• This BaptistWay Bible Study for March 17 focuses on Psalm 16.
• Download a powerpoint resource for this lesson here.
Psalm 16 is an unrestrained celebration of God’s goodness and exuberant declaration of trust in God’s provision. This hymn has an infectious capacity to lift our spirits, realign our focus on the blessings of God and inspire rejoicing over God’s constant presence with us.
The psalm begins with a petition for God’s protection, “keep me safe” (v. 1), and ends with gratitude that God has rescued him from death and led him in the path of life (vv. 10-11). In between these comments, we find alternating declarations of trust in God and testimonies of God’s goodness that form the basis for the trust. As James Mays says, “The psalm teaches that trust is not merely a warm feeling or a passing impulse in a time of trouble; it is a structure of acts and experiences that open one’s consciousness to the Lord as the supreme reality of life.”
Practice the presence of God
The psalmist expresses trusting commitment to God in various ways. For example, God is his refuge (v. 1), his one and only Lord (vv. 2, 4), his “portion” and “cup” (v. 5), and the one whom the psalmist keeps ever before him, probably in the sense of God being the singular focus of his attention (v. 8). The last idea is echoed in the psalm’s final lines, which confidently declare, “you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand” (v. 11). It seems the psalmist’s greatest joy is to “practice the presence of God,” to borrow a famous expression from the 17th-century monk Brother Lawrence.
The psalm’s profound trust in God is rooted in the author’s experiences of God’s blessings. Overwhelmed with divine gifts, the psalmist even says, “apart from you I have no good thing” (v. 2). Verses 5-6 celebrate God’s goodness with the metaphor of the allotment of territories to the 12 tribes as described in Joshua 13-21.
The psalmist says God has made his “lot secure,” caused “boundary lines” to fall in “pleasant places” for him and given him a “delightful inheritance.” While the literal land of promise may be in view, the psalmist is probably implying gratitude for another kind of delightful inheritance—the bountiful allotments of spiritual blessings that have been measured out generously and fallen graciously to him through God’s constant presence.
Put God first
Sign up for our weekly edition and get all our headlines in your inbox on Thursdays
Another expression of God’s goodness is the way the Lord counsels the psalmist, instructing his heart nightly (v. 7). The comment illustrates God’s respect for human freedom, as the Lord advises rather than coerces. In turn, the next verse says the psalmist responds by choosing to put God first, in concert with the first commandment of the Decalogue, as Robert Davidson points out in The Vitality of Worship. The psalm’s author also celebrates the security that comes from God being as close as his right hand, keeping him safe so that he will not be shaken (v. 9).
The next item in the psalm’s list of divine goodness addresses a matter of life and death. The Hebrew text says the Lord has kept the psalmist from sheol, the realm of the dead, and from shachat, the pit or grave (v. 10). For most of the era of the Old Testament, nothing was known of an afterlife. The concept of life after death is envisioned in some late Old Testament texts, but is not uncovered fully in Scripture until the revelation of the resurrection of Jesus.
Thus, the understanding of life after death is a matter of progressive revelation that likely was not understood by the psalmist. He, like other ancient Israelites, thought of sheol as a shadowy place where the dead had no real consciousness or realization of God’s presence (see Psalm 6:5). For the psalmist, the only life he could imagine was life on earth; so he praises God for deliverance from death and making known the path of life for him to walk, a path in the joyful companionship of God, knowing the pleasures of the Lord’s intimate presence for all his days (v. 11).
Joy fills his soul
This remarkable psalm revolves around two poles, according to Mays in his book on the Psalms and their interpretation. The first is “the way the Lord fills the personal horizon of the psalmist. Every one of the prayer’s lines in all their variety says in one way or another, ‘The Lord is everything to me.’ … The whole confesses, ‘The Lord is my life.’” The second pole is the way in which the psalm is full of joy in the Lord. Mays notes how frequently the hymn uses words like “good,” “delight,” “pleasant,” “glad” and “rejoice.” Joy fills the psalmist’s soul and is the consummation toward which his life is headed. Spared from the threat of death, he is free to rejoice in God’s presence.
The most extensive New Testament quotation of Psalm 16 appears in Acts 2:25-31. While the psalmist celebrates God’s goodness in rescuing him from the threat of death (vv. 8-11), Luke appropriates this language to illustrate something beyond what the psalmist could imagine: the resurrection of Jesus, whom God did “not abandon … to the grave” but raised to life, so all who believe in him also might have “life with eternal pleasures” in the Lord’s heavenly presence.
We seek to connect God’s story and God’s people around the world. To learn more about God’s story, click here.
Send comments and feedback to Eric Black, our editor. For comments to be published, please specify “letter to the editor.” Maximum length for publication is 300 words.