The Cup of Salvation
On this page
Read Psalm 116 in full before proceeding; it is nineteen verses. Notice the love that rises from being heard, the question of what to render to the LORD, and the cup of salvation the psalmist lifts in thanks. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.
How can I repay the LORD for all his acts of kindness to me?
Psalm 116:12
The last psalm blessed the LORD for His benefits in general. This one narrows to a single, specific rescue, and gives us the gratitude of a person who has been brought back from the very edge of death. It opens with one of the most personal confessions in the whole Psalter: I love the LORD because he heard my plea for mercy, and listened to me. As long as I live, I will call to him when I need help (vv. 1–2). Here is a soul that cried out from the brink, was heard, was delivered, and now loves the God who answered, and wants to know how to thank Him.
There is a reason this psalm belongs here, after the long road we have traveled through the Psalter. We spent six sessions in the laments, learning to cry up out of the depths: How long, LORD; from the deep water I cry out to you, O LORD; O LORD God who delivers me! By day I cry out and at night I pray before you. Psalm 116 is what those cries were reaching toward. It is a lament answered, sung from the far side of the trouble by one who cried and was heard and delivered. And it stands as a kind of promise to everyone still in the depths: the crying is not the end of the story. There is a thanksgiving on the other side of the lament, a day when the soul that cried rescue my life will say instead I love the LORD because he heard my plea for mercy. Not every rescue comes in this life, and the psalm does not pretend it does; but the God who hears the cry of His people will bring them, sooner or later, to the lifted cup and the song of thanks. The lament and the thanksgiving are two ends of one road, and the same God walks His people from the one to the other.
For the psalmist had been in mortal trouble. The ropes of death tightened around me, the snares of Sheol confronted me. I was confronted with trouble and sorrow (v. 3). Whatever the particular danger (sickness, violence, some peril that nearly took his life), he had felt the ropes of death tightening, and out of that extremity he had cried, Please LORD, rescue my life! And God heard, and saved him. The psalm is what comes after the rescue: the testimony, the wonder, the love, and above all the question that any rescued soul must ask: How can I repay the LORD for all his acts of kindness to me? (v. 12).
And the answer the psalm gives is one of the most important in all of Scripture for understanding how we respond to grace. The rescued soul does not say, I will repay the LORD, as though the debt could be discharged by our efforts. It says something quite different: I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the LORD (v. 13 ESV; the NET paraphrases I will celebrate my deliverance, but the Hebrew names a cup). The way to render thanks for salvation is not to pay God back but to take up the cup He offers, to receive yet more from His hand, and to give thanks. We will return to that answer, for it is the heart of the psalm.
But there is something else about this psalm that the whole of Scripture asks us to see, and it transfigures every line. Psalm 116 belongs to a little group of psalms (Psalms 113 through 118) that Israel sang at the Passover meal. Which means that on the night before He died, in the upper room, when the Gospels tell us that, after singing a hymn, the Lord Jesus and His disciples went out to the Mount of Olives, these were among the words on His lips. The Lord Jesus sang I will lift up the cup of salvation; He sang the ropes of death tightened around me; He sang precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints. And He sang them walking toward His own death. This psalm of a rescued sufferer was prayed by the one Sufferer who would go unrescued, to the cross, for us.
So we will follow the rescued soul through its testimony: the love that rises from being heard, the deliverance from death, the soul called back to its rest, the great question and its answer in the cup of salvation. And we will watch all of it gather to a point in the Lord Jesus, who lifted the cup of salvation at His table while going out to drink the cup of wrath, and who by His death made even the death of His saints precious. After blessing the LORD for all His benefits, we learn here how to render Him our thanks.
I Love the LORD, Because He Has Heard
I love the LORD because he heard my plea for mercy (v. 1). Notice that the love comes second, as a response. The psalmist does not begin with a resolution to work up affection for God; his love is the natural answer of a heart that has been heard and helped. He loves because God listened, the phrase the NET renders and listened to me, older translations because he inclined his ear to me (v. 2). That picture is wonderfully tender: the LORD of heaven and earth bent down, turned His ear toward one desperate voice, the way a parent leans low to catch the whisper of a frightened child. This is how Christian love always begins. It is never the first move; it is always the answer. We love because he loved us first, and the soul that has known itself heard, answered, rescued, finds love rising in it as naturally as warmth rises from a fire.
And out of that love comes a resolution: As long as I live, I will call to him when I need help (v. 2). Having been heard once, the psalmist commits to a lifetime of calling on God. This is the logic of answered prayer rightly received: it does not make us self-sufficient, as though, the crisis past, we could now manage on our own; it makes us more dependent, more ready to call, more sure that calling is worthwhile. The God who heard me once will hear me again; therefore I will be a person of prayer all my days. The rescue did not graduate him out of need; it bound him closer to the One who meets it.
