The Cross from the Psalter
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Read Psalm 22 in full before proceeding: slowly, and as one continuous movement from the opening cry to the closing praise. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.
My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? I groan in prayer, but help seems far away.
Psalm 22:1
We said it once already, in the first session, and let it go by quickly: the Lord Jesus prayed Psalm 22 from the cross. Now we stop and stand under that sentence, because it is one of the most astonishing facts in all of Scripture, and the whole of this volume’s claim is concentrated in it. The Psalter is the prayer book of Christ. Here is the proof, nailed to a piece of wood.
It was the sixth hour, noon, and darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour. Three hours of it, in the middle of the day. And at the end of that darkness the dying Lord Jesus cried out with a loud voice (not a whimper, a loud voice): Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani (Matthew 27:46). The bystanders did not understand Him; some thought He was calling for Elijah. But the words were not nonsense and they were not new. They were the first line of a psalm: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? With the last of His strength, with the breath He had to fight the cross to draw, the Son of God prayed the Psalter.
Think about what that means for how we are to read this book. The Lord Jesus did not, in His worst hour, reach for words of His own. He reached for words that had been waiting for Him on the page for a thousand years. David had written them: David, who never hung on a cross, never had his hands and feet pierced, never had soldiers gamble for his clothing. And yet David wrote, in the first person, a description of exactly that, and the One who would live every line of it took the scroll and made it His own prayer at the moment it came true. The psalm was always His. He was simply praying what had been written about Him, and to Him, and now finally by Him.
There is a discipline in this, and a comfort, and we will come back to both. The discipline is that we read Psalm 22 first and last as His psalm: not a poem that happens to fit Him in a few uncanny details, but the prayer of the crucified Christ, prayed in His own voice. The comfort is that He has left the psalm to us. The believer who one day finds himself in a darkness he cannot pray his way out of is handed this psalm and told: your Savior prayed it before you, all the way to the bottom, and came up the other side into praise. You may pray it after Him.
We will walk the psalm in its own order, because its order is the gospel’s order. It descends into forsakenness, into mockery, into the physical undoing of a body pulled apart; and then, on a single hinge near the end, it turns and climbs, until it is no longer one sufferer crying in the dark but all the ends of the earth turning to the LORD in praise. Down to the dust of death, and up to the worship of the nations. That is the shape of Psalm 22. It is also the shape of Good Friday and Easter, held together in one prayer, on the lips of one Man.
A Prophet’s Psalm
Before we descend with the psalm, we should ask the question it ought to raise in any careful reader: how did this prayer come to exist at all? The heading over it tells us its human source: For the music director, according to the tune “Morning Doe”; a psalm of David. The tune, the Morning Doe (older translations call it the doe of the dawn), is lost to us; it was a melody everyone in Israel once knew and no one now can hum. But the rest is plain enough. A psalm of David. The shepherd who became king, who died old and full of days and was buried in a tomb that still had a known address in Jerusalem a thousand years later, when Peter could point to it (Acts 2:29). That David.
So how did that David write this? He was never crucified. He never had his hands and feet pierced, never watched soldiers gamble for his clothes, never hung in public view while a crowd wagged its heads and dared his God to save him. Rome was not yet a city worth the name, and crucifixion as Rome would practice it lay a thousand years over the horizon. David knew enemies and exile and the long silence of unanswered prayer; he had griefs enough of his own to reach for strong words. But the words he reached for describe, in exact and specific detail, an execution he had never seen and would never suffer. The psalm fits his own sorrows loosely. It fits his Son’s sufferings like a glove.
That fit is the fingerprint of prophecy, and it is the doctrine this whole series rests on. The prophets did not merely speak their own minds and their own times. Peter tells us they searched their own writings: They probed into what person or time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating when he testified beforehand about the sufferings appointed for Christ and his subsequent glory (1 Peter 1:10–11). The prophets were given words that outran their own understanding, words they then pored over, trying to see whom the Spirit within them was pointing to. David was a prophet (Acts 2:30); the Spirit of Christ was in him; and out of his real human anguish that Spirit composed a prayer that strained past David toward the One it was always about. The human author felt his afflictions and sang. The divine Author was writing the prayer His incarnate Son would one day pray, word for word, from a cross.
