Bible verses for feeling lost

Strayed, and in danger of perishing

The Hebrew word under lost in the list above is avad (6), and the lexicons do not keep its two senses apart. Strong’s gives it as “properly, to wander away, i.e. lose oneself; by implication to perish”. Brown-Driver-Briggs puts perish first, then gives a separate sense, “be lost, strayed”, and its first examples are animals: the donkeys Saul was sent out to find (1 Samuel 9:3 and 20), then sheep (Jeremiah 50:6, Ezekiel 34:4 and 16, Psalm 119:176). The Cambridge Bible’s note on the psalm puts both senses in one phrase: “The word means ‘strayed and in danger of perishing.’”

Psalm 119 is the longest psalm, 176 verses, nearly all of them about how much the writer loves God’s law. Its last verse is the first one in the list. It has two words for being lost, ta’ah (8582), to go astray, and avad, and then a request, baqqesh, seek (interlinear). The writer does not say he has found his way back. He asks to be looked for, and in the same breath says I don’t forget your commandments. Lost, and not forgetting, at the same time.

Commentators read the verse two ways. Ellicott grants that a personal confession “may be a legitimate application”, but thinks the line is more likely about the whole community in exile, because the same word “is used in Isaiah 27:13 of the exiled Hebrews, and is rendered ‘outcasts’”. The Cambridge Bible reads it as one man asking God “not to leave him to wander alone, but in accordance with His promise (Ezekiel 34:11 ff.) to seek for him” (commentaries on Psalm 119:176). Both of them point to the same chapter of Ezekiel.

“I will seek that which was lost”

Ezekiel 34 is addressed to shepherds, meaning the people who were supposed to be looking after Israel, and it opens with a charge sheet:

You haven’t strengthened the diseased. You haven’t healed that which was sick. You haven’t bound up that which was broken. You haven’t brought back that which was driven away. You haven’t sought that which was lost, but you have ruled over them with force and with rigor.Ezekiel 34:4 · World English Bible

Five failures, and the last is You haven’t sought that which was lost. Twelve verses later God takes the same list and does it himself, which is the verse in the list above: I will seek that which was lost, and will bring back that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken. Its first two Hebrew words are ha’ovedet avaqqesh, the lost one I will seek (interlinear). They are the same two words as the last line of Psalm 119. The psalm asks to be sought, and Ezekiel has God say he will do the seeking. The same verse has bind up that which was broken, and those are the two verbs of Psalm 147:3, shabar (7665) and chabash (2280), which our page on heartbreak is built around.

Jeremiah 50:6 uses both of the psalm’s words again, ovedot, lost, and hit’um, from ta’ah, made them stray (interlinear). But here the straying is done to the sheep: My people have been lost sheep. Their shepherds have caused them to go astray. In this verse, as in Ezekiel’s charge sheet, the blame for the scattering is laid on the shepherds. If you feel lost because the people meant to look after you did not, these chapters already have that in them. Jeremiah’s verse ends They have forgotten their resting place, and the verb is shakach (7911), the one the psalm’s last line denies: I don’t forget.

“A Syrian ready to perish was my father”

Deuteronomy 26 gives the words a farmer was to say when he brought the first basket of his harvest to the priest. The speech opens with an ancestor, whom Barnes and most commentators take to be Jacob, described with the same participle as the psalm’s lost sheep, oved (interlinear). Both of our translations say a Syrian ready to perish. Most recent English translations say a wandering Aramean (parallel translations of Deuteronomy 26:5), and that difference is the word’s two senses again. This is one of the places where the toggles in the list cannot show you the split, because both of ours sit on the same side of it.

The lexicon does not settle it either. Brown-Driver-Briggs lists this verse under perish with a question mark, and again under lost, strayed with a “perhaps”. Keil and Delitzsch translate “a lost (perishing) Aramaean”, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown say “rather, ‘a wandering Syrian’”, and the Cambridge Bible has “A nomad Aramean”. Some ancient versions read a different sentence altogether. The Pulpit Commentary records that “The Targum, Vulgate, Luther, etc., have, ‘The Aramaean (i.e. Laban) oppressed my father’”, which is why the Douay-Rheims, translated from the Latin, prints The Syrian pursued my father. It suggests that renderings like these follow a different text or are “expedients to soften down the apparent ignominy of the description” (commentaries on Deuteronomy 26:5).

That is the part worth keeping. The words were said at the moment of plenty, with the harvest in your arms, and they begin by remembering that your family started out lost, or close to dying, or both. On every reading, the speech does not let the person saying it forget where they came from.

One word, eight times

Luke 15 tells three stories in a row, a lost sheep, a lost coin and a lost son, and the Greek verb apollumi (622) occurs eight times in the chapter: twice in verse 4, then in verses 6, 8, 9, 17, 24 and 32 (concordance). Thayer’s lexicon gives it two sides: active, to destroy or to lose; middle, “to perish, to be lost”. The sheep and the coin are lost by somebody. The coin never leaves the house:

“Or what woman, if she had ten drachma coins, if she lost one drachma coin, wouldn’t light a lamp, sweep the house, and seek diligently until she found it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbours, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the drachma which I had lost!’Luke 15:8-9 · World English Bible

The son is the one who uses the word about himself. In the far country, his money gone and feeding pigs, he says I’m dying with hunger. The verb is apollymai, present tense, in the middle voice that Thayer lists under “to perish”, with this verse as one of his examples (interlinear). When he comes home, his father says He was lost and is found, and the verb is the same one, apolōlōs (interlinear). Open both in the list: the King James has I perish with hunger and he was lost, the modern rendering I’m dying and he was lost. Neither English version can do it with one word. The son said he was perishing; his father, looking back, said he had been lost. One verb, and the difference is who is saying it.

