“No wonder my heart is glad, and I rejoice. My body rests in safety. For you will not leave my soul among the dead or allow your holy one to rot in the grave. You will show me the way of life, granting me the joy of your presence and the pleasures of living with you forever.”
Psalm 16:9-11 NLT
David was in a good place, assured of God’s presence in his life, assured for his future beyond the grave, and experiencing spiritual blessings with a “glad heart” and “the joy of [His] presence”.
David also had a prophetic glimpse of what was to come, when Jesus came to this world. We fast forward to when Paul and Barnabas were in Antioch and Paul was preaching in the local synagogue with a message entwining Jewish history with the message of salvation through Jesus, their Messiah. Paul referred to Psalm 16:10 and then explained why David’s prophesy was for Someone else. He said, “Another psalm explains it more fully: ‘You will not allow your Holy One to rot in the grave.’ This is not a reference to David, for after David had done the will of God in his own generation, he died and was buried with his ancestors, and his body decayed. No, it was a reference to someone else—someone whom God raised and whose body did not decay” (Acts 13:35-37). In those years before Christ, I wonder what the Jews made of David’s statement, because they would have been there when David died and was buried, and his body decayed in the tomb like anyone else’s did. Come to that, I wonder what the Jews today, who don’t believe Jesus was the Messiah, make of this prophesy.
David wasn’t fearful of death, because he was totally secure in his relationship with God, and because of that he was assured that God would look after him beyond the grave. The Hebrews believed that after death, a person’s soul ended up in the Place of the Dead, or Sheol. But David faithfully believed that God wouldn’t let his soul stay there because he was looking forward to “the pleasures of living with [God] forever”.
We Christian pilgrims needn’t be afraid of death either because we have been promised that we will spend eternity with Jesus. We will migrate from this evil world, with all its sin and wickedness, into a place of God’s glory, a place of holiness and purity. Jesus said, as we know so well, “For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Yes, our physical bodies will be left behind on Planet Earth, where they will eventually be subsumed back to their constituent parts, one way or another, but our souls will live forever in the presence of the Lord. Jesus said to His disciples, and by association to us as well, “Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in me. There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am”(John 14:1-3). Jesus never told a lie, because he was the perfect sinless Man, so He would not have said something that was untrue.
We pilgrims trust in the Lord. What David prophesised about the Holy One’s body came to pass on the first Easter Sunday and the tomb is empty. There is no body rotting away there. No tell tale bones. And in front of witnesses, that Body rose up into the heavens before them, as we read in Acts 1:9, “After saying this, he was taken up into a cloud while they were watching, and they could no longer see him”. We have faith that there is a Man with a resurrected body in Heaven just now, busily preparing our new home. Like David, we believers won’t find ourselves in the Place of the Dead either after we die. Sheol (or Hades in the Greek) is the place for souls that don’t know Jesus, There is no point in them being in Heaven because it is a place that they know nothing about, a place where they cannot enter because of their unconfessed sins, a place of torment as they mull over their missed opportunity.
For most people, those who don’t know Jesus, the reality of the Place of the Dead should inspire “grave thoughts” indeed, but it needn’t be that way. We pray for our unsaved friends and family, that they too will know the “joy of [His] presence”.
Dear Heavenly Father. Thank You for Jesus, the Holy One anticipated by David all those years before he was born. We pray for our families that they too will come to know Him. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.
Being a Pilgrim 