Psalm 16. Eternal security

From NBC

It is not certain what prompted David to cry out for preservation (1), but the focus on the grave (9-11) suggests that some close brush with death, through illness or danger, drove him to probe the question of personal security, its nature and extent. In any case this is the theme of the psalm whose structure proclaims its message:

A1 (v 1) Security in God: a plea
B (vs 2-4, 5, 8) The evidences of security
a1 (v2) The Lord my total good
a2 (v 5) The Lord my portion
b1 (v 3) Delight in the people
b2 (v 6) Delight in the inheritance
c1 (v 4) Commitment: negative
c2 (vs 7-8) Commitment: positive
A2 (vs 9-11) Eternal security in God: a possession

1 Security in God, a plea. Security begins when we ask for it and seek it in God (1). 2-8 There are three evidences of possessing security: First, delight in the Lord: (2) apart from you, ‘my good/wellbeing is not beyond you/does not lie outside you’, ‘you are all the good I need’— ‘Thou, O Christ’ art all I want’; (5) lit. ‘The Lord is my share of the portion’; cup, translated lot (11:6), personal fortune, good or ill, in life. To say The Lord is... my cup is to affirm that in sorrow or joy he is the overriding reality (73:25-26). Secondly, delight in the Lord’s people and kingdom: (3) saints, ‘holy ones’, those whom the Lord has ‘set apart’ for himself; (6) delightful, synonymous with delight (3), here the object is the inheritance which the Lord has allotted. Thirdly, delight in the Lord’s truth. Refusing devotion to other gods (4c) or what they claim to be (4d, names), David delights in the Lord’s teaching ((7) counsels... instructs) and, in its light, makes the Lord his constant goal in life ((8) set... before) and experiences his presence (8b, c).

9-11 Eternal security in God, a possession. Security has an eternal dimension: the whole person, inwardly (heart) and outwardly (flesh), can rest secure, even in the face of death (grave( ‘Sheol’, where the dead live on); beyond Sheol there is a path to life leading to (lit.) ‘satiation of joys’ in your presence (See Introduction, ‘Hope’).

Even when David wrote this psalm he was going beyond his own personal experience: he did not, for example, always set the Lord before him, nor was he always unshaken. Both he and his contemporaries would recognize the psalm as an unrealized ideal. Rightly, therefore, the NT finds here a foreshadowing of the Lord Jesus Christ in whom its ideals and hopes were fulfilled (Acts 2:24-32) and through whom the identical hope awaits us (Rom. 8:11).