The whole sentiment and scenery of this poem seems to prove, by accumulative evidence, that it was written at the time when the forty-second Psalm was written: when David had taken refuge from Absalom among the wide uplands which lie around the city of Mahanaim.
I. This poem is impregnated with one feeling: the feeling of trust in God. The illustration of this trust is taken from pastoral life. The case of the Oriental shepherd and the trustfulness of the sheep furnish a symbol to David of the mutual relations between himself and God. (1) In the first verse we find two of the activities of faith. First, it appropriates God. "The Lord is myShepherd." (2) It sees the invisible in the visible. For other men the scenery and life which moved round Mahanaim was merely scenery and life, and no more; to David the whole was a parable of which God was the interpretation. The veil of the phenomenal was lifted up, and he beheld the spiritual. (3) We find in this Psalm the childlike simplicity of faith. One of the most remarkable effects of intense grief is that it brings back to us the simplicity of childhood. By sorrow such as this, David had been made in feeling a child again. So it happened that the expression of his grief was soft and sweet rather than sublime. I have been through the valley of the shadow of death, yet the Lord is my Shepherd. That was all childlike sorrow, childlike trust.
II. We can account still further for the simplicity of this Psalm because David had really returned, through the power of association, to his childhood. He saw himself leading his sheep with staff and rod through the gloomy gorges of the hills to shelter them at noon and water them at even; and now, with the faith of the man and the child combined, he represented to himself in simple words a like relation between himself and God. Through this retrospective faith David learned three things. (1) Me learned that the intervals of rest in trial are the kindness of God. God concentrates joy for the weary of heart. That which is spread for the happy over a large surface is poured by God in its quintessence into a day or an hour for the suffering. (2) It is not only keen joy which God gives us in trial; it is also strength. "He restoreth my soul;" i.e.,He gives me back my vitality, my force of life. (3) God is teaching us in trial to walk after Him in a straighter path. In my sorrow, by my sorrow, He is leading me into paths of righteousness. "Before I was chastened I went wrong, but now have I kept Thy word."
S. A. Brooke, Sermons,p. 73.
References: Psalms 23:1-4. J. F. Haynes, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxi., p. 387. Psalms 23:1-6. J. Wells, Bible Echoes,p. 247.