The Empty Tomb from the Psalter
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Read Psalm 16 in full before proceeding, and read Acts 2:22–32 and Acts 13:32–37 alongside it. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.
For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption. You lead me in the path of life. I experience absolute joy in your presence; you always give me sheer delight.
Psalm 16:10 (ESV), 11
We left the Lord Jesus last session in the dust of death. Psalm 22 took us all the way down (My strength drains away like water … You set me in the dust of death), and then it turned and climbed into praise, but it never quite told us how a man laid in the dust comes to be leading the praises of a congregation a few verses later. It assumed the rising. It did not describe it. Now we open the psalm that does.
Psalm 16 is the empty tomb from the Psalter, and it was placed at the front of this volume alongside Psalm 22 on purpose, because the two belong together and the church has never been allowed to have one without the other. Psalm 22: forsaken, mocked, drained away like water, the dust of death. Psalm 16: you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, the flesh dwelling secure, the path of life. Good Friday and Easter morning, sitting two psalms apart in David’s prayer book, waiting a thousand years for the One who would pray them both.
And here is the astonishing thing about this particular psalm, the thing that earns it a session of its own this early in the volume. Psalm 16 was the text of the first Christian sermon ever preached. When Peter stood up on the day of Pentecost, fifty days after the resurrection, with a bewildered crowd gathered around the sound of a rushing wind, and preached the risen Christ aloud for the first time in the history of the church, the Scripture he reached for was not a Gospel, because no Gospel had yet been written. He reached for a psalm. He preached the resurrection of the Lord Jesus straight out of Psalm 16, and three thousand people were baptized that day on the strength of it (Acts 2:41).
We are so used to proving the resurrection from the empty tomb and the eyewitnesses that we can forget how the apostles themselves preached it. When Paul hands on the gospel in its earliest form, he says the Lord Jesus was raised on the third day according to the scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:4). By the Scriptures he means the Old Testament, the only Scriptures the church yet had. The first preachers did not merely report the resurrection as a startling event; they proved it from the Scriptures that had foretold it, and showed that the empty tomb was the very thing the prophets had promised. Psalm 16 is one of the Scriptures they meant, perhaps the chief one. To study it is to put our hands on the text the apostles used to preach Easter before there was an Easter Gospel to read it from.
Last session we named the doctrine that makes such a thing possible: David was a prophet who was given words that ran past his own life, words the Spirit of Christ in him was aiming at Someone yet to come. We said it; here the apostles say it outright and build a sermon on it. Because he was a prophet, Peter says, David by foreseeing this spoke about the resurrection of the Christ (Acts 2:30–31). What we drew out as a principle, Peter preaches as a fact, with the proof standing in plain sight.
Because the whole argument turns on one thing David wrote that David could not truthfully have said of himself: you will not let your holy one see corruption (v. 10 ESV). David’s holy flesh most certainly did see corruption. He died old and full of days, was buried, and his tomb was a known address in Jerusalem that Peter could point to as he spoke. So either the line failed, and a psalm in the inspired Scriptures made a promise that came to nothing, or it was never finally about David at all, but about Another whose flesh did not decay. We will walk the psalm down to that line and watch the apostles spring it like a trap. And we will read the whole of it, first and always, as the prayer of the One it was waiting for: the Lord Jesus, trusting the Father through death itself, certain He would not be left in the grave; and then, in Him, as our prayer too.
The Refuge Where the Psalm Begins
The heading calls it a miktam of David (the NET simply says a prayer of David). The word miktam sits over a handful of psalms and no one is quite sure what it means; the old guesses range from an inscription, something carved to last, to a golden poem. We will not build anything on a word the scholars cannot pin down. It is enough that it is David’s, and that it has lasted, carved into the church’s memory more deeply than any inscription in stone.