The father says it once more, at verse 32, to the older brother who will not come in: this, your brother, was dead, and is alive again. He was lost, and is found. Our page for Father’s Day reads the rest of the chapter, including the father running before his son has said anything, and our page on shame has the robe and the ring.

Gone astray, or lost

Matthew tells the sheep story too, with a different verb:

“What do you think? If a man has one hundred sheep, and one of them goes astray, doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine, go to the mountains, and seek that which has gone astray? If he finds it, most certainly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine which have not gone astray.Matthew 18:12-13 · World English Bible

Matthew’s sheep goes astray, planao (4105). Luke’s is lost. Thayer notices it in his entry for Luke’s verb, setting Luke 15:4’s to apolōlos beside Matthew 18:12’s to planōmenon. It is a synoptic difference, two gospels reporting one story in different words, and Matthew uses Luke’s word one sentence later:

Even so it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.Matthew 18:14 · World English Bible

Both words are in one verse of the Old Testament, if you read it in the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation. It renders the start of Ezekiel 34:16 as to apolōlos zētēsō, kai to planōmenon epistrepsō, the lost I will seek, and the straying I will turn back, where the Hebrew of the second clause has driven away (Septuagint, Ezekiel 34). Luke’s lost sheep and Matthew’s straying sheep are both in that line. When Jesus sums up his own work at the house of Zacchaeus, the sentence is For the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost, and the Greek is zētēsai, to seek, and to apolōlos, the lost: the verb and the participle of Ezekiel’s first clause (interlinear). The Cambridge Bible’s note on the verse points to Ezekiel 34:11-16 (commentaries on Luke 19:10). And 1 Peter has the other clause’s two verbs, straying and turning back (interlinear):

For you were going astray like sheep; but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.1 Peter 2:25 · World English Bible

Not knowing the way

The Bible’s plainest picture of being lost is Hagar, sent away from Abraham’s household with a skin of water and her son:

Abraham rose up early in the morning, and took bread and a container of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder; and gave her the child, and sent her away. She departed, and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba.Genesis 21:14 · World English Bible

The verb for wandered is ta’ah, the psalm’s gone astray (interlinear). Ellicott says she “had no plan or purpose, but went hither and thither till the water in the skin was spent” (commentaries on Genesis 21:14).

What happens next is in the list. God heard the voice of the boy, and the boy’s name, Ishmael, means God hears (Genesis 16:11): the Cambridge Bible calls the sentence “a play upon the name of Ishmael with its meaning of ‘God heareth.’” The angel says God has heard him where he is, which Keil and Delitzsch gloss as “in his helpless condition” (commentaries on Genesis 21:17). Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. The Cambridge Bible: “What she had not seen before, Hagar suddenly received power to see.” The Pulpit Commentary thinks it was “Not necessarily by miraculous operation; perhaps simply by providentially guiding her search for water” (commentaries on Genesis 21:19). On either reading, the boy was heard where he was before anyone had found anything.

Psalm 107 starts its list of people rescued with travellers who wandered in the wilderness in a desert way and found no city to live in, and the verb is ta’ah again (interlinear). He led them also by a straight way, and the verb for led is darak (1869), to tread, which the King James elsewhere renders guide and lead forth (interlinear). Isaiah 42:16 has the same verb: I will lead them in paths that they don’t know (interlinear). In Isaiah the paths do not become known. The people are led along them anyway, and the darkness is made light before them, literally before their faces. After its wanderers, Psalm 107 sings its refrain for the first time, Let them praise the LORD for his loving kindness, and our page on gratitude counts that word.

And one disciple says it out loud. Jesus has just told them You know where I go, and you know the way (John 14:4), and Thomas answers, Lord, we don’t know where you are going. How can we know the way? He contradicts Jesus to his face, and what comes back is not a route. It is I am the way. Thomas has a better-known moment in John 20, and it is on our page about doubt.

What this page is not

• It is not the page for confusion. If the trouble is that you cannot work out what is happening, confusion has Isaiah 30:21’s voice behind you. If it is a decision, Proverbs 3:5-6 has its own page.
• It is not the page for being alone. If lost mostly means that nobody is with you, loneliness is closer, and if it means not knowing who you are, insecurity. If you are thinking about walking away from something, giving up is the page.
• It is not a diagnosis. Feeling lost for a while is part of being alive. If it has gone on for weeks and is getting in the way of sleeping, eating or working, talk to a doctor: the US National Institute of Mental Health describes depression as different from ordinary low moods, with symptoms that “affect how you feel, think, and handle daily activities” (NIMH on depression). If feeling lost has turned into not wanting to be here, call or text 988 in the US (988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), or your local emergency number anywhere else.