The Path of Life and Pleasures Forevermore Text: Psalm 16:9-11
Introduction: The Joy Set Before Him
The book of Psalms is the prayer book of the Lord Jesus Christ. When He was on the cross, He prayed the Psalms. When He was preparing His disciples for His departure, He taught them from the Psalms. And when He wanted to explain the bedrock foundation of the Christian faith, the resurrection from the dead, He directed them to the Psalms. This psalm, Psalm 16, is one of the premier examples of this. On the day of Pentecost, when the Spirit fell and the New Covenant was formally inaugurated, the apostle Peter stood up to preach the first Christian sermon. And what was his text? It was this very psalm. He quotes our passage today and makes it abundantly clear that David was not, and could not have been, speaking ultimately of himself. David died, his body saw corruption, and his tomb was a local landmark. No, David, a prophet, was speaking of his great Son, the Lord Jesus.
This psalm is a glorious declaration of faith that culminates in one of the most potent prophecies of the resurrection in all the Old Testament. It is a psalm suffused with confidence and hope, a confidence that stares death squarely in the face and does not flinch. Why? Because the one praying this prayer, the Lord Jesus, had a joy set before Him. He knew the path of life went through the grave, not around it, and that on the other side of that grave was the fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore at the Father's right hand. This is not wishful thinking. This is covenantal certainty.
We live in a world that is terrified of death and desperate for pleasure. Our culture chases after fleeting joys and tries to numb the constant, nagging fear of the void. But it is a fool's errand. They are seeking life in the land of the dead. This psalm shows us the only true path of life, the only source of lasting joy, and the only ground for secure hope. It is a path that was walked first by Christ, and it is a path that we, in Him, are now privileged to walk as well. This is not a psalm about a generic, fuzzy hope in the afterlife. This is a detailed, Christ-centered roadmap to eternal glory.
The Text
Therefore my heart is glad and my glory rejoices;
My flesh also will dwell securely.
For You will not forsake my soul to Sheol;
You will not give Your Holy One over to see corruption.
You will make known to me the path of life;
In Your presence is fullness of joy;
In Your right hand there are pleasures forever.
(Psalm 16:9-11 LSB)
Gladness in the Face of the Grave (v. 9)
We begin with the fruit of a life that has set the Lord always before it.
"Therefore my heart is glad and my glory rejoices; My flesh also will dwell securely." (Psalm 16:9)
The "therefore" connects us back to the previous verse. "I have set the LORD always before me; because He is at my right hand, I shall not be moved." Because of this fixed, unwavering focus on the Father, the Son's heart is glad. This is not a superficial happiness dependent on circumstances. This is a deep, abiding gladness rooted in the unshakable presence of God. This is the joy that was set before Jesus, for which He endured the cross, despising the shame. His heart was glad even as He faced the agony of Golgotha.
His "glory" rejoices. What is this glory? It is his tongue, the faculty of speech with which we give praise to God. The tongue is our glory because with it we can articulate the greatness of our Creator. So, we have internal gladness in the heart, and external praise from the tongue. The whole inner man is oriented toward joy in God.
But it doesn't stop there. "My flesh also will dwell securely." The word here is literally "rest in hope." This is not just about the body being safe during life. The context, as the next verse makes plain, is death. The body, the flesh, will be laid in the tomb, but it will not be abandoned there. It will rest securely, in confident hope of the resurrection. This is an audacious claim. For any mere man, the grave is a place of decay and finality. But for the Messiah, it is a resting place, a bed where His body will lie in hope, awaiting the dawn of the resurrection morning.
The Unforsaken Son (v. 10)
Verse 10 provides the foundation for this incredible hope. It is a divine promise.
"For You will not forsake my soul to Sheol; You will not give Your Holy One over to see corruption." (Psalm 16:10 LSB)
This is the linchpin of the psalm and the verse that the apostles Peter and Paul both seize upon to prove the resurrection of Jesus. There are two parallel promises here. First, "You will not forsake my soul to Sheol." Sheol, in the Old Testament, is the realm of the dead, the grave. The promise is that the soul of the Messiah will not be abandoned or left there. His death was real; He truly went to the place of the dead. But He was not left there. The Father would not forsake Him.
Second, "You will not give Your Holy One over to see corruption." This refers to the body. Corruption is the physical decay that begins after death. The promise is that the body of God's Holy One would not rot in the grave. This is a direct, specific, and physical prophecy. As Peter argued on Pentecost, this could not apply to David. David's body saw corruption. But Jesus' body did not. He was in the tomb for three days, but on the third day, before any decay could set in, He was raised. He is the "Holy One" of God, sinless and perfect, and death could not hold Him because the corruption of the grave had no claim on His undefiled flesh.
This verse is a sledgehammer to any attempt to spiritualize the resurrection. It is about a real soul not being abandoned in the place of the dead, and a real body not decomposing in a tomb. The Christian faith stands or falls on this historical, physical event. If Christ's body saw corruption, our faith is futile, and we are still in our sins. But because God kept this promise to His Holy One, we have a living hope.
The Path to Everlasting Pleasure (v. 11)
The psalm concludes with a triumphant vision of what lies on the other side of the empty tomb.
"You will make known to me the path of life; In Your presence is fullness of joy; In Your right hand there are pleasures forever." (Psalm 16:11 LSB)
The resurrection is not an end in itself. It is the gateway to the "path of life." Christ is the pioneer of this path. He blazed the trail through death and out the other side into resurrected, ascended glory. He is the path of life. He did not just find the way; He is the Way.
And where does this path lead? It leads into the very presence of God. And what do we find there? "Fullness of joy." Not partial joy, not intermittent joy, but a complete and overflowing torrent of joy. This is what our hearts were made for. Every lesser joy we experience in this life is but a dim echo, a faint scent of this ultimate reality. To be in the presence of God is to be in the presence of undiluted, infinite joy.
And it gets even better. "In Your right hand there are pleasures forever." The right hand is the place of power, authority, and favor. To be at God's right hand is to be in the place of ultimate blessing. And in that place, there are "pleasures." The God of the Bible is not a cosmic killjoy. He is the inventor of pleasure. All true, good, and lasting pleasure finds its source in Him. And these are not temporary pleasures that fade and leave us empty. They are pleasures "forever." They are eternal. This is the inheritance Christ secured for Himself, and by extension, for all who are united to Him by faith.
Conclusion: Our Hope in the Holy One
So what does this mean for us? It means everything. Because Christ walked this path, we can walk it too. Because His flesh rested in hope, our flesh can rest in hope. When a believer dies, we do not grieve as those who have no hope. We know that the soul is not abandoned to Sheol, but is present with the Lord. And we know that the body, though it sees corruption for a time, will one day be raised, just as His was, transformed and glorified.
The promises of this psalm are applied to us because we are "in Christ." We are united to the Holy One. His victory over the grave is our victory. His resurrection is the firstfruits of our own. Therefore, we can have glad hearts and rejoicing tongues even in a world full of sorrow and death. We can face our own mortality not with fear, but with a secure hope, knowing that our Lord has gone before us.
The world thinks pleasure is found in rebellion, in autonomy, in chasing after the created things while ignoring the Creator. But this psalm tells us the truth. The path of life, the fullness of joy, and the pleasures forevermore are found in one place and one place only: in the presence of God, at the right hand of the Father, where the risen and ascended Lord Jesus Christ now sits. And because He is there, that is where our hope is. That is where our joy is. That is where our life is.