The psalm opens with a plea and a profession pressed close together. Protect me, O God, for I have taken shelter in you (v. 1). The verb is chasah: to take shelter, to run for cover to someone, to hide in another as in a fortress. We have met it before. Psalm 2 closed the great opening diptych by pronouncing blessed all who take shelter in him (chasah again), in the Son, the LORD’s Anointed. Now here is Psalm 16 opening with the very same word, but the One taking shelter is the Son Himself, and the refuge He runs to is the Father. The One in whom we are told to hide is first shown hiding in God. Before He is our shelter, He shelters in the LORD. There is no trust He asks of His people that He did not render first and perfectly Himself.
I say to the LORD, “You are the Lord, my only source of well-being” (v. 2). This is the creature speaking, and we should let it be exactly that, because the One who prays this psalm prays it as true man. The eternal Son, who is Himself God of God, took our flesh, and in that flesh He lived a human life of utter dependence on His Father, owning no good He did not receive, claiming nothing apart from God. My only source of well-being. That is the first commandment kept from the inside, the whole of it, you shall have no other gods, rendered not as a strain but as a glad confession, by the one human being who never once looked for good anywhere but in the LORD. He kept it where Adam broke it, where Israel broke it, where we break it every day. And He kept it for us.
There is a quiet pastoral gift folded into that. We are told all through the Scriptures to trust God, and we know how poorly we manage it, how our trust drains away the moment the ground shakes under us. Psalm 16 sets before us a trust that never drained, a refuge-taking that never once faltered, rendered in our own flesh by the One who came to stand in our place. So when our own faith feels too thin to bear any weight, we are not finally thrown back on the quality of our trusting. We take refuge in the One who took refuge; we hide in His unfaltering hiding in the Father; and His perfect trust becomes the solid floor beneath our shaky one. The blessing Psalm 2 pronounced on all who take shelter in the Son rests, at the very bottom, on the Son’s own taking of shelter in God.
The Saints and the Other Gods
From that confession the psalm looks out at two companies of people, and the old two ways of Psalm 1 come back into view. On the one side: As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones, in whom is all my delight (v. 3 ESV; the NET reads vv. 3–4 quite differently, as a lament over leaders who turned to other gods). The saints are simply the LORD’s set-apart people, the believers scattered through Israel, and the speaker says his whole delight is in them. Hear that as the word of Christ and it lands with weight. The risen Lord’s delight is in His people, the saints in the land, the believers who are His by faith. The same mouth that confessed the LORD as my only source of well-being turns and says that His delight is in the people the Father gave Him. He has no good apart from God, and no delight apart from God’s people. The two are not in competition. To love the LORD is to love the saints He loves.
On the other side: The sorrows of those who run after another god shall multiply; their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out or take their names on my lips (v. 4 ESV). Here is the road that runs the other way: the chase after other gods, which the psalm flatly promises will multiply sorrows. This is a law-word, plain and unsoftened: idolatry does not deliver what it advertises; it compounds grief. And the speaker will have no part in it. He will not so much as let the names of the false gods cross His lips. The blessed Man of Psalm 1 who would not sit in the seat of scoffers is here the holy One who will not pour the idolater’s offering or speak the idol’s name. The same separation, the same refusal of the wrong road. He walks the way of life and will not be drawn onto the way that perishes, and in a moment the psalm will tell us where the way of life leads.
Read of Christ, that delight in the saints has a particular depth. In the upper room, with Psalm 22 only hours away, the Lord Jesus prayed to His Father about the very people Psalm 16 calls the excellent ones: They belonged to you, and you gave them to me (John 17:6); I am praying on behalf of them (John 17:9). The saints in the land are the people the Father gave to the Son, and the Son’s whole delight is in them. He went to the cross for the joy set out for him (Hebrews 12:2), and the joy was, in no small part, them: a people made His own, gathered out of every land, the saints in whom He delights. When a believer wonders whether he amounts to anything in the eyes of the Lord Jesus, Psalm 16 has answered before he asks: in whom is all my delight.
