Ray Vander Laan: The ancient land of Israel is a testimony and evidence, if you will, of the greatness of what God did in that country, a testimony to the truth of the words that we find in the pages of the Bible. 

Thank you. That's homemade pizza, people. That's not bakery pizza. But they're looking like they could be Sarah or Rebecca or Rachel. The custom has not changed much. The dark skin would be very close to what she looked like. 

Do you remember when God comes to visit Abraham and Abraham right away invites him eat? You're experiencing the same hospitality. 

The children of Israel or even the Jewish people of today in many ways think of themselves as a desert people. A great deal of the imagery of the Bible comes out of their experience in the desert. The father of the Jewish people, Abraham, was a desert person, a Negev person. Moses, their law giver lived and worked and led them in the desert. David, their king, was a shepherd and wandered in the desert before he became king. So it's appropriate if we're to understand the imagery of the Bible, that we experience that part of the country which the Bible calls the wilderness.

We're sitting, this morning, on a hill in the area of Israel called the Negev. People that live in this area are called Bedouin. We're here this morning to talk a bit about Bedouin, and you see a flock of sheep here. The word Negev means south or dry. If you look around, you see several settlements in the distance at the base of all these hills. Those settlements, those camps are Bedouin. The Bedouin live a very similar lifestyle to what the early people in the Bible did - people like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. And so we come here this morning to talk a little bit about the lifestyle of the people called the Bedouin. Maybe in the Bible, we could refer to them more as Amalekites or Midianites. 

So much of the imagery of the Bible comes out of this country. The Israelite people thought of themselves as wilderness people, desert people. They thought of God as being the shepherd. They thought of themselves as being his sheep. They thought of Abraham, their founder, as being a shepherd, a man of the wilderness. Moses, the great law giver, was a man who lived in the wilderness in the desert south of here. David, the king, the one who founded their political state, was a shepherd. So a lot of the Bible's imagery comes out of this particular lifestyle. I'd like to just share with you several things this morning, kind of reflecting on the Bible's image of shepherds from Psalm 23 and Jesus' words in the book of John and in other places, that may help to really see the impact of what the shepherd and the shepherd lifestyle meant for these people. 

The first thing I'd like to have you just notice this morning is this flock of sheep over here. The shepherds are children. The two boys here that are walking ahead of the sheep are 11 and 13, and the two girls in the back are actually quite a bit younger than that. To be sure, there's an adult male somewhere in the vicinity to kind of keep an eye on all this. But the shepherding work is actually done mostly by children. Certainly, you can't say that adults never care for the sheep. That, you even see today. But if you notice that observing these children who are caring the sheep is the father of the sheep, the head of the group. He's up on the hill over here.

There's a biblical image of that too, because the Bible does talk about Jesus being a chief shepherd. And in a sense, those who are called to be leaders are what we call under shepherds. Some of you are leaders in big ways and little ways, so you imitate what Jesus does as you lead others.

Does anybody have a question?

Participant 1: Ray, this place just makes me feel so much at home and reminds me of my boyhood. Because I did just what these kids are doing here as a youngster taking care of my grandparents' flock of sheep. One thing I've come to learn about sheep and goats is that if you leave a flock of sheep - just like those - if you kind of go away from them for a while and you're watching them at a distance, the goats will always be the ones to wander. They'll always stray off and the sheep will follow those goats. They'll break the flock apart. And that's why, at least in our country, there's always less amount of goats than there are sheep so that that doesn't happen too much.

Ray Vander Laan: Neat observation. That brings up, of course, Jesus' parable about how the sheep and the goats are mixed. And then at the Judgement Day, the shepherd comes and he divides them and puts the goats one way and the sheep the other. What Elmer just said is really neat to think that even in our own experience, some of us have been goats. Sometimes some of us act like goats and divide the flock. 

Participant 2: I like the idea of the under shepherds. I think of us with children. I think of myself of being an under shepherd, and the sheep are my own children. And I think we need to constantly look for God for the direction that we will guide them. And I like the idea that they look to your feet. They recognize or voice, but they look at our feet for an example of what we do.

Ray Vander Laan: That's a wonderful image. I love that. I think that's great to think of the opportunities you have to be an under shepherd and how important it is for you to be like THE shepherd and that children watch your feet, your daily walk.

Participant 3: Ray, you've changed some of our images of what's said in Psalm 23. Can you comment on "My cup runneth over"?

Ray Vander Laan: Since you're talking about the sheep image and the sheep go to drink or to eat out of a trough when they're in a sheepfold, in a sense by saying, "My cup runs over," you could translate that as, "My trough runs over." So you get this image of this large container that is so full that it actually runs over.

"A sheep listens to his voice," - that is the shepherd. "He calls his own by name and leads them. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger. In fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger's voice." Then he says, "I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. I am the Good Shepherd. I know my sheep and my sheep know me just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life for my sheep."

