Background Noise

I hate to brag, but I am a musical genius.  My voice has the rare quality of being able to sound exactly like most popular singers.  In fact, if the radio is turned up loud enough, you cannot tell whether it is me or Memorex.  Alone on a stage with a microphone in front of me my voice makes children cry and adults cover their ears.  But in the car with the windows down and the radio up, I sound pretty terrific, if I do say so myself.

And my range is, not that I’m bragging, quite remarkable.  My parents tortured me as a child by making me listen to those old K-Tel “Hits of the Fifties” eight tracks as we traveled.  As a result, I can hit all the low notes with Elvis in “Blue Christmas.  Because I grew up in Oklahoma, the home of country music, I can keep up with Willie and Waylon and the boys.  A member of the high school class of 1979, I know all the words to all the hits of all the supergroups of the Seventies.  Not to be left behind by my three daughters, I can sing both versions of Jesus Freak and (this is remarkable) I understand the words to all of the Newsboys songs.  From Elvis to alternative Christian rock, I can sing them all.

Because I possess such rare musical talent, I constantly hit the scan button while driving, searching for songs I know, songs I can sing real loud.  One day while traveling up the Ventura Highway (...in the springtime...do da do do) a song from my teenage years came on an oldies stations.  Like any good child of the Seventies, I cranked the volume and sang along. I had not heard the song in over fifteen years yet I remembered the words. Halfway through the song I stopped singing and started listening. Back in my high school days I was clueless as to what songs said.  My friends and I just wanted something that, in the words of Dick Clark, had a beat we could dance to (or drive to). Driving down the highway on this afternoon I heard the message behind the words.  I was shocked by it, and shocked by how oblivious to it I had been all those years ago.

I was oblivious because so much of the music you and I listen to is little more than background noise to the rest of our lives.  It is always there, but we never really listen.  A similar fate often befalls the twenty-third psalm.  From funeral services to disaster movies, David’s little masterpiece turns up everywhere in a variety of forms.  When I searched the World Wide Web for references to the twenty-third psalm I found over four million matches.  Four million!  Its simplicity makes it easy to personalize... and trivialize.  There is a twenty third psalm for everything from students (The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not flunk), to mathematicians (the Lord is my thesis adviser, I shall not err), to computers (the Lord is my programmer, I shall not crash), and computer geeks (the modem is my shepherd... It makes me connect to alt.green.pastures).

The song of the shepherd penned by David nearly three thousand years ago has grown so popular that we all know it, but none of us hear it.  Why listen?  We know what it has to say.  And it is so upbeat that everyone enjoys it.  So much of the Bible talks about death and deliverance and judgment, but not the twenty-third psalm.  Other psalms lament recent tragedies, but the twenty-third assures us that God will protect us.  Blessing and sunshine and goodness and love, the song is the ultimate pick me up.  Not even death can dampen its mood.  The final refrain lifts our eyes to heaven with the words, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever!

The one thing we like best of all about the psalm is that it gives us all of the above without making any demands on us.  There aren’t any references to sin or guilt or any of those negatives that turn us off to organized religion.  God comes across as a God of love, not a rule maker with narrow guidelines for entrance into His kingdom.  When the twenty-third psalm is separated from the rest of Scripture (as it is in popular usage), it presents us with a God whose arms are open to all comers, no questions asked.  The Lord is my shepherd, and He can be yours as well. Our approach is so sentimental and romanticized that the psalm is treated more like the inside of a greeting card than inspired Scripture.

It is time for us to stop, turn up the volume, and listen.  We have missed the point of David’s song.  The song of the shepherd is about more than comfort in times of sorrow. Within its words is a challenge to you and me to live a different kind of life.  These familiar words written nearly three thousand years ago by Israel’s shepherd king call us to live a life of total dependence upon the Lord.

To fully appreciate the call of the twenty-third psalm, we need to listen to its words as spoken by its original writer.  The song is so personal that we sometimes forget that we are not the “my” in its words.  The one who said, “The Lord is my shepherd,” was David, the second king over Israel, the man entrusted with the job of being the shepherd over the nation of Israel nearly three thousand years ago.  He was a man unlike any who came before or since.  God Himself testified of David that he was a man after God’s own heart.  His reign became both the standard by which every other king was measured and the hope of those waiting for the Messiah, the son of David.