And the other road is named with equal plainness. The sorrows of those who run after another god shall multiply. This is not a threat God invented to keep us in line; it is a true report of how idolatry actually pays out. Every false god promises what it cannot deliver, and the chase after it ends not in the satisfaction it advertised but in multiplied sorrow, the ache that drives a man on to the next god, and the next, each one costing more and giving less. The One praying this psalm will not set a foot on that road; He will not pour the idolater’s offering or so much as let the idol’s name cross His lips. And because He walked the way of life without once straying onto the way that multiplies sorrows, He is able to lead His delighted saints safely along it after Him.
The LORD My Portion
Now the psalm reaches for the language of land. The LORD is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot. The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance (vv. 5–6 ESV; the NET paraphrases away the portion, the cup, and the measuring lines this section unfolds). To feel the force of these verses you have to remember how Israel came into the promised land. It was surveyed and divided, tribe by tribe and family by family; the measuring lines were stretched out across the ground, and each household received its allotment, its portion, its inheritance: its piece of the land to hold and pass down. The whole nation’s life was staked to that division of the soil.
With one exception. The tribe of Levi received no allotment of land because, the LORD said, I am your portion and your inheritance (Numbers 18:20; Deuteronomy 18:1–2). The priests and Levites were given no fields because they were given God Himself. And that is the very language Psalm 16 now takes up: the LORD is my chosen portion … I have a beautiful inheritance. The One praying this psalm has no acreage; His inheritance is the LORD. Read it of Christ and you have the great High Priest who, like the landless Levites, has no portion but His Father, and who at the end will commend His spirit into the Father’s hands because the Father is all the inheritance He has ever wanted or needed.
And here the psalm turns and offers the pew-sitter something it would be a shame to walk past. The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. The believer’s true inheritance is not the size of his allotment in this life: not the house, not the land, not the balance in the account, not the comfortable retirement that may or may not come. The believer’s inheritance is the LORD Himself, and a Christian who has grasped that has grasped something the richest man without it has missed entirely. You hold my lot. Whatever the lines have marked off for any of us, the portion underneath the portion, the inheritance beneath every other inheritance, is God. The man who has the LORD has had the lines fall for him in pleasant places, though he own nothing else on earth.
One more word in those verses repays turning over. The LORD is my chosen portion and my cup. A cup, in the Psalter, is a thing handed to you to drink: sometimes the cup of blessing, sometimes the cup of the LORD’s wrath that the wicked must drink to the dregs. And here is something strange and wonderful about the One who prays Psalm 16. He could call the LORD His cup, His brimming portion of blessing, and yet in another garden, on another night, the same Lord would kneel and pray let this cup pass from me (Matthew 26:39), and then rise and drink it: the cup of wrath that was never His and was always ours. He drank the cup of judgment down to the dregs so that the LORD could become our cup of blessing. The portion He accepted was our curse; the portion He hands back to us is His own God. It is the whole exchange of the cross again, folded into a single word: cup.
I Have Set the LORD Always Before Me
I will praise the LORD who guides me; yes, during the night I reflect and learn (v. 7). The guidance of the LORD by day, and in the night (the wakeful, sleepless, fearful hours when the heart turns things over in the dark) the same instruction, still holding. We saw the Lord Jesus pray through the night of the cross in Psalm 22: during the night my prayers do not let up. Here is the other side of those nights: a heart that, even unrested, is being taught, kept, and guided by the God it has set before it.
We should not pass over the night too quickly, because the Lord Jesus knew guidance in the night in a particular garden. In Gethsemane, with the cross a few hours off, He prayed through the dark until His sweat fell like drops of blood, and rose from it settled, resolved, ready to drink the cup. During the night I reflect and learn. He learned obedience through the things he suffered (Hebrews 5:8), not because He was ever disobedient, but because real obedience is forged in real nights, and He walked through His to the end. The believer who lies awake in his own dark hours, turning his troubles over, is not outside the experience of his Lord. He is inside it, and he has a Savior who took counsel in the night and was not shaken, and who keeps watch with him now.
