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After the last four weeks in psalms of lament, today’s text in Psalm 16 offers a contrast, exulting in the joy of the Lord. After briefly looking at the passage on our own, we started with the question: “How did David get from ‘Preserve me…’ (v. 1) to ‘…pleasures forevermore’ (v. 11)?”
“Preserve me” at first seemed like a cry for help. One member of our group suggested instead that it was David’s desire that God would keep him in the mindset expressed in the rest of the psalm. We so easily lose our sense of joy in the face of difficulties. That desire to be “preserved” makes sense, that God would “cover” us (another comment from the group) to keep our focus on the joy in Him. David wanted the “refuge” of the safe place of delight in the Lord.
Looking at the psalm as a whole, there were several summaries – how a mature faith trusts God, how to make right choices in the midst of turmoil, hope in our day-to-day life. All those descriptions apply to most of the psalm, but we explored how verses 3 and 4 fit. Biblical writers were not recording random thoughts. Examining how a seemingly “out-of-place” verse or idea fits can give us a clearer picture of the Spirit-inspired thought process of the author. “I have no good apart from you” (v. 2b) and his “delight” in the saints (v. 3a) seem unrelated. Is there a connection? The woeful description of “those who run after another god” (v. 4) adds to the puzzle. Why bring such a negative image?
One thought was that the psalmist’s assertion “I have no good apart from you” has at least one practical application: He delighted in what he saw of God in other people, the “saints” (“the holy ones”, qodeshim, קְדוֹשִׁים). Community with others is a key part of our growing relationship with God. People around David (and around us) can be displays of God at work in them. That work of God in His people is set in sharp contrast to others who look for life in other places, “who run after another god.” As one person commented about the point of verse 4, “Don’t go there!” Instead, God’s people have chosen to pursue Him (v. 5).
The rest of the psalm resumes the delight in who God is and what He has done:
- He ordains our life circumstances (v. 6).
- He provides guidance for our actions (v. 7).
- He makes us secure by His presence (v. 8).
- He gives us joyful confidence by His faithfulness (v. 9).
- He makes us hopeful for our eternal future (v. 10).
We had a brief discussion of the word “Sheol” (שְׁא֑וֹל). While a few versions translate the word as “hell” (as different as King James and The Message!), consider the following description:
Sheol is the Hebrew word for the netherworld. Though it might have been considered an act of judgment for a person to be consigned to Sheol from life, it was not in itself a place of judgment to be contrasted to the reward of a heavenly destiny. The word was sometimes used as a synonym for “grave” because the grave was the portal through which one entered the netherworld. The Israelites believed that the spirits of the dead continued to exist in this shadowy world.[1]
One observation in our discussion was that the context suggests “the grave” since the parallel phrase mentions “corruption” (v. 10b). Also, there is a contrast with “life” at the beginning of the following verse (v. 11a). Our discussion included a brief tangent on translations. There is seldom, if ever, a one-to-one correlation between languages. Words have ranges of meaning, and translation often involves finding the overlapping meanings of words in different languages. The context is important in the process, as illustrated in this passage.
Serious Joy
David’s psalm resounds with his joy in the Lord. As one commentary summarized, “The theme of having one’s affections centered on God gives this psalm its unity and ardour.”[2] That passion for God fueled by delight in Him sounds wonderful, but is it realistic? Was David exaggerating? Can that kind of joy be part of our experience?
Jesus had things to say about joy as well:
These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full. John 15:11
Until now you have asked for nothing in My name; ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be made full. John 16:24
But now I come to You; and these things I speak in the world so that they may have My joy made full in themselves. John 17:13
Several observations came from our discussion:
- In each case, Jesus refers to joy being “full.”
- The joy is “My joy” or in “My name.”
The fullness of joy in the presence of God was the desire of Jesus for His followers.
Our group mentioned other occurrences of “joy” in Scripture:
- Rejoice always. – 1 Thessalonians 5:16
- Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice! – Philippians 4:4
- Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials. – James 1:2
As one member pointed out, those three are all imperatives. Joy is not an optional part of the life of following God. David was not exaggerating. We are commanded to have joy. Another observation was that the commands to have joy are very comprehensive: always and specifically in difficult trials.
If we are to obey the commands for constant and comprehensive joy, we need to have a clear understanding of what that joy is and how we experience it.
Obeying God or Serving God or Enjoying God
We are generally more familiar with the ideas of obeying God (compliance) or serving God (commitment) than with enjoying God (communion). This is an area where Augustine can be helpful. Born in 354 A.D., he spent his early life immersed in immorality (unmarried sex, theft, greed, etc.).[3] Then he turned to philosophy in search of values and truth. Later he was involved with a heretical sect. Finally, he met Ambrose, the bishop of Milan. At first, the quality of Ambrose’s speaking attracted Augustine, Then the content of what the bishop was saying began to penetrate his heart.
