keller: A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23. He talked to me about that. I really enjoyed learning about that book and talking to him. Just one day on one of my visits with him, I thought, “Oh, I’ve never preached Psalm 23 and I’d like to do something for the congregation.” My visits to him were affecting me so much. So it kind of came out of that.
A sermon series was borne from that sense of—I saw for the first time, if you like, why the psalm is so precious—that when everything else is stripped away … It’s quite amazing, isn’t it: you think it’s your job, teaching theology in a Bible college; the number of books on our shelves; the number of things we’ve read; when everything falls away and it’s you and the Lord, you’ve got six verses [Laughter] and it’s where most people turn. Your relationship with God is, in a way, that simple and that beautiful, and you need things that rich.
So it came from that, really. From that experience, I wanted to feed the church family with that. I went away and did some work, and came up with three sermons. Sometimes you preach a sermon series and people are like, “Yeah, thanks.” [Laughter] Other times, they’re like, “Oh, that was particularly helpful!” So from there, I decided to try writing it up in a book, and that was it.
The Lord is my shepherd
PO: The book starts with your reflection on the significance of the identity of the shepherd. Every line, every word in this psalm—we’re familiar with it. But what you do so powerfully in the book is make us stop, meditate and think.
That first line: “the Lord”—“The Lord is my shepherd”: can you reflect a little bit for us the significance of that identity of our shepherd?
DG: Yeah, thank you. Well, certainly personally, that was the most profound bit of the study for me. I did get there in the sermons, but even more so when I began to read, study, and try write things up into a book. I don’t think I’d ever really noticed before.
The way I put this in the book is that we just move so quickly to the idea of “shepherd”, “green pastures”, “hills”, “valleys”, the lyrical roll of “the valley of the shadow of death”, “sheep” and “shepherd”: that’s what we think Psalm 23 is about. But I think Psalm 23 is really about the shock that it is Yahweh who is my shepherd. That title—the divine name, “the Lord”—it doesn’t automatically have shepherding connotations built into it. What’s built into it is grandeur, majesty, self-sufficiency, God’s aseity—God’s eternal, divine nature. So I take a bit of time in the book to talk about where that title comes from—Moses and the burning bush (Exod 3).
I think there’s even more to say there—to be realised—than I say in the book. Moses is called by God to rescue his people, and what is Moses doing when he turns aside to the burning bush? He’s a shepherd: he’s tending his father-in-law’s flock. At that moment of shepherding literal sheep, God says, “I’m going to make you a shepherd of metaphorical sheep—my people—and here’s what you need to know.”
He gives him the burning bush, and the bush, of course, is a way of God communicating his utter otherness—that he’s not like anything else in this world. We begin, we end; God has no beginning and no end. He’s uncaused. The bush is burning without using up any raw materials. You cannot diminish God in any way; you cannot lessen him; you can’t add to him.
I realised that in studying Psalm 23 that the wonder that the eternal God—who has no need of me, who will be there after I’ve gone, who was there forever before I ever was—that one is our shepherd—my shepherd. It’s a stunning thing to say. You might expect to say, “The Lord is—” well, I don’t know—some words that keep him at a distance. But to say that “the Lord is my shepherd”, it’s like saying I have—
PO: —the intimacy that that brings?
DG: Yeah, absolutely. I remember years ago hearing Eugene Peterson, in Psalm 46:7, point out “the Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our fortress”. That phrase comes twice: in verses 7 and 11. Eugene Peterson points out that it’s the wrong way around: it should be “the Lord of hosts is our fortress—the God of armies is our fortress—and the God of Jacob is with us”. Personal, close: the God of Jacob. The Lord of hosts: strong, mighty. Peterson said it’s an amazing thing that that switch—the Lord of hosts, the God of armies—is right there. You’ve got your own SAS squadron at your right hand and your fortress comes from the personal God, the close God, the God who knows you by name. I think that Psalm 46 phrase is expressed in the one line in Psalm 23.
Jesus is our shepherd
PO: And yet, the subtitle of your book, “The Lord of Psalm 23: Jesus, our shepherd, companion and host”. Talk to us about the significance of the subtitle and the way you’re identifying “the Lord” as Jesus, our shepherd.