I have set the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken (v. 8 ESV; Peter’s quotation keeps the same picture, I saw the Lord always in front of me, Acts 2:25). This is the steady center of the psalm, the line everything before it has been building toward and everything after it will rest on. To set the LORD always before me is to keep God in view in every hour, to refuse to let Him slide out of sight when the trouble comes. And because the LORD stands at my right hand (the strong side, the fighting side, the place a defender stands), the One who prays this shall not be shaken. Not might not. Shall not. There is a flat certainty here that no mere mortal could honestly claim, and the rest of the psalm will tell us why this One can.
Hold on to that phrase, at my right hand, because the apostles will not let it go. In this verse the LORD is at the speaker’s right hand, holding Him steady through death. But when Peter finishes preaching this psalm at Pentecost, he moves straight from the resurrection to the ascension and quotes another psalm, the Lord said to my lord, “Sit at my right hand” (Psalm 110:1; Acts 2:34), and now it is the risen Christ who is at God’s right hand, enthroned. The One who kept the LORD at His right hand through the grave is exalted to the LORD’s right hand beyond it. We will spend a whole session on Psalm 110 and that throne later in this volume. For now it is enough to see that the trust of verse 8 does not end in the tomb. It ends on a throne.
And weigh that certainty once more before we move on, because it is the kind of thing only one Man has ever been able to say without lying. I shall not be shaken. Not braced against being shaken, not hoping to weather it, but shall not be shaken, flatly, said by a Man on His way to a cross. No mere mortal can say that and mean it; we are shaken by far less than death, undone by a bad diagnosis or a hard letter. Only the One who truly kept the LORD always before Him, who never once let God slip out of view even in the dark, could say it and be proved right when the grave itself failed to hold Him down. And here is the gift: the believer comes to say it too, not on his own account, but on His. Joined to the unshaken One, hidden in His refuge, the trembling Christian borrows a steadiness he does not own. Because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken. The certainty is Christ’s; the comfort of it is ours.
Your Holy One Will Not See Corruption
Now the psalm gathers everything into its last three verses, and they climb. Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices; my flesh also dwells secure (v. 9 ESV; Peter’s quotation keeps the body too: my body also will live in hope, Acts 2:26). Therefore: because the LORD is at my right hand, because I shall not be shaken, therefore gladness, rejoicing, and then a word we must not rush past: my flesh also dwells secure. Not only my heart, not only my soul, but my flesh, my body, the part of me that dies and is buried and decays; even that dwells secure. The hope of this psalm is going to be a hope for the body. Keep that in front of you, because tender Christians are forever tempted to shrink the resurrection down to the survival of the soul, and Psalm 16 will not let us.
For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption (v. 10 ESV). Sheol is the grave, the realm of the dead, the place down to which all the living go. The holy one (chasid) is the LORD’s faithful, devoted, covenant-kept one. And see corruption is the language of a body in the ground beginning to decay. (The Hebrew word behind corruption can also be read as the Pit, which is how the NET renders it; but the ancient Greek translation the apostles preached from rendered it decay, and the apostles’ whole argument turns on that sense, so that is where we will stand.) The line makes a staggering claim: this holy one will go down toward death, and the LORD will not abandon Him there, will not leave His body to rot in the ground.
