Psalm 16. The hope of the faithful, and the Messiah’s victory

This psalm is a very personal piece of writing. It begins with the prayer to be preserved because the speaker has trusted God. Spiritually, to be preserved is to be kept whole, and in faith. This becomes the fervour running through this psalm in confident language and declaration.

The words in verse 2, “O my soul”, touch the inmost parts of our being, our soul, which is the means of us having life and being able to know God (see Heaven and Hell 39). This soul-level continues through the psalm, affirming many things because it loves, understands and knows the difference that our love of the Lord and our life in the Word brings. So the soul says, “You are my Lord, my goodness is nothing apart from You.” (Arcana Caelestia 874-876)

The soul knows that all holy people on earth are in true excellence and this is the soul’s delight. The spiritual meaning here is our ability to sense holiness when it is present, in people, in situations, in words and actions, in the sphere we pick up at the level of the soul. (Arcana Caelestia 4154)

The soul knows the consequences of going against the Lord and against what is good and true. It knows that this leads to self-inflicted punishment and finally to hell. This path in life is so terrible it is not even to be thought about, spoken of or named.

By contrast, the Lord is to be thought about, spoken of and named. “O Lord, you are the portion of my inheritance and my cup.” This is to acknowledge that the Lord is the giver, the source of all that we receive and have in our lives. Everything that we can think of that we can use and which we find delight in is from the Lord.

This affirmation leads on to an awesome appreciation of the provision of the Lord in our lives. “The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places…” is a beautiful declaration that everything in our life is for our spiritual good and that we know we are always blessed by the Lord. (Arcana Caelestia 8478.4)

This leads on to a renewed and deeper strong acknowledgment of the Lord in our life. Verse 8 brings out the idea of the permanence of our sense of the Lord who is there before us even when we are involved in life and not thinking about the Lord. (Arcana Caelestia 10259.3)

So the soul expresses itself in open worship of the Lord, and is endlessly uplifted to new states of devotion. The psalm ends with an affirmation that the Lord will bring us out from the darkness and take us out of sight of corruption. The spiritual meaning in these phrases is that we recognise that we are capable of experiencing darkness and we are able to be drawn towards corruption but our trust in the Lord will always be our defence against these states of life.

This leads to the final statement that the Lord shows us the way to live, the Lord’s presence in our being is the very joy of our existence, and at the Lord’s right hand is the eternal pleasures of heavenly life. Spiritually, these three phrases contain everything which relates to our life; its purpose and progress, its need of the Lord to be directing it, and its need to be brought into activity, use and service, which are the right hand of God. (Apocalypse Explained 298.2)