A very unusual man was Blaise Pascal, a 17th century French mathematician and philosopher. He once wrote about the motives of all people, “All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end… The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.”
Contrary to what some people think, the Bible is not against seeking joy, pleasure, or fulfilment. Yes, false prosperity-Gospel teachers have distorted the Bible to make out that God is just a tool, an instrument that we use to please ourselves, and fulfil every selfish lust. There’ve been teachers like that since the days of the apostles; Paul even references their false teaching. And then, as usually happens, the reaction to the false teaching is usually an over-correction, and then we’ve had people teaching a severe, stoic, Spartan Christianity where pleasure and joy is only reluctantly admitted, and where happiness is sometimes equated with selfishness.
But Psalm 16 refutes both those false teachings. Psalm 16 is one of many places in the Bible where the Lord pulls upon on our God-given desires to be happy, and shows us where that desire will be fulfilled. Here God shows us that the life of fulfilment, of contentment, of joy is not something you have to shun or reject to be a follower of God, a believer, a Christian. God made the world, and made life to be enjoyed, not merely endured. First Timothy 6:17 tells us “the living God, gives us richly all things to enjoy.” Earlier in the same book, Paul writes “For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, (1 Timothy 4:4)
Joy, pleasure, happiness, contentment, peace are God’s creations, not Satan’s. The nature of sin is to take one of God’s gifts, and distort it, twist it, pervert it. The problem in sin is not the pleasure or the delight itself. The problem is the disobedience of God’s will, abusing what God gave. It’s taking God’s creation, ignoring the Creator’s manual on how to use it, and using it sinfully, selfishly.
Satan’s great lie is that when you sin, you maximise fun, pleasure, and joy, that the good life is found in rebellion to God. Even to believers, Satan whispers that when you’ve done your Christian duties, you deserve a bit of sinful pleasure on the side.
God’s response to this is to remind us repeatedly that the good life, the life with deep and unshakeable joys, the life abundant with pleasure is not found in a life turned away from God, lived selfishly and sinfully. God tells us in His Word that sin’s pleasures are easy, quick, and then deadly. God’s pleasures are sometimes slow, sometimes costly, but then supremely satisfying. The Good Life is the God-Centred Life, the life lived in union with Him. Happiness is found in holiness. Be God-centred and be satisfied.
Psalm 16 allows us to drink a concentrated, sweet sample of what this life is like. It is filled with pleasure-words: goodness, excellent, delight, inheritance, pleasant, good, bless, glad, rejoice, rest, fullness of joy, pleasures forevermore.
It is written by one of history’s most ardent worshippers, King David. It’s called a Michtam of David, a heading given to Psalms 56-60. The most likely meaning of this term is inscription, meaning a poem that should be inscribed to make them permanent, inscribed on some stone or parchment to read, and inscribed on the hearts of God’s people to remember and feel.
It is also a testimony Psalm. The personal pronoun “my” is used over a dozen times. David lived this good life in his best days, in his best moments.
But under the control of the Holy Spirit, this psalm takes on a voice more than just David describing his own life, but the ultimate Son of David, the Messiah describing His life. The psalm gives us the experience of the one who walked closest to God, Jesus Christ, and gives us the experience of the Good Life from the inside. We get to experience the mind of Messiah. And since believers are indwelt with the Spirit of Christ, that means we can, by faith and obedience have this psalm inscribed on our hearts, and be growing into this very life: the good life, the life of joy, the life of delight in God.
Psalm 16 is not a structured logical argument, which we can take apart, piece by piece. Instead, it is one song, where sometimes David speaks of his own life, sometimes he addresses God directly, and he alternates.
Instead, we can take in the whole psalm but step back and look at it from three different angles, like hearing a singer but standing in different places in the room to hear it slightly differently. One side of David’s song is the Experience of the Good Life. David will describe what a God-centred life feels like. We should listen and desire the same experiences of pleasure, joy, rejoicing, peace, contentment.
A second side of David’s song is the Explanation for this Good Life. Where does it come from? What is the source and cause? A third side of this psalm is the Exercise of the good life. How do you get it? What do you do?
I. The Experience of the Good Life
What does this life look like and feel like?
O LORD, You are the portion of my inheritance and my cup; You maintain my lot.
The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places; Yes, I have a good inheritance.
I will bless the LORD who has given me counsel; My heart also instructs me in the night seasons.
I have set the LORD always before me; Because He is at my right hand I shall not be moved.
Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoices; My flesh also will rest in hope. (Psalm 16:5–9)
Try to feel the poetry here, drink in the images He gives us.
