As mentioned above, when the faithful sing Psalm 16 each of them can entrust himself or herself to the Lord and foster confidence and contentment in God’s care. This is no trivial feat; believers face many attractions, and possibly even threats, from those members of the people who do not prize faithfulness (v. 4).
To cultivate such confidence and contentment, the psalm enables those who sing it to prize their fellowship with the other faithful (v. 3), to appreciate God’s providential supervision of their circumstances (vv. 5–6), to recognize God’s care for them in their daily tasks (vv. 7–8), and to anticipate the fullness of joy in God’s presence forever, even beyond the death of their bodies. To put these feelings into a song is to acknowledge that they are not what the average Israelite felt; they are instead what God is helping him or her to feel, from the perspective of trust in the God of the covenant.
Christians likewise need to learn how to cultivate such healthy affections. In addition to how the psalm functioned for Israel, we now behold the record of Jesus’ resurrection as the first installment and guarantee of our everlasting inheritance.Psalm 16
Probably a musical or liturgical term
Or To the saints in the land, the excellent in whom is all my delight, I say:
Or who acquire
Hebrew my kidneys instruct me
Hebrew my glory
Or see the pit
I. (16:1–2) The Lord Is My Refuge. The psalm opens by declaring that the Lord is the only one on whom the psalmist relies for well-being.
Verse 1 begins with a prayer for protection (“Preserve me”), followed by a ground for the appeal: “for in you I take refuge,” that is, “I may make this prayer because I have taken refuge.” The idea that the faithful “take refuge in” (Hb. khasah be-) the Lord recurs frequently in the Psalms (twenty-five times in twenty-four verses); the idea is that God provides shelter and protection for his own, though this does not exclude hardship or persecution.
In verse 2 the singer addresses “the Lord” (Yahweh) as “my Lord” (i.e., “my master”). This assumes that God is a benevolent master who cares for his children; he alone is the source of their “good” or well-being.
II. (16:3–4) My Preferred Company: The Godly. This stanza, as rendered in the ESV, makes a contrast between “the saints,” those “in whom is all my delight” (v. 3), and “those who run after another god” (v. 4; idolaters, among whom would be unfaithful Israelites), whose practices the faithful will shun.
Verse 3 in the ESV main text begins with “as for the saints,” while the alternate rendering is “to the saints” (ESV mg.). The difference is the interpretation of the Hebrew preposition le- (“to/for/with reference to”). The alternate reading continues the speech of verse 2: “to the Lord I say, while to the saints [I say]” (with the second “I say” supplied). The alternate reading would be more appealing if there were a conjunction (“and”) in the Hebrew; the fact that it is missing, together with the need to add an understood “I say,” makes the ESV text preferable.
Further, many commentators suppose “the saints” (or “the holy ones”) to be deities, particularly deities worshiped by the Canaanites. Since the second line of verse 3 declares the singer’s “delight” in them, such a reference looks out of place in a worship song. Rather, it is better to take this as a designation for the people of Israel (broad sense) or for the faithful within the people (narrower sense). All Israel is holy in the broad sense of being consecrated to the God who is himself holy (e.g., Ex. 19:6; Lev. 20:26). This does not guarantee, however, that every member of Israel will actually live out his holy status; hence we have the command to “be holy” (cf. Lev. 20:7–8). Therefore the saints in the narrower sense are those who have actually embraced their privilege, and that seems more fitting here, as the idolaters of verse 4 could easily include unfaithful Israelites. These “saints” are the ones whom the faithful singers should esteem and whose company they should prefer. He prefers the saints’ joys (as in vv. 7–11) to the “sorrows” of the unfaithful.
This declared loyalty is so strong that the psalmist utterly refuses to participate in idolatrous practices, such as pouring out “their drink offerings” or taking “their names” on his lips (probably these names belong to the false gods being worshiped, rather than to the idolaters).
III. (16:5–6) Contentment with My Chosen Portion. In the next section the psalm describes the psalmist’s satisfaction with the Lord and his provision.