So the image is, just like you're seeing out here, in many ways of the shepherd, God to us, Jesus to us, out in front, sheep following, the voice calling, and God saying, "This is the way." 

Now I thought about that yesterday as we walked that beautiful Jericho road up toward Jerusalem. In a sense, Jesus is walking the road, but he's out in front of his disciples. And he's saying, "Follow me." I don't know how often he looked back to see if they were or not. But at that point, the option was theirs. So we're talking about God giving us the responsibility of affecting and shaping our culture, and what you need to see Jesus doing is Jesus is out there walking ahead and saying, "Here's the battle plan. You have to go out there and very simply give yourself to other people in love and meekness and humbleness," and all of those things that we've talked about. And he says, "Follow me." And there he goes.

And a Jewish rabbi said to me one time that God walks ahead of us and we have to look at his feet. And he said, "When the Israelites were in the desert, they thought of the pillar of smoke and the pillar of fire as God's feet." 

And the Hebrew says, "And the pillar of fire walked ahead of them." So they really did think of those as God's feet. Then there's the reference in Revelation where the Son of Man comes on the clouds of glory, and lo and behold, his feet, his legs look like a pillar of smoke and a pillar of fire.

So even in the New Testament, there's that image that God's feet are out there ahead of us, and as we're down eating the grass, we just kind of keep our eyes up enough to see his feet.

You feel the very cool breeze coming from the West this morning off the Mediterranean. And that cool breeze carries moisture. As that moisture goes down into the ground, you begin to get grass growing. In the Psalm, when the Bible says, "The Lord leads me into green pastures," what you see in front of you are the green pastures of the shepherd. And that's not an exaggeration.

I had always pictured the green pastures as belly-deep alfalfa. So when God takes me as a sheep, he plunks me down and I've got everything I need for the rest of my life. But if you think about it, that's not what life is like. A shepherd finds enough grass so that they can fill their mouth right now. The reason those sheep aren't worried about this afternoon is because they know their shepherd always knows where the grass is for this afternoon. 

So if I pick up this image, what God says to me is, "I'll give you what you need right now. Worry is to deal with tomorrow's problems without tomorrow's green pastures. But you're not going to get tomorrow's green pastures until tomorrow. 

Now that was a life-transforming concept for me as I began to discover that in this culture. Because for me, I was a person who spent a lot of time worrying about tomorrow. I still am. But maybe less so now. Because I realize God says, "I'll give you what you need right now." We're all doing fine. We've got enough to eat. We're healthy. Things are fine. I don't know what's going to happen an hour from now, but God says, "Don't worry. When it gets here, I'm your shepherd and I know where the pastures are."

Just over a week ago, my mother was killed and my first instant reaction was, "There's no way I can complete this assignment that God has given." And it just came back to me that Psalm 23 was the answer. I needed to deal with each moment and to say, "God, I can't think about going to Israel in a week. It's too big. It's something I can't handle, so give me the green pastures for right now." And he did. 

Jesus tells a parable about the 99 sheep. And one of them wanders away. There are two dangers when the one wanders away from the other 99. One is, if you lose track of the shepherd, you could die for a lack of something to eat. And those huge cliffs - wandering away from the shepherd is an extremely dangerous option. You could very easily fall, very easily be seriously hurt. 

The Bible also says, "God leads me to quiet water." Now in this particular country, you can see some of them over there. They have a phenomenon called wadis. It rains up in those mountains. The farther you go, the more it rains. You can get heavy rain storms in those mountains, and suddenly, the mountains can't absorb enough water and that water will come rushing down these canyons. Some goes to the east to the Dead Sea, some to the south down into this valley and out into the Negev. Well the sheep have a tendency to go down in those wadis looking for water. Because often, there are pools of water trapped in the wadi. But that's dangerous. Because while you're getting a drink of that water, it could end up killing you. 

Quiet water is water that is peaceful, not dangerous, not something that's going to hurt you, not something that's going to create a problem for you. So God says, "Follow me, and I'll show you the quiet water. I'll show you what's safe. I'll show you what's good." There's a tendency sometimes, I think, to satisfy that thirst for life in ways that are potentially very dangerous. And God says, "Be thirsty. That's wonderful. But let me show you what's good water."

We climbed down into the wadi, and we found the acacia trees just as the Bible describes. We're just about down to the Dead Sea. We're in the bottom of a wadi, so you have to imagine during a rain storm or a flood, this thing would be full of water maybe four or five feet deep. It happens a couple of times a year. 

Normally, in this area, shrubs and trees grow very short. You can look on these hills and see almost nothing growing. But if you get a place where occasionally there's some water like this, all of a sudden, this tree will grow. And that's the image in the Psalms of a tree planted by streams of water. The thought is you can't see the water, but you know there's water because of the size of the tree. So in the life of a person, the idea is someone may not see you rooted in the water of God, but they can tell by who you are and how you live that you're roots are in the water. And the proof is not that you can see the water. The proof is what you're like.

Last modified: Wednesday, September 6, 2023, 5:26 PM