I Shall Not Want
The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.” Palm 23:1
When I was a child, I always assumed this verse meant that because the Lord is my Shepherd, I should not want. Of course, if we are trusting the Good Shepherd to provide us with all that we need, we won’t be pining away after things He hasn’t allowed us to have. But that’s not exactly the point here. The verse says “I shall not want” it is a statement of confidence, not duty.
Perhaps the secret to a proper perspective here is that little word want. In English, want is often contrasted with need. It is a word we use to show desire. The Hebrew word translated here as want has a meaning our English word has largely dropped in recent years. Want is used here not in the sense of desire, but of lack.
The fascinating thing to me is, when you look up all the uses of this specific Hebrew word in the Bible, many, if not most of them have to do with God’s faithful provision for His people, or else His withholding of the blessing of provision to those who are rebelling against His love, in order to bring them back to Himself.
God is a God of order: His creations burst with purposeful design and perfect attention to detail. His word choice is just as detailed, just as purposeful, and these verses paint a beautiful mosaic of His loving care for those who trust Him. Take, for example, this verse in the account of God providing the Israelites with manna:
“And when they did mete it with an omer, he that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack; they gathered every man according to his eating.” Exodus 16:18
No lack. That is the faithful provision of God, enough for each according to their need. But it wasn’t just food God provided:
“For the Lord thy God hath blessed thee in all the works of thy hand: He knoweth thy walking through this great wilderness: these forty years the Lord thy God hath been with thee; thou hast lacked nothing.” Exodus 2:7
“Yea, forty years didst Thou sustain them in the wilderness, so that they lacked nothing; their clothes waxed not old, and their feet swelled not.” Nehemiah 9:21
This provision continued once the people of Israel entered the land:
“For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey; A land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass.” Deuteronomy 8:7-9
God also desired the abundance of His provision to allow His people to give to those who did have need:
“If there be among you a poor man of one of thy brethren within any of the gates in thy land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not harden thine heart, nor shut thine hand from thy poor brother: But thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him, and shalt surely lend him sufficient for his need, in that which he wanteth.” Deuteronomy 15:7-8
To the widow in 1 Kings, Elijah promised,
“For thus saith the Lord God of Israel, The barrel of meal shall not waste, neither shall the cruse of oil fail, until the day that the Lord sendeth rain upon the earth” (17:14)
As she obeyed God, He provided. Aren’t you glad our faithful God doesn’t change? Psalm 34:9-10 exclaims,
“O fear ye the Lord, ye His saints, for there is no want to them that fear Him. The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger, but they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing.”
And, of course, we could go to the post-resurrection book of Philippians to find,
“But my God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus.” (4:19)
Because our faithful Shepherd loves His sheep, we can face each day in confidence, knowing that we shall “want” nothing. As Psalm 84 puts it, “no good thing will He withhold from them that walk uprightly.”
“For He shall deliver the needy when he crieth; the poor also, and him that hath no helper.” Psalm 72:12