864. The Psalm of the Cross

Welcome to The Daily Platform from Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. Today's speaker is Dr. Steve Pettit, who served as an evangelist for over 29 years before becoming president of Bob Jones University. I'd like to ask you to take your Bibles today and turn with me to Psalm 22 as our theme is show us Christ. I pray that this morning that that will be the fruit of your prayer as we look at Psalm 22. I'd like us to look at the whole of Psalm 22 this morning as we have time. And so because of the nature of the Psalm, I'd actually like to read it.

And I think for our attention, and I want us to give the full attention, I'd like to actually ask you to stand as we read it this morning. Psalm 22, a Psalm of David. God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Why art thou so far from helping me? And from the words of my roaring. Oh, my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not.

And in the night season, and am not silent. But thou art holy, O thou that inhabits the praises of Israel. Our fathers trusted in thee, they trusted, and thou didst deliver them. They cried unto thee, and were delivered, and they trusted in thee, and were not confounded.

But I am a worm and no man, a reproach of men and despised of the people. All they that see me laugh me to scorn, they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying, He trusted on the Lord that he would deliver him, let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him. But thou art he that took me out of the womb, thou didst make me hope when I was upon my mother's breasts.

I was cast upon thee from the womb, thou art my God from my mother's belly. Be not far from me, for trouble is near, for there is none to help. Many bulls have compassed me, strong bulls of Bashan have beset me around. They gaped upon me with their mouths as a ravening and a roaring lion. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax, it is melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a potchard, and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws, and thou hast brought me into the dust of death. For dogs have compassed me, the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me. They pierce my hands and my feet.

I may tell all my bones, they look alike and stare upon me. They part my garments among them and cast lots upon my vesture. But be not thou far from me, O Lord, O my strength, haste thee to help me. Deliver my soul from the sword, my darling from the power of the dog.

Save me from the lion's mouth, for thou hast heard me from the horn, thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns. I will declare thy name unto my brethren. In the midst of the congregation will I praise thee. Ye that fear the Lord, praise him. All ye the seed of Jacob, glorify him and fear him, and all the seed of Israel. For he has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted.

Neither hath he hid his face from him, but when he cried unto him he heard. My praise shall be of thee in the great congregation. I will pay my vows before them that fear him. The meek shall eat and be satisfied. They shall praise the Lord that seek him.

Your heart shall live forever. All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the Lord, and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee, for the kingdom is the Lord's, and he is the governor among the nations. All they that be fat upon the earth shall eat and worship. All they that go down to the dust shall bow before him, and none can keep alive his own soul. A seed shall serve him. It shall be accounted to the Lord for a generation. They shall come and shall declare his righteousness unto a people that shall be born, that he hath done this. God add his blessing to the reading of his word, and all God's people said, Amen.

You may be seated. In a very simple reading of this Psalm 22 that we just read, it is clear that the author David is expressing his feelings as someone who's been abandoned and forsaken by God, and he has responded to the Lord by clinging to him in faith and prayer. And from that perspective, we would call this psalm a psalm of lament when you're in trouble and you seek God. But I don't think you have to read very long as we did this morning before you realize that the setting of this psalm cannot really be the experience of David because this is the suffering of someone who is being executed by crucifixion.

One writer, Derek Kidner, said, No incident recorded of David can begin to account for this. The language of this psalm defies a naturalistic explanation. The last account is in the terms used by the Apostle Peter concerning another psalm of David when he wrote, Being therefore a prophet he foresaw and he spoke of Christ the Messiah. Psalm 22 is not so much a lamentable account of the suffering of an ancient king, but rather it is a prophetic picture of the suffering of the King of Kings, the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ. Steve Lawson writes of this psalm, The way I find Psalm 22 so amazing is that it was written 1,000 years before the first coming of Christ, and it reads as if it were actually recorded by a person standing at the foot of the cross. The very words spoken by Christ from the cross, as well as his thoughts and the injuries he suffered, are all recorded here by David. David is the sweet psalmist of Israel, and yet he sets forth a graphic portrayal of the cross hundreds of years before crucifixion was even invented as a form of capital punishment. With the precision of an eyewitness observing the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus Christ, David, under the direction of the Holy Spirit, wrote the most detailed description of the cross found anywhere in the Bible. Here is David's preview of the cross, a masterpiece that has been called the fifth gospel and the gospel according to David. Perhaps we should simply entitle this psalm as Charles Spurgeon entitled it, the Psalm of the Cross. And Psalm 22 best describes the crucifixion of Christ of all the verses that are in the Bible.

