Hope in Psalm 16

This evening we’re beginning a little sermon series. We’ll be working through Psalm 16 over the next 4 evenings that I will preach. This evening, July 13, August 10 and August 17. And I’m calling this series Our Christian Hope. One of the greatest realities, one of the greatest blessings we have as Christians is hope. We have a worldview suffused with hope. (We have a basis for our hope). Think about this: Are your best days ahead of you or behind you? If you’re a Christian, the answer is always ahead of you.’ 

We live knowing the greatest conflict in the world has been decided and the victory is won. And we know, from Psalm 16, that we hope in the future Resurrection of our bodies and in communion with God forevermore. Fullness of joy; pleasures forevermore. Who doesn’t want that? 

Now we live in a particularly hopeless time and culture. Especially see this in younger generation. In 2019 – before COVID, CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey reported that HS students reported increase in adolescent suicide rates, and percent of teens experiencing feelings of persistent sadness and hopeless rose from 26% in 2009 to 37% in 2019. In 2021 42% 

If you look at results from 2023 survey, the “promising improvement” listed is that this percentage fell from 42% to 40%. 40% of students. 53% female students felt persistently sad or hopeless. In public high school. 

Hope is something that we have to offer our neighbors, our friends, our children; our campus. And it’s something we need to lay hold of ourselves. So we will look at Psalm 16 over four weeks as I mentioned. Tonight I want to look at the Basis for our Christian Hope. We’ll be looking particularly at v1-2 and v10-11. 

Where Does Our Hope Come From?

The specific hope that Psalm 16 focuses on, as I have mentioned, is resurrection from the dead, and everlasting enjoyment of God. And the basis for our hope is in our triune God. We see in this passage is that he is the God a) who keeps us (v1), b) who is source of all good (v2) and c) who’s gone before us (v10-11) Those will be our points this evening

The Basis for Our hope is our God who keeps us.

You see this in verse 1. This Psalm begins with David crying out “preserve me, O God for in you I take refuge.” It sounds like the psalm will go on, like in many psalms to talk about all the trouble he is in. But there’s none of that. It’s a psalm of robust confidence in God, of expressing, the Psalmist’s delight in God. But it starts with this cry for help: preserve me, or guard me, keep me. 

Here’s what this opening cry says about the basis for our Christian hope. The God who we put our trust in, the God who we hope in, is a God who keeps his people. 

The word “preserve” here can be translated a number of ways. Preserve, guard, protect – or keep. This is a very common verb in the OT. Shows up a bit less than 500x. 

– It is used to describe a fundamental aspect of man’s responsibility in God’s creation. God places Adam in the garden to “work and keep” it. – It is used to describe the angel who guards the way back into the garden with a flaming sword after fallen Adam and Eve are banished. – Cain asks “Am I my brother’s keeper?” showing how unfaithful fallen man is. 

But it’s also used of God. Think for example of Psalm 121. You might know verse 1-2.: 

“1 I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? 2 My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”

But after that, what follows is a description of God’s care for his people. And 6 times it uses a form of this verb. “Keep”. Listen. 

“3 He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. 4 Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. 5 The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand. 6 The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. 7 The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. 8 The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore.” The Lord keeps his people. Keeper is in fact a name for God. 

If you’re a soccer or hockey fan, you know how important a good keeper is. I’m a hockey fan. Stanley cup playoffs just finished. There were two very talented, incredibly skilled teams in the final this year. In fact, one team, Edmonton, has perhaps the best player in the NHL right now. Connor McDavid. But Edmonton was the losing team. Florida – of all teams – was the winning team. Now there are a number of reasons you could point to for why Florida won. But, as is the case most years, this year, Florida had the better goalkeeper. Team with the better keeper wins 9x out of 10. The goal keeper, the goal guarder, goal protector, who can more faithfully, consistently protect the goal, wins. 

Side note, Florida’s goalie was interviewed after the game and the first words out of his mouth were “glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.” – pretty cool words to hear on national tv. God never gives up a goal. God protects his people perfectly. 

God’s perfect protection is part of the blessing God gives to his people. That’s what it means when you hear those words, “The Lord bless you and keep you.” All David is doing here at the start of this Psalm is praying God’s promises. God has said “this is what it means to be my people: you have my protection.” So David prays, “protect me.” “Keep me.” 

Friends in Christ, doesn’t that give you confidence? He is your keeper. He is a perfect protector. He brings all of his people home to see his face, he brings all his loved ones, and if you’re his child, you’re his loved one, to resurrection. 

