Psalm 22 (Part 1)
by adamsteins
A deeper look into the graphic nature of Psalm 22 opens the door to make a direct correlation between King David and the greater King, Jesus Christ. David’s writings become Jesus’ words, and his cries to God begin to emulate the Lord’s pain on the cross. This is the most personal and brutal account that I have read about our Savior’s last hours spent on the cross.
“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” Take in these words and let this first verse in the psalm cut your heart open. Search yourself and begin to place yourself in our Lord’s anguish. This is pain pouring out from between His blood-stained lips; His deepest heart’s cry to his Beloved Father. “Why have You forsaken Me?” We will never be able to understand these words. Interpret them as we may, we will still never know the wrath of the Father that our Lord Jesus had felt in the very moments He had mustered up this plea. These words mark the moment in which the Father had left His only Begotten Son. What a tragic, yet empowering moment this is to embrace as a believer. This is the moment where our Lord, who has been with the Father since the beginning of time itself, experiences something that He has never known. Jesus had went forty days without food and had rivaled all of Satan’s temptations, but at this very moment when He desperately utters, “Why have You forsaken Me,” He finally knew what life on this decaying earth was like without God. It was in this hour that our Lord Jesus connected with every unbeliever’s lonely and pained existence. It was here where Jesus felt what a believer suffers through moments of unbelief. A life without the Father is a forsaken life and this was the life that our Lord Jesus endured only hours before His final breath.
Our Beloved Lord’s pain continued on the cross for hours. He was beaten, flogged, spit on, ridiculed, His body torn apart, nailed to a tree, placed on a hill, and He still had not undergone the full wrath of His Father. The fullness of God’s wrath befell Jesus the moment that God left His Son’s side. As Jesus now had suffered every kind of physical temptation, endured every kind of physical pain, and understood the awfulness of life without His beloved Father, I say shame to those who say that we “do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses…” (Hebrews 4:15) Don’t you dare ever say that Jesus doesn’t know what you are going through. Humble yourself and realize that it is you who will never be able to sympathize with what our meek Lord has went through.
Look unto your King now and hold tight to the nail-pierced hands that embrace you. Follow His lead for He has endured more than what we will ever know. Not only has He suffered the full wrath of our God, but in those hours Jesus still chose to praise His Father. “But You are holy” (Psalm 22:3). Can we look at our own difficulties in life and still praise our Father in heaven for His Holiness? Do you crumble at the sight of the wind and desperately cry out to the Lord to save you (Matthew 14:30) or do you endure hardships and pain with much patience and give praise to our Father for His grace and holiness (2 Corinthians 6:4-10)? Our King, even in His deepest humiliation on the cross, chose to praise God even while feeling the fullness of His wrath! Who are you not to praise the Lord even when life is crumbling around you? You live a life of knowing the fullness of God’s goodness during all tribulations, unlike Jesus who knew the fullness of God’s wrath during the hardest tribulation of all. You live free from shame and the weight of sin; the Messiah lived to be shamed by others on the cross while the weight of His body became sin. No longer was He a Lamb in those final moments before the Father. Instead, He had become a Scapegoat for each one of us and the sins that we commit daily.
For those of you who say that the Lord cannot save you from your sin or that He cannot rescue you from your problems do not take the time to comprehend all that He truly took on during His time on the cross. Rome’s greatest symbol of fear has now become the world’s greatest symbol of hope. The earth’s most inhumane way to die became the most loving and humane act done for all mankind. Whether in need or in agonizing pain, take the time from your day to choose what our faithful Lord did through His anguish, and tell God how Holy He is. For if Jesus was forsaken on the cross by His own Father for our lives’ sake, how much more will God freely give to us in our hurt? (Romans 8:32)