So this morning, let's take a few moments to look at this gripping, prophetic portrayal of the crucifixion of Jesus and the words that he spoke. And I'd like to divide the psalm up in two simple parts. You see the parts in the reading verses 1 through 21 and then verses 22 to the end of the chapter. And the first part of this psalm is entitled The Prevailing Darkness of the Crucified Savior. And as you read it, it is very clear that he feels abandoned by God. And I'm going to follow the idea that has been proposed by a number of authors that in this first part, these first 21 verses, there are two running alternative faults, two ideas running through these first 21 verses. On the one hand, there is the experience of the writer where he reveals what he thinks and what he feels in his suffering.

And so he uses the pronouns I and me. We will call that the A section. Then the second part, on the other hand, is the writer reveals what he knows is true about God and then how he responds in prayer and faith. And he uses the word thou or the word you. We call that section B.

So back and forth, section A and section B. So if we look at the first A section in verses 1 and 2, what do we see? The author is crying out with a question. God, why have you abandoned me? My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me? And according to Matthew 27, 46 and Mark 15, 34, Jesus applied this verse to himself at 3 o'clock in the afternoon after three hours of darkness while he was suffering on the cross. It is clear that when Jesus was on the cross, Psalm chapter 2, 22, which he would have memorized, was running through his mind. So why did Jesus feel abandoned by God? Well, I think it's important to understand that in the Old Testament, the essence of the atonement was the transferral of guilt to an innocent sacrifice.

That is like core. Atonement is the transfer of guilt to an innocent sacrifice. And that transfer would take place when a priest would lay, literally would press down his hands on the head of a sacrifice. He would confess the sins of the people over the sacrifice so that the sacrifice was receiving the guilt and bearing the full weight of the sinner's deserved judgment upon himself. And then that sacrifice was executed. He was slain. He was killed by the shedding of his blood as a death penalty for those sinner's sins.

That's what atonement is all about. And when John the Baptist saw Jesus for the first time, what did he say? He said, Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. Why would Jesus feel abandoned by God? Because he was bearing the full weight, the pressure, of the guilt of the sin of the world on his own body.

Isaiah says it this way. Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him. He has put him to grief when his soul makes an offering for guilt. Jesus was being abandoned by God because God was pressing on Christ the sin of the world and he was bearing it alone.

And then that takes us to the first B section, verses three through five. God is silent, but David exercises faith. He expresses that he does know that God is not like man. God is holy.

What does that mean? It means he doesn't make promises and then he breaks them. God is not like you.

He doesn't lie. And David goes on to acknowledge that in the past, his ancestors trusted in God and God faithfully delivered them. And all you have to do is to read the Old Testament and you see one deliverance after another. God never puts his people to shame. And therefore, will God not also be faithful and deliver the one who is crying out in abandonment? For Christ on the cross understood the history of his people and he knew that God faithfully delivered them, then God will deliver him. And may I say to you, as it is true for his people in the past and for Christ on the cross, it is true for you and I. God will not put us to shame.

He will deliver his people in their darkest hours. And then we come to the second section A, verses 6 through 8. Here the author prophetically expresses the shame and the rejection he feels when he is being mocked for trusting God. For when Christ hung on the cross, the crowd derided and scorned him. Even the two thieves that were on either side mocked him so that he felt subhuman.

He felt like a worm because of the cynicism and the mockery. And notice verse 7, he says, All who seek me mock me, they make mouths at me, they wag their heads. This is quoted directly by Matthew and Mark as they alluded to this verse when they said all those who pass by derided him, wagging their heads.

Jesus experienced contempt, rejection, and ridicule by those he came to save. And then notice chapter 22 and verse 8, he trusts in the Lord, let him deliver him. Only Matthew mentions this verse in his gospel as he describes the crowd who said he trusts in God, let God deliver him now if he desires him. Though Jesus claims to be close to God, it is apparent that God is not there to answer or deliver him. He appears to be abandoned by God. Will God step in and deliver him from abandonment? And then we come to verses 9 through 11.

And here we come to the second B section. And here David writes of himself and prophetically of the Messiah that he has always had a close relationship with God ever since his birth. For here the writer speaks about being in the womb of his mother and on his mother's breasts. And I think it is very clear to us as we understand the conception of Jesus Christ that he was born of a virgin miraculously in the womb of his mother Mary. So that even from his womb he was trusting in the Lord.

