Gibson The Lord of Psalm 23

Jesus Our Shepherd, Companion, and Host
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-4335-8801-3
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 184 Seiten

Expository Study of Psalm 23 Reveals the Beauty and Deep Theological Meaning behind a Familiar Part of Scripture Psalm 23 is one of the most recognizable passages in the whole Bible. Though relatively short, this poetic depiction of God's love epitomizes Christ's goodness and provision as he leads his children. Even lifelong Christians will find fresh encouragement by closely studying these familiar words. David Gibson walks through each verse in Psalm 23, thoroughly examining its 3 depictions of the believer's union with Christ as sheep and shepherd, traveler and companion, and guest and host. Gibson provides canonical context for the Psalm's beautiful imagery, inspiring praise and wonder as readers reflect on the loving Shepherd who meets every need. - Rich Theology: Adapted from 3 engaging sermons by David Gibson - Expository: Closely examines Psalm 23's imagery and what it reveals about the relationship between Christ and his followers - Uplifting and Informative: Encourages deep reflection on Christ's provision, comfort, and eternal strength - With a Foreword by Sinclair Ferguson

David Gibson (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is minister of Trinity Church in Aberdeen, Scotland. He is a coeditor of From Heaven He Came and Sought Her, and his publications include Living Life Backward; Radically Whole; and The Lord of Psalm 23. He is married to Angela, and they have four children.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gibson, David

Leseproben

Introduction

Some texts of Holy Scripture are hard to preach on or write about, not because they are especially difficult for the pastor or theologian to understand but because they are already so profoundly precious to the hearer and reader.

I suspect this is more true of Psalm 23 than of any other part of the Bible.

I came to preach on this psalm to my own church family after visiting a dear friend in the congregation who was hospitalized for major, life-changing surgery. After his operation, for several weeks my friend was able to read only very small portions of text. One day he showed me his copy of W. Phillip Keller’s book A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23. Keller reads the individual phrases of the psalm through his shepherd eyes and runs each word through his shepherd hands; the result is a thoughtful and intimate reading of Psalm 23.1 We discussed the book and why it was helpful, and as I walked home that day, the idea for three sermons on Psalm 23 came to me. I did some reading and initial study, outlined the sermon series in a way that seemed to make sense, and even sourced a picture of a deep, dark valley to advertise the sermon series to our congregation. It was sure to whet their appetite! I proudly showed my artwork to my friend next time I visited the hospital.

“No,” he said, almost immediately. “That hillside in your picture is so soft and gentle you could do forward rolls all the way down! In my mind ‘the valley of the shadow of death’ looks and feels like the valley in The Pilgrim’s Progress.”

We will come to that valley later in this book, and to John Bunyan’s vivid depiction of it. Bunyan certainly helped me understand it much better, and I hope I can do it justice here. But my friend revealed something that might happen as you read these pages. Psalm 23 has comforted so many of us during the most painful and difficult moments of our lives that to have someone else analyze it line by line and tell you what it means, when you have already felt what it means in such a precious way, can be a profoundly disappointing experience. If you’ve actually lived in the valley, you don’t need me trying to describe it to you. That feels like taking something beautifully well-worn and exquisitely comfortable out of your hands, playing around with it, knocking it out of shape, and handing it back to you now beyond recognition.

I hope and pray your experience will not be like this. My aim is for this exposition to be like revisiting an old friend, with the familiarity and ease of such an encounter offering a gateway to learning new and unexpected things that detract in no way from what the two of you already have but, rather, serve only to add new layers of depth.

The riches in this psalm are inexhaustible. We will see that even the small phrases in it are, to use Martin Luther’s lovely phrase, “a little Bible.”2 These six short verses are a window into the sixty-six books of Scripture, and they take us through the whole story of redemption in an elevated, majestic, and also personal, intimate way. In the pages that follow, I simply want to walk through each phrase of the psalm and, as best I can, portray the beauty of its meaning for us. The walk will not be linear, like a straight line tracing the tightly composed argument of an epistle. Rather, this journey will be more circuitous and involve revisiting some parts of the psalm in light of its other parts and, indeed, other portions of the Bible.