In verses 5 and 6, David pictures the life he has like finding out you have inherited land. Inheritance, lot, lines all picture receiving land, which in David’s time was your source of wealth. And the lines, the boundary lines of that land run through beautiful territory. “The land allotted to me is beautiful! What a delightful area I have been given to dwell in.” He pictures his life like an area, and it is pleasant, delightful place. He adds the image of a cup, meaning a full cup at a feast. What does the Good Life feel like? It feels like a rich reward, like contentment.
In verse 7, we read that David is like a delighted student who has been given answers, like someone leaving a counsellor’s office with their questions answered. He is filled with gratitude for the guidance he gets. What does the Good Life feel like? It feels like gratitude and thankfulness.
Verse 8, David says his life is like walking about with a powerful guiding guard in front of you, and to the side of you, always watching out for you, seeing what you do not see. “Because He is at my right hand I shall not be moved.” The Lord’s guidance and leadership of David’s life, the Lord’s protection, fills David with calm assurance. What does the Good Life feel like? It feels like peace.
Verse 9 is like a great summary statement of his everyday emotions: “Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoices; My flesh also will rest in hope.” What does the Good Life feel like? Gladness, rejoicing, and resting with confidence in the future.
When it comes to the future, verse 10 describes David’s hope, even when he dies. And here, the hope telescopes beyond David to the Lord Jesus.
For You will not leave my soul in Sheol, Nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption.
Both Paul and Peter tell us in the NT that verse 10 was fulfilled not by David, but by his descendant, Jesus, when raised from the dead. The body of Jesus was not left to decay, His spirit was not left unclothed in Paradise. David prophetically spoke of the confident hope that Messiah would have after death.
Verse 11 is as intensely inviting as it could possibly be. This is the expectation of Heaven, which we can begin to taste now, and experience forever.
You will show me the path of life; In Your presence is fullness of joy; At Your right hand are pleasures forevermore. (Psalm 16:10–11)
What is the Good Life like? Like basking in the glow of a perfectly happy place, like inexhaustible pleasures that don’t fade, or weaken, or run out.
Let’s put these together. The inner experience of Psalm 16 is contentment, gratitude, peace, joy, hopeful assurance about the future. For the past: gratitude. For the present, joy, contentment and peace, for the future, hope and confidence. Put together: fullness of joy, pleasures forevermore.
Now if this is a psalm which finds its ultimate fulfilment in Messiah, the best way to imagine what this looks like and feels like is to think of the Lord Jesus in the Gospels. But wait, wasn’t Jesus a Man of Sorrows, and Acquainted with grief? He was. But like Paul, He was sorrowful and yet always rejoicing. He lived with gratitude to His Father, perfect contentment and peace in the present, full of rejoicing and delight in the present moment, absolute security and rest about the future. He was the sort of man that drew children into His arms, the sort of man that people who had made a career out of sin felt willing to approach. He was the sort of man whose joy was slandered by the Pharisees as gluttony and overindulging.
“Jesus Christ is the happiest being in the universe. His gladness is greater than all the angelic gladness of heaven. He mirrors perfectly the infinite, holy, indomitable mirth of his Father” (Seeing and Savouring Jesus Christ). G. K. Chesterton said this about Jesus “There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes [thought] that it was His [joy].”
This is not a life of wearing a plastered grin on your face. It is not a life of flippant or frivolous happiness. This is deep and serious joy, the kind that could fast for 40 days, the kind that could endure slander and opposition, the kind that could go to a cross and endure it for the joy set before Him.
II. The Explanation of the Good Life
The key to the good life is found in verse 2.
O my soul, you have said to the LORD, “You are my Lord, My goodness is nothing apart from You.” (Psalm 16:2)
David recounts his first commitment. There he said to Israel’s God, called here by His covenant name, Yehovah. Yehovah, you are my Adonai. You are my Master, the Head of my soul, my source. This is very much like the New Testament moment when we bow the knee to Israel’s God through Jesus Christ, and accept Him. We repent of being our own lords, and we look to His work on the cross, and we say, Lord, you are my Lord. Come into my life, forgive me, take over, make me new.
And then he says the key to the Psalm: My goodness is nothing apart from You. (Psalm 16:2)
What does that mean? David is saying, I have no good besides You. I have no good thing apart from You. If there is a good thing in my life to enjoy, then it comes from You. All the good gifts of my life can be traced back to you. You Yourself are my ultimate good, my ultimate reward. It is what Asaph said in Psalm 73:
Whom have I in heaven but You? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides You. My flesh and my heart fail; But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. (Psalm 73:25-26)
Notice how the rest of the psalm proves that David meant that.