Both of those are true at once, and we hold them together the way the church holds together the two natures of Christ. This is not a case of finding Christ hiding in old poetry because we are clever enough to spot Him. It is a case of the Author of the poetry aiming at Christ from the first stroke of the pen. And it is why a psalm can strain past its writer the way this one does: why the bones out of joint and the pierced hands and the dice thrown for his clothing, which never literally happened to David, sit in the psalm anyway, too large for the man who wrote them. When a type strains past itself and is filled to overflowing only in Christ, we are watching prophecy do exactly what prophecy is for. The doe of the dawn runs through a long night in the first half of this psalm and breaks into morning in the second. We will not lean any weight on a tune name we cannot recover, but a believer might be forgiven for hearing, even in that lost title, a rumor of the dawn that was coming.
The Cry the Whole Psalm Hangs On
My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? The Hebrew verb is ʿazav: to leave, to abandon, to forsake. (The NET renders it abandoned here in the psalm and forsaken when Matthew reports the cry from the cross.) It is not a soft word. It is the word for a husband deserting a wife, for a man walking out and not looking back. And it is set here against the most intimate address a creature can speak to his Creator: ʾēlî, ʾēlî, my God, my God. The two halves of the line pull in opposite directions with all their might. Total abandonment, and total belonging, in the same breath. That collision is the center of the psalm, and the center of the gospel.
We have to say plainly what confessional Lutherans have always said and what tender hearts are always tempted to soften: the forsakenness was real. The Lord Jesus was not play-acting a despair He did not feel, narrating an abandonment that was not happening. On the cross He was forsaken, truly handed over, truly under the wrath His people’s sin had earned. God made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21). Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us (Galatians 3:13). The sinless One stood in the place of sinners and took what sinners are owed, and what sinners are owed is exactly this: to be cut off, abandoned, left in the dark. The cry of dereliction is the sound of our sentence being served by Another.
This is worth guarding from a misreading that comes easily and ruins everything. The cross is not first an example. The Lord Jesus is not on Golgotha to show us how to suffer bravely or how to keep faith under pressure, though He does both. He is there to make an exchange. He is not modeling courage; He is paying a debt. The whole of His life He had rendered to God the perfect, lifelong obedience the law demands and we never give; and now, at the end, He takes upon Himself the whole of the law’s curse that our disobedience has earned. The obedience becomes ours by His doing; the curse becomes His by our deserving. Strip the exchange out and leave only the example, and Psalm 22 shrinks to a noble man’s tragic poem: moving, and useless to a sinner. Keep the exchange, and the forsaken cry becomes the best news a sinner has ever heard, because the abandonment inside it is the abandonment that is no longer waiting for us.
Here we must walk carefully, because the comfort of the gospel depends on getting it right, and a careless word can wreck it. To say the Son was forsaken is not to say the Holy Trinity came apart. The eternal communion of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit cannot be broken; God does not stop being God. What happened at the cross is stranger and deeper than a rupture in the Godhead. The one person who cried out was the eternal Son, true God, but He cried out as the One who had taken our flesh, and in that flesh, as the sin-bearer standing under judgment in our place, He bore the abandonment our sin deserved. The same Lord who is from all eternity of one being with the Father drank, in His humanity, the cup of being forsaken. Chemnitz spent a whole book on this mystery, that the one undivided person of Christ truly suffered and truly died according to His human nature while remaining the divine Son. We will not solve it in a paragraph. We confess it, and we adore.
This is what Luther meant by the theology of the cross. God does not show His deepest love where we would look for it: in glory, in power, in a rescue at the last second. He shows it sub contrario, under its opposite: His strength hidden under weakness, His life hidden under death, His nearness hidden under a cry of abandonment. The crowd at the foot of the cross saw a failed prophet forsaken by the God he claimed. They were looking straight at the love of God for the world, and they could not see it, because it had come to them upside down. The cross is God saving us in the one place no one would think to look for salvation.
And notice (this cannot be said often enough) that the cry is a prayer. My God, my God. Even forsaken, He does not let go of God; He arraigns God to God; He flings the why up into the darkness and addresses the darkness as my God still. This is not the despair that turns away. It is faith crying out from the very bottom of the pit, faith with nothing left to hold but the bare word my God, and holding it. The believer needs to see this. There is a forsakenness that can be prayed, and the Lord Jesus has shown us how: by praying it. He did not curse God and die. He prayed a psalm and died, and the psalm He prayed had a my God in its first breath and he has done it in its last.
