Psalm 23 - a well-known but misunderstood Psalm (v)
Lesson Five
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Moving from the relatively safety and comfort of verses one to four into verse five is a huge metaphorical shift. The song has changed key. If it was a play, the lights have dimmed only to come up again for the audience to see a whole new set: the pastoral scene of a Shepherd and his sheep is packed away, and now the lights have come up on a battleground.
The shepherd has discarded his staff and rod; he is now a battle commander, but even this metaphor is insufficient to cover the shift which so rapidly takes on ‘other-worldly’ characteristics. I can imagine C S Lewis enjoying this verse immensely; by the time we have finished we’ve passed through the wardrobe from this world into Narnia where nothing is quite the same. In fact, Narnia represents a greater reality, not a dreamworld…or a hallucination.
It wouldn’t be ridiculous to speculate whether David as the lyricist or the sheep in the Psalm hasn’t happened upon some particularly nourishing mushrooms.
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Imagine a hillside. It’s a medieval battle scene. There are lancers, horses, archers, soldiers with swords and shields. You have just arrived, and the Commander says, ‘Follow me!’. He walks out between the opposing forces and sets up a trestle table in the middle of the field. A tablecloth next followed by a sparklingly clean wine glass and a pleasant red to swirl, whilst reading the extensive menu. He invites you to sit down. The battle continues to rage around you. A feast is delivered, and you tuck in.
That’s the picture of this verse. It almost feels like we have entered into a fairy story, where it’s just as likely that leprechauns chatter away, or unicorns appear out of the mist. Nothing quite matches the world we knew. Is this real?
And then the Commander stands behind you and pours over your head some anointing oil ‘Thou anointest my head with oil’ and he doesn’t stop. He keeps pouring until ‘my cup overflows’. The anointing doesn’t stop. It’s all over the table, the food, everything is anointed.
We can barely remember the metaphor of sheep with a shepherd. And even the figurative battle commander seems to be blurred by the unexpected meal and anointing. We seem to be in a different realm, a new normal. Can we make sense of this?
One way of interpreting Psalm 23 is to say it is Messianic, ‘prophetic’, describing ahead of time, the coming Messiah (Hebrew, translated Christ in Greek). Messiah means: ‘anointed one’. In the Old Testament the anointing was restricted to Kings, prophets and priests. But the prophets, including David, looked ahead for the emergence of THE Messiah who would be King, prophet, and priest in one person. In other words, Ps 23 can be thought of as a prophetic Psalm containing the yearning of David for the coming One who would be called the Son of David, the Messiah, Jesus.
David was singing from his own experience of course. The prophet Samuel had found David and anointed him to be king of Israel even though he was the youngest son of Jesse: ‘Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed David in the midst of his brothers: and the Spirit of the Lord came upon him from that day forward.’ 1 Samuel 16 v 13
The anointing transported David from the very earthly realm of being a shepherd with his father’s sheep in the hills, fighting off wild animals attacking the sheep, into the realm of the Spirit. Of God. This is what we are dealing with in verse five. We have moved from earth to heaven. No one has died and ‘gone to heaven’. What we see in David is a man on Earth who is anointed with the Holy Spirit, connected to both realms simultaneously, like Jesus who was to come.
When the disciples asked Jesus about prayer he said ‘thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’. This is the new normal. Made possible by the anointing.
If you want to play safe, you can leave the interpretation of this verse as applying to David and/or the Messiah Jesus (‘Christ’ being the Greek translation of the Hebrew ‘Messiah’ which means anointed one). But we cannot. If the preceding verses are taken as relevant for us, so is verse five.
This is to be our new normal. The New Testament describes Christian believers as being ‘in Christ’. Water baptism is a remarkable sacrament and illustrates for us what God has done plunging us, immersing us, baptising us in His Son, Christ Jesus.
Jesus spoke of another baptism not with water but the Spirit: ‘John truly baptised with water but you shall be baptised with the Holy Spirit…you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you…’ Acts 1 v 5,8 John the Baptist had prophesied that whilst he baptised with water there was coming ‘One who would baptise with the Holy Spirit…’
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It is worth stopping for a moment and catching our breath. So much has changed in the space of one verse.
We are looking at Psalm 23 ‘linearly’, verse by verse, as a ‘discipleship course’ of a number of lessons. Each one is a prerequisite of the next. You can’t be led until you have lied down. You can’t face the valley of the shadow of death until your soul has been restored, and you can’t enter the reality of verse five, of the realm of the Spirit, until you, like the disciples of Jesus, have left everything to follow Him.
The new normal looks like this.
You have enemies, who will attack and attempt to prevent you from doing what God is leading you into. But, instead of tensing and ‘girding up your loins’ God tells you to sit down and tuck into a good meal. Let the battle rage all around you, but first, enjoy a feast. So unexpected.
In other words, the answer is not activity, or more ‘ministry’ but to eat. Jesus said ‘I am the bread of life’. Just like the first lesson for the sheep was to ‘lie down’ now we have to learn to ‘sit down’ and eat, to feast on Him.
The second requirement is for this Messiah-consuming believer to be anointed with the Spirit. This isn’t a dab of perfume, this is a deluge of God Himself. The new normal is living an earthly life with a heavenly anointing, just like David. Just like Jesus. That is Christianity, normal Christianity.
To close this post let us return to the verse in 1 Samuel: ‘Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed David in the midst of his brothers: and the Spirit of the Lord came upon him from that day forward.’
If we are to be true disciples, the words ‘from that day forward’ are to become our story as well, not locked away in the bible, or some intellectual closet, or even ‘in church’, whether Pentecostal, or a ‘charismatic’ church. For David, as he grew into the anointing, he gradually fulfilled all that God has anointed him for, despite some notable setbacks.