And we should feel how close to death he had come, because it makes the rescue and the gratitude weightier. The ropes of death tightened around me, the snares of Sheol confronted me. I was confronted with trouble and sorrow (v. 3). This is the language of a man caught, hemmed in, gripped: death not as a distant rumor but as a noose drawing tight. We have heard such language before in this volume, in the laments that cried up out of the depths. But here we hear it from the far side, recounted by one who has been delivered, and that changes its tone entirely. The believer who has come through a dark valley can speak of it now without terror, as a place the LORD brought him through, and his very recounting of the danger becomes part of his praise. I called on the name of the LORD, “Please LORD, rescue my life!” (v. 4). It is the shortest and surest of prayers, and God answered it.
There is a quiet comfort here for everyone who has ever wondered whether their prayers go anywhere at all. We pray, sometimes, into what feels like silence, and the suspicion creeps in that no one is listening, that our words rise a few feet and fall back, that God is too great or too distant or too busy to attend to one small voice. Psalm 116 answers that suspicion with a man’s own experience: he heard my plea for mercy, and listened to me. The God of the Bible is not deaf, and He is not far off. He is the God who hears, who bends down, who turns His ear toward the cry of His people as readily as a mother wakes at the smallest sound from her child’s room. We will not always be delivered in the way or the time we ask (the psalmist himself would face death again one day), but we are always heard. The ear of God is inclined toward you. Your prayers are not falling into an empty sky; they are landing on the heart of a Father who is listening.
Return, O My Soul, to Your Rest
The LORD is merciful and fair; our God is compassionate. The LORD protects the untrained; I was in serious trouble and he delivered me (vv. 5–6). The psalmist reaches, as the rescued so often do, for the great words about God’s character (merciful, fair, compassionate) and then names the kind of person God saves: the untrained. Not the clever, not the strong, not those who can engineer their own deliverance, but the untrained: the simple, the helpless, the ones with nowhere else to turn. I was in serious trouble and he delivered me. It is precisely at the point of our helplessness, when we have run out of our own resources and can only cry, that God’s saving so often comes. The LORD is the helper of those who have no other help.
And then the psalmist does something we have learned to recognize: he preaches to his own soul. Rest once more, my soul, for the LORD has vindicated you (v. 7). Just as Psalm 103 commanded the soul to bless the LORD, this rescued soul is commanded to rest once more, to come back from the agitation and dread of the crisis into the settled peace of one who has been carried through. After a season of distress, the soul does not always return to rest on its own; it can stay braced and anxious long after the danger has passed, as though still waiting for the blow. So the psalmist speaks to it, gently and firmly: the trouble is over; the LORD has vindicated you; come back now, and rest. It is a word many an anxious believer needs to learn to speak to his own restless heart.
And he names the deliverance in full: Yes, LORD, you rescued my life from death, and kept my feet from stumbling. I will serve the LORD in the land of the living (vv. 8–9). Soul, eyes, feet, the whole person rescued (the NET names life and feet; older translations, following the Hebrew, add my eyes from tears): snatched from death, the weeping dried, the faltering steps made firm, and set once more to serving the LORD in the land of the living, in the presence of God. He even tells us that faith held through it all: I had faith when I said, “I am severely oppressed” (v. 10). His faith did not wait for the affliction to lift; he believed in the very thick of it, even as he cried out his trouble. That is why the apostle Paul would later take up this very line as the motto of the believing life, the same spirit of faith that lets the people of God speak the truth of their hope even while they are being crushed, because they know that the God who raised the Lord Jesus will raise them also.
It is worth lingering on how hard that return to rest can be, because the psalmist’s command to his soul assumes a real difficulty. A heart that has been through a season of dread does not simply switch the dread off when the danger passes. It stays braced, scanning the horizon, half-expecting the next blow; the body and the soul remain on alert long after there is anything to be alert for. Anyone who has come through a serious illness, a crisis, a long fear, knows this lingering tension: the trouble is over, and still the soul will not lie down. To such a soul the psalmist speaks not a reproach but a gentle, deliberate word: Rest once more, my soul, for the LORD has vindicated you. He preaches peace to himself, reminding his own heart of what God has already done, until the bracing can ease and the rest can come. This is a skill worth learning: to speak God’s proven goodness to our own anxious hearts, patiently, as often as it takes, calling the soul back from its needless vigilance into the rest secured for it by a God who has dealt so kindly with it. And where the bracing will not ease, talk with your pastor, and do not be ashamed to seek a doctor or counselor as well; these too are among the good gifts God uses to bring His people to rest.
