What Psalm would you say is the most memorable to you? For me it would be Psalm 23 for a few reasons, it was the one that I memorized first, it was the one that I heard the most growing up, and it has a great message. The Psalms were collected to give the Israelites songs and poems that they could remember and study to help them better understand and love God. Israelites would study these and meditate on their meaning day and night to have the mindset of the writers and to learn about the God that inspired these writings. There is a great amount that we can learn from studying and meditating on the Psalms today.
As an example, we will look at Psalm 23 to see what treasures we can find in that Psalm. The best way to meditate on a Psalm would be to read the whole thing first. This one is easy because there are only six verses to read in Psalm 23. When we look at this Psalm as a whole, we can see that the main subject of the Psalm is how God takes care of his people just like a shepherd takes care of the sheep. We can note that the Psalm is credited to David which will help us to understand why this illustration was chosen, considering that he was a shepherd.
The Psalm begins by pointing to how God provides for his people by saying “I shall not want.” This naturally leads to the next two lines where David points out how God provides for his sheep by leading them to food and water. The Psalm is creating a setting of peace and tranquility for the reader to understand what the mindset of David is when he is writing this. Through the first three verses, God is portrayed as a keeper of his people and a sustainer of their needs.
Verse 4 brings the reader into the realm of the Shepherd being the leader. When the sheep are following their shepherd, they do not have a fear of the potential predators around them because they are following the one that they know will keep them safe. David is showing God here to be a protector even in deep darkness or “the valley of the shadow of death.” There are many different times where we can look back at David’s life where this would have potentially been the case because of the persecution that he faced from Saul, the Philistines, or any of the other enemies that David faced.
The last two verses, 5 and 6, paints God as the provider for the people again. It takes that thought in verse 4 about God being a protector and shows the reader that God not only keeps them safe in the presence of their enemies, but he provides what they need. The final words of this Psalm are there for the reader to understand why it is so great to be a sheep to this Shepherd. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” These words are the thing that David wants us to remember. God will provide for his people and will keep them in His house forever.
When we look at the Psalms, it can be easy to consider them to be poems that would be worth reading eventually, but when we look at the things that we remember the best, songs and poems tend to stick with us. Some songs carry memories of when we heard them first or when they came up around a memorable event in our lives. The same things happen when we think about the Psalms. We begin to form memories of when we were thinking about a Psalm or some event that happened around the time that we read a Psalm. It is never a bad idea to read the Psalms because there is a great number of good things that we can learn from them.
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