Episode Details

Psalm 16: The Lines in Pleasant Places

There is a word in this psalm that most of us have stopped noticing because it belongs to a vanished world. "The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places." Lines — the cords a surveyor dropped to mark the edges of a man's inheritance. In the ancient world, your lot in life was literally drawn with rope. And David, who had every reason to complain about his portion (a man hunted like a partridge through the hills), looks at the boundaries of his life and says: this is a goodly heritage. Not because the circumstances were easy, but because the Lord Himself is the portion within the portion, the treasure the surveyor could never map. "I have set the Lord always before me," he says — not behind, not above, but before, in the line of sight, where the eye naturally rests. And from that single discipline flows the most audacious claim in the psalm: "Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell." The man whose eyes are fixed there does not fear what waits at the end of the road. Even the grave becomes a pleasant place when the Lord has walked through it first.

00:00 Preserve Me, O God
00:15 The Saints in Whom Is All My Delight
00:30 The Lord Is My Inheritance
00:45 The Lines in Pleasant Places
01:00 I Have Set the Lord Before Me
01:15 My Flesh Shall Rest in Hope
01:30 The Path of Life