“He Trusted; Let the LORD Deliver Him”
The cry does not resolve at once. My God, I cry out during the day, but you do not answer, and during the night my prayers do not let up (v. 2). The heavens are shut. The prayer goes up and nothing comes down. Anyone who has prayed into a silence that would not break knows this verse from the inside, and it is worth saying that the Lord Jesus knew it from further inside than any of us ever will.
And yet the very next line turns. You are holy; you sit as king receiving the praises of Israel (v. 3). Before the psalm says one word about His own suffering it says a word about God’s character, and it refuses to let the silence rewrite who God is. He is still holy. He is still enthroned. The sufferer reminds himself, in the dark, of what is true in the light. Then he reaches back into the history of his people: In you our ancestors trusted; they trusted in you and you rescued them (v. 4). The ancestors cried out and were saved; they trusted and were not disappointed. The pattern of the LORD with His people has always been: they trust, He delivers. Which makes the present moment unbearable, because here is One trusting as no one ever trusted, and not being delivered. Not yet. The deliverance that came to the ancestors is, for now, withheld from the Son, so that through the Son it can come to the whole world.
Then the descent steepens. But I am a worm, not a man; people insult me and despise me (v. 6). A worm: tolaʿat. Not even an animal with some dignity to it; a worm, a thing trodden underfoot, the lowest crawling image the language has. The One by whom all things were made calls Himself a worm, because that is what He has been reduced to in the eyes of those who watch Him die. He is despised and rejected, and He says so in the barest word available.
And the watchers prove it. All who see me taunt me; they mock me and shake their heads (v. 7). Then comes the taunt itself, and here the psalm reaches across a thousand years and lands on Golgotha with terrible precision: He trusts in the LORD; let him deliver him; let him rescue him, for he delights in him! (v. 8 ESV; the NET reads the opening as a command, Commit yourself to the LORD!). Turn to Matthew 27 and read what the chief priests and scribes actually said as the Lord Jesus hung there: He trusts in God; let God, if he wants to, deliver him now (Matthew 27:43). They were not quoting the psalm on purpose. They had no idea they were reading from a script. But they spoke Psalm 22:8 almost word for word, and in doing so they testified, against their own intent, that the Man they mocked was the very One the psalm was about. The mockery is part of the fulfillment. Even the sneer was written down beforehand.
There is a deep irony buried in the taunt, and the psalm will dig it up before the end. Let God deliver him, they jeer, and God will. Not in the way they mean, not by lifting Him down to spare Him, but by raising Him up on the third day, having let Him go all the way down first. The crowd demands a rescue that would have left us unsaved. The Father gives a deliverance that goes clean through death and comes out the far side dragging the nations behind it. The taunt asks the wrong question and the psalm answers the right one.
And under the mockery, the thread of trust holds. Yes, you are the one who brought me out from the womb and made me feel secure on my mother’s breasts. I have been dependent on you since birth; from the time I came out of my mother’s womb you have been my God (vv. 9–10). From the first hour of His human life this One has belonged to the LORD and trusted the LORD, and He says so even now. The law of God requires perfect, lifelong, unbroken trust; here is the only human being who ever rendered it, rendering it still, with the nails in. He keeps the first commandment from the cross. That, too, is for us. His obedience covers our distrust, all the way back to our own mother’s womb.
Poured Out Like Water
Now the psalm turns to the body, and it does not look away. Many bulls surround me; powerful bulls of Bashan hem me in. They open their mouths to devour me like a roaring lion that rips its prey (vv. 12–13). The enemies are beasts now (bulls, a lion, and soon dogs), a ring of animal violence closing in on a man who cannot move. Bashan was cattle country, its bulls proverbially huge and strong. The picture is of overwhelming force bearing down on utter helplessness.
And then, from the inside, the dissolution: My strength drains away like water; all my bones are dislocated. My heart is like wax; it melts away inside me. The roof of my mouth is as dry as a piece of pottery; my tongue sticks to my gums. You set me in the dust of death (vv. 14–15). Read those lines slowly with the cross in view. My strength drains away like water: the body losing its hold on itself. All my bones are dislocated: what crucifixion does to a frame hung by its arms, the weight slowly dislocating the skeleton. The roof of my mouth is as dry as a piece of pottery; my tongue sticks to my gums: the raging thirst of a dying man, the mouth gone to dust, so that not far from here in John’s Gospel the Lord Jesus will say simply, I am thirsty (John 19:28). David wrote this centuries before anyone in Israel had seen a Roman cross. He did not know the mechanics of crucifixion. The Spirit who moved him did.