DG: Yeah. I read lots of academic books on Psalm 23. There’s as much academic stuff as there is pastoral stuff—popular-level stuff. Of course, academics spend whole books clearing their throat to say, “Well, maybe in some way we can say this is about—”, and I just wanted to cut through all of that completely and say it’s so clear that the Lord Jesus saw himself that way: John 8:58, “before Abraham was, I am”. He saw himself, presented himself and revealed himself to us a Yahweh—as the eternal God come in flesh. A couple of chapters after that in John 10:11, he identifies himself as “the good shepherd”—the one that all of Israel’s history was waiting for and looking forward to, in contrast to the bad shepherds of Israel.
I don’t think it’s easy to read the Gospels and to see the way the Lord Jesus thinks of himself, and the way that he treats people and interacts with people—I don’t think it’s easy to see that and to see the way that David conceives of himself in David’s life story. We recently preached through 2 Samuel and it’s really quite astonishing—particularly when David is exiled from the capital and he has to leave. He crosses the Kidron Valley and goes up the Mount of Olives. Jesus clearly sees himself as being and doing everything that David was and did. So I just wanted to write a book that gave us complete confidence, right from the start, that this is the Lord Jesus.
Psalm 23 and the exodus
PO: So often we see throughout the Scriptures these patterns—God working in the same patterns. One pattern that you draw on is the pattern of the exodus. We might not read Psalm 23 and think, “Oh! It’s the exodus”, but you draw out some really helpful connections between the psalm and the exodus. Could you speak about a few of those for us?
DG: Yeah, sure. This, again, was something that really struck home to me. There’s a wonderful Crossway book called Echoes of Exodus by Andrew Wilson and Alastair Roberts that I would recommend to our listeners if what I’m about to say sounds a bit strange. That book opened up a lot of the Bible for me, and it’s a very readable book. It uses the imagery of music and helps you see the way that the exodus functions as a main motif through the whole of the Bible. That book was helpful.
But in studying Psalm 23 and then reading other parts of the Bible, I realised that the way that I would put it (and I’ve come up with this phrase since I wrote the book) is if you were to take a photo of the exodus and put it on Instagram, what would the photo be? Most of us think the photo would be what we grew up with in our childrens storybook Bibles—of either the walls of water parted and the people walking through, or if it was really exciting, the Egyptians drowning. I can remember that: I’ve still got it in my head—the image of chariots—
PO: —submerged—
DG: —floating on the top of the water—
PO: —yeah, that’s right.
DG: Yeah. We think that’s the picture of the exodus. But actually, the picture that the Bible would put on Instagram is of a shepherd leading his people through the wilderness. It would be a shepherd with his sheep.
So Psalm 77:19-20, which is a psalm celebrating God’s redemption of people from Egypt:
Your way was through the sea,
your path through the great waters;
yet your footprints were unseen.
You led your people like a flock
by the hand of Moses and Aaron.
Psalm 78:51-53:
He struck down every firstborn in Egypt,
the firstfruits of their strength in the tents of Ham.
Then he led out his people like sheep
and guided them in the wilderness like a flock.
He led them in safety, so that they were not afraid,
but the sea overwhelmed their enemies.
If you want a picture of God’s key redemptive work that sets the paradigm and pattern for the rest of the Bible, it’s a shepherd, rescuing his people through the hand of weak, under-shepherds, and leading them through a wilderness, feeding them in the wilderness and taking them to the promised land to glory. And when you see that that’s the basic pattern for how God leads his people and interacts with them, I think you begin to see all of that on the surface of Psalm 23. That’s the story, isn’t it, of being led through a wilderness, through the valley of the shadow of death, being fed in that wilderness with enemy and danger all around you, and then being led home, safely through to the other side to glory.
The story of the exodus is there, but then in the book, I try to point out some of the actual details. There’s a lot more to it—like some of the phrases that David uses about lacking nothing, being led to the house of the Lord, still waters, waters of rest, his namesake—these are all phrases that are actually associated with the exodus so that, if you like, we need to re-learn our history, our shared Bible history, with our ancestors in the faith, and once we have their stories—our story—then these words begin to echo in our mind in the way that they would have echoed, I think, for the first hearers of the psalm.
