S7 Episode #5 - Jehovah Rohi, The Lord Our Shepherd
THE ONE WITH JES + JEHOVAH ROHI
This week on the podcast, Jes is sharing the next message in our Names of God Series! Throughout this series, we have been highlighting different names of The Lord. Understanding who God is and who we are in Him are vital parts of walking in freedom and remaining rooting in who we are created to be!
In this epsiode, we are circling back to JEHOVAH ROHI. This name highlights The Lord as our loving shepherd. In the Ancient Near East, a good shepherd would endure danger, extreme weather conditions and sleeplessness in order to protect and provide for his sheep. In the same way, God protects us from danger, provides us with nourishments through His Word, stays by our side through times of struggle, and seeks after our hearts when we wander away. This is such a beautiful picture of care and selfless love!
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SHOW NOTES
This week we are digging deeper into the name JEHOVAH ROHI. This name highlights The Lord as our loving shepherd.
In the Ancient Near East, a good shepherd would endure danger, extreme weather conditions and sleeplessness in order to protect and provide for his sheep. In the same way, God protects us from danger, provides us with nourishments through His Word, stays by our side through times of struggle, and seeks after our hearts when we wander away. This is such a beautiful picture of care and selfless love!
Herbert Lockyer summarizes this name perfectly for us when he says “The Lord is the Feeder to provide, Keeper to protect, Companion to cheer, Friend to help, Pastor to comfort, Herdsman to gather, and Shepherd to lead.
He explains, “While the people magnified the LORD for life, healing, victory, holiness, peace and protection, they were still pilgrims and were in dire need of divine provision in their wilderness journey with all its weariness and wants, duties and dangers and difficulties. Thus came the revelation of God as their Jehovah Rohi, the One whose shepherd love, care, and resources they could depend upon in all the untrodden and unknown pathways of the future. No matter what the unseen days may produce, whether their needs will be temporal or spiritual– needs they would be utterly powerless in supplying at every turn of the way, their faithful Shepherd would be at hand to relieve and undertake.” (Herbery Lockyer, p. 47)
At the same time, James Boice points out in his commentary, “In Israel, as in other ancient societies, a shepherd’s work was considered the lowest of all works. If a family needed a shepherd, it was always the youngest son, like David, who got this unpleasant assignment…Jehovah has chosen to be our shepherd, David says [in Psalm 23]. The great God of the universe has stooped to take just such care of you and me.”
FIRST USE
We will spend some time in Psalm 23 later in the episode, but before that, I want to dive into the first use of this name. We are introduced to Jehovah Rohi in Genesis 48:15, when Jacob is giving a final blessing to Joseph and his 2 sons– Manasseh and Ephriam.
Jacob says, “May the God before whom my grandfather Abraham and my father Isaac, walked– the God who has been my shepherd all my life, to this very day, the Angel who has redeemed me from all harm– may He bless these boys. May they preserve my name and the names of Abraham and Isaac. And may their descendants multiply greatly throughout the earth.” (emphasis added)
Another translation of the verse says, “The God who has fed me all my life long, to this day.”
I can almost hear the break in Jacob’s voice as he speaks these words over his grandsons. They are a proclamation of God’s goodness and provision throughout every step of Jacob’s life. And his life wasn’t always easy– he fled for his life out of fear that his brother would kill him, he worked for 14 years in order to marry the love of his life, he was manipulated and lied to by his uncle, he had to move his family and flee after threats from his uncle, he suffered the loss of his wife, his beloved son Joseph was believed to be dead… BUT GOD remained faithful through it all.
Now, in some of his final moments, Jacob is overcome with the knowledge that God fed him and led him every step of the way. When Jacob was running in fear of his life, or felt like he was working in vain, or dealing with the discomforts of being displaced, or struggling with the grief of losing a wife and a son, God was still shepherding him. God was still faithful to the covenant He made with Abraham many years before.
I love how the Enduring Word Commentary describes the scene. They say, “Jacob’s testimony was [one] of grace, not personal merit. He did not say how faithful he was to God, but how faithful God was to him.”
Over and over throughout the book of Genesis and beyond, we see a central theme is God’s grace in establishing and upholding his covenants, even when humanity falls short.
MAPPING GOD’S FAITHFULNESS TO JACOB
I want to camp out on Jacob’s life for a few more moments because I do think it is very profound that in his last moments Jacob chose to call The LORD his shepherd. Based on what we know of his life, he could certainly have used a different name of God– he had experienced the provision of Jehovah Jireh, he had been seen by El Roi, his family had been restored by Jehovah Rapha, he had experienced the divine sufficiency of El Olam, the Everlasting God. And yet– He saw God has a shepherd above all else.
This makes me believe that Jacob was deeply impacted by the gentle way that God led him through the wilderness. It’s so easy to read through the stories of the life of Jacob and skip over the names of cities, but wrapped up in those names are hundreds of miles that Jacob traveled– most likely on foot– across deserts, through mountains, and along dangerous trade routes. The dangers faced by a traveler in the Ancient Near East were no joke… and come on– if you’ve been with me for any length of time, you know I’m not going to miss an opportunity to talk about geography! ;)
So let’s make a mental map! Throughout Jacobs life he travels from Beersheba, north to Bethel, then continues north to Haran. Later he travels from Haran back to Beersheba in the south. This would be a total of about 1,200 miles traveled on foot over difficult and dangerous terrain.