However, the truth of what Augustine was hearing and beginning to believe and how he was living soon revealed a surprising problem:
I was astonished that although I now loved you . . . I did not persist in enjoyment of my God. Your beauty drew me to you, but soon I was dragged away from you by my own weight and in dismay I plunged again into the things of this world . . . as though I had sensed the fragrance of the fare but was not yet able to eat it.[4]
That reality may have “astonished” Augustine, but anyone who has tried to follow Christ for a length of time will resonate with that contradiction. Try as we might, believing as we do, our will doesn’t always follow our conviction.
How did Augustine come to understand this discrepancy? It is important to note that he did not focus on obedience or service but on the “enjoyment of my God.”
Augustine, Grace, and Joy
How does God’s grace working in our lives relate to our experience of joy? One person in our discussion remarked that joy results when we see God’s grace at work in our life. Our gratitude to Him can result in joy. Another member commented that we sometimes have to “fake it until we make it” acting even when we don’t feel like it. Both of those suggestions contain some truth. There are times when spiritual disciplines are beneficial regardless of our emotional state. Also, contemplating what God has done for us certainly should produce thankfulness and gladness. However, Augustine’s idea of the relationship between grace and joy takes another direction.
John Piper describes Augustine’s thinking as a “theology of the triumph of joy in God.”[5]
This is Augustine’s understanding of grace. Grace is God’s giving us sovereign joy in God that triumphs over joy in sin. In other words, God works deep in the human heart to transform the springs of joy so that we love God more than sex or anything else. Loving God, in Augustine’s mind, is never reduced to deeds of obedience or acts of willpower. It is always a delighting in God, and in other things only for God’s sake.[6]
Delighting in and loving God results in the joy that enables the believer to follow faithfully. “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15). Communion enables compliance and commitment, not the other way around.
Augustine saw delight in the beauty of who God is. He recognized Him as the only source of genuine joy, and he saw Him as a generous provider of abundant joy. Like our passage in Psalm 16, Psalm 36:8 expresses joy in God:
They drink their fill of the abundance of Your house;
And You give them to drink of the river of Your delights. Psalm 36:8
Augustine’s translation illuminates the way he saw God’s provision for joy in our life:
They shall be inebriated with the plenteousness of Thy House
and with the torrent of Thy pleasures Thou shalt give then to drink.[7]
“Torrent of pleasures” sounds like the imagery of “drinking from a fire hose” in our day.
Piper continues to elaborate:
For Augustine, freedom is to be so in love with God and his ways that the very experience of choice is transcended. The ideal of freedom is not the autonomous will poised with sovereign equilibrium between good and evil. The ideal of freedom is to be so spiritually discerning of God’s beauty, and to be so in love with God that one never stands with equilibrium between God and an alternate choice. Rather, one transcends the experience of choice and walks under the continual sway of sovereign joy in God. For Augustine the self-conscious experience of having to contemplate choices was a sign not of the freedom of the will, but of the disintegration of the will.[8]
We discussed what Piper might have meant by his often-repeated phrase “sovereign joy” taken from Augustine.[9] Several suggestions about the word “sovereign” were helpful: in God and from God, only one, powerful, having the right to rule, actually ruling, in control. Then someone commented, “Joy rules” which seemed the best fit. “Joy rules” expresses Piper’s “transcendence of choice.”
My personal example involves my favorite dessert: cherry pie. Given the choice of various sweets, I would usually choose cherry pie. But Augustine’s “sovereign joy” and Piper’s “transcendence of choice” demand a more radical example. Presented with a freshly-baked cherry pie and a plate of rancid meat, there is no choice to be made. There is no contemplation of pros and cons, no struggle of my will to decide. Cherry pie rules!