Notice that the psalm does not say the holy one is spared death, or routed around the grave. You will not abandon my soul to Sheol: He goes down to Sheol; He really dies; His soul really enters the realm of the dead. He was truly dead and truly buried, as the creed confesses. (When the creed goes on to say that He descended into hell, it confesses something more: not a further stage of His suffering, but the living Christ, body and soul, going down in victory to proclaim His triumph over the devil and the powers of hell; see 1 Peter 3:18–19 and the Formula of Concord, SD IX.) He did not hover above death and only seem to die. He went all the way in, down among the dead where every child of Adam goes. But He was not abandoned there: not left, not forsaken, not held. Sheol received Him as it has received everyone, and Sheol could not keep Him. On the third day He came out, His flesh never having begun the decay that, by the reckoning of His own people, set in by the fourth day, the decay that had already claimed Lazarus, of whom Martha said, by this time the body will have a bad smell, because he has been buried four days (John 11:39). The Lord Jesus rose on the third, His body whole and uncorrupted, walking out of a grave that had been certain it would hold Him as it holds us all.
Which brings us to the trap the apostles spring, and it is worth watching them do it, because it is the clearest lesson in the whole volume on how the New Testament reads the Old. Peter quotes these very verses to the Pentecost crowd, and then turns the screw: Brothers, I can speak confidently to you about our forefather David, that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day (Acts 2:29). Everyone listening knew where David’s tomb was. They could have walked to it. And a tomb with a body in it is a body that saw corruption. So David, whatever he meant for himself, said something in this psalm that was simply not true of David. Because he was a prophet, Peter concludes, David by foreseeing this spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was neither abandoned to Hades, nor did his body experience decay. This Jesus God raised up, and we are all witnesses of it (Acts 2:30–32).
Paul preaches the identical argument at Antioch, in case we thought Peter had improvised it. He quotes the same line, You will not permit your Holy One to experience decay, and then: For David, after he had served God’s purpose in his own generation, died, was buried with his ancestors, and experienced decay, but the one whom God raised up did not experience decay (Acts 13:35–37). Two apostles, two cities, one argument, and it is airtight. The psalm promises a holy one whose flesh does not decay. David’s flesh decayed. Therefore the psalm was always reaching past David toward One whose flesh would not, and that One is the Lord Jesus, raised on the third day, before decay could set in, His body coming out of the tomb uncorrupted while David’s bones lay quietly where they had always lain.
This is exactly the discipline the series promised, working at full strength. We are not spiritualizing the psalm or hunting hidden meanings; we are doing what the apostles did, in the open, on solid ground. The text strains past its writer (that is the mark of prophecy we named last session), and the apostles, not we, are the ones who name the One it strains toward. And notice what carries the whole argument: not a clever allegory, but a plain historical fact. His tomb is with us to this day. The christological reading rides on real history, on a real David in a real grave, exactly as this series has insisted from the first volume. Take away the historical David and his actual tomb, and Peter has no sermon. Leave them standing, and the empty tomb of the Lord Jesus is preached out of a thousand-year-old psalm.
And the psalm does not stop at the empty tomb; it walks out of it into the open air. You lead me in the path of life. I experience absolute joy in your presence; you always give me sheer delight (v. 11). The path of life is the road that runs through death and out the far side, the road the Lord Jesus was the first to walk all the way, from the dust of death to the Father’s presence, where there is not a little joy but absolute joy, and not delight for a while but delight given always. The psalm that began by taking refuge in God ends in the unshaded presence of God. It started in the storm and ends in the morning. The doe of the dawn, we might almost say, has run clear into the sunrise.
The Path of Life, and Those Who Walk It After Him
So this is Christ’s psalm, the prayer of the One who trusted the Father through the grave and was not left in it. But the whole burden of this volume is that His psalms become ours, prayed in Him, and Psalm 16 is no exception. The question is only how, and here we have to be careful, because it would be easy to claim too much and just as ruinous to claim too little.
Too much would be to take you will not let your holy one see corruption and say it flatly of ourselves: my body will not decay. But it will. The believer’s body is laid in the ground and does exactly what David’s did; we hold no illusions about that, and we bury our dead under that hard truth. Christ’s body did not see corruption, raised on the third day before the fourth-day stench that even Lazarus could not escape (John 11:39). Ours is not spared the grave’s slow work. On the literal face of verse 10, the holy One is Christ, and only Christ.
