David My Servant Will Shepherd

Sheep scattered across the hills in the fog. Some are limping. Some have fallen into ravines. Some have wandered so far they cannot find their way back. And then a voice calls out across the mountains: I am coming for you myself.

Ezekiel is a priest who was taken into exile in Babylon with thousands of others, about six hundred years before Jesus. He lives beside a canal called the Chebar, far from home. News reaches the exiles that Jerusalem has fallen completely. In the ancient world, kings and leaders were often called shepherds. Their job was to protect and care for the people. But Israel's shepherds had failed. In the first part of this chapter, God speaks against them. You ate the fat and wore the wool, he says, but you did not feed the flock. You did not strengthen the weak, heal the sick, bind up the injured, or search for the lost. You ruled them harshly. And so the sheep were scattered.

Then God makes a promise. “Behold, I, even I, will both search my sheep, and seek them out.” Not another hired hand. God himself. Like a shepherd who goes looking for his flock on a dark and cloudy day, God will rescue his sheep from every place they have been scattered. He will gather them from the peoples, bring them back to their own land, and feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the streams. They will lie down in good grazing land, on rich pasture. “I will feed my flock,” says the Lord, “and I will cause them to lie down.”

And listen to how detailed God's care is. “I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick.” Every kind of sheep that the bad shepherds ignored, God will look after. But there is a warning too. Some of the strong sheep had been pushing the weak ones around, trampling the grass and muddying the water so the others could not eat or drink. God says, I will judge between sheep and sheep. I will save my flock. They will not be bullied any more.

Then the most surprising promise of all. “I will set up one shepherd over them, and he shall feed them, even my servant David. He shall feed them, and he shall be their shepherd. And I the Lord will be their God, and my servant David a prince among them.” But King David had been dead for over four hundred years. God means a new David, a king from David's family, who will shepherd God's people the way David, the shepherd boy from Bethlehem, once watched his father's sheep. One shepherd, under God, caring for one flock.

Calling a king a shepherd was very old. Around seventeen hundred and fifty years before Christ, King Hammurabi of Babylon had his laws carved on a great stone pillar, and in the opening lines he calls himself the shepherd, chosen by the gods, who brings well-being to his people. Ezekiel's hearers, living in Babylon, would have known that kings boasted of being shepherds. God's complaint was that Israel's shepherds had not lived up to the name.

David my servant will shepherd. You can read it in Ezekiel chapter thirty-four, verses eleven to twenty-four. On the first Christmas night, shepherds near Bethlehem, David's town, were the first to hear about a newborn son of David. And that child grew up to say, I am the good shepherd, and to tell of a shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to search for the one lost sheep. So here is a question to carry with you. God promised to search for his lost sheep himself. When have you felt lost, and how might God be looking for you?