What Shall I Render?
Now comes the great question, and it is the question every rescued soul eventually asks: How can I repay the LORD for all his acts of kindness to me? (v. 12). How do I respond to such grace? What can I possibly give back to a God who has saved my life? It is the right question, and it springs from a right instinct: gratitude longs to do something, to give something, in return. But the answer the psalm gives is not the answer we might expect, and in its surprise lies the whole gospel.
For the psalmist does not say, I will repay the LORD. He knows he cannot; the gift of a rescued life is not the kind of thing that can be paid back, and any attempt to discharge the debt would only insult the Giver. Instead he says: I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the LORD (v. 13 ESV). The cup of salvation was, in Israel’s worship, a cup raised in the thank offering, a cup of celebration lifted to acknowledge God’s deliverance. And so the answer to How can I repay the LORD? turns out to be, astonishingly, more receiving. The way to thank God for salvation is to take up the cup He holds out and drink it down, to receive yet more from His hand, and to praise Him for it. We do not repay God; we receive Him, and give thanks.
This is the very grammar of grace, and it cuts against the deepest instinct of the religious heart. We want to even the score with God, to do enough to feel that we have held up our end, and the gospel will not let us, because the whole point is that we cannot, and need not. What God asks of the rescued is not repayment but reception and thanksgiving: lift the cup, call on His name, fulfill your vows before all his people (v. 14), that is, give Him public thanks, tell others what He has done, keep the promises gratitude made in the dark. The good works of the Christian life are real, but they are never the repayment of a debt; they are the overflow of a cup that God keeps filling. We serve Him not to settle accounts but because the cup of salvation, once lifted, runs over into a life of grateful obedience.
And part of that overflow is the keeping of promises. Twice the psalmist says, I will fulfill my vows to the LORD, and behind that lies a common and humbling experience. In the grip of the crisis, with the ropes of death tightening, he had made promises to God, as we so often do in our extremity: if You will only bring me through this, I will serve You, I will change, I will give myself to You. Such vows are easy to make in the dark and easy to forget in the morning, once the danger is past and the urgency cools. But gratitude has integrity; it does not let the promises lapse. The rescued soul fulfills its vows, follows through on what it swore when it was desperate, and does so publicly, before all his people. There is a searching question in this for every believer who has bargained with God in a hard hour and been answered. What did you promise Him when you were afraid? And have you, in the calm that followed, kept your word? The cup of salvation is lifted not only with the lips but with a life that makes good, in gratitude, on what it vowed in need.
The Cup He Lifted, the Cup He Drank
And now we must follow that cup to the upper room, for this is where the psalm opens onto the gospel most wonderfully. Psalm 116 was sung at Passover, and so it was on the lips of the Lord Jesus on the night He was betrayed. When the Gospels record that, after singing a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives, they mean these very psalms. The Lord Jesus sang I will lift up the cup of salvation, and then, in that same upper room, He took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to His disciples, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood. The cup of salvation the psalm speaks of finds its deepest meaning at His table, where the cup He gives is the cup of His own blood, poured out for the forgiveness of sins. When the church lifts the cup at the Lord’s Supper, it is lifting the cup of salvation of Psalm 116, filled now to the brim with the new covenant in His blood.
But there is a second cup in the story, and we cannot understand the first without it. That same night, in the garden, the Lord Jesus fell on His face and prayed about another cup entirely: My Father, if possible, let this cup pass from me! Yet not what I will, but what you will. That cup was not the cup of salvation but the cup of wrath, the cup of judgment against sin that the prophets had spoken of, the cup He alone could drink. And He drank it. He drank the cup of wrath to the dregs upon the cross, so that the cup He puts into our hands could be the cup of salvation and nothing but. Here is the exchange at the center of everything: He took the cup we deserved, that we might lift the cup we never earned. The bitter cup He drained alone in the dark; the cup of salvation He shares with all His people forever.
So when the rescued soul of Psalm 116 asks How can I repay the LORD, and answers I will lift up the cup of salvation, the Christian hears more than the psalmist could yet know. The cup we lift is the cup the Lord Jesus filled with His blood, after draining the cup of wrath in our place. To render thanks for our salvation is to come to His table, to take the cup He offers, to receive again the salvation He purchased, and to call on His name. The whole movement of the psalm, from the snares of death to the lifted cup, is the movement of the gospel itself: God hears the cry of the dying, delivers them at the cost of His Son, and hands them a cup of salvation to lift in thanks, world without end.