Psalm 23 as a help for modern rootlessness
PO: One of the implications you bring out is how that helps us in our contemporary society’s rootlessness: modern people are rootless. This psalm that’s so meaningful for so many for us actually connects us back, as you say, to our shared history. It gives the psalm a depth. I mean, it already is something that’s so rich and solid, but it gives us a depth—this seam running throughout the Bible that is solid for our faith.
DG: Yeah, exactly. That’s one of the things I try to do in the book. I hope that that comes through. We are Christian people taking our place in the same story of God leading his people through a wilderness to hope—to the promised land.
[Music]
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PO: Our culture is obsessed with identity: we’re often told, “You do you” and encouraged to live according to our “true and authentic self”, expressing publicly how we feel about ourselves internally.
However, the very idea of personal identity is inherently slippery. It encompasses things like ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion, belief, educational background, profession and personality, but it’s not fixed: our identity can change through time, circumstance and even self-invention.
How as Christians should we regard identity? God created us as unique individuals; how does our creatureliness affect who we are? Furthermore, as sinners who have been redeemed and sanctified by the Lord Jesus and adopted into the family of God, how does Christ’s work change the way we view ourselves? How does the encouragement to “find your identity in Christ” actually play out in the complexities of competing sources of identity?
Join us for our next and final event in our series on “Culture creep” on Wednesday 23 October, when Rory Shiner, Senior Pastor of Providence City Church in Perth, will show us how losing ourselves for the sake of the kingdom will help us find ourselves once and for all (Matt 10:39). Register and find out more on our website: ccl.moore.edu.au.
Now let’s get back to our program.
“Paths of righteousness”
PO: Just moving in on some of the detail, David. You provide some really helpful insights. I wonder if I could ask you a few of the details of the psalm and how they help us as we read the psalm. “Paths of righteousness” (Ps 23:3), for example.
DG: Yeah, thank you. This sort of stuff doesn’t come naturally to me; I’ve got to find this in good commentaries and books the way that anybody else does. Many commentators point out that that word “paths” is literally cart tracks or wagon ruts. The idea is that someone has gone ahead and an initial path has been forged. The wagon has gone ahead and pressed down into the ground, and it’s left this track that others can go in. That’s what the path is: there’s a clear way for me to walk in.
Notice where the shepherd is: he is ahead. He’s not behind us, driving. He’s leading us. These are his paths. If you’re going to walk in a path of righteousness, whose righteousness is it? How do you know it’s a righteous path? The only answer is because it’s his: he’s gone ahead of us and we’re following him.
When you put that together—the idea that the shepherd is ahead: he’s not behind, driving me; he’s ahead and I’m following—you put that together with John 10 and it’s exactly what the Lord Jesus says: “When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice” (John 10:4). I think it’s very plausible to say that what creates the path of righteousness is the voice of the shepherd ahead of us, speaking to us. As you follow him and his speaking voice, you are on the path of righteousness. You’re not just following him anywhere, aimlessly; it’s a righteous path that he’s leading you on. In the book, I try and pause in that a little bit and say that the righteousness of the Christian life—the righteousness that believers need—is closely tied to the voice of the shepherd.
You see what comes just before it in Psalm 23:3?
He restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness
for his name’s sake.
The way I say it in the book is there is no wholeness—restoring of soul—without holiness—without following in the paths of righteousness.
I think pastorally, every pastor would say that as you begin to dig into pastoral problems with people who come and tell you, “I’ve got this going on in my life or this problem”, somewhere involved in it somewhere down the line—depending on the problem, of course, but particularly with grievous sin—somewhere down the line, they’ve stopped listening to the shepherd’s voice and they’ve begun to leave the path of righteousness. Or they’re wondering about this particular problem. Most of it is not solved—it’s often never right the right word pastorally—but most of it is illuminated by “Where are you with Christ’s voice?”
I always remember a theology lecturer saying he learned this through experience: he had a student who was studying undergraduate theology come and see him, and the student said to him, “I think I’m losing my faith. I’m not sure I can join up the dots in the Bible the same way the lecturers are pulling apart the Bible.” This lecturer said to him, “Tell me what’s happening in your private life.” The student eventually admitted that he was sleeping with his girlfriend. The point is, if you’re leaving the path of righteousness, you’re going to think up new thoughts to make the path that you’re on a better path.
