God’s Word for You

Psalm 16:1-2 LORD you are my Lord

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Wednesday, April 1, 2026

Psalm 16 “You Will Not Abandon Me to the Grave”

A Miktam of David.

This is the first of six miktams in the Psalms. All of the miktams in the Bible are by David. The word is supposed by Luther to come from the word kethem, “gold,” and could mean a golden or gem of a psalm. Other attempts to translate the word include Ein Geheimnis or “Secret Verse” (Hengstenberg), and “Epigram” (Stoeckhardt, Lillegard). Since an epigram is a concise, cleverly-worded set of verses on a single subject, it is not a bad translation. It is one of the most important Messianic Psalms, along with Psalms 1, 2, 7, 22, 45, 72, and 110. In the case of Psalm 16, we will remember that it is quoted in Acts 2:25-28, 2:31; and 13:35. Also the language of the Psalm is alluded to in John 20:9 and again in 1 Corinthians 15:4

1 Watch over me, O God, for in you I take refuge.
2 I say to the LORD, “You are my Lord;
  apart from you I have no good thing.”

Who is speaking? It is David, but he is also speaking prophetically in the place of Christ. It will do us the most good if we remember to apply the passage in both ways: to Christ, and to ourselves (as David did) speaking the same words. We will even learn things about our place in God’s kingdom by doing so—not that we are more useful than we think, but that we are more loved than we know.

The believer prays, “Watch over me, O God, for in you I take refuge.” That last phrase is a verb, “to take or seek refuge,” just as we find in Psalms 7:1 and 11:1, and Ruth 2:12. We run to God to guard us and to watch over us, like a shepherd, like a father, like a king.

Christ prays, “Watch over me, O God, for in you I take refuge.” In the torture of his final day, facing Annas, Caiaphas, Pilate, the Roman guard, and the waiting planks of the cross, Christ had nowhere to turn for help. And even though he would be abandoned by his Father to death, he would not be abandoned to decay (verse 10).

The believer prays, “I say to the LORD, you are my Lord.” When David and you and I lift up our voices with these words, we are confessing our faith in the true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and our God, and we are adding a sense of personal devotion and confidence by saying “my Lord.” The God who spoke to Moses out of the burning bush is the same God that we pray to; the same God who opens his hand every day and satisfies the desires of every living thing (Psalm 145:16). What leads the Christian to confess his faith in this way? It is not out of obedience to the Law, not even the First or Second Commandments, since they make demands of us and do not prompt a loving response. Our Confession teaches: “It is easy to determine the difference between faith and the righteousness of the law. Faith is that worship which receives God’s offered blessings; the righteousness of the law is that worship which offers God our own merits. It is by faith that God wants to be worshiped, namely, that we receive from him what he promises and offers” (Apology of the Augsburg Confession IV:49).

Christ prays, “I say to the LORD, you are my Lord.” Here we have a divine mystery, that Christ who is true God would give worship to his Father who is equally God, as we confess in the Athanasian Creed, “equal in glory and coequal in majesty” (§6), and again, “Among these three persons none is before or after another, none is greater or less than another” (§24). But Christ, according to his human nature, constantly prays to and praises the Father, in public (Matthew 18:35; John 8:54) and in private (Mark 14:36; Luke 22:42; John 17:5). He demonstrates through his worship how God (including he himself) wants in turn to be worshiped. For what does the Holy Spirit say? “Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will glorify me” (Psalm 50:15). So Christ according to his two natures while here on earth accepts the Father’s blessings and receives them on account of the Father’s mercy. When he was about to perform one of his greatest miracles, multiplying the fishes and loaves, he first gave thanks to the Father (Matthew 14:19). And when he transformed the Passover meal into the Lord’s Supper, taking a memorial of one miracle (the rescue of Israel from bondage in Egypt) and made it a sacrament based on the greatest miracle (the rescue of mankind from the bondage of sin), he took the earthly elements and first gave thanks before distributing them to this disciples (Matthew 26:26-27; Mark 14:22-23). So we see that even before he institutes the sacrament for mankind’s eternal good, he does not take credit for the act as if he is a rogue member of the Holy Trinity, saying, “My Father is a Tyrant who would condemn you all, but I alone will save you!” This is not at all how Christ speaks or acts. No, he gives glory to the Father, who is his Father from eternity, and gives thanks for the gifts at their table, before offering a gift of his own, which is his body and blood, that is, his very life offered up on the cross, for man’s forgiveness. For this was the plan of the Triune God all along, from the first hint to Eve in her Garden after she and her husband betrayed God with their sin (Genesis 3:15) to his own impending crisis in the other Garden, which led to his betrayal and arrest in order to overcome all sin (Luke 22:48).

The believer prays, “apart from you I have no good thing.” This phrase is not easy to understand or translate. It seems to be “I have nothing good above or beyond you,” but other possibilities include “You do not need my goodness,” or “My goodness is not an obligation on you.” Dr. Brug shows that every single line of this Psalm agrees with the first choice, “The Lord is everything to me.” Of course, it is also true that God has no need of good things from us; “The Lord has no need of a sinful man.” But taken as we have translated it, the sentence makes the most sense in the context of the verse. The only source of blessings is our God.

Christ prays, “apart from you I have no good thing.” This, too, shows Christ in the long night of his torture, when mankind had only fear, abandonment, spitting, beating, hitting, mocking, and the lash for him. He bore in his flesh the wrath of God, but he still drew the breath of air that is always a good gift from God. He shed his blood for the sins of mankind, but each beat of his heart was a blessing from his Father in heaven. He called out in his misery, even after he has said, “My God, why have you forsake me?”, and said, “I am thirsty.” The drink was pathetic, just the cheap wine-vinegar of soldiers during their duty hours. But it was enough to wet his lips a little. It was still a blessing, a gift and a good thing.

Before I began studying for the ministry and I was still a painter, there was a day when one of our co-workers thought it would be funny to run a brush full of paint across the body of a toad, blinding it. My brother showed his compassion by controlling his obvious rage and real fury at our co-worker, and in wasting no time for the sake of the poor animal. He caught it and, apologizing to the creature over and over, wiped away the oil-based paint with a gas-soaked rag, which must have burned the poor thing, especially in the eyes and ears. Then he washed off the gas with water and wiped away every last trace of the paint as best he could, keeping the terrified and suffering thing with him for the rest of the day. By the afternoon, it seemed fine and hopped away. This was one of many demonstrations of Christ-like love I witnessed in my younger years, always wishing I could be a better man, a better believer, a better Christian, like my brother. When we care for the good things God has placed onto his good earth, even the toads and the other crawling things, we give God glory. When we care for the souls of one another, we do the very work of God according to our humble abilities, and give glory to our Savior. But those works we do are not our own, they are from God. “Creatures (including mankind) are only the hands, channels, and means through which God bestows all blessings. We receive our blessings not from them (our parents and others) but from God through them.”

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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