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We are warranted in taking this Psalm to ourselves, inasmuch as the first verses of it plainly belong to David as well as to Christ. Every part of the Psalm may be applied to David in some sense, except that one clause m which our Lord only can be meant, "Thou wilt not suffer Thine Holy One to see corruption." See what consolation devout persons had, even under the Old Testament: they did, as it were, keep a kind of Easter beforehand. Observe what use the man after God's own heart made of his nightly pain and sickness. As he lay awake he practised himself in heavenly contemplations. In what he says he could not mean less than this: that he had a fair and reasonable hope of being somehow delivered from the power of death, and made partaker of heavenly joys in the more immediate presence of God. Yet even the greatest of the old fathers only saw through a glass darkly the things which Christians see face to face. Such as desire to offer to God thanksgivings worthy of His Gospel will find it no small help to know that their unworthy thanksgivings are very far from being single and alone. The saints before Christ partake of our devout joy and hope of immortality.

1. See what kind of persons may reasonably hope to persevere in well-doing and in God's favour; namely, those who make it a rule to live always as in God's especial presence. If you want to have a cheerful and rational dependence on your continuance in well-doing, this one thing you must do, you must set God always before you. You must never act as if you were alone in the world. This is the only "assurance" of salvation that can be reasonably depended on by any man in his own case; namely, the sober yet cheerful hope which arises from a pure conscience, from long-continued habits of real piety and goodness. All assurance besides this is more or less fanciful and dangerous. If a man is endeavouring to keep on this safe ground of assurance he may, without presumption, look for the other comforts mentioned in the Psalm. He may indulge in a calm and reverential joy of heart. The Psalmist notices, as another, the greatest of all fruits of holy trust in the Almighty, that it causes our very "flesh," that is, our mortal body, to "rest in hope"; it makes sleep quiet and secure, and it takes out the sting of death. The chiefest of all privileges is to have hope in the grave; hope that through Him, to whom alone these sacred promises belong of right, our souls shall not be left in hell, — in that dark, unknown condition to which, before the coming of Christ, the name of Hell was usually given. There need not now to be anything forlorn or desolate in our meditations on our departed friends, or on the condition to which we are ourselves approaching. The unseen region where the soul is to lodge is the place where once the Spirit of our Saviour abode, and is therefore under His especial protection, even more than any church or place that is most sacred on earth.

(Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times.)

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KJV: For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.

WEB: For you will not leave my soul in Sheol, neither will you allow your holy one to see corruption.