This is such a profound Psalm in so many ways. David was completely God focused, even when he screwed up, even when according to human eyes his life looked like anything but God blessed. He starts by praying for God to keep him safe, that God is his refuge. Then he says something that is so incredibly important that all of God’s people should realize every minute of every day:
2 I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord;
apart from you I have no good thing.”
Every blessing, every good thing, is of the Lord. Just yesterday I came across this quote from C.S. Lewis in his Screwtape Letters:
Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden.”
Pleasure is God’s invention! We only get in trouble when we absolutize it, turn it into an idol as if the pleasure were an end in and of itself, as if it could bring us any lasting fulfillment. In fact the next two verses say just this:
3 As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones,
in whom is all my delight.
4 The sorrows of those who run after other gods shall multiply;
their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out
or take their names on my lips.
God’s holy people in his holy land, those he has saved, are his delight. Imagine that, God delighting in me! All because of Jesus. I can have absolute confidence that when Jesus said, “It is finished,” that God’s orientation to me as judge was completely changed to Father, and thus delight. I love what I just read in Hodge’s Systematic Theology (Vol. 3, p. 172) that captures this so perfectly:
According to the Bible the favor of God is the life of the soul.
This could not be more simply stated and more profound. The transformation in me is because of what God did for me in Christ: His wrath satisfied, my guilt washed away. Once an enemy, running away, blaming God, ashamed, scared, I am now his child, adopted into his eternal family, and loved with an everlasting love. Amazing, and all of the Lord.
The contrast could not be more stark. People don’t just ignore the true God, they “run after” other gods. They’re passionate for these other gods, as if they could really deliver on their promises, but all they deliver is increasing sorrows. And God let’s them go, in fact, it is he who ignores them. Paul in Romans 1 puts this starkly. Since they refuse God’s knowledge implanted in them, or suppress it by their wickedness, God gives them over to their sin. They get exactly what they want, they think, and it ends in eternal misery. Very sad. But it makes me very glad that God never gave me over.
The middle part of the Psalm is David’s gratitude expressed for God’s blessing in his life, and that he knows this because he always sets the Lord before him. Again, why David was called a man after God’s own heart. The essence of true life is trust in Him.
The final three verses, we’re told by Paul and Peter in Acts, refer to the resurrection. You wonder what David was thinking as he was writing this:
9 Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
my body also will rest secure,
10 because you will not abandon me to the grave,
nor will you let your holy one see decay.
11 You make known to me the path of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence,
with eternal pleasures at your right hand.
He clearly has in himself in mind. David knows this mortal mess we inhabit isn’t it; there is more. But as Peter points out in Acts 2, David is in fact dead and in a grave. David knew he would be too, but life, and joy, and pleasures in God’s presence, would somehow go on forever and somehow in bodily form. This could not be fully fleshed out, so to speak, until the other side of the resurrection, but that event completely transformed our perspective of the OT. I can imagine in the weeks after he was raised and teaching the disciples, that he told them exactly what these verses meant. What we have to look forward to, these eternal pleasures that God has the power to give us (his right hand), make the momentary and light afflictions of this life, as Paul put it, seem trivial in comparison.
My Walk Through The Bible 
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