Psalm 23

The Danger of Familiarity

Occasionally familiarity, paradoxically, turns into an enemy of understanding, or at least becomes an obstruction. Psalm 23, perhaps the most loved psalm of the entire Psalter, is sometimes one of those victims—we settle for a surface understanding of this psalm. But the psalms, many of them, should be viewed as having layers of meaning that have an interlocking relationship. This will become clear in our discussion.

Before the days of modern Bible translations—thank God for them, or most of them—we could depend on virtually every church-goer to know this psalm by memory from the King James Version. I have knelt by the bedside of believers who had just passed into eternity and offered a prayer of hope and faith, and,…