How David Prophesied the Resurrection of Christ

Logical Truths

How Jesus fulfilled prophecy in the Psalms is a case study in the resurrection.

“For David says concerning him”—that is, concerning Jesus Christ—the words of Psalm 16:8–11, which prophecy Christ’s bodily resurrection (Acts 2:25–28). But what does it mean—what can it possibly mean—for David, a millennium before Jesus, to speak words about Jesus Christ?

Or, to ask the question more generally, what do we mean when we say that Jesus Christ fulfilled prophecies given many years before his incarnate life on earth? In the Psalms, there are quite a few examples where the New Testament writers claim that events in Jesus’s life fulfill prophecies given many centuries before. Examples include (a) what happens to Jesus’s garments at the crucifixion (see Ps. 22:18, explicitly said to be fulfilled by John 10:24); (b) that he would be betrayed by a close friend (see Ps. 41:9 quoted in John 13:18) and that this friend’s position would be taken by another (see Ps. 109:8 quoted in Acts 1:20); (c) that he would ascend (see Ps. 68:18 quoted in Eph. 4:8); (d) that he would be given sour wine to drink at his death (see Ps. 69:21 quoted in John 19:28–29); (e) that he would be like the stone rejected by the builders which turns out to be the key to the whole building (see Ps. 118:22–23 quoted or echoed in Matthew, Mark, Luke, Acts, and 1 Peter).

But I want to focus on perhaps the most significant of all such prophecies in the Psalms: his bodily resurrection. In Psalm 16, David prays to be preserved (Ps. 16:1) and then expresses his wholehearted devotion to the Lord. He has no good thing in life apart from the Lord; he delights only in God’s holy people; he will never worship other gods; the Lord is his only chosen portion in life; he sets the Lord always before him (Ps. 16:2–8). In Psalm 16:2–8, David voices a pledge of single-hearted loyalty (Ps. 16:2–4), followed by a strong profession of unbridled delight (Ps. 16:5–8). It is a remarkable and inspiring profession of love for God. Augustine writes of Jesus here that, “Confronted by the things which pass away, I did not take my eye off him who abides always, for I looked forward to speeding back to him when my passage through temporal things should be over.”¹

And then, in Psalm 16:8, David pivots: “because he is at my right hand”—because, and only because, I love the Lord alone with a wholehearted and passionate devotion, therefore I can be confident that “I shall not be shaken.” This pivot is the key to the psalm: a man who loves God alone, with a pure and passionate love, knows he will never be shaken.

Psalm 16:9–11 follow from this. Because I love God alone, says David, I can be so very glad and know that my flesh dwells secure (Ps. 16:9); that is, my body is completely safe. Because I love God alone, I know that God will not abandon my soul (my life) to Sheol, the place where dead people rot. He will never let me, his holy devoted one, see corruption. That is to say, even if I die, my body will not rot.

What are we to make of this amazing confidence on the lips of David? Peter spells it out on the day of Pentecost: “Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day.” (Acts 2:29). That is to say, David’s body rotted. So these words cannot, in the end, apply to David. They must be spoken, through the Holy Spirit, of a successor of David who will truly love God with a whole heart. We know that David, for all his shining faith, did not. We have only to think of what he did to Bathsheba and her husband Uriah to know this (1 Sam. 11). So, Peter goes on, “Being therefore a prophet . . . [David] foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption” (Acts 2:30–31). The apostle Paul says something very similar, albeit a little more briefly, when speaking in the synagogue in Pisidian Antioch. Like Peter, he also quotes Psalm 16:10 and says this speaks of the bodily resurrection of Jesus (Acts 13:34–35).

How then does Psalm 16 prophecy the resurrection of Christ? It does so like this: It says, with a glorious shining assurance, that when a man walks this earth who truly loves God alone with a pure and undivided devotion all the days of his life, that man will not—cannot!—die and his body rot. It simply cannot be. God would never let this happen. David pens these words by the Spirit of Christ (see 1 Peter 1:10–12). He speaks them about a man who will follow him many centuries later, of whom every word will be true.

There is a misconception about prophecy that sees it in terms of Scripture speaking of random and disconnected events which—surprise, surprise!—happen years later. It can feel rather like a conjuror pulling a rabbit out of his hat. It is illogical and somehow disconnected from the big story of the Bible. But prophecy is not like that. Psalm 16 celebrates a logical and deeply theological truth, that God will preserve the body of the man who loves him with a whole and sinless heart. The logic is similar to what Jesus says in Luke 11:38, when arguing with the Sadducees about resurrection: “Now he is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” So, when Jesus is raised in his body from the dead, he fulfills the prophecy of Psalm 16:9–11 in the sense that he demonstrates that he—at last!—is the wholehearted worshiper of whom Psalm 16 spoke.

How do we know that “David says this” (Psalm 16:9–11) concerning Christ? We know it because Jesus Christ is the man who perfectly fulfills the first part of the psalm. He “is the only one who has ever wholeheartedly desired the living God with every fiber of his being in every moment of his life on earth.”²

Working hard to grasp the deep logic of prophecies such as this will help us to understand that prophecy is not a matter of random, even trivial, predictions and equally random fulfilments, but rather of profoundly logical truths that not only have but must be fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

Christopher Ash is the author of The Psalms: A Christ-Centered Commentary.

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