And like David, our call is to cry out to him. To ask for what he has already said he will do. And what hope we have that such a God will answer such a prayer. We have a God who keeps us. (1st pt)

The God who is the basis for our hope is the source of all good things.

Second, We see in verse 2 David says ‘I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.”’

David speaks to the LORD, using what we might call his proper name. All caps “LORD” in your Bible. Don’t know exactly how they pronounced this name anymore, hence the convention of small caps/all caps “LORD” (Yahweh). Then he calls him “the Lord” – title like “Master.” Our God, who is personal, who reveals his name to us, is also our master, our sovereign. 

Don’t always like the idea of someone being sovereign over us. As Americans we don’t love authority. Kings n such. We’re celebrating that this week. 

But here’s what David says about our God. This Master, this King, this Lord is all good, only good, all the time. 

“I have no good apart from you.” The wording in Hebrew is a little difficult, but it’s something like “My good, or goodness, is not beyond you.” That is, “I don’t have anything good besides you.” He’s not denying that God made all things good. But by comparison, God is so good, that all things look bad in comparison. 

As a Christian, you don’t have to worry about who is in charge of your world, of your life. You know: it’s Yahweh. He’s your Lord, he calls all the shots. And you don’t have to worry about what he’s like. He’s good. In himself. 

Which is why he creates all things and everything that comes out is “good”. Then when God’s Son Jesus comes to live and die for us, and Peter latter summarizes his whole ministry by saying “Jesus went about doing good.” (Acts 10:38). 

Psalm 119 says “You are good and do good.” Now, beyond David claiming that God is good, he is claiming that God is his good. All his good. God is his delight. 

And my friends, that is one of the chief markers that distinguishes a true Christian from someone who just professes the faith, and the person who thinks that any generic belief in God will do. Love for God. Delighting in him. Worshipping and enjoying this God. Seeing him as all your good.

Can you say this? Not just that God is your Lord. Not just that he tells you how to live your life. But that he is everything to you. You have nothing good apart from him. 

If you can, you not only know that God is powerful and will keep you, but that the God whom you set your hope on is worth following. Is worth trusting. And his plans and preservation are all towards good ends. 

Because he is good. We have a keeping God, and a good God who is the basis for our hope. And thirdly:

Our God has gone before us. That is the basis for our hope.

As we’re thinking about God being the basis of our hope, we’ve talked a lot about who God is. He keeps his people. He is steadfast and faithful. He is good. Our hope rests in who God is. 

But as we’re looking at this Psalm, I want us to see that our hope also lies in what God has done for us. When the Holy Spirit came down on the disciples at Pentecost and Peter preached his sermon, one of his texts was Psalm 16:8-11. These are the verses that describe the Psalmist’s confidence in the extent of God’s protection: “For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your Holy One see corruption.”

Peter points out that strictly speaking, David did not have this happen to him. “Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day.” 

Then Peter says, “Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses.

Paul makes a similar point in Acts 13. The words of Psalm 16 are not just the words of David. They are most truly the words of Jesus Christ, prophetically written hundreds of years beforehand. 

God determined that it was not just enough to give us confidence that God is the kind of God who will preserve us and raise us up. God sent his Son to go before us and die and rise again. He doesn’t just claim that he can defeat death. He came in our nature and he did defeat death. 

Why can we as Christians live with hope each day? Because our God did it. He The unchanging God united himself with our nature. The one who cannot die submitted himself to feel our pain He submitted himself in our nature to death. And death could not hold God. And so our Lord destroyed death for us. And showed us what it looks like to die in the Lord. He showed us even the kind of body we will have. 

That’s why when we talk about Christian Hope we talk about it fundamentally differently from the normal way people talk about hope. 

“I hope it won’t rain today.” There’s no assurance that it won’t rain in that hope. “I hope I get a baseball bat for Christmas.” Well unless I’ve been in my parents closet, it’s just expressing a general desire for me to get something that I want. 

But “I hope that I will rise from the dead one day and enjoy pleasures forevermore at God’s right hand.” My friend, if you’ve trusted in Christ; if you have no good apart from him, you’re more certain of that than you are of making it home tonight. 

Will the sun come up tomorrow morning? Almost definitely. Will you rise from the dead and enjoy God at the last day? You can be infinitely more certain of that. Because God himself is the basis for our hope. He is a God who keeps his people. He is the source of all good, and he has gone before us. Trust in him. Hope in him. And Christian, live in hope. Let us pray.

(Josh Duemler is the Assistant Pastor at Fellowship Reformed Church (PCA) in Mount Pleasant, MI).