But too little would be to leave it there, as though the psalm had nothing for the rest of us but a doctrine about Someone else. For the apostle who wrote most about resurrection ties the knot for us: Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep (1 Corinthians 15:20). Firstfruits: the first sheaf of a harvest that guarantees the rest of the field is coming. Christ’s uncorrupted body is not an exception to the human story; it is the first of it, the down payment on every grave that holds a believer. So the Christian’s body does see corruption, and will be raised incorruptible all the same (what is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable, 1 Corinthians 15:42), because the One whose flesh did not decay is the firstfruits of the field where our flesh is sown. The grave gets the believer’s body for a while. It does not get to keep it.
That is how a Christian prays Psalm 16 standing at a graveside, and it is no small thing to be able to. When we lay a believer in the earth, we are not whistling past the corruption; we are confessing, over a body that will decay, that its decay is not the end, because it has been sown into a field whose firstfruits are already raised. We say it every time we confess the creed: not the immortality of the soul, which the pagans believed well enough, but the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Psalm 16 is the Old Testament’s deposit on that article of the creed, and the Lord Jesus is the reason it will be paid in full.
And the believer is not merely waiting at the far end of the path of life for a resurrection still to come; he has already been set on the path, at the font. Therefore we have been buried with him through baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may live a new life. For if we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, we will certainly also be united in the likeness of his resurrection (Romans 6:4–5). The path the Lord Jesus walked first, down into death and out into life, is the path the Christian was joined to in baptism, going down into the water with Christ and rising with Him. So the resurrection is not only the believer’s future; it is already his story, begun. He walks the path of life now, in the One who blazed it, on his way to the presence where it ends.
And set this beside last session and see the gospel whole. Psalm 22 was the Father’s forsaking; Psalm 16 is the Father’s not abandoning. The cross was the sentence served; the empty tomb is the receipt that the sentence was served in full, for the Lord Jesus was given over because of our transgressions and was raised for the sake of our justification (Romans 4:25). The resurrection is the Father’s audible Amen to the finished work of the cross, His public verdict that the sacrifice was accepted and the debt is closed. A Christ who died and stayed dead would be a tragedy and no gospel. The empty tomb is the Father saying, over the whole transaction of Good Friday, done, and accepted, and here is your Son back to prove it. The cross from the Psalter, and the empty tomb from the Psalter; and a sinner who has both has the whole of his salvation written into the prayer book he holds in his hands.
Gathering the Threads
We came to Psalm 16 straight out of the dust of death, looking for the rising that Psalm 22 assumed but never described, and we found it preached, of all places, in the first Christian sermon. Peter at Pentecost and Paul at Antioch both read this psalm of the risen Christ, and both hung the reading on a plain fact anyone could check: David died, was buried, decayed, and his tomb stood in plain sight, so the psalm’s promise that the holy one would not see corruption was never finally about David at all.
We watched the psalm build to that claim. It opens with the Son taking shelter in the Father (chasah, the very word Psalm 2 used of those who take shelter in the Son) and confessing the LORD as my only source of well-being, the first commandment kept from the inside for us. It delights in the saints and refuses the road of the other gods, the two ways of Psalm 1 once more. It claims the LORD Himself as its portion and inheritance in the language once reserved for the landless Levites, and it hands the pew-sitter the same inheritance: not the size of the allotment, but the God beneath it. It sets the LORD at its right hand and refuses to be shaken, a steadiness that ends not in the tomb but, by way of Psalm 110, on a throne. And it climbs to its great claim (flesh dwelling secure, the holy one not abandoned to Sheol or left to decay) and out onto the path of life, into absolute joy in the Father’s presence.
Then we asked how the psalm is ours, and answered carefully: not that our flesh escapes the grave, for it does not, but that Christ’s uncorrupted body is the firstfruits of a harvest that includes every believer’s grave, so that we bury our dead in the sure hope of the resurrection of the body. Psalm 22 was the forsaking; Psalm 16 is the not-abandoning; the cross was the sentence served, and the empty tomb is the Father’s Amen that it was served in full. The cross and the empty tomb, set two psalms apart in David’s prayer book: a Christian who holds both holds the whole of his salvation.