And so the writer here is saying that this we should never be moved away from the conviction that we are gods even from our mother's birth. When you face the darkness, and all of you will face the darkness, all of you will. What do you do with your mind? What do you fill your mind with?

Fill your mind with light. Fill your mind with your history. How has God been faithful to you? We did a podcast this past week and in that the president's podcast we had the testimony of Helen Wallen. Everybody knows Helen. And she talked about how through her darkest hours she remembered God delivering her as a baby that was left in a field to die. And a man picked her up and brought her to an orphanage. And eventually God has brought her here and she's a junior at Bob Jones University. In your darkest hours remember that God is unchanging and immutable in his faithfulness.

Will he abandon his own? And then we come to the third A section verses 12 through 18. This section is a vivid portrayal of the crucifixion. David describes the abusers as wild beasts, bulls, lions, dogs, wild oxen.

And how they abused the Messiah in the well-known Scofield reference Bible. Scofield writes, Psalm 22 is a graphic picture of the death of death by crucifixion. Bones out of joint, profuse perspiration caused by intense suffering. The heart is being affected.

Strength is exhausted and extreme thirst. But what I think is the most remarkable are verses 16 and 18. Because in verse 16 it reads, For dogs encompass me, a company of evildoers encircle me.

They have pierced my hands and feet. Here we have crucifixion prophesied. Nails driven through the criminals feet and hands as he is nailed to a tree. And this was not a form of Jewish execution. It was invented 400 years after King David. And yet David prophesied of the way the Messiah is executed. Never question what Christ has done as we see it prophesied. But Zechariah prophesied it. Chapter 12 verse 10, So that when they look on me, on whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him as one mourns for his only child. Jesus was prophetically announced in death and crucifixion in the Old Testament. Then we come to verse 18 and it says, They divide my garments among them and my clothing they cast lots. And for my clothing they cast lots. At the foot of the cross the Roman soldiers were anticipating how close Jesus was to death.

So what did they do? They rolled the dice for his clothes. And all four gospels describe this event.

And John is probably the most descriptive. Let me read to you John 19 verse 23 and 24. When the soldiers had crucified Jesus they took his garments and they divided them into four parts. One part for each soldier, also his tunic. But the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom. So they said to one another, Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it shall be.

This was to fulfill the scripture which says, They divided my garments among them and for my clothing they cast lots. We have prophecy written a thousand years before Jesus was even born, prophesied and fulfilled at the foot of the cross. And then we come to the third B section. And here we have the climactic turning point of the first part. And the Messiah here prays earnestly for his deliverance. And the section concludes with an answer to his prayer. Look at verse 21 and I'm going to read it in the ESV where it says, You have rescued me from the horns of the wild oxen. Literally the phrase, You have rescued me reads, You have answered me. What started with abandonment on the cross in darkness ends with assurance.

You have answered me. John Calvin makes this powerful application for believers when he writes, A sense of being forsaken by God, far from being unique to Christ or rare for the believer is a regular and frequent struggle for believers. There is not one of the godly who does not daily experience in himself the same thing. According to the judgment of the flesh, he thinks he is cast off and forsaken by God, while yet he apprehends by faith the grace of God, which is hidden from the eye of sense and reason. On the cross Christ said, You have answered me. And that leads quickly to the second part. The first part being the crucified one. Now we come to verse 22, the most powerful, and this part is known as the most powerful deliverance or the powerful deliverance of the resurrected Savior. I think one of the most interesting portions in the New Testament is Luke 24. After Jesus had resurrected, two disciples were on the road to Emmaus.

Emmaus is about seven miles from Jerusalem. As they're walking along, they're talking about the weekend, what had happened. And what had happened was that Jesus had been executed and they had heard credible reports that the tomb was empty, but they did not believe that Jesus had resurrected from the dead.

And on their way home, what happens? Jesus comes alongside of them and asks what they're talking about. And they describe how their hopes that Jesus was the Messiah had been destroyed. And so Jesus holds the first Bible study of the Christian era. What did he teach them? He went to the Old Testament beginning with Moses and all the prophets and he spoke and explained to them his death and resurrection. Have you ever wondered what scriptures in the Old Testament he used? Surely he used Isaiah 53, but I think most definitely he used Psalm 22. Because in this he said, guys, it's like I told you.

