Psalm 16 Commentary

We have all seen the latter portion of Psalm 16 used at Christian funerals.  It gets printed on the memorial folder or the funeral service bulletin.  Or we preachers are asked to base our funeral sermon on Psalm 16, especially verses 9-11.  And we have occasionally seen verse 9b engraved on headstones at the cemetery.  That is all lovely and to a decent degree has some biblical-theological warrant.

But neither the original author of Psalm 16 nor those in Ancient Israel who would have heard and sung this song understood it the way Christians today may appropriate it.  Today we take the words about not seeing death and especially that “my body will rest secure” and we read it through the lens of Christ Jesus’s resurrection from the dead and his promise that we will all one day be raised.  When we read Psalm 16 saying that God will not abandon us to the realm of the dead, again Christians tend to take that to mean what Jesus said to Martha in John 11: that for those who believe in Jesus, death will not have the final word.  We will die but we won’t stay dead because Jesus will ultimately triumph over sin and death and hell.

But for Ancient Israel, their view of what happens to us after we die was not anything like that.  They believed that all people would go to Sheol after physical death.  But Sheol is not viewed as a good place.  It seems to be some kind of rather grim holding room from which people are not able to pray to God or to praise God.  That is why other psalms sometimes cry to God to not let them die because if a person dies, God loses one member of his choir because no one can praise God from the realm of the dead in Sheol.  We may all end up there eventually but let’s delay this inevitability for as long as possible.

In other words Psalm 16 in the end is not saying that the psalmist is glad to know that even in death he will be fine.  No, it is more likely that the psalmist is asking God to do everything in God’s power to keep him alive on this side of the grave so that he could flourish and hold death at bay for as long as possible.  His body will rest secure when he lays down on his bed at night.  He will wake up the next morning and will not die in his sleep.

Of course and at the same time one cannot deny some longer term implications of these words.  When the psalm concludes by looking forward to “eternal pleasures” at the right hand of God, surely this does not mean the poet thinks he will actually never die but will have eternal life in the context of this present life as we know it.  There must be some sense of being sustained even after physical death on this earth.  So insofar as Christians today may likewise read this psalm from the vantage point of eternal life, one cannot say that is incorrect.  A key tenet of hermeneutics is that Scripture interprets Scripture and so in the larger context of the full canon of the Bible, we see God’s revelation as a whole, as finally being of one piece.

Thus let’s grant all due recognition of the original sense of Psalm 16: both to the one who composed it and to those who read it, heard it read, or sung it, they had a different view of it from how Christians wield it at funerals or when engraved on grave markers.  Nevertheless within the context of living in a post-resurrection world, we can appropriate these words as part of our living hope in the risen and ascended Jesus.  But if we are preaching on Psalm 16, we do want to present it accurately both in terms of its original setting and how we may appropriate it today in a Christian context.

Of course the first part of Psalm 16 is also as relevant today as it was in Ancient Israel even if the specifics have naturally shifted across time.  A key problem in Ancient Israel is that because they failed to follow God’s commands thoroughly to scour Canaan of all remnants of its idolatrous past—most particularly the shrines to Baal and Asherah—and thus the people too often lapsed into idolatry.  That is why God wanted the land to be scrubbed clean of idolatrous religion: the remnants alone might become a snare to the people.  And they did.  Sometimes it did not replace the worship of Yahweh but got blended into Yahweh worship in a syncretistic way.  Other times it did shove Yahweh aside in favor of all-out idolatrous worship to Baal and Asherah.

Thus the first part of Psalm 16 makes clear the psalmist’s intention to worship Yahweh alone with no room whatsoever for the honoring of any other alleged gods.  The psalm acknowledges that there will be some who continue to stray and they will find their lives spiritually impoverished by this idolatry over time.  Today the things that may distract us from a pure apprehension of the Gospel or of worshiping and following and imitating Jesus alone are very different from an obvious embrace of a false god like Baal.

But there are so many crosscurrents between religion and politics in some places today, there are so many expressed concerns about nationalism of various stripes influencing people in the church.  So it may well be that Psalm 16’s call for a focus on God alone—and in the context of the church a focus on our God in Christ alone—still has a lot of meaning and is still something that is vital for all of us to say and to declare this to all of our sisters and brothers in Christ.  We too can be tempted to worshiping a false version of Jesus.  We too can be tempted to worship not our God in Christ alone but our God in Christ and . . . also something else.

We too need to say, “You are my Lord.  Apart from you I have no good thing.”

Illustration Idea

This sermon commentary has noted the Christian appropriation of parts of Psalm 16 to tie in with the resurrection of Christ Jesus from the dead and his promise that one day we will all be raised.  The psalm as originally written and conceived likely was not heading in that direction.  The other very famous instance of an Old Testament passage now interpreted almost exclusively in a Christocentric way comes from Job 19:25-27.  In that chapter Job is once again defending himself to his not-so-comforting friends who are sure Job is suffering as punishment for some sins Job seems unwilling to fess up to.  But suddenly in the midst of Job’s marshalling his best counter-arguments he launches into the now well-known words “I know that my redeemer lives and that in the end he will stand upon the earth.  And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God.”

That Christians have turned this into a verse predicting the resurrection of Jesus and then the resurrection of also our bodies was cemented into place by Georg Friedrich Handel who in his oratorio Messiah turned those verses from Job 19 into a lyric aria that directly jumps from Job 19 to the resurrection of Christ.  Many commentators, though struggling to make full sense of what Job is saying in that 19^th chapter, are fairly certain that whatever Job meant by this in the context of his robust self-defense in the face of his condemnatory friends, it was not what Handel did with it.  Still, did biblical writers convey more than they knew?  By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit might they have written things the full and final and ultimate meaning of which even they could not have guessed?  The traditional answer to that has been “Probably.  Many times, probably yes.”

Maybe Psalm 16 and Job 19 are two such instances that point forward to a reality that now comprises the very core of the Good News that just is the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Lord.