For Discussion
Both Peter and Paul rest their argument on an ordinary fact: David died, was buried, and his tomb was a known place, so his body did experience decay (Acts 2:29; 13:36). Why is that plain historical fact essential to their claim that Psalm 16 speaks of Christ, and what does it show about the way this series reads the Old Testament?
Psalm 2 pronounced blessed all who take shelter in the Son; Psalm 16 opens with the Son Himself taking shelter in the Father (compare Psalm 2:12 and Psalm 16:1). What does it mean for those who shelter in Christ that He first sheltered in God?
In Psalm 16:5–6 the speaker calls the LORD his portion and inheritance, language once used of the Levites, who received no land because the LORD Himself was their inheritance (Numbers 18:20). What changes when a believer’s inheritance is God Himself rather than God’s gifts?
Psalm 16:9 says my flesh also dwells secure, and the apostles press that the Holy One’s flesh did not experience decay. Read 1 Corinthians 15:20–23. Why does the session insist this is a hope for the body and not only for the soul, and how is Christ’s bodily resurrection the ground of the believer’s?
The session was careful to say that the believer’s body, unlike Christ’s, does decay in the grave, and yet Psalm 16 remains the believer’s hope. How can a psalm that says you will not let your holy one see corruption comfort a Christian standing at the graveside of someone he loves?
Set Psalm 22 and Psalm 16 side by side: the forsaking and the not-abandoning, the cross and the empty tomb. Read Romans 4:25. In what sense is the resurrection the Father’s Amen to the cross, and why would a Christ who died and stayed dead be no gospel at all?
Looking Ahead
These first three sessions have set the volume’s foundation: the Psalter is the prayer book of Christ (Psalm 1 and 2), and at its heart lie the cross (Psalm 22) and the empty tomb (Psalm 16), the crucified and risen Lord met in His own prayers before we go a step further. With that foundation laid, we need one more tool before we range out across the whole book: a way of reading that does not lose its footing among the Psalter’s very different kinds of poem.
So the next session is a genre map. The Psalter is not a single kind of writing; it is a library of kinds: laments that cry out of trouble, royal psalms that crown a king, wisdom psalms that teach the two ways, songs of ascent for pilgrims going up to Jerusalem, hymns of pure praise, and the hard imprecatory psalms that call down judgment on the LORD’s enemies. Each kind asks to be read on its own terms, and each kind, read with Lutheran eyes, yields its own sight of Christ and its own working of law and gospel. Before we walk through the rooms one by one in the sessions to come, we will stand in the doorway and learn to tell the rooms apart.
Before the next session, page slowly through the book of Psalms with an eye for variety. Notice how differently Psalm 13, Psalm 100, Psalm 110, Psalm 121, and Psalm 137 each sound, and ask what kind of prayer each one is.
Closing Prayer
Risen Lord Jesus Christ, the Holy One whom the Father would not abandon to the grave nor let see corruption, we bless You that the path of life ran through death, and that You walked it to the end and out the other side. You took refuge in the Father through the dark; You set Him always before You; You were not shaken, even in the dust of death, and on the third day Your flesh came out of the tomb while the powers of death stood by undone. We confess that David sang of You before he knew Your name, and that the empty tomb was written in the prayer book long before the morning it came true.
Make us sure of the harvest of which You are the firstfruits. When we lay our beloved dead in the ground, and when at last we are laid there ourselves, let us not grieve as those who have no hope, but commit body and soul to the Father who did not abandon You and will not abandon those who are Yours. Teach us to count the LORD our portion and our inheritance, to set Him always before us, and to walk after You on the path of life, until we stand where You have gone before us, in the presence of the Father where there is fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. For You live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.