Ep. 102. Psalm 22 | A Cry From The Cross

EPISODE 102

A CRY FROM THE CROSS: PSALM 22

The twenty-second Psalm has to be one of the most important Old Testament texts in terms of understanding the cross of Christ. I grew up in church. There has never been a period of my life where I haven't been in church; more than that, there has never been a time in my life when I only went to church on Sunday mornings. As a kid, I was in church on Sunday mornings and Sunday nights, Wednesday nights for Awana's, Monday nights for visitation, Vacation Bible School, summer camps, Royal Ambassadors, choir, and Evangelism Explosion training. From the time I was sixteen, I have been leading Bible studies, and by the time I was twenty-two, I had started my own non-profit organization where I spent the next twenty years traveling, preaching all manner of events. I could not possibly tell you how early it was that I was first taught that God forsook Jesus on the cross. After all, Jesus declared, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" Not once in all those years did anyone point me to Psalm 22. When I finally made the connection, it was around my thirty-eighth birthday.

Let's unpack a few things here. It is true that in Matthew 27:46, while on the cross, Jesus says, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me." We don't deny that. But the night before he was crucified, Jesus also said, "Behold, the hour is coming; indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each to his own home, and will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me." Jesus was speaking of his arrest and crucifixion, that the disciples would be scattered from him and abandon him, but he declared that the Father would be with him. Earlier than that, in the book of John, Jesus says, "When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he and that I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me. And he who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, for I always do the things that are pleasing to him." Again, about the cross, Jesus says the Father has not left him alone and that he always does those things that please the Father. This, of course, includes the cross since we see in both John and Philippians that the cross was how Jesus brought glory to the Father and how glory was given to Jesus.

So, I ask you, if the Father was always pleased and glorified by and through Jesus's work, if the Father was with Jesus and did not leave him alone, what might Jesus have meant when he said from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

It is important to remember the audience around the cross. Though the Romans were doing the work of putting Jesus to death, the Jews were in assembly around the cross. Every Jew in earshot of Jesus would have thought of the 22nd Psalm when Jesus spoke those words from the cross. The scene unfolding in front of them had been captured nearly 700 years earlier by David the Psalmist. David, carried along by the Holy Spirit, had revealed not only the death of the Messiah but specific details of that fateful morning.

David predicted that the mockers would wag their heads at Jesus and make mouths at him, which was fulfilled in Matthew. David predicted that they would say, "Let God rescue him," and they did. David predicted that his heart would be poured out like water and melt like wax, that his bones would not be broken, that they would gamble for his clothing, that he would thirst from the cross, and that his hands and feet would be pierced. How can we not see the 22nd Psalm as a step-by-step account of the cross? Jesus, in his final breaths, was not crying out that God had forsaken him; rather, he was preaching the Psalm of the Cross to all who would listen. Even the Psalmist did not believe he had been forsaken, for he writes, "[God] has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hidden his face from him but has heard when he cried out to him." (verse 24) Do you see that? God did not hide his face from the afflicted one, despite the songs we sing to the contrary, "The Father turned his face away."

We read one verse in Matthew 27 and conclude that Jesus was forsaken by God, despite Jesus having said the night before the Father would not leave him alone, despite the predictive and preaching nature of Psalm 22, despite the Scripture saying the Father would not turn his face away, despite the Scripture saying that the cross was for the glory of the Father and the glory of Jesus. For nearly four decades, my teachers declared that the Father hated Jesus at this moment. For almost two decades, I preached the same thing. The Scripture doesn't bear that idea out but instead contradicts it. Is it so impossible to believe that Jesus was pointing, one more time, to the fact that he was the fulfillment of the Scripture? Do we believe Jesus when he says, "I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who sent me commanded me to say all that I have spoken?" Or is the cross somehow an exception to that?

Or ask yourself this question: Where in all of the Old Testament was God angry with the offering rightly presented to him? If the offerings rightly given in the OT were a "pleasing aroma" to God, why would the perfect sacrifice be any different? We've got to quit building an entire (wrong) theology on one statement of Jesus without considering the rest of the Scripture.

Okay, send me your questions or your hate mail. This is probably a difficult one to process. Sit with it for a few days.

ADDITIONAL READING: John 16:32; John 8: 28-29; John 12:27-28; Philippians 2:5-11; Isaiah 53; Matthew 27: 39-40; Matthew 27:43; John 19:34; John 19:28; John 19:32; Matthew 27:35; Hebrews 2:12; John 17:1; John 12:49