The rod and staff
PO: As well as leading us, there’s shepherd imagery of the rod and the staff. That’s very helpful—that distinction between the two. Can you bring it out for us?
DG: I think one is a implement of warfare (the rod) and one is an implement of discipline—shepherding—protection (the staff). The idea is that the shepherd has both of these implements in his hand: they’re not the same thing. The rod is the iron shaft that the Son has in his hand in Psalm 2:9, smashing the nations, the enemies of king. David uses it to fight the bear and the lion (1 Sam 17:34-35). In the Book of Revelation, there’s a rod in Jesus’ hand (Rev 19:15; cf 12:5).
The staff, on the other hand, is for situations like when the sheep is going off to the side: it’s the crook around the neck, pulling the sheep back. The way I try to express it in the book is that the rod saves us from our enemies and the staff saves us from ourselves—that it’s the shepherd’s discipline, as well as the shepherd’s divine protection. We need both.
Again, I try to explore how pastoral experience has taught me that not everybody is happy with both implements: some people are very, very happy to see shepherds go out to fight wolves, and not so happy to see shepherds try to shepherd sheep. But both are essential, aren’t they.
PO: Yep, absolutely.
The valley of the shadow of death and our enemies
PO: In terms of the negative experiences in the psalm, we have the description of “the valley of the shadow of death” (Ps 23:4), which is probably the image that we’re most familiar with after the very first verse. So we’ve got “the valley of the shadow of death” and then we’ve got “the presence of my enemies”. Can you reflect a little bit on the significance of those sorts of negative experiences for us?
DG: Yeah, sure. One of the things I try to argue in the book is that part of the beauty of Psalm 23, the reason people turn to it so quickly and the reason it’s become so precious to us is because of the open-ended nature of those phrases. If you’re dying, of course it makes sense: the valley of the shadow of death—there it is. But many people still feel immense beauty from the psalm—people who are not dying, but they’re in a valley and they feel like death is encroaching. I feel like let the scholars argue over what was exactly happening here in David’s life and all the rest.
Personally, I do think verse 5—“You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies”—refers to something specific. I’d written this book on Psalm 23 before we preached through 2 Samuel. At one point in 2 Samuel 17, David is exiled, he goes up the Mount of Olives, his men are about to enter warfare into with his own son Absalom, and soldiers come and feed him by a brook (vv. 27-29). Personally, I agree with those scholars who think that that’s probably what verse 5 is about.
At the same time, we don’t know. The fact that the author of the psalm—David—doesn’t tell us the details helps us to say, “Life has terrible valleys. Death is a real enemy that still encroaches. There are real enemies that Christ’s people—Christ’s sheep—face: the world, the flesh, the devil—literal enemies—spiritual enemies—metaphorical enemies.” I don’t think the psalm wants to say, “Oh, you can’t have that as part of this.”
PO: “That’s something different. That’s not what the psalm is specifically talking about.” Yeah.
DG: Yeah. I think the psalm is a lovely, open-ended description of a sheep’s terrible vulnerability and the shepherd’s immense closeness and goodness. The fact that we find ourselves in that situation speaks so deeply to us.
Drawing on Psalm 23 as a pastor
PO: You’ve talked a little bit about this already, but in terms of your own work as a pastor, particularly as you’ve done more study on this psalm, do you find yourself drawing on it as you shepherd a flock?
DG: Yeah, I do, in lots of different ways. I try to argue in the book, like I was just saying about the rod and the staff, that sheep expect that. They’re used to the imagery of rod and staff, and in terms of—maybe this is just Scotland; I don’t know—but God is strong, God is stern, God disciplines, God protects—they like all that.
But does he also have wine and perfume in his hand? “You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows” (Ps 23:5). They’re like, “Hang on: is he that good to me—that he actually lavishes me?” He doesn’t just feed me a little titbit, but my cup overflows. I think there’s tremendous beauty in that image attached to the way that Christ is in the Gospels. David forged a phrase, but Jesus literally ate his way through the Gospels: he’s always on his way to a meal [Laughter]—at least in Luke’s Gospel. Why is food so important? You just realise from the Garden of Eden onwards through the prophet Isaiah the predictions of end time feasting. Pastorally, trying to say to people, “God is so much more generous and lavish and for you, and kind to you than you think he is” is a beautiful thing.
