STUDIES IN THE PSALMS No. 12

Psalm 22

April 4, 2004

One noteworthy fact about the Psalter, which is, after all, the largest book of the Bible, is that there is scarcely a subject that it does not raise and in some way turn into worship. There is scarcely a biblical doctrine that is not taught, scarcely an experience of believing life that is not addressed, scarcely an aspect of faith that is not considered or expressed. And, as we have said, that is preeminently true about very many things concerning Jesus Christ, whose life and ministry as the Messiah are taught, illustrated, and set before us as the object of our faith in many Psalms, especially by means of the typology by which the person and the life of David the king anticipates the life of his descendant, Jesus Christ. It is not for nothing that sometimes in the prophecies of the coming of the Messiah that we find in the OT he is not called the Son of David, or the descendant of David, or the heir of David’s throne, but simply David. The Messiah will be David in his ideal and eternal form, David with all of his human promise fulfilled on the grandest conceivable scale. And that is how in the Psalms we come to know so much about Jesus and what his ministry would be like and what he would accomplish: he is a David; he is the David! So we find ourselves on Palm Sunday in the midst of a series of studies in the Psalms and have no difficulty finding a psalm that is precisely appropriate to the subject of Christ’s suffering for sin and the events of the Passion week. (“Passion” used in this sense, by the way, as in the title of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, has its old original sense of suffering, as it is derived from the Latin verb meaning “to suffer.” The Passion of the Christ means the suffering of the Christ.)

We are aware of the importance the NT attaches to this psalm as a prophecy of the Lord Jesus, his death on the cross, some of the circumstances of his crucifixion, of his eventual triumph, and of the declaration of that triumph to the ends of the earth. We’ll take note of the verses that are cited in the NT as we come to them.

Text Comment

Title: It may be that the tune was entitled “The Doe of the Morning.” It may be – the issues are complicated questions of Hebrew translation – that the title declares that David wrote this psalm concerning “Help that came to him at dawn, or in the morning.” [Kidner]

v.1 Now, as we begin take note of the structure of the psalm. From v. 1 to v. 22 there are alternating sections of I/Me and You. We have “I/Me” sections in 1-2, 6-8, 12-18 and “You” sections in 3-5, 9-11, and 19-21. At v. 22 the pattern changes as the psalm turns to praise and a vision of the gospel’s future in the world.

Of course, as you recognize, the opening cry the Lord Jesus takes upon his lips while hanging on the cross. It is one of the few places in the Gospels where we hear the Lord’s ipsissima verba as it is given first in the Lord’s native Aramaic and only then in translation. It is, on the Lord’s lips, a profoundly consequential statement, of course. He was “forsaken by God” for the time of his suffering, so that we would never have to be “forsaken by God.”

v.2 We do not know what particular circumstances may have called forth these cries from David. It is often said that the statements of the psalm surpass anything David ever suffered – and so we should think of this psalm as a pure prophecy of Christ and having nothing to do with David’s own life – but with the hyperbole that is characteristic of the lament psalms, I don’t think we can say that.

v.3 Now, even in his great distress, David asserts his faith, as the Lord did on the cross in the next things he said – after “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” – such things as 1) “It is finished”; 2) “Today you will be with me in Paradise”; and 3) “Father into your hands I commit my spirit.”

v.4 As so often in the psalms, the psalmist finds comfort in looking back to times when the Lord delivered his people from other troubles. “I will appeal to the years of the right hand of the Most High…” (77:10)

v.8 What increases the pain is that this man values his place in the community of God’s people, he cares about his reputation as a believing man, he values the Lord’s name and it is precisely these things that are under being scorned in his case. We can at least begin to imagine what it meant to the Lord, of all people, to be so widely thought a blasphemer and an irreligious man whose concern for the Lord’s name in his life was greater than any man’s before or since. It is surely a remarkable measure of his humiliation that, at the end, the people, so far from recognizing that Jesus was the Son of God, did not even think him a good man.

v.10 The Lord is no casual acquaintance (Kidner, i, 107); he has been the Psalmist’s hope and trust from the very beginning of his life. An important verse for covenant children! A proof-text, and there are a number of others, for the Bible’s expectation of infant and early faith in covenant children. Donald Cargill, the Covenanter martyr, said to his accusers, “I have been a fearer of God from my infancy…” And a vast number of Christians could say the same thing.

v.12 Back to the psalmist’s present circumstances: he is under attack by evil men.

v.15 This is probably the source of the comment in John 19:28 that Jesus said, “I thirst” in order that the Scripture may be fulfilled. There is no statement anywhere in the OT precisely like “I thirst,” but this text, from a psalm that has several important links to the Lord’s crucifixion, and is cited elsewhere in John 19, does describe great thirst. That is the sense of “my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth…”

v.16 This image, of course, the Holy Spirit placed here in this psalm to anticipate the particular circumstances of the Lord’s crucifixion, as do these pictures of the crowd gloating over the king’s suffering.

v.17 This image certainly evokes the crucifixion scene as it is described in the Gospels.

v.18 This is cited word for word in John 19:24 as being fulfilled in the Lord’s case. By the way, this fact is omitted from Mel Gibson’s portrayal, as is the fact that there was a garment that had not been destroyed by the scourging and was of sufficient quality that the soldiers felt it best to cast lots to see who would get it rather than cut it into four pieces. The filmmaker’s concentration on the savagery of the Lord’s flogging rendered the value of the Lord’s remaining clothing an unhelpful detail.

v.21 It may be that v. 21 represents the pivot of the psalm, which ends with a single verb in the perfect tense. “You have delivered me!” To have been heard “from the horns of the wild oxen” is to have been delivered from the very mouth of the danger, at the very moment of greatest danger. This too fits the crucifixion perfectly.

v.22 Hebrews 2:11-12 cites this verse as proof that the Lord Jesus is not ashamed to call those who trust in him his brothers. He stands among them and, as we will now see, sets a feast for them.

v.25 This verse sets the scene of David’s praise and hopeful faith for the future. David is discharging his obligation to honor the Lord for his deliverance by fulfilling vows and having a great feast in the temple. The law said that they were not to keep their happiness to themselves but to share God’s bounty and their thanksgiving with their families, the Levites, and with the needy (Deut. 12:17-19). [Kidner, i, 108]

v.27 From here to the rest of the psalm the vision expands to embrace all the nations and the future generations.

v.31 The psalm that began with “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me” ends with a statement not very different from “It is finished!” [Kidner]

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Now, there is a deep and rich theology of salvation in this psalm. It is the same theology that one finds, for example, in Paul’s epistle to the Romans, but, while there it is found in the form of a closely reasoned argument, here it is found in the personal, passionate, agonizing cries of our Savior-King himself and the promise of his world-wide victory. What I am thinking of, in particular, this evening is the