When David came to power, the tribes of Israel were in chaos.  After the death of Saul, the first king, the northern tribes pledged their allegiance to Ish-Bosheth, one of Saul’s descendants, while the southern tribe of Judah anointed David as king.  Seven years of civil war followed until David was finally able to unite the kingdom under his reign.  With a stroke of diplomatic genius, he then conquered the city of Jerusalem from the Jebusites and created a new capitol for the nation, a capitol that belonged neither to the north or the south.  For the next thirty-two years David ushered in a period of peace and prosperity unlike any the nation had ever dreamed of.  All of the promises God made through Moses about the land of Canaan finally came true.  The Philistines were subdued, surrounding nations paid tribute to Israel’s throne, and the borders of Israel’s influence stretched from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates.  David was more than a king, he was a national hero, the greatest man the nation ever produced.

This same man wrote, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.  He makes me lie down in green pastures.”  To David, these were more than sentimental words describing God’s love and compassion.  They were a bold statement of dependence and humility before the Lord.  With these words he was in effect saying that in comparison to God, the great king was nothing more than a helpless lamb before a shepherd.  David knew who had placed him on the throne.  He knew who had defeated the giant Goliath and all the other foes he faced during his lifetime.  David never forgot that the Lord was the true King of the nation, the one true Shepherd under whose authority David served.  His confession was a statement of true humility.

Humility is an indispensable element of faith.  Without it, faith degenerates into nothing more than positive thinking or a magic formula by which we try to wrench favors from the hand of God.  Positive thinking cannot save a soul, nor does God respond to the reciting of meaningless prayers and formulas.  The first step toward life as a sheep before the Shepherd is the realization of the greatness of God and the worthlessness of our own selves.  We must begin with the confession that we are sinners totally incapable of saving ourselves.  This goes far beyond belief in a higher power.  It plunges us totally and completely on the mighty, Sovereign Lord of the universe.

            Paul had this in mind when he described true Christians with these words:

For it is we who are the circumcision, we who worship by the Spirit of God, who glory in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh. Philippians 3:3

Paul then went on to describe why he of all people had reason to place confidence in his own abilities and accomplishments.  But he concluded the matter by saying, “I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord (Philippians 3:8).”  These words came from a man whose education approached the modern equivalent of a Ph.D., a missionary who took the gospel around the world, a man who penned thirteen books of the Bible.  Yet Paul understood that faith means humbling ourselves under the mighty hand of God.  David echoes Paul’s words when he confesses his utter dependence on his Shepherd, the one true God.  The twenty-third psalm calls us to do the same.

Claiming the Lord as our Shepherd also means we will be faithful to Him alone.  David penned the words of the twenty-third psalm in the middle of a time in Israel’s history when the people were in constant flux as to which of the pantheon of ancient gods they would serve.  Between Israel’s birth as a nation under Moses and the reign of David, judges ruled the nation under the authority of God.  Although the period started out with such promise under Moses the lawgiver and Joshua his successor, the people of Israel soon began to copy the practices of the nations they had displaced in the land of Canaan.  The writer of the book of Judges described it as a time when everyone did what was right in their own eyes.  This was especially true in the area of religion.  Altars to Baal, the god of the Canaanites, and Asherah, the fertility goddess, sprung up on high places everywhere.  In addition, the Lord’s chosen people served the gods of the Philistines and the Amorites as well as the gods of every other nation around them.  Each time the people would turn to an idol, the Lord would send some sort of judgment to call them back to Himself.  Israel’s history during this time is a yo-yo cycle of fidelity to the God of Israel and any other god that happened to catch their eye.

Once God gave Israel a king the cycle did not stop.  Solomon, David’s son and successor to the throne, erected altars to Molech and Chemosh, detestable gods of the Ammonites and the Moabites.  He also reintroduced the worship of Asherah with all of its blatant sexuality.  This came at the end of Solomon’s life, after he built the fabulous temple of the Lord in Jerusalem in fulfillment of his father’s dream.  Idolatry remained an integral part of Israel’s history until God sent them into exile in Babylon. Yet they never completely abandoned the Lord. The ancient Israelites would serve the Lord while also participating in the deviant sexual practices that were used in the worship of Baal and Asherah.  People would pray to the one true God while also sacrificing their children to Molech, the fire god.