- Verse 5 and 6: Who is David’s inheritance? The Lord Himself. Yehovah, You Yourself [alone] are my share of wealth, my portion of what I am to receive, you are my overflowing cup of blessing.
- Verse 7: Who is David’s counselor and teacher? The Lord Himself.
- Verse 8: Who is David’s guide, guard, his north-star, his goal, his stability? The Lord Himself.
- Verses 10-11 Who is David’s destiny, his ultimate hope, his future paradise? The Lord Himself.
This even extends to the people David identifies with.
As for the saints who are on the earth, “They are the excellent ones, in whom is all my delight.” (Psalm 16:3)
God’s people, the saints, the ones who seek to be like their God and Saviour – holy as He is holy – these are the people that David regards as the true nobility. These are the honourable, excellent, famous, mighty ones. “These are the people I admire, these are celebrities to me. These are my people, my loyalties. They are my heroes.”
I am a companion of all who fear You, And of those who keep Your precepts. (Psalm 119:63)
Why? Again, the source of the good things, in this case the good thing of friendship and companionship and society, is traced back to and rooted in God Himself. If they love You, Lord, then I love them. I love what you love, and if they share those loves, then I love them.
David practices ultimate love. He loves all other things as a means to the one greatest love of His life: God. All other things are means to one great end: God. Everything outside of God, David loves them for God’s sake. He doesn’t love God instrumentally. He loves God for Himself.
What is the difference between instrumental love and ultimate love?
Ken gives Barbie a gold necklace, and Barbie loves Ken. Ken gives Barbie a house by the ocean and Barbie loves Ken. Ken gives Barbie an unlimited credit card and Barbie loves Ken. Ken stops giving things to Barbie, and Barbie stops loving Ken. What does Barbie love?
God gives me health, and I love God. God gives me a job and enough money, I love God. God gives me healthy children, and I love God. God protects me and my loved ones, and I love God. God gives me a certain quality of life, and I love God. And if God takes any or all of those things away, then what?
Some people want God to be their Cosmic Cash Cow. Some people want God to be their Prescription-free Prozac pill. Some people want God to be their good luck charm. That’s loving God instrumentally. There is some good beyond God, some good better than God.
Jonathan Edwards:
“For if we love him not for his own sake, but for something else, then our love is not terminated on him, but on something else, as its ultimate object. … If we love not God because he is what he is, but only because he is profitable to us, in truth we love him not at all.
Bernard of Clairvaux:
“So, all the more, one who loves God truly asks no other recompense than God Himself; for if he should demand anything else it would be the prize that he loved and not God.
The reason for loving God in this ultimate way is that He is the only true God. There is a great contrast then in verse 4 between the true God and idols.
Their sorrows shall be multiplied who hasten after another god; Their drink offerings of blood I will not offer, Nor take up their names on my lips. (Psalm 16:4)
David says, if you worship the wrong god, it will fill your life with pain and sorrow. False gods always disappoint you, divide you, and betray you. Idolatry will bring grief and problems. In our country, this might be actual false gods. The gods of false religion. The worship of ancestors. But it can also be secular gods: relationships, money, cars, your appearance, your health, drugs, drink, sex, entertainment, holidays, career.
David says, I will not dabble with idolatry: I don’t partake in their worship, I don’t even say the names of their gods. Jesus was the most God-centred man who has ever lived. Jesus lived with unshakable confidence in His Father’s complete sovereignty. Jesus had rooted all His goodness, all His happiness ultimately in God.
You see, elsewhere the psalms teach us a very important principle: we become like what we worship.
The idols of the nations are silver and gold, The work of men’s hands.
They have mouths, but they do not speak; Eyes they have, but they do not see;
They have ears, but they do not hear; Nor is there any breath in their mouths.
Those who make them are like them; So is everyone who trusts in them. (Psalm 135:15–18)
People who worship their appearance become as shallow as their skin-deep appearance. People who worship money become as fickle and fleeting as the money in and money out they covet. People who worship a distant, cold God become aloof and cold.
Now let me extend the principle. If you say you are a Christian and you say God is the one you worship, is the God you worship Himself a happy God?
I remember a transformative change in my Christian life was when I was shown the biblical logic. If you believe there is only one God, then He is supreme. If He is supreme, then He is sovereign. If God is truly sovereign over everything, then everything is going according to God’s plan. And if everything is going according to God’s plan, then God is not frustrated, irritated, disappointed or gloomy. Instead, if God is sovereign, then God is also the happiest being of all, irrepressibly joyful, an overflowing fountain of holy gladness.
