Reading the Psalms after reading about Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection brings its own delightful surprises. Like so much of the message the world calls foolish, the surprises don’t draw attention to themselves with all kinds of fireworks; often they come with just a whisper.
This time around, Psalm 16 caught me out—a psalm of King David, like so many of them. This means it has special importance for understanding the Messiah. It’s also one of David’s happy ones: everything seems pretty good to him. He has found his refuge in God, and that is better than the misery of the idolater. He feels God has set him in a beautiful inheritance. Life is looking fairly rosy, it seems. So why does he feel he has to pray “Preserve me, O God” (v. 1)?
By the end of the Psalm, you find out: David is praying that his flesh might be secure forever. He prays, confident that the Lord will preserve him even from the grave. Now, in a world like ours, which keeps turning in the kind of death statistics it does, that is some preservation he is asking for.
1000 years later, the apostles Peter and then Paul both preached on this Psalm, saying it was not really about David (Acts 2, 13). Their logic was simple: David’s body was still in the tomb. But Jesus’ body couldn’t be found. So the psalm is about Jesus. He must be the Messiah.
Earlier before he died, when Jesus told his friends that he was going to be killed, but after three days, he would rise, how was he so confident that his body wouldn’t see corruption? Okay (it dawns on me): maybe Jesus was reading Psalm 16 too, just like me. But he read it about himself. He was the Messiah who couldn’t be held down by the grave’s rottenness. So he went to the cross, knowing he would not end up putrefying like the rest of human history. Three days later, he got up out of there.
Then the whisper came: Jesus died for me. We all know that! But hang on: when he rose from the dead, that was for me too. David prayed ‘preserve me’ from the grave, without knowing how that would be possible; now I can pray “Preserve me, O God” from a rotten eternity, and I know the answer is guaranteed. After all, we live in a world in which a man has already risen from the dead.
Or so the whisper goes.
