Psalm 16:11

Scripture Explained · Pairs with New Beginnings

“You will show me the path of life. In Your presence is fullness of joy. In Your right hand there are pleasures forever more.”

Psalm 16:11 · World English Bible

What it meant then

Earlier in this psalm David names the alternative bluntly: people who chase joy by running after other gods, multiplying their objects of worship (verse 4). This verse sets down what he chose instead, one path, one presence, one source of joy, and follows it with an odd detail for a man still very much alive. Peter later quotes this whole psalm in his first sermon (Acts 2:25-28) and applies it to the resurrection of Christ, since David's own body did eventually decay in a tomb like anyone else's, so the hope in the psalm was always reaching further than David himself.

“Fullness of joy” and “pleasures forever more” carry more weight than they first appear to. The Hebrew behind them describes joy with nothing missing from it, and pleasure that keeps going rather than running out the way ordinary pleasures do.

What A.W. Tozer wrote

Tozer wrote urgently about the difference an experienced nearness of God makes: “The world is perishing for lack of the knowledge of God and the Church is famishing for want of His Presence.”

“The instant cure of most of our religious ills would be to enter the Presence in spiritual experience, to become suddenly aware that we are in God and that God is in us.”

A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God, “Removing the Veil”