This is why the Lord’s Supper is the church’s standing answer to the psalm’s great question. How can I repay the LORD for all his acts of kindness to me? Week by week the people of God answer by coming to the table, lifting the cup, and giving thanks. The very name the church has long given the Supper says it: the Eucharist, from the Greek word for thanksgiving. We do not come to the table to pay God back, or to do something that settles our account with Him; we come to receive again the salvation His Son purchased, to take the cup He fills, and to render thanks. It is the cup of salvation of Psalm 116, lifted in the courts of the house of the LORD, in the midst of the assembled people, exactly as the psalmist vowed. Every time the church gathers at the table, a hall full of rescued souls is asking and answering the oldest question of gratitude (how can I repay?) and answering it the only way the gospel allows: by lifting the cup He has filled, and calling on His name.
Precious in the Sight of the LORD
Near the end of his thanksgiving the psalmist sets down a line that has comforted the dying and the bereaved for three thousand years: Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints (v. 15 ESV; the NET’s The LORD values the lives of his faithful followers loses the word precious and the death it speaks of). It is a startling thing to say, and we must hear it rightly. It does not mean God is glad when His people die, nor that death is a good thing in itself; death is the last enemy, and Scripture never pretends otherwise. It means that God does not regard the death of His faithful ones carelessly or cheaply. Their death is precious to Him: weighty, costly, watched over. Not one of His saints slips out of this life unnoticed by Him; not one dies abandoned or forgotten. When a believer dies, it is no small thing in heaven; the LORD marks it, values it, holds it dear. For the saint facing death, and for those who must let a loved one go, this is deep comfort: we do not die, and our beloved do not die, outside the tender attention of God.
And the death of the saints is precious for a reason the psalmist could not yet have seen in full: because of the death of the Saint, the Lord Jesus, the Holy One of God. His death was the most precious death the world has ever known. You were ransomed, the apostle writes, not by perishable things like silver or gold, but by precious blood like that of an unblemished and spotless lamb, namely Christ. And because He died and rose, the death of those who belong to Him has been utterly transformed. It is no longer a plunge into the dark but a falling asleep in Him; no longer the end but a doorway; no longer a defeat but, the Scriptures dare to say, gain. The psalmist was delivered from death for a time, only to face it again one day; but the Lord Jesus was not delivered from death at all. He went down into it, undelivered, in our place, and rose, so that for His saints death itself is now a defeated and harmless thing, precious in the LORD’s sight because it ushers His own into His presence.
This is why Christians have carried this verse to so many gravesides, and why they grieve, as the apostle says, but not like the rest who have no hope. The believer standing beside the grave of someone he loved in the Lord does not pretend the loss is small (the tears of Psalm 116 are real, and so are ours), but he stands there knowing that the death he mourns was precious in the sight of the LORD, marked and treasured by the God who lost none of His own. The one who has died in Christ has not vanished into the dark but fallen asleep in Him, to be raised when He returns; for if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so also we believe that God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep as Christians. So the graveside is not the end of the road but a bend in it, and the parting is not forever. The death of the saints is precious to the LORD, and the saints themselves are safe with Him, awaiting the morning of resurrection; and that is a hope strong enough to weep within without being destroyed by the weeping.
And so the psalm ends as every true thanksgiving ends: in glad, public, lifelong service. Yes, LORD! I am indeed your servant … You saved me from death (v. 16), where older translations read you have loosed my bonds. The rescued man knows what he is now: not his own, but God’s servant, and glad to be, for the same God who heard his cry has loosed the bonds that held him, freed him from the snares of death and, deeper still, from the bondage of sin that the Lord Jesus broke. I will present a thank offering to you, and call on the name of the LORD … in the courts of the LORD’s temple, in your midst, O Jerusalem. Praise the LORD! (vv. 17–19). He will not keep his gratitude private; he will bring it into the assembly, to the house of God, among the people of God, and there lift the cup and fulfill his vows and praise the LORD aloud. That is where our thanksgiving belongs too: not hidden in the heart but carried into the gathered church, where the cup of salvation is lifted still, and where the rescued of the LORD tell one another, and the watching world, what He has done.
Gathering the Threads
We followed the testimony of a soul brought back from death’s door, and learned from it how to render the LORD our thanks. The psalmist loves the LORD because he heard, love rising as the natural answer to being heard and rescued (for we love because He loved us first), and out of that love resolves to call on God all his life. He recounts how the snares of death had closed around him and how he cried and was delivered, and then, from the far side of the danger, preaches to his own soul: Rest once more, my soul, for the LORD has vindicated you. We watched him ask the great question, How can I repay the LORD for all his acts of kindness to me?, and give the gospel’s surprising answer: not I will repay, but I will lift up the cup of salvation. The way to thank God for salvation is to receive yet more from His hand and give thanks; we do not repay God, we receive Him.
