Psalms 16 Footnotes

16:10 David was confident of his deliverance from Sheol and “the Pit”; that is, from death. The Lord will protect his faithful worshiper from it. In its Israelite application, the context could be the struggle against the adherents of false religions, “those who take another god” (v. 4). Still occupying enclaves within Canaan, these peoples ignored the “boundary lines” (v. 6) by which the Lord allocated the promised land to the tribes of Israel (Jos 13–17). Opposition from these polytheistic groups often took the form of open warfare, endangering the king’s life. But the psalm has a prophetic application to the coming King, the Messiah (“faithful one”). At Pentecost, Peter quoted these words with reference to the resurrection of Jesus (Ac 2:8-31); Paul used the psalm the same way in a sermon at Antioch in Pisidia (Ac 13:25). If David’s words stopped short of affirming a bodily resurrection, they were certainly consistent with that hope. Because Christian believers participate in Jesus’s resurrection (e.g., Rm 6:4,8; 8:29; Col 3:1; Rv 1:5), the words of the psalm apply to the “faithful one[s]” of all ages—we will not be abandoned to the decay of the grave.