Ecclesiastes 12:11 speaks of the words of the wise, which are like well-driven nails, given by one Shepherd.Psalm 80:1 also looks to the LORD as the Shepherd of Israel, who would lead Joseph like a flock. In Psalm 28:9 David invited the LORD to shepherd the people of Israel, and to bear them up forever.

The idea begins as early as the Book of Genesis, where Jacob called the LORD the Shepherd, the Stone of Israel (Genesis 49:24). It is also a familiar idea throughout the Bible that the LORD is a shepherd to His people. “In all Eastern thought, and very definitely in Biblical literature, a king is a shepherd.” (Morgan) There are other references to this analogy between the deity and his followers in ancient Middle Eastern cultures. God was like a shepherd to David, and David was like a sheep to God. The LORD is my shepherd: David thought about God, the God of Israel as he thought about his relationship with God, he made the analogy of a shepherd and his sheep.

(1) A declaration and its immediate result.Ī.

For some, the words of this psalm have been the last they have ever uttered in life.” (James Montgomery Boice) A. Ministers have used it to comfort people who are going through severe personal trials, suffering illness, or dying. “Millions of people have memorized this psalm, even those who have learned few other Scripture portions. It has made the dying Christian slave freer than his master, and consoled those whom, dying, he left behind mourning, not so much that he was gone, as because they were left behind, and could not go, too.” (Henry Ward Beecher, cited in Charles Spurgeon) Dying soldiers have died easier as it was read to them ghastly hospitals have been illuminated it has visited the prisoner, and broken his chains, and, like Peter’s angel, led him forth in imagination, and sung him back to his home again. It has poured balm and consolation into the heart of the sick, of captives in dungeons, of widows in their pinching griefs, of orphans in their loneliness. It has sung courage to the army of the disappointed. It has comforted the noble host of the poor. It has remanded to their dungeon more felon thoughts, more black doubts, more thieving sorrows, than there are sands on the sea-shore. “It has charmed more griefs to rest than all the philosophy of the world. He had been a shepherd, and he was not ashamed of his former occupation.” Charles Spurgeon wrote, “ I like to recall the fact that this psalm was written by David, probably when he was a king. Most account it to be a psalm of David’s maturity, but with vivid remembrance of his youth as a shepherd. Like many others, this beloved psalm bears the simple title A Psalm of David.

Dake bible online free