Here it is. And then they read it and suddenly their eyes were open and they saw what Christ came to do. Verses 1 through 21 are prophetic for seeing of the crucifixion of Jesus. Verses 22 through 31 are prophetic for seeing of the resurrection of Jesus. And specifically it anticipates the growth and the expansion of the gospel. And we see it in three phases. In verses 22 to 24 we see Jesus meeting with his Jewish brothers.

You know what's really interesting to me? Hebrews 2-12 is a direct quotation of Psalm 22-22. In Hebrews the writer declares that Jesus is superior to the angels.

He's greater than the angels. He also stresses that Jesus has become the savior of his people because he became like them and by making them members of his family. So we read in Hebrews 2-11, listen to this. But both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family.

That is why he's not ashamed to call them brothers. And then he quotes Psalm 22-22 saying, I will tell of your name to my brothers. In the midst of the congregation I will sing your praise. The New Testament interprets Psalm 22-22 as the words of Jesus as he goes to meet his brothers after he dies and rises from the dead. And this is Jesus coming to his own after his resurrection. And what did Jesus command his disciples to do? Go into the world and expand the gospel. Start with the Jews then go to the Gentiles. And Psalm 22 prophetically not only sees the crucifixion, but it sees the effects of the resurrection, the preaching of the gospel. And then we come to verses 25-29 where he speaks of the global expansion of the church, the great congregation.

It starts with the early church targeting the Jews and then the Gentiles are followed. Jesus spoke about this in his parables, about the king who had a banquet and went out to bring his friends in, the Jews. But they rejected and so he said go into the highways and the hedges. Compel them to come in.

What's he saying? Reach the Gentiles. We see this in the feeding of the 5,000 and 4,000. 5,000 Jews in Jewish territory. 4,000 Gentiles in Gentile territory.

Saying what? That beginning in Psalm 22 this is a worldwide expansion of the gospel. And then in John 17 Jesus prays for the future of the gospel.

He prayed for his disciples and all who shall believe in me through their word. Do you realize that when Jesus was dying on the cross and he had Psalm 22 in his mind, he had the future expansion of the gospel even all the way up to today, even all the way to you sitting here right now. And I want to finish with what he says in verses 30 and 31 because the final phase of this prophecy sees the gospel expanding not only through space, that's in the world of the day, but through time, future generations. For verse 30 says this, posterity shall serve him. It shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation. They shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn. 3,000 years ago you and I were included in this prophecy.

We are the fulfillment of the coming generation and the people yet unborn. And since, listen very carefully, since this is what Jesus, this looks like what Jesus was thinking while he hung on the cross during those hours of darkness, and this is incredible, then it means that you and me were on his mind while he was dying. At the moment of his death, we were in his thoughts.

The first half of Jesus' crucifixion was within daylight and he thought about people that were around the cross, but his last hours were in darkness and he thought about the future and those that would come to believe. And it means that you and me explicitly were on his mind when he was dying on that cross. And as we conclude these verses, we see the last phrase, verse 31, that he hath done this, or literally he has done it. And Jesus on the cross said the same thing when he said, it is finished.

He has done it. And all of that was in his mind on the cross to fulfill what he came to do to make the atonement for us. Psalm 22 is the psalm of the cross. And you know what God intends for us to do? To fulfill that prophecy in the day and age in which we're living, to go out and preach the gospel, to see those he has called to come and be saved. That's what he's called us to do. Psalm 22 being fulfilled as we sit here in chapel at Bob Jones University. Father, we praise you this morning that your ways are beyond understanding and your ways are perfect. Thank you that when you were on the cross, we were on your mind. And we praise you for this. Help us to be faithful to what you have called us in Jesus' name.

Amen. These daily programs are made possible by the many friends of Bob Jones University and this radio ministry. We'd love to hear from you, so don't hesitate to send us your feedback by going to the website, thedailyplatform.com. There's a place where you can send a message, and you'll also find our phone number, along with more information about Bob Jones University, the sponsor of today's program. I'm Steve Pettit, president of Bob Jones University, and I invite you to join us at our beautiful campus in Greenville, South Carolina, to see how you can be prepared academically and spiritually to serve the Lord through one of our more than 100 undergraduate and graduate programs. For more information about Bob Jones University, visit www.bju.edu or call 800-252-6363. Thanks again for listening, and we look forward to having you tomorrow as we study God's Word together on The Daily Platform.