There is, and very near himself.  As prominent a feature in the wilderness as the shepherd is the shepherd’s tent.  To Western eyes a cluster of desert homes looks ugly enough—­brown and black lumps, often cast down anyhow, with a few loutish men lolling on the trampled sand in front of the low doorways, that a man has to stoop uncomfortably to enter.  But conceive coming to these a man who is fugitive—­fugitive across such a wilderness.  Conceive a man fleeing for his life as Sisera fled when he sought the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite.  To him that space of trampled sand, with the ragged black mouths above it, mean not only food and rest, but dear life itself.  There, by the golden law of the desert’s hospitality, he knows that he may eat in peace, that though his enemies come up to the very door, and his table be spread as it were in their presence, he need not flinch nor stint his heart of her security.

That was the landscape the Psalmist saw, and it seemed to him to reflect the mingled wildness and beauty of his own life.  Human life was just this wilderness of terrible contrasts, where the light is so bright, but the shadows the darker and more treacherous; where the pasture is rich, but scattered in the wrinkles of vast deserts; where the paths are illusive, yet man’s passion flies swift and straight to its revenge; where all is separation and disorder, yet law sweeps inexorable, and a man is hunted down to death by his blood-guiltiness.  But not in anything is life more like the Wilderness than in this, that it is the presence and character of One, which make all the difference to us who are its silly sheep; that it is His grace and hospitality which alone avail us when we awaken to the fact that our lives cannot be fully figured by those of sheep, for men are fugitives in need of more than food—­men are fugitives with the conscience and the habit of sin relentless on their track.  This is the main lesson of the Psalm:  the faith into which many generations of God’s Church have sung an ever richer experience of His Guidance and His Grace.  We may gather it up under these three heads—­they cannot be too simple:  I. The Lord is a Shepherd; II.  The Lord is my Shepherd; and, III. if that be too feeble a figure to meet the fugitive and hunted life of man, the Lord is my Host and my Sanctuary for ever.

I. The Lord is my Shepherd:  or—­as the Greek, vibrating to the force of the original—­The Lord is shepherding me; I shall not want.  This is the theme of the first four verses.

Every one feels that the Psalm was written by a shepherd, and the first thing that is obvious is that he has made his God after his own image.

There are many in our day who sneer at that kind of theology—­pretty, indeed, as the pearl or the tear, but like tear or pearl a natural and partly a morbid deposit—­a mere human process which, according to them, pretty well explains all religion; the result of man’s instinct to see himself reflected on the cloud that bounds his view; man’s honest but deluded effort to put himself in charge of the best part of himself, filling the throne of an imaginary heaven with an impossible exaggeration of his own virtues.