Word of Encouragement (6/17/2026)

“Hear, O Lord, and be merciful to me! O Lord, be my helper!” (Ps. 30:10)‍

Yesterday, we saw how David asked the Lord to rescue him, saying, “What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness?” (v. 9). A natural question that arises is whether this was theologically correct. If David died, would God end up with “a praise deficit”? Only if David stopped existing or fell asleep for an indefinite period. But do we not believe that our souls go to heaven or hell the moment we die? Isn’t this what Jesus implied when He promised the penitent thief on the cross, “Truly, I say to you, today you shall be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43)?

This applied to Old Testament saints as well. They received the same salvation as New Testament believers by the same means—by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. This was what Paul demonstrated in Rom. 4 as he spoke of Abraham’s justification by faith. Obviously, they were justified by faith in the Messiah to come, whereas we are justified by faith in the Messiah who has come. But the fact that we are all justified by faith in Christ remains the same.

If so, didn’t David know that, even if he died, his praise of God would not stop but continue in heaven for all eternity? There is no such thing as a deficit in the kingdom of God.

There is indeed a surprising scarcity of statements concerning the afterlife. So, many theologians claim that the Jewish belief in the afterlife developed only after the Babylonian exile. We don’t find any clear statement about the resurrection and afterlife until Dan. 12:2. We don’t have to reject such a suggestion outright, unless they claim that this idea of the afterlife was borrowed from other religions as the Jews came into contact with them during their exile. They would view David’s prayer here as evidence of the absence of any expectation of the afterlife in Jewish theology.

But it is not wrong to think that the theology of the afterlife was not prominent in the Old Testament. We believe in the organic, progressive revelation of God. The Bible is not an encyclopedia, but a history book of sorts, in which the drama of God’s redemption progressively unfolds. Not everything about Jesus was revealed from the beginning; more and more about Christ was revealed (progressively so) as the drama of God’s redemption unfolded. This is not to say that there were no hints of the afterlife in the Old Testament until later. Think of Elijah being taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire. It was that the Jewish life revolved around the promised land until the Babylonian Exile exposed its limitations.

Now that the certainty of our eschatological hope is revealed through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we should set our minds on the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God (Col. 3:1).

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