In Augustine’s thinking, joy rules! Seeing more of who God is reveals His beauty and delightfulness. Seeing Him increases our spontaneous obedience and willing service. Our knowledge of what we should do and our feeling of what we want to do merge. “The final union of knowledge and feeling would involve a man in the object of his choice in such a way that any other alternative would be inconceivable.”[10]
Joy and This World
How does our joy in God relate to our everyday life? Does delight in God (“I have no good apart from you” – Psalm 16:2) mean rejecting or minimizing earthly pleasures? Not according to Augustine: “For these earthly things, too, can give joy, though not such joy as my God, who made them all, can give.”[11]
Delighting in God enhanced Augustine’s enjoyment of every other blessing that God provided:
And yet, when I love him, it is true that I love a light of a certain kind, a voice, a perfume, a food, an embrace; but they are of the kind that I love in my inner self, when my soul is bathed in light that is not bound by space; when it listens to sound that never dies away; when it breathes fragrance that is not borne away on the wind; when it tastes food that is never consumed by the eating; when it clings to an embrace from which it is not severed by fulfillment of desire. This is what I love when I love my God.[12]
Like Augustine, C. S. Lewis (whose autobiography was entitled Surprised by Joy) appreciated the continuity between joy in God and joy in His blessings:
I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.[13]
Those “copies” and “echoes” and “mirages” provide a continuous stream of pointers back to our delight in God: “If the things of this world delight you, praise God for them, but turn your love away from them and give it to their Maker….”[14]
Cultivating Joy
How do we get joy? Joy is a command according to Scripture. Joy is key to living the Christian life according to Augustine. How do we make joy more a part of our life? If joy is about delighting in God, how do we do that? How do we make ourselves delight in God more?
Augustine set a high priority on joy and on delighting in God. However, he had a very sobering comment about being motivated by delight:
Who has it in his power to have such a motive present to his mind that his will shall be influenced to believe? Who can welcome in his mind something which does not give him delight? But who has it in his power to ensure that something that will delight him will turn up? Or that he will take delight in what turns up?[15]
In other words, “The will is free to move toward whatever it delights in most fully, but it is not within the power of our will to determine what that sovereign joy will be.”[16]
Another food illustration may be helpful. I like most foods but not mangos. I can eat mangos, I can pretend to like mangos, but I cannot make myself like mangos. I cannot, by an act of my will, decide to enjoy mangos, even if I go through the motions. I can “fake it until I make it” if I have to eat mangos, but even that is not likely to lead to delight in mangos. In Augustine’s perspective, neither can I, by an act of my will, make myself delight in God more, even if I “fake it” for a very long time. For Augustine (using my analogy), grace is like a pill that would miraculously increase my delight in mangos. I would begin more and more to genuinely like mangos, even to delight in them. “So saving grace, converting grace, in Augustine’s view, is God’s giving us a sovereign joy in God that triumphs over all other joys and therefore sways the will.”[17]
Joy is one component of the fruit of the Spirit,[18] the work of God. He produces the results. We can plant and water, but He causes the growth.[19] Our part is merely to provide the right conditions and try to avoid obstacles. “Loving, or delighting in, what we know of God in Scripture will be the key that opens Scripture further.”[20] Time in Scripture and with other believers (“the saints in the land in whom is all my delight”), as well as reading theology and Christian biography, can help us see more of who God is, “gazing on the delightfulness of the Lord” (Psalm 27:4). Joy can come from our diligence in learning and our dependence on God to show us more of Himself. We can ask Him to increase our delight in Him.
What man can teach another to understand this truth? What angel can teach it to an angel? What angel can teach it to a man? We must ask it of you, seek it in you; we must knock at your door. Only then shall we receive what we ask and find what we seek; only then will the door be opened to us.[21]
May God grant us that grace to find the door to His fullness of joy and His pleasures forevermore.
[1] John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews, Mark W. Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary Old Testament (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 603.
[2] Derek Kidner, Psalms 1-72 (London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1973), 83.
[3] For more details about his life, go to a sermon by John Piper, or
Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, A Biography (New York: Dorset Press, 1986).
[4] Aurelius Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin Books, 1961), VII-17; 150, Kindle Edition location 2584;
quoted in John Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2000), 50.
[5] John Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2000), 54.
[6] John Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2000), 57; emphasis in Piper’s original.
[7] Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Expositions on The Book of Psalms – Vol. III, John Henry Parker, trans. (London” F. and J. Rivington, 1849), 507;
quoted in John Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2000), 63.
[8]John Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2000), 62.
[9] Aurelius Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin Books, 1961), IX-2; 181, Kindle Edition location 3124;
quoted in John Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2000), 19.
[10] Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, A Biography (New York: Dorset Press, 1986), 374.
[11] Aurelius Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin Books, 1961), II-5; 48, Kindle Edition location 820.
[12] Aurelius Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin Books, 1961), X-6; 211, Kindle Edition location 3638;
quoted in John Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2000), 67.
[13] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins e-books, 2009), 136; Kindle Edition location 1754.
[14] Aurelius Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin Books, 1961), IV-12; 81, Kindle Edition location 1377;
quoted in John Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2000), 72.
[15] Augustine quoted in John Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2000), 59.
[16] John Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2000), 59; emphasis in Piper’s original.
[17] John Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2000), 59; emphasis in Piper’s original.
[18] Galatians 5:22-23.
[19] 1 Corinthians 3:6.
[20] John Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2000), 69.
[21] Aurelius Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin Books, 1961), XIII-38; 348, Kindle Edition location 6170