Up till then, I would have told you that I believed God was sovereign, but I thought all the evil, and all the rebellion, and all the rejection mightily displeased Him and made Him primarily grieved. And the truth is, since we become like what we worship, if you think of God as primarily grieved, so will you be. If your God is not happy, then He is not fully supreme.
You couldn’t have Psalm 16 without a sovereign God. Only a sovereign God could control your inheritance, your destiny, guide you, counsel you. Only a sovereign God could conquer death and raise someone from the dead. Only a sovereign God could offer fullness of joy and pleasures at His right hand. That’s why David was joyful. Because His joys were rooted in a joyful God.
This is the Explanation of the Good Life: true joy only comes from making the joyful God the source of your joys.
III. The Exercise of the Good Life
We’ve already seen the first key:
O my soul, you have said to the LORD, “You are my Lord, My goodness is nothing apart from You.” (Psalm 16:2)
He made God His ultimate satisfaction. If you cannot enjoy it in God, it should not be enjoyed. If you can love it for God’s sake, then love it. If you can thank God for it, then partake of it. You Romans 11:36 it – this is of Him, and through Him, and to Him.
But the second thing that David did is what it looks like at 8:30 on a Tuesday morning, or 7pm Thursday night, or Saturday afternoon. This is what ultimate satisfaction looks like at home, at work, at church, alone or in company.
I have set the LORD always before me; Because He is at my right hand I shall not be moved. (Psalm 16:8)
He made God his central orientation. I have set – shiviti – to place, to set, to arrange the Lord always, at all time, before me. God is not an afterthought. God is not peripheral. God is not a side-concern. God is in front and ahead. He is central, unavoidable, inescapable, and focal. David says, I always seek to live in God’s presence. I seek to let God’s Word and God’s truth become like a filter or a lens upon everything in front of me.
This is truly a wonderful description of how Jesus lived. “I always do those things that please Him.” (John 8:29) “I do not seek My own will but the will of the Father who sent Me.” (John 5:30)
“the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner. (John 5:19)
Jesus lived in His Father’s presence by prayer, by obedience, by meditating on the Word. The same Spirit that filled and enabled Him can enable us, if we make this earnest commitment: I have set the Lord always before me. I want to acknowledge Him in all my ways. I want to rejoice evermore, pray without ceasing, and give thanks in everything. I want to meditate on His Word in the day and in the night. I want to abide in Him. This doesn’t mean pressing things, conversations, commitments won’t fully occupy our attention. They will, and they must. But what it means is like the needle of a compass will keep swinging back to magnetic north, a believer who is serious about joy keeps swinging his attention back to the Lord always before me. That’s how you keep connecting all the good in your life back to God.
As you can tell, joy in God is not for the lazy, for the frivolous. Seeking joy in God is not for the flippant, for those seeking fun. It’s serious business making God your ultimate satisfaction and your central orientation. In fact, it involves plenty of sacrifice, giving up lesser joys, denying yourself the passing pleasures of sin, embracing service and sacrifice and sometimes suffering for ultimate satisfaction in God. People who desire fullness of joy do it at great cost and with great faith.
So much so, that the only way we can do it is through faith in His sustaining and keeping grace. That is why the very first verse is the one and only request in the psalm.
Preserve me, O God, for in You I put my trust. (Psalm 16:1)
I can’t do this, Lord. Only you can do it in me. Only you can sustain me, keep me, enable me to endure, and preserve my faith to the end. I trust you, Lord, not my own heart, not my own determination, not my own strength. I want You to be my ultimate satisfaction, and I want you to be my central orientation, but I can only have that by faith in Your grace. I will work out my own salvation with fear and trembling, but please, work in me to will and to do of your good pleasure.
This is the Exercise of the Good Life.
You might still be a person who doesn’t believe or trust that God is the source of the truest joys. C. S. Lewis said “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.” Your problem is not that you want joy; it is that you don’t want it badly enough to risk it all on Jesus Christ. You want it safe and predictable, which means you’re settling for less. Today, God’s Word calls on you to stop settling for the inferior pleasures of man-made gods, false gods, things that will not satisfy. Come to Jesus Christ.
But if you confess Christ as Lord, then the real Good Life is not out of reach for you. What you must first settle on is if you believe that He is this sovereign, supreme God, unshakably joyful in Himself, irrepressibly glad in bringing all things to pass.
And then, you have to be serious about joy in God. That means declaring that God is your ultimate satisfaction, and setting Him, by grace to be your central orientation.