The first significant move in Jacob’s life is when we see him fleeing from Esau and his home in Beersheba after Jacob steals Esau’s blessing. From Beersheba, Jacob travels nearly 600 miles north to his uncle’s house in Haran. Along the way he spends the night in Bethel (also known as Luz). In this place, God meets Jacob in a dream and reaffirms that the Abrahamic Covenant will indeed be carried out through the line of Jacob. We see that Jacob is retracing the very steps that his grandfather Abraham took as God led Abram from Haran to Canaan. Two generations before, Abraham also stopped in Bethel and built an altar to The LORD in that place.
In this same spot, Jacob makes a vow saying “If God will be with me and will watch over me on this journey I am taking and will give me food to eat and clothes to wear so that I return safely to my father’s household, the the LORD will be my God and this stone that I have set up as a pillar will be God’s house, and all that you give me I will give you a tenth.” (Genesis 28:20-22)
This is a huge moment of surrender when Jacob is asking The LORD to essentially “shepherd” him on this journey. So what a beautiful full-circle moment then, when Jacob– at the end of his life– recalls this very moment in Bethel to his son, Joseph. In Genesis 48:3-4, Jacob says, “God Almighty appeared to me at Luz in the land of Canaan and blessed me. He said to me, ‘I will make you fruitful, and I will multiply your descendants. I will make you a multitude of nations. And I will give this land of Canaan to your descendants after you as an everlasting possession.”
Jacob once again reiterates the covenant that God established with him. We have to keep in mind that every time Jacob set out on another journey, he was putting his life at risk, and therefore putting the covenant at risk. When Jacob stole Isaac’s blessing from Esau, Jacob became the family line that would one day fulfill all of God’s promises for a Savior and Redeemer. Jacob, not Esau, was now promised land, seed, and the ultimate blessing of Jesus coming from his family tree.
Yet, practically speaking, none of this would be possible if Jacob died because he repeatedly felt the need to flee for his life from members of his own family or his in-laws. But The LORD, our Shepherd, in His great love and faithfulness protected Jacob and the future of the covenant.
So once again we see God’s grace in establishing and upholding his promises, even when humanity falls short. Every story in the Old Testament points to Jesus and our need for the coming Savior.
PSALM 23 & BEYOND
I hope you can feel deep in your soul the tender connotation of this name. As a shepherd, The LORD draws near to His people and knows them intimately. There are 110 uses of Jehovah Rohi in the Bible, but I want to spend the next few minutes looking at arguably the most famous use of Jehovah Rohi– Psalm 23:
The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
He refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths
for his name’s sake.
Even though I walk
through the darkest valley,[a]
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely your goodness and love will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.
It is believed that David is writing this after he has become the king of Israel, however he is still very deeply connected to the role of a shepherd because it is what he did for the better part of his youth. I could do a whole podcast series on this chapter alone, it is such a beautiful picture of how The Lord shepherds his people. He provides for our needs, he leads us, he gives us peace, he refreshes our souls, he defends and protects, he walks us through the darkest times in our lives, he comforts, he anoints, he makes us righteous, his goodness and love will never leave us. I fully recognize that each thing in this list could be a full episode on its own, but we will have to put a pin in that for now. Instead, I want to share something different that stood out to me– specifically about the placement of this chapter within the book of Psalms.
You see, Psalm 22 is a foreshadowing of the coming Messiah. That God would send his Son Jesus to suffer and die on the cross. This is the ultimate act of the shepherd because before the shepherd can even begin to care for his sheep, he must purchase them. Charles Spurgeon explains, “A sheep is an object of property, not a wild animal; its owner sets great store by it, and frequently it is bought with a great price.”
Jesus paid the ultimate price so that we would be able to come to him and experience him as our shepherd. So when Psalm 23 breaks down the gentle, tender, merciful, fiercely protective role of a shepherd, we must understand that the cost for the shepherd was greater than we can fathom. Yet, the reward will also be far greater than we can imagine as Christ establishes his rule over all of creation.
A Quick Recap:
Psalm 22- Jesus suffered and died for us
Psalm 23- He shepherds His people
Psalm 24- He established His rule over the earth
So sandwiched between Christ’s death and glorification is a perfect reminder that He did it all for us and because of this, we can experience all of the beauty and grace offered in Psalm 23 as we are shepherded by the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
And this is another example of how everything in the Old Testament points to the coming of Jesus.
GLIMPSES OF THE SHEPHERD THROUGHOUT THE BIBLE
So we have looked at 2 of the 110 uses of Jehovah Rohi in the Bible. I want to spend our last few minutes together running through a few more. As I was studying for this message and reading through the various verses, a beautiful picture of the attributes of Jehovah Rohi began to emerge. I found that each verse or passage showed divine insight about the Shepherd as well as us, the sheep.
NEXT STEPS
Here are a few action steps to help you dip deeper this week!
Select one of the verses or passages above and meditate on it this week. Ask God to reveal to you something new about his character, or something new about your identity in Him.
Spend some time meditating on these other uses of Jehovah Rohi. Add your own row to the chart above.
Psalm 28:8-9
Psalm 78:70-72
Micah 7:14
Zechariah 13:6-8
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