In the middle of all of this, David confesses, “The Lord is my shepherd.”  The word Lord is actually the name of God, the name Yahweh.  Those who listened to this song at the time of its writing understood that the king was professing his loyalty to Yahweh as opposed to some other rival god.  In this way David’s words sound very much like those of Joshua who declared:

Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living.  But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord (Yahweh).  Joshua 24:15

We live in a time when idolatry is more subtle, but we are still faced with the same choice David called the people of Israel to make.  There are some actual false gods who have made their way to the Western world by way of the New Age movement.  But for the most part, we must choose between the one true God and impostors that we sometimes do not recognize as gods. A god is anything we focus our attention upon and adore as precious in our sight.  These include the god of wealth, the god of pleasure, the god of sensuality, and in Indiana, the god of basketball.  When we stop and take inventory, we find we too are up against a pantheon of suitors trying to win our devotion.

David’s words in the twenty-third psalm call us to make a choice.  We cannot sing the song of the shepherd and claim it as our own when we place our own careers above the Lord.  Reciting “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for You are with me” during a time of trial is nothing more than a sick joke when we consistently skip church to watch our favorite teams play on Sunday.  As we explore the twenty-third psalm, we will find that it does not call us to keep all of our rival interests in balance.  It calls us to make a choice.  Which God will we serve?  David makes it clear that he has already made his choice.  He calls us to do the same.

Some commentators believe David wrote the twenty third psalm late in life.  They draw a picture of the old king sitting in his palace, thinking back to the carefree days of his youth when he sat on a hill watching his fathers sheep.  I don’t think that was what David had in mind as he wrote these words.  It wasn’t during his time as a shepherd that he learned to depend on God.  Rather he learned those lessons after his shepherd days ended, as he waited for God’s promises to come true. 

When David was an adolescent, still living at home, still caring for his father’s sheep, an old prophet came to his home.   The prophet poured oil upon David’s head and proclaimed, “You are God’s choice to be the next king of Israel.”  There was only one problem: Israel already had a king and he had other plans for his successor.  From that moment forward David had to believe God for that which seemed impossible.  Shortly after Samuel the prophet anointed him as king, David stood on a battlefield face to face against the champion of the Philistine army.  Goliath was over nine feet tall with many victories under his belt.  David was little more than a adolescent.  The Philistine champion was decked out in full armor, with a sword, spear, and shield at his side.  David was dressed in his shepherd’s clothes armed only with his shepherd’s weapons, a sling and a stick.  Against all odds, David won the battle by trusting in the Lord.

His victory did not bring the throne closer to him.  Instead, it made the thought of becoming king even more remote.  Saul, the sitting king of Israel, set out on a campaign to kill David.  He was jealous of the accolades the crowds poured out on the young man.  Even after David became the king’s son in law, he was not safe.  Saul hunted him like a dog across the hills of Israel.  David lost everything to Saul’s jealousy: his wife, his position in the nation, his hope, everything.  He reached his lowest point when he was forced to hide in one of the cities of the Philistines pretending to be a mad man.

During this time of running David composed another psalm.  Listen to the way it begins, “I will extol the Lord at all times; his praise will always be on my lips.  My soul will boast in the Lord; let the afflicted her and rejoice (Psalm 34:1).”  Even when he had nothing, even when everyone had abandoned him and he had to pretend to be insane to save his own life, David knew that the Lord would never let him down.  To say he knew what it meant to live by faith is a gross understatement.  As he boldly proclaimed, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want,”  he knew what it meant to wonder where his next meal would come from.  The lessons he learned while running for his life and hiding in caves spill out in the song he penned.

The fifty six Hebrew words that are the twenty-third psalm are much more than religious background noise.  They call all of us to live by simple trust in God.  The call of the twenty-third psalm is the call to a life of dependence upon the Lord.  In the pages that follow we will explore each line of the song of the shepherd and find a different aspect of what it means to follow the Lord as our Shepherd.  Listening to the call is not optional.  It is the only way to live a life that pleases God.  Our first step brings us face to face with an unpleasant truth.  In fact, the opening line of the song can be down right disturbing.

  ©1999 Mark A. Tabb