The roots of Psalm 23 reach back deep into the rocky soil of Psalm 22. The sheep can only reach the green pastures of Psalm 23 because the Shepherd of Psalm 22 held on His way among the wasteland. The thorns are over there, and the green pastures are here, and “my” is the adoring result of it all. Surely in such loving sequence we find an adequate reason why the ineffable name of Jehovah can be linked with the name of the lost sheep of humanity, lost David, or lost anybody! Jehovah is my Shepherd. Here we learn that the grace of God is so exceeding abundant at the Cross that we find a pledge of the peace of the sinner in the woes of the Saviour.
Watch the contrast. Like David, the Christ, too, opens His psalm of Calvary with a “My.” Twice does the forsaken cry ring out to the skies. How different David’s “my” to that of the lonely Christ! A heaven and a hell of difference, surely! The deep of Christ’s forsakenness calls across to the deep of David’s calm and joy.
But watch this divine sequence a little longer. David’s “I shall not want” finds its reason in the fact that Jehovah is with him. And so, too, in the opposite experience of Christ’s loneliness do we see the utter poverty of the Cross. Without God was the sinner, and without God was the Saviour. The Shepherd being poured out like water is the source of the satisfaction in the sheep. Watch, too, those still waters of tranquility, and listen in contrast to the words of Christ’s roaring. All God’s waves and billows are rolling over Him there, in the strong crying and tears of the Son of God.
Both David and David’s Lord have a cup, and both the cups are seen running over–the red wine of wrath and the rich wine of joy. Without the shedding of blood there is no . . . there is no anything without the shedding of blood. Even in the marshes of Africa the tribesmen say, “No blood, no blossom!”
Contrast further David’s head anointed with oil and the head of the Christ of God wounded with thorns. That soft oil, and those sharp thorns are so widely removed from each other that they spell salvation to the sheep. There is one phrase in this psalm, almost Pauline, which reveals how fully the writer has seized upon the fact that Christ is his Saviour substitute. When David says, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” surely here we have a subtle hint that if the substitute Christ has so utterly died for the sheep, then in some glorious sense the sheep will not die at all. “Shall not see death” is the note of joy for the sheep. But for that wounded Shepherd of the psalm of sorrow, there was no such qualification. The “must be” of the Cross was ever before Him.
See the contrast also in the two groups of enemies surrounding David and David’s greater Son. There, in the presence of his enemies, God loads our table with good things. God Himself prepares that table, prepares both the time and the place for it, when the enemies are in full view. But look at Christ, hungry both in body and soul! His is the bread of affliction. And if David’s joy was the confounding of his enemies, how deep the woe of Christ in being taunted by His foes. There they are, shooting out the lip and shaking the head in derision. David gets the banquet, and David’s Lord gets the wormwood and the gall. Surely the lesson for us is written large. Do we take our brimming cup to Calvary and, before drinking even one drop of joy, bless the cup of woe that the Shepherd drank alone for us?
David’s last contrast is with the Man of Sorrows, an outcast from the Father’s house, and he, David, boasting of that house as his dwelling for evermore. The homeless Christ, out in the cold, knocking at the door of heaven: “My God! My God! Why . . . ?” The reason you will find in the mind of God and in your own sinful heart–in His matchless plan and in your desperate need.