Scripture Daily

Context No. 617 of 4322 · Psalms

Context · Reflection

Psalms 16:1-11: in context

1Preserve me, God, for I take refuge in you. 2My soul, you have said to the LORD, “You are my Lord. Apart from you I have no good thing.” 3As for the saints who are on the earth, they are the excellent ones in whom is all my delight. 4Their sorrows shall be multiplied who give gifts to another god. Their drink offerings of blood I will not offer, nor take their names on my lips. 5The LORD assigned my portion and my cup. You made my lot secure. 6The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places. Yes, I have a good inheritance. 7I will bless the LORD, who has given me counsel. Yes, my heart instructs me in the night seasons. 8I have set the LORD always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. 9Therefore my heart is glad, and my tongue rejoices. My body shall also dwell in safety. 10For you will not leave my soul in Sheol, neither will you allow your holy one to see corruption. 11You will show me the path of life. In your presence is fullness of joy. In your right hand there are pleasures forever more.

This psalm keeps circling one conviction: that God himself is the psalmist's true good and true joy. Apart from you, he tells the LORD, I have no good thing. The LORD is my chosen portion and my cup; the lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; I have a good inheritance. He is not saying God gives him good things, though God does; he is saying God himself is the good thing, the portion, the inheritance, the one in whom everything worth having is found. And the psalm builds toward its famous ending, where it names exactly where the deepest joy is located: you will show me the path of life; in your presence is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

Read that closing line slowly, because it makes a claim I spend most of my life quietly disbelieving. It says that fullness of joy, the complete and satisfying kind, and pleasures that actually last, are found in one place: God's presence, at his right hand. Not in the endless things I chase after joy and pleasure in, the acquisitions, the experiences, the achievements that thrill for a moment and leave me hunting for the next, but in God himself. The psalmist has discovered that the real, lasting version of everything I am looking for elsewhere is found in the presence of God, and that everything else, by comparison, is a thin and temporary substitute.

That searches where I am actually looking for joy. If I am honest, I pursue it almost everywhere except God's presence, treating him as a duty and my pleasures as something I find in the world, then wondering why the joy never fills or lasts. Psalm 16 insists the fullness is in his presence, the pleasures at his right hand, forevermore, and that God himself is the good portion I keep overlooking. Am I seeking joy and pleasure in a hundred things that leave me empty, when the fullness the psalmist found is in God's presence itself, and do I actually believe he is my good portion?

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