“He is my shepherd” by David Gibson

“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.” (Psalm 23:1)

“Here is the point of this meandering start to our study of Psalm 23: the one whom you need to shepherd you neither needs you nor needs to be shepherded Himself as He gives Himself to shepherd you. He shepherds you from His eternally undiminishing fullness, and He is never the poorer for it.

Look how needy David is in Psalm 23. If the Lord is his shepherd, then he is of course portraying himself as sheep-like in all the things he needs. He requires food, rest, water, guidance, shelter, comfort, housing, helping. You name it, David needs it.

And here is the question Psalm 23 asks: Can you see who gives David all that he needs? It is the God who needs nothing and no one. The one who essentially says to his people: “ ‘I AM WHO I AM.’ Before you were, I was, and after you are no more, I will be. I am the first, I am the last, I am a God outside time before time began.”

So in this psalm, David comes alongside you as you read and puts his strong shepherd crook around your shoulder and pulls you in so that you can hear him tell you that the God of heaven can meet your every need precisely because He is the one who has no need of anything Himself.

This is where the next phrase in Psalm 23:1 (which we will come to in a moment) receives all its meaning: “I shall not want.” Despite my best intentions and my most fervent wishes, I am not the kind of father whose children are able to say, every day, for the rest of their lives, “I shall not want.”

I might love them very much and pray for them always and long for their best, but I am a finite, sinful man with limited resources on every hand. I cannot supply their every need as I shepherd them through life.

But God is not like that with us. It is one thing to have a shepherd, but it is an utterly staggering thing to have as a shepherd the one who is strength itself, who never tires, never slumbers, and who never needs protection Himself.

So here is where we touch the wonder of the fact that this one, a God like this, the Lord, might ever be described as a shepherd. Just consider for a moment: What kind of pictures does the idea of complete and utter self-sufficient, self-existent deity conjure up in your mind? I think you would agree that this aspect of who God is lends itself most naturally to pictures of strength and power.

In John’s Gospel, the Lord Jesus declares, “I am the good shepherd” (John 10:11). It is a familiar title we know and love, and we are right to see him as the true fulfillment of what it means to call the Lord our shepherd. But in doing so we must remember what Jesus also declared a few chapters earlier in John: “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am’ ” (John 8:58).

This is an astonishing claim. Jesus took the divine name that God revealed to Moses in the burning bush and he effectively applied it to himself: “I am the LORD.” The Lord Jesus, our good shepherd, is Yahweh himself, which means He is our sufficient shepherd.

I hope you can see new layers of beauty to the simple phrase “The LORD is my shepherd.” It is a portrait to communicate that the One at your side has matchless strength and indescribable power, which He is stooping to lend to your aid.

The self-sufficient God is not the self-absorbed God. The self-existent God is not the self-centered God. Rather—wonder of wonders— the God who is so strong clothes Himself in a picture of the closest tender care for those who are so weak.

It is a way of saying that He puts all the resources of His infinite fullness at the disposal of finite creatures. He is a shepherd. As Martin Luther says:

‘The other names sound somewhat too gloriously and majestically, and bring, as it were, an awe and fear with them, when we hear them uttered. This is the case when Scripture calls God our Lord, King, Creator. This, however, is not the case with the sweet word shepherd. It brings to the godly, when they read it or hear it, as it were, a confidence, a consolation, or security like the word father.’

More than this, He is my shepherd.”

–David Gibson, The Lord of Psalm 23: Jesus Our Shepherd, Companion, and Host (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023), 16–19.