And we followed that cup to the upper room, where the Lord Jesus sang this very psalm at Passover and then lifted a cup that was the new covenant in His blood, while going out to drink, in the garden and on the cross, the cup of wrath He prayed might pass, so that the cup He hands us could be the cup of salvation and nothing but. He took the cup we deserved that we might lift the cup we never earned. And we heard the line that has comforted the dying for ages, precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints, and found in it not a welcome of death but the tender truth that God marks and values the death of His own, made precious now by the precious blood of the Saint who died and rose, so that for His people death is a falling asleep that opens on His presence. The rescued servant ends with loosed bonds and a thank offering in the house of the LORD. So do we, lifting the cup of salvation in the gathered church and calling on the name of the LORD.
For Discussion
The psalm begins, I love the LORD because he heard my plea for mercy, and listened to me (vv. 1–2). How does our love for God rise as a response to being heard and answered by Him (compare 1 John 4:19), and what does it mean that God bent down and listened to us?
The psalmist was at death’s door and was rescued, and then preaches to his own soul, Rest once more, my soul (v. 7). What does it mean to call your soul back to rest after a season of distress, and why does an anxious heart sometimes need to be told the danger is past?
He asks, How can I repay the LORD for all his acts of kindness to me? (v. 12), and answers, I will lift up the cup of salvation (v. 13 ESV). Why is the answer to receive more and give thanks, rather than to repay God, and what does this teach us about how Christian good works flow from grace rather than pay for it?
Psalm 116 was among the psalms sung at Passover, so the Lord Jesus sang I will lift up the cup of salvation on the night before His death. How does it deepen the Lord’s Supper to know He lifted a cup of salvation for us, and drank the cup of wrath in our place (consider Matthew 26:39)?
Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints (v. 15 ESV). How is it a comfort that God does not regard the death of His people carelessly but as precious, and how has the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus transformed what death is for His saints?
The psalmist calls himself God’s servant whose bonds have been loosed (v. 16) and presents a thank offering in the house of the LORD (v. 17). How does grateful service flow from being delivered, and why does he insist on bringing his thanksgiving into the assembly of God’s people rather than keeping it private?
Looking Ahead
We have spent these sessions among the psalms of personal trust and thanksgiving: the Shepherd, the joyful noise, the blessing soul, the lifted cup. The next psalm lifts our eyes outward and upward, to the two great books in which God has made Himself known. Psalm 19 opens with the silent sermon of the skies: The heavens declare the glory of God; the sky displays his handiwork. Day after day it speaks out; night after night it reveals his greatness (Psalm 19:1–2).
And then it turns from the heavens to the Scriptures, from what God shows of Himself in creation to what He tells of Himself in His word: The law of the LORD is perfect and preserves one’s life. The rules set down by the LORD are reliable and impart wisdom to the inexperienced. We will consider how God speaks to us in two books (the wordless witness of the world He made, and the clear word of the Scriptures He gave) and why the psalm prizes the second above the first, of greater value than gold and sweeter than honey. And we will end where the psalm ends, with a prayer many believers know by heart: May my words and my thoughts be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my sheltering rock and my redeemer.
Read Psalm 19 in full before the next session; it is fourteen verses. Notice how it falls into two halves (the glory of God in the heavens, and the perfection of God’s word) and how it closes with a prayer about our own words and thoughts.
Closing Prayer
O LORD, we love You, because You have heard our voice and our pleas for mercy; You inclined Your ear to us and bent low to listen. When the snares of death and the pangs of trouble have closed around us, You have heard our cry and delivered our soul; teach us, in the quiet after the storm, to say to our restless hearts, Return, O my soul, to your rest, for the LORD has dealt bountifully with you. And when we ask what we shall render to You for all Your benefits, teach us the gospel’s own answer: not to repay what we never could, but to lift the cup of salvation and call on Your name.
We thank You for the Lord Jesus, who sang this psalm on the night before He died, who lifted the cup of the new covenant in His blood at His table, and who drank the cup of wrath in the garden and on the cross so that the cup He hands us might be the cup of salvation and nothing but. We bless You that the death of Your saints is precious in Your sight, marked and treasured and never forgotten, made precious by the precious blood of Your Son, who went down into death undelivered and rose, so that for Your people death is now a falling asleep that opens on Your presence. Loose our bonds, make us Your glad servants, and gather our thanksgiving into the assembly of Your people, where we lift the cup of salvation still. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.