Verse 6: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me”: I think there’s a really good case that it’s “only”, not “surely”. Now, you try and rub that into my life—your life—your listeners’ lives. There are some horrendous evils that we live with: people suffer terribly, and David says, “Only goodness and mercy follow me”. I mean, what on earth is going on there that somebody could say that? The moment you think, “Well, that can’t be right theologically”, you have to think, “Well, this is David saying this.” If anybody knew suffering and trauma from his own sin and his family disintegrating on every level, it was him, and yet he’s still capable of somehow looking back through it and saying, “Ah, even there, the Lord was with me. Even there, God was good. Even there, God was merciful.” I think Psalm 23 has a very big God to give people, pastorally.
The relevance of the psalms to the Christian life
PO: David, it’s a wonderfully helpful book. I wonder if I could just ask a final question that steps back a little bit. The psalms in general: why do you think they’ve faded from contemporary Christian life? I think for our Christian forebears—our evangelical forebears—the psalms were precious. They’re maybe not front-and-centre in our experience as Christians as they once were. Any reflections on that?
Maybe in your context, it is. I think more in terms of personal piety, we don’t turn to the psalms. They maybe don’t have a place in our Christian life. How do you encourage listeners to draw on the psalms more generally? Psalm 23 is the example par excellence, but the psalms as a whole give us a wonderful resource for the Christian life.
DG: I think we have experienced so much comfort in the Western Christian tradition in, say, the last 100 years—maybe longer. Christ’s people—at least in the West—do not know how to suffer well—on the whole, not in every regard.
If it’s true, Calvin’s phrase that the psalms are “An Anatomy of all the Parts of the Soul” 1 (in that all of life’s emotions are there), Christian people, when they suffer, on the whole, don’t know where to turn or where to go to. So much of the psalms have angry believers—angry at God, angry at their enemies. There’s lament, which is a totally missing category in church life. Who in their right mind wants to go to church to lament on a Sunday? We try to do this at Trinity. We don’t do it very well. We don’t sing enough psalms. But I mean, you’re right: in Scotland, we probably do sing more than other parts of the world in Scottish Presbyterianism.
But over the years, I’ve had some people say to me, “Why are we singing that miserable song? That’s a really depressing psalm!” It’s quite astonishing, isn’t it, that sheep might think, “Why do I want to sing that?” when I think, “Because that person over there is clinging on for dear life, and that psalm is exactly what they need to say to God today.” It may not be what you need to say, but we all need to learn to say it for when our time comes to want to have those words.
If the church’s exile increases and we become even more the scum of the earth, as we’re becoming, I just wonder whether the psalms will return. Their preciousness will come back to us, because we’re going to find ourselves needing to say and sing some of these words that we didn’t ever need to before.
PO: They also give us this kind of rich and bigger view of God than often what we have before our consciousness.
DG: Yeah, exactly.
Conclusion
PO: David, thank you very much. It’s been wonderful talking with you. Thank you for writing this book and thank you for helping us to see something afresh of the beauty and power of Psalm 23.
DG: Such a pleasure! Thanks so much, Peter. Lovely to be with you. I hope the conversation helps and obviously, I hope the book does too. Thank you very much for talking to me!
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PO: To benefit from more resources from the Centre for Christian Living, please visit ccl.moore.edu.au, where you’ll find a host of resources, including past podcast episodes, videos from our live events and articles published through the Centre. We’d love for you to subscribe to our podcast and for you to leave us a review so more people can discover our resources.
On our website, we also have an opportunity for you to make a tax deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre.
We always benefit from receiving questions and feedback from our listeners, so if you’d like to get in touch, you can email us at ccl@moore.edu.au.
As always, I would like to thank Moore College for its support of the Centre for Christian Living, and to thank to my assistant, Karen Beilharz, for her work in editing and transcribing the episodes. The music for our podcast was generously provided by James West.
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Endnote
1 John Calvin, “The Author’s Preface”, Commentary on the Book of Psalms—Volume 1, trans by James Anderson (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1845) 23.
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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