Psalm 16: What Are You Expecting From God's Will?

Keep me safe, my God, for in you I take refuge.

I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord; apart from you I have no good thing.”

I say of the holy people who are in the land, “They are the noble ones in whom is all my delight.”

Those who run after other gods will suffer more and more. I will not pour out libations of blood to such gods or take up their names on my lips. 

Lord, you alone are my portion and my cup; you make my lot secure. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.

I will praise the Lord, who counsels me; even at night my heart instructs me. I keep my eyes always on the Lord. With him at my right hand, I will not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body also will rest secure, because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead, nor will you let your faithful one see decay.

You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand. - Psalm 16

What are the Old Testament and New Testament? The word "testament" isn't a word that means part or section or partition-a way of denoting the sections of a book like the Bible into its "Old Section" and "New Section". No, a 'testament' is "a person's will, especially the part relating to personal property." The Bible is a will describing what God has left to us as his legacy. 

So what is it that he left us? I think that this psalm gives us glimpse "Lord, you alone are my portion and my cup." If all we end up with is God himself--no health, no riches, no influence, no wisdom-just God. Is that enough?

I have spent an awful lot of time recently dealing with inheritances. Executors, beneficiaries, trustees and lawyers are all words whose rankings have risen in my vocabulary. People build up layers of complexity and much is forgotten that later needs to be uncovered to make sense of a person's life and what they have left behind. But in the will and trust that I am delving through, there is nothing that I would not exchange for more time--even moments more-with the one who made the will.

What do we expect of from another person? Themselves? Or what they can give us. I think that is what God asks: do we want God or do we want what God can do for us. This psalm expresses contentment in what was distributed to him as a beneficiary of the Father's testament. "The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance." Why is the inheritance in pleasant places? Because the boundary lines enclose not a rich estate but a loving God.