God Who Shepherds
Natalia Terfa
Day 1 of 6: Shepherding God
The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want
–Psalm 23:1
It is so well known and much loved, but rarely do we take the time to really sit with each individual part of Psalm 23. And we almost never hear it outside the context of grief and loss and funerals. So for the next few days I invite you to go through this psalm with me, one bit at a time.
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Today we’re starting with just verse 1: >The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.
This psalm is a song attributed to David, who was a shepherd before he was a king. We often think of him fighting Goliath, or leading the Israelites, but before all of that, he was a simple shepherd. So for David to begin this psalm with this metaphor is powerful. It’s what he knows.
He knows what the job of a shepherd is—to guide and provide and take care of their sheep. So when we consider God as our shepherd, we can trust we will be taken care of. There’s an interesting set of questions that come up when we read this verse with this lens of David and what he understood. Do we believe that God is our shepherd? That God is taking care of us?
This way of reading the first verse of Psalm 23 is just fine, but there’s another way to read both parts of the verse. In the Biblical Hebrew, this verse reads a bit differently. So to start, “shall not want” in Hebrew more likely translates to “I am not lacking.” Or, maybe my favorite way to translate it: “I need nothing.”
What would it be like to stop needing things? To trust you’re taken care of? That you will be ok? It’s different than not wanting. Saying we need nothing implies a trust that God will give us what we need.
AND while we’re talking about the Hebrew, here’s the best part: that word for “shepherd” in Hebrew is not a noun. It’s a verb. “Shepherd” is a verb in this passage. God does what a shepherd does. it’s an action. For me, this is a huge change to how I understand this verse and all the verses that come after.
So then this other way of reading this first verse of our beloved Psalm 23 is: >“The Lord shepherds me, I am not lacking.”
Isn’t that interesting?
What might it look like to be shepherded by God? To be directed and moved and taken care of? (Ooooh, we do NOT like this.) We like to be in charge of our own actions and pride ourselves on self-sufficiency. But this psalm begins with a call back to what our life will be like when God is the one doing the shepherding.
Not our ego. Not the people around us. Not societal norms or culture, but God. “The Lord shepherds me, I am not lacking.”
Natalia Terfa