Psalm 16 Commentary

It is easy to see why many people associate Psalm 16 with funerals.  It often gets read at funerals and one or another of the verses sometimes gets printed on the cover or the back cover of a funeral program or memorial folder.  And of course sometimes we preachers are asked by families to use this text as the basis for the funeral sermon.  In a Christian context this typically means the preacher appropriates the words about “my body will rest secure” and “you will not let me see decay” in the light of Christ’s resurrection from the dead and Christ’s promise that our bodies, too, will in the end be raised.  Sometimes 1 Corinthians 15 is used as a kind of gloss on Psalm 16 itself.

But many of us also know that imbuing this poem with the full weight of Easter and its implications for the Gospel probably moves us a fair distance away from the original intent and understanding of this psalm.  Christians have a tendency to assume that their views on the afterlife, on heaven and hell, and on the resurrection of the body mirror the whole of Scripture and the views of all the people who had a hand in writing the Bible in its various books.  Clearly, however, that is not the case.

Even by the time of Jesus’s earthly ministry, the descendants of Israel were not uniform on their views of the afterlife.  The Sadducees and the Pharisees disagreed sharply on any notions involving a resurrection from the dead of our earthly bodies.  Many of us recall the time when some of the Sadducees (who did not espouse a belief in the resurrection of our bodies) tried to have a little fun with Jesus with the fictional scenario involving seven brothers each of whom married in turn the same woman.  So if they will be raised back to life again one day in heaven, “Whose wife will she be?”  Jesus did a neat end-run on this by saying there would not be marriage in the kingdom of God the way we know marriage now.  But Jesus left to one side their snide and tacit dismissal of the doctrine of resurrection.

If we go even further back in Israelite history, we discover several views.  But in general there seemed to be a belief that death was a terrible prospect even for a devout person since the end destination for all folks was this murky realm of Sheol and if Sheol was not hell exactly, it sure wasn’t heaven either.  More than a few psalms indicate that one might be sufficiently cut off from God himself in Sheol that the dead would not even be able to praise or worship God from that location.  And though there is in Job and Daniel a couple passing references to things that might look to be on a trajectory toward affirming the resurrection of the body, the evidence that this belief existed at all is scant at best.

And so now back to Psalm 16.  In general this is a poem expressing lyric trust in the God of Israel.  This is definitely among the sunniest of all the 150 psalms.  God is described in such intimate terms that it is almost as though the psalmist is claiming that God is the home in which he lives.  God is his cup, his portion, his lot, his inheritance and because of all this, everything has consistently moved in the right direction for this poet.  The result is pure joy.  The result is a faith and a relationship with God that is radiant and pure.  Day and night the psalmist will keep his eyes fixated upon Yahweh alone because with God’s being so solidly on his side, where else would he even be tempted to look for anything?

All this, then, is the prelude for and the context of those words that could sound like resurrection hope.  Except probably they aren’t.  Probably the hope expressed here is more proximate than ultimate.  God will not let his faithful and holy one see decay . . . for now.  It seems unlikely the psalmist entertained the idea he was immortal, that he would never die.  But the bottom line of a lot of the psalms that express similar sentiments about heading off a trip to Sheol is this: let’s hold off on that for as long as possible.  And once death does come as it must for all of us, then what?  Well, that’s not fully clear but there are seeds of hope in the Old Testament that that may not be the ultimate end for any of us but exactly how that all might work out is not spelled out.

Maybe.  Then again, the last verse speaks of “eternal pleasures” and that surely sounds like something that goes well beyond our time on this mortal coil.  All of these sentiments weave in and around one another such that the portrait sketched at the end of Psalm 16 manages to be lyric and muddled at the same time!

However, if you hold to a fairly robust doctrine of biblical inspiration under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, you can always fall back on the idea that it’s possible—probable?—that biblical writers conveyed more than they knew or where consciously aware of.  Indeed, it seems likely that many, most, and possibly all those who wrote down the words we now consider to be canonical Scripture would be very surprised how those same words would later be interpreted, understood, and applied.  “Scripture interprets Scripture” is a key tenet of most biblical hermeneutics and by that principle, passages end up going well beyond at least some of the original intent or understanding of the human authors.  (And shucks, a lot of us preachers know the Holy Spirit is up to the same thing today when people thank us for things in our sermons we never said and make applications of our own sermons that we could but have dimly imagined would be heard by anybody!)

Thus can a preacher today at a Christian funeral appropriate the latter portion of Psalm 16 as seeing its ultimate fulfillment in Christ?  Yes, albeit it with due awareness that this was not likely the view of the psalmist.  But Psalm 16 can stand as an early indication in the Bible that God was letting his people know that death would not have the last word and if the precise way that ultimately came about would be surprising to even the author of Psalm 16—as it should actually be for all of us—then that is simply yet another indication that the Gospel’s Good News is not only wonderful news but also surprising news!

Illustration Idea

In a commentary he wrote years ago on Psalm 16, my former CEP writing colleague Dr. Stan Mast recalled the 2002 movie titled Panic Room.  If you have ever seen it, you know it’s a thriller and a nail biter.  Jodie Foster plays Meg Altman, a woman recently estranged from her older husband.  She is also the mother of a diabetic daughter named Sarah played by a very young Kristen Stewart.  Meg buys a very large home that turns out to have a “Safe Room” replete with a heavy metal door that locks multiple times once a person is inside the Safe Room, which is also equipped with multiple video monitors that connect to cameras throughout the house.  The only thing missing is a working telephone and because of the thick cement and steel walls all around, cellphone signals don’t work well either.

That of course becomes important when Meg and Sarah have to take refuge in the Safe Room once some well-armed thugs break into the house.  Problem is: what the thugs want is a large stash of government bearer bonds worth millions and that the thugs know are inside the Safe Room.  As it turns out, the Safe Room does not stay feeling safe for long and indeed, the movie’s title of Panic Room is a double entendre: it is the rom to which you go when you are in a panic but that same panic enters the room with you!

The writer of Psalm 16 would likely say that this is because there is only one true “Safe Room” and that is when you make your home with the eternal God of Israel alone.  All other attempts at safety will, in the long run, fail and lead to panic indeed.