The terms “portion,” “lot,” “lines,” and “inheritance” evoke the allocation of the land into family plots (Joshua 13–19), perhaps with an allusion to the Lord as the Levites’ portion and inheritance (Num. 18:20). The song promotes contentment with all of the arrangements of one’s life, seeing them as providentially ordered, just as the allocation was (cf. Prov. 16:33). God’s people need the help of such songs to form this kind of faith, since his providential government is often mysterious to man (Prov. 20:24).
IV. (16:7–8) Delight in God’s Constant Presence. God’s presence, in which the psalmist delights, is seen in the moral instruction he receives and results in his assurance of stability.
In Psalm 16:7 the singer notes that his “heart” (Hb. “kidneys”; cf. ESV mg.) “instructs” him during the night. This would be the result of deliberate reflection at the deepest level of his being, just as to “set the Lord always before me” expresses intention. Singing this involves a person in treasuring such activity.
The “right hand” (v. 8) is probably a figure for one’s ability to do what needs to be done (sometimes man’s, 109:31; 110:5; 137:5; more often God’s, 18:35; 20:6), based on a world in which most people are right-handed (and left-handedness was unusual enough to receive special mention; Judg. 3:15; 20:16). Because of God’s enablement the singer affirms that “I shall not be shaken,” an image for stability and security (cf. comment on 10:1–11[at v. 6]). In verse 11 the singer anticipates receiving benefits “at [God’s] right hand.”
V. (16:9–11) Hope of Everlasting Joy. These verses seem to be a clear affirmation that the human yearning to be near to God and to know the pleasure of his welcome forever, beyond the death of the body, finds its answer in God’s promises to his faithful covenant members. It is controversial among Bible specialists to what extent the OT entertains a hope of blessed life after death for the faithful, but it seems unreasonable to deny that such hope is present here (and at the very least at 49:15; 73:24–26; others will be argued as well).
“Therefore” (introducing 16:9) draws a conclusion from the security of verse 8 (or perhaps of the whole of vv. 1–8): Reflecting on the stability that God provides leads to joy in every aspect of one’s being: in the “heart,” in the “whole being” (Hb. kabod, “glory”; Gen. 49:6; Pss. 30:12; 57:8), and in the very “flesh,” or bodily existence.
In verse 10 “Sheol” (cf. comment on 6:1–5) is probably the abode of the wicked; in the same way, “corruption” probably describes the experience of being far from God forever. These are not likely terms for the grave, since everyone singing these words would know that his body would one day die and rot; hence each singer anticipates that such decay is not the end of his or her story. As A. B. Davidson put it,
According to verse 11, “You make known to me the path of life.” The “path” is a “master image” of the Bible: the covenant provides a “path” by which one walks to life in all of its fullness (Prov. 5:6; 6:23; 10:17; 12:28; 15:24; Matt. 7:14). The song celebrates how God has generously made it known to his faithful. To enjoy God’s “presence” (Hb. “face”) is the fruition of the covenant (cf. Ex. 33:14–15; Num. 6:24–26). The word “pleasures” (Hb. neʿimot) is related to “pleasant places” (neʿimim; 16:6); the pleasure that he has begun in this life will continue into its fullness in the world to come.
The apostle Peter cites Psalm 16:8–11 LXX in his Pentecost speech (Acts 2:25–28), applying the verses to the resurrection of Jesus; Paul uses Psalm 16:10 in a similar speech (Acts 13:35). Scholars have proposed a variety of explanations for what Peter and Paul think they are doing: that they read the psalm as a direct description of the Messiah, that they import a meaning into the psalm that has nothing to do with its “original” intentions, and that they take the psalm as establishing a pattern that Jesus has fulfilled. Now, if the apostles meant that David’s words were a straight prediction of the death and resurrection of Jesus, it is difficult to know what function the psalm could have played in ancient Israel: the congregation would have scratched their heads in puzzlement every time they sang it, since they would have no referent for the “I” in the psalm (which is usually the singer himself). Further, Acts portrays the apostles as generally trading in accepted Jewish interpretations (which tether themselves to some notion of the perceived original intention). The puzzlement disappears if we see the psalm as cultivating the hope of everlasting glory for the faithful, with the resurrection of Jesus (the “holy one” par excellence) as the first step in bringing this hope to fruition (cf. Rom. 8:23; 1 Cor. 15:23).