On the one hand, “this Psalm is so clear, that there is no real need to comment upon it”;3 on the other hand, it contains numerous words and ideas that are “open ended” and regularly “under defined.”4 I trust that in what you read here you won’t lose track of that first truth about the clarity of Psalm 23, and that your experience of the Lord Jesus as shepherd will only become richer and sweeter. That goal can also be realized because of the second truth about the “open ended” nature of the psalm. This reality is not to be feared. You will see that the English Standard Version, which I am working with in this book, and which is printed in full at the start, contains no less than seven footnotes on issues of translation, and we will engage with many matters like this. So, simply by reading this version of the psalm, we are already embarking on a path of finding more treasures in this psalm than meet the eye on a first reading. This combination of truths about Psalm 23 is part of why the psalm is universally loved and also why we will not quickly plumb all the depths it contains.

I am going to lead us through Psalm 23 with the help of Alec Motyer’s incisive outline, which is tucked away, almost obscurely, in The New Bible Commentary. Out of gratitude for his outstanding work as a commentator, I have retrieved Motyer’s profile of the psalm, and it has guided my reading here in three vignettes: the sheep and the shepherd (vv. 1–3), the traveler and the companion (v. 4), and the guest and the host (vv. 5–6). As part of this, Motyer observes that each of these sections has a personal confession at its heart—“I shall not want” (v. 1), “I shall not fear” (v. 4), and “I shall dwell” (v. 6)—with the reason for these three confident assertions beautifully explained in each section.5

If these portions of the psalm make up its skeletal structure, then the spine of the psalm is the close, deeply personal relationship between its author and the person it describes. This is expressed as a “he-me” relationship in the opening lines, which is close enough, but then most beautifully and seamlessly becomes “you-me” in the valley of the shadow of death. As Motyer says, “The darker the shadow, the closer the Lord!”6 From that point on, the psalm only ever directly addresses the Lord as good shepherd, closest companion, and generous host.

This means that this psalm is in our Bibles as an exquisite depiction of the Lord Jesus Christ. More than that, it is a song of personal praise flowing from what it means to know and adore him as belonging to me, personally. So in these pages, in faltering words, I have one simple aim: to show you in the images, poetic beauty, and themes of Psalm 23 just how the Lord Jesus takes complete and absolute responsibility for those who are in his care.

I believe this is the point of the shepherding imagery, which blends into the hosting imagery. In the ancient Near East, shepherds were entirely and absolutely responsible for their sheep, and hosts were entirely and absolutely responsible for their guests.7 This is why the words of this psalm have nourished God’s people ever since they were written down. From start to end, the language describing God is active, intensive, causative—he makes, he leads, he restores, he leads again, he is with me, he prepares, he anoints. Through the doorway of only six short verses, we enter a world of the most stunning beauty because of whom we meet once inside the psalm and because of what he does for us as we walk through life with him. Psalm 23 teaches that if we belong to Christ, we are in a world of active initiative, of strength, of leadership and protection; it is a relationship of the very best and most secure intentional care.8

Throughout church history many of our best-loved theologians and pastors have seen that what Jesus offers us is so comprehensive precisely because what he gives us is himself. He gives us everything we need because he himself is everything we need. The scale of his sufficiency has drawn forth some of the most beautiful lines we have in Christian theology. Consider, for example, John Calvin’s depiction of all that Jesus is for us, both in his person and in the work he accomplishes:

We see that our whole salvation and all its parts are comprehended in Christ. . . . If we seek strength, it lies in his dominion; if purity, in his conception; if gentleness, it appears in his birth. . . . If we seek redemption, it lies in his passion; if acquittal, in his condemnation; if remission of the curse, in his cross; if satisfaction, in his sacrifice; if purification, in his blood; if reconciliation, in his descent into hell; if mortification of the flesh, in his tomb; if newness of life, in his resurrection; if immortality, in the same; if inheritance of the Heavenly Kingdom, in his entrance into heaven; if protection, if security, if abundant supply of all blessings, in his Kingdom; if untroubled expectation of judgment, in the power given to him to judge. In short, since rich store of every kind of good abounds in him, let us drink our fill from this fountain, and from no other.9

Calvin’s words reach these eloquent heights because of his profound grasp of the doctrine of union with Christ—all that is Christ’s becomes ours through our faith-union with him.

Although the grammar of Psalm 23 is different from this, I want to show you that the theological worldview of Psalm 23 is not. Indeed, it is in the imagery of the psalm (sheep with a shepherd, traveler with a companion, guest with a host) that we see...