For dogs encompass me; a company of evildoers encircles me; they have pierced my hands and feet (v. 16 ESV). We come here to a famous difficulty, and because this series promised you honesty about how we read, we will not slide past it. The traditional Christian reading, they have pierced my hands and feet, follows the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, the one the apostles themselves usually quoted, which renders the word as they dug or pierced. The standard Hebrew text that has come down to us, however, has a form that can be read instead as like a lion at my hands and feet (the NET follows it: like a lion they pin my hands and feet), and faithful translators have gone back and forth over which reading stands behind the verse. We do not need to settle the textual question to read the psalm rightly, and we should be wary of leaning the whole weight of the crucifixion on a single contested word.
Because we do not have to. Look at the very next lines: They are dividing up my clothes among themselves; they are rolling dice for my garments (v. 18). There is nothing contested about that verse, and there is nothing contested about its fulfillment, because the apostle John stood at the cross, watched it happen, and told us what we were seeing. The soldiers took the Lord Jesus’s garments and divided them four ways; but His tunic was seamless, woven in one piece, so rather than tear it they gambled for it. This took place to fulfill the scripture that says, “They divided my garments among them, and for my clothing they threw dice” (John 19:24). John quotes Psalm 22:18 by name and tells us it came true under his own eyes. That is apostolic warrant of the firmest kind. The New Testament has read this verse of Christ for us, so we read it of Christ without flinching.
This is exactly the discipline we set out at the start of the series, and Psalm 22 is the place to feel its value. A psalm this charged invites over-reading; a clever interpreter could spin a hidden crucifixion out of every line and leave a lay reader unable to tell what is solid from what is fanciful. Our guardrail keeps us steady. We read Christ where the text’s own shape leads and where the apostles have already gone (the forsaken cry that He prayed, the mockery that the priests echoed, the dice thrown for His clothing that John witnessed), and we hold our verdict loosely where the ground is less sure. We do not need to win every disputed word. The verses that are beyond dispute are more than enough to pin this psalm to the cross.
But you, O LORD, do not remain far away. You are my source of strength. Hurry and help me! Deliver me from the sword. Save my life from the claws of the wild dogs. Rescue me from the mouth of the lion, and from the horns of the wild oxen (vv. 19–21a). The plea gathers everything the psalm has shown us (sword, dog, lion, the horns of the wild oxen) into one last cry for rescue. And then, mid-verse, on a single word, the whole psalm turns.
You Have Answered Me
You have answered me (v. 21b). It happens that fast. One moment the sufferer is begging to be saved from the lion’s mouth and the horns of the wild oxen; the next moment, in the same breath, he says you have answered me: past tense, accomplished, done. The cry has been heard. The translators wrestle with the exact wording, but every reading agrees on the hinge: somewhere right here the prayer crosses over from begging to thanking, from the pit to the answer. The God who did not answer in verse 2 has answered. And the rest of the psalm, ten more verses, is what the answered sufferer does with the rest of his life, and with the rest of the world.
I will declare your name to my countrymen. In the middle of the assembly I will praise you (v. 22). The first thing the rescued One does is gather a congregation and preach. He calls them, in the Hebrew, my brothers (the NET’s my countrymen). And lest we wonder whether we are allowed to hear the risen Lord Jesus in that line, the Letter to the Hebrews settles it for us. Writing of the Christ who has passed through suffering into glory, who is not ashamed to call those He has sanctified His own family, the writer puts Psalm 22:22 directly into His mouth: I will proclaim your name to my brothers; in the midst of the assembly I will praise you (Hebrews 2:11–12). The verse that turns the psalm from death to life is the risen Christ’s own word. The forsaken One of verse 1 is the resurrected One of verse 22, and between the two lies an empty tomb that the psalm does not describe but plainly assumes. For how else does a man set in the dust of death (v. 15) come to be leading the praises of a congregation a few verses later?
And see who the congregation is. My brothers. The crucified and risen Lord stands in the middle of the assembly of those He suffered for and calls them His brothers and sisters. The forsakenness was His alone; the family it bought is enormous. This is the same movement we traced in the first session, the Head and the body, the whole Christ, now running in the other direction. There we saw how He could pray our guilt as His own; here we see how He shares His vindication as ours. He went down into the forsakenness by Himself. He does not come up by Himself. He comes up at the head of a congregation, telling them the Father’s name.
It is worth staying inside the Letter to the Hebrews a moment longer, because of how it reads this turn. Just before it quotes our psalm, Hebrews has been saying that we see the Lord Jesus crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, that by God’s grace He experienced death on behalf of everyone, and that it was fitting for God to make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings (Hebrews 2:9–10). That is the movement of Psalm 22 in a single sentence: through the suffering of death, into glory and honor. And then, having traced that arc, the writer reaches for verse 22 to explain why the risen One calls us brothers: He shared our flesh and blood, He went through death itself, and He did it so that through death he could destroy the one who holds the power of death (that is, the devil), and set free those who were held in slavery all their lives by their fear of death (Hebrews 2:14–15). So the turn in Psalm 22 is not merely one man’s rescue from a bad day. It is the breaking of death’s whole grip on the human race. The congregation the risen Christ gathers is the assembly of the death-freed.
And do not pass too quickly over that word assembly (older translations, congregation). The Hebrew is qahal, the assembly of the LORD’s people, and when the old Greek translation rendered it, the word it chose was ekklesia, the very word the New Testament uses for the church. So when the risen Lord Jesus says in the midst of the assembly I will praise you, He is standing in the midst of the church, and He is not only the one the church praises; He is the one who leads its praise, the first voice, the great High Priest who sings the Father’s name and hands us the words to sing after Him. This is the very thing the first session claimed: the Psalter became the prayer book of the church because it was first the prayer book of Christ. Here is that claim with a tomb behind it. Every time the congregation gathers and lifts a psalm, the risen Christ is in its midst doing exactly what verse 22 said the rescued One would do: telling His brothers the Father’s name, in the middle of the assembly, forever.
All the Ends of the Earth
Once the psalm turns, it does not merely recover; it overflows. The circle of praise widens with every verse until it can hold the whole of creation. First the worshiping assembly of Israel is summoned, You loyal followers of the LORD, praise him (v. 23), and a reason is given that answers the whole first half of the psalm: For he did not despise or detest the suffering of the oppressed. He did not ignore him; when he cried out to him, he responded (v. 24). The God whose help seemed so far away in verse 1 had not ignored Him after all. The cry that went unanswered was finally answered. The psalm now testifies to the very thing it could not yet see when it began.
Then the circle breaks past Israel entirely. Let all the people of the earth acknowledge the LORD and turn to him. Let all the nations worship you (v. 27). This is the missionary horizon of the cross, written into the psalm of the cross. The suffering of the One becomes the salvation of the many, and not the many of one nation only but all the nations: Gentiles, foreigners, the ends of the earth. The blood shed in the dark at Jerusalem reaches Bashan and beyond, reaches Rome and Africa and the islands and the cold north, reaches a folding chair in a church basement on the northern plains of a continent David never knew existed. For the LORD is king and rules over the nations (v. 28). The cross looks like the defeat of a king. It is the enthroning of one.
The reach even runs past the living. All those who are descending into the grave will bow before him, including those who cannot preserve their lives (v. 29). Those already in the grave, those with no power to preserve their own lives: they too are swept into this worship. The deliverance the psalm celebrates is finally a deliverance from death itself, and so it gathers in the dead. There is no one this cross cannot reach.
And then, at the very end, the psalm reaches forward in time and finds us. A whole generation will serve him; they will tell the next generation about the Lord. They will come and tell about his saving deeds; they will tell a future generation… (vv. 30–31a). A future generation; the Hebrew says, more vividly, a people yet unborn. When David wrote that line, the people sitting in your study were the unborn posterity he was writing toward, and now here we are, the coming generation, holding the psalm in our hands, doing the very thing it foretold: hearing of the Lord, and being told His saving deeds, His righteousness. The psalm of the cross plans for the church before the church exists, and writes our names, without knowing them, into its last verses.
And the final words: what he has accomplished (v. 31b), or more literally, that he has done it. The Hebrew is spare almost to the point of silence, kî ʿāśâ, that he has done, the deed named but not described, because the deed is the whole psalm and needs no further word. We cannot read those three syllables from this side of Calvary without hearing another voice, on another hill, gathering the same thought into a single Greek word as He bowed His head: It is completed, tetelestai (John 19:30). We do not claim the apostle is quoting the psalm there; we only notice, and we are surely meant to notice, that the prayer which opened with why have you abandoned me closes with he has done it, that the psalm of dereliction ends on the note of the finished work. What was begun in the dark at the first verse is done by the last. The cross is not an accident that God recovered from. It is a work, and it is complete.
The Psalm the Forsaken May Pray
So what do we do with this psalm, we who were not at the cross and have never been truly forsaken? We pray it. But we had better be clear about how, because there is a wrong way and a right way, and the difference is the difference the first session was built on.
The wrong way is to climb into Psalm 22 as though it were first of all about us, as though our bad days were the dereliction, our critics the bulls of Bashan, our disappointments the dust of death. That is not reading; it is borrowing a grandeur we have no claim to. We were never the worm scorned for the sin of the world. We were the ones whose sin did the scorning. The psalm is His before it is ever ours, and if we forget that, we turn the cross into a mirror and lose the gospel in it.
The right way is the way the whole Christ makes possible. Because the Head has prayed this psalm to the bottom and out the other side, the members may pray it in Him. When the believer is plunged into a darkness that will not lift, when the prayers seem to strike a shut heaven and fall back unanswered, when God Himself seems to have walked out and not looked back, the believer is not handed a slogan and told to cheer up. He is handed Psalm 22 and told: your Lord prayed this, and meant it, and was heard. Pray it after Him. Your forsakenness is real to you, but it is not the bottomless thing His was; He went to the bottom precisely so that yours would have a floor. You feel forsaken. He was forsaken, so that to you the LORD could promise, and keep the promise, I will never leave you and I will never abandon you (Hebrews 13:5).
That is the whole comfort of the theology of the cross brought down to where the pew-sitter lives. The God who saved the world by being forsaken on a Friday afternoon is not absent from His people in their dark hours; He is hidden in them, working life under the appearance of death, exactly as He did on the cross. The believer in the depths is not outside the pattern of Christ. He is inside it. And the psalm that begins in his darkness ends, as surely as it ended for his Lord, in the praise of the nations and the finished work of God. Law and gospel meet in this psalm as starkly as anywhere in the Old Testament (the full curse of the law spent on the Forsaken One, the full sweetness of the gospel poured out on a people yet unborn), and the believer who learns to pray it learns to find himself on the gospel side of the cross, where his Savior put him.
Two things follow, and they reach to the edges of a Christian life. The first is that this psalm is given to the dying. The first session ended at a deathbed, with into your hands I commit my spirit on the lips of the Lord Jesus and of the believers who have died after Him; Psalm 22 is the companion prayer for the same hour. Every believer comes at last to his own dust of death (v. 15). To go down into it praying the psalm your Lord prayed, to say my God, my God in the dark with a tongue that sticks to the gums, knowing He said it first and rose on the third day, is simply what it means to die in Christ. The psalm does not promise the dying believer that the darkness will feel like anything but darkness. It promises that the darkness has a floor, and a morning past it, because the One who went first found both.
The second is that this psalm gives the believer permission to be honest. The Psalter does not require him to walk into God’s presence pretending he is fine. It hands him a prayer that begins with an unanswered why and does not apologize for it, and it teaches him that such a prayer, far from being faithless, is the prayer of the most faithful Man who ever lived. So to the believer who is sure God has abandoned him, the answer of Psalm 22 is not a brisk He hasn’t, so cheer up. The answer is deeper and stranger and far more comforting than that. It is: He was abandoned, truly, to the bottom, in your place, so that the abandonment you dread has already fallen, and fallen on Him, and will never now fall on you. The believer’s worst fear was real. It simply happened to Someone else, on purpose, a long time ago, and the bill has been marked paid. That is a prayer worth dying with, and worth living with until then.
Gathering the Threads
We began where the Lord Jesus began on Good Friday: with the first line of a psalm, prayed aloud from the cross. That single fact carries the whole session: the Psalter is His prayer book, and Psalm 22 is the sharpest proof of it, a thousand-year-old prayer that He made His own at the moment it came true.
We stood under the cry of dereliction and refused to soften it. The forsakenness was real, borne by the eternal Son in our flesh as the sin-bearer under judgment, the curse of the law spent on the One who knew no sin; and yet the Holy Trinity was not torn, and the cry itself was a prayer, my God held fast in the dark. We watched the psalm descend through mockery the chief priests would one day echo word for word, through a body poured out like water, to the dice thrown for His clothing, which John saw with his own eyes and named as Scripture fulfilled. We were honest where the text is contested and confident where the apostles have spoken. Then we felt the psalm turn on a single word (you have answered me) and climb from the dust of death to a congregation of brothers, the risen Christ leading their praise in the words Hebrews puts on His lips. And we followed the circle of that praise as it widened past Israel to all the nations, past the living to those descending into the grave, and forward in time to a people yet unborn, to us, closing on the spare and final word, he has done it.
Down to the bottom, and up to the ends of the earth; the cry of dereliction and the finished work; Good Friday and Easter in one prayer, on the lips of one Man, and left as a gift for every believer who will ever have to pray from the dark. That is Psalm 22, and that is the cross, read from the Psalter.
For Discussion
The Lord Jesus prayed the first line of Psalm 22 from the cross rather than crying out words of His own invention. Why does it matter that, in His worst hour, He reached for a psalm? What does it suggest about how the Psalter is meant to be used by those who pray after Him?
This session insisted that the forsakenness was real and yet that the Holy Trinity was not broken. Read 2 Corinthians 5:21 and Galatians 3:13 alongside Psalm 22:1. How do these passages help hold both truths together: that the Son was truly forsaken as the bearer of sin, and that He remained the beloved Son?
The chief priests at the cross spoke words almost identical to Psalm 22:8 without knowing it (compare Matthew 27:43). Where is the irony in their taunt, “Let God deliver him”, and how does the second half of the psalm answer it?
John 19:24 names Psalm 22:18 (the dice thrown for the garments) as Scripture fulfilled, while Psalm 22:16 rests on a disputed Hebrew text. Why does the series rest its weight on the verse the apostle quotes rather than on the contested one? How does that discipline protect a lay reader?
Psalm 22 turns from forsakenness to worldwide praise without ever leaving the single prayer. Read Hebrews 2:11–12. How does the writer to the Hebrews use Psalm 22:22 to describe the risen Christ, and why does He call the worshipers His brothers?
The psalm ends by promising that its message will be proclaimed to a future generation, a people yet unborn, and announces simply that he has done it. In what sense are the people in your study part of that unborn posterity, and what is the it that has been done and is now ours to proclaim?
Looking Ahead
Psalm 22 took us down into the dust of death and assumed, without quite describing, the rising that turns its prayer to praise. In the next session we go to the psalm that describes it. Psalm 16 is David’s psalm of confidence (I constantly trust in the LORD), and it climbs to a line that David could not have said truthfully of himself: you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption (Psalm 16:10 ESV). David’s body did see corruption; David’s tomb was a known address in Jerusalem. So of whom is the psalm finally speaking?
The apostles answer that question twice, and on purpose. Peter preaches Psalm 16 at Pentecost and tells the crowd outright that David, being a prophet, was speaking of the resurrection of the Christ, whose flesh did not see corruption (Acts 2:25–31). Paul preaches the same psalm at Antioch and presses the same point (Acts 13:35–37). If Psalm 22 is the cross from the Psalter, Psalm 16 is the empty tomb from the Psalter: the two great paschal psalms, set side by side at the front of this volume so that we meet the crucified and risen Lord in His own prayer book before we go a step further. The forsakenness of Friday and the incorruption of Sunday belong together, and the Psalter holds them both.
Read Psalm 16 in full before the next session, and read Acts 2:22–32 and Acts 13:32–37 alongside it. Notice how the apostles handle the psalm: what they claim David could not have meant of himself, and why.
Closing Prayer
Lord Jesus Christ, forsaken for us, we can scarcely bear to look at what You bore. In the darkness over Golgotha You prayed the psalm of dereliction to its bitter bottom; You were made sin who knew no sin, made a curse to redeem us from the curse, abandoned that we might be gathered, cut off that we might be brought near. We confess that it was our sin that wagged its head at You and our debt that the Father exacted from You, and we have no thanks equal to it. Teach us never to soften what You suffered, and never to doubt why You suffered it.
And because You did not stay in the dark, but turned the prayer to praise and rose to lead Your brothers in it, give us courage to pray Psalm 22 after You in our own dark hours: not as those who are bottomlessly forsaken, for You have promised never to leave us nor forsake us, but as those whose darkness now has a floor, because You went beneath it. Hide our lives in Your finished work, that when we go down to the dust we may rise where You have risen, and take our place in the congregation of all the ends of the earth that will yet praise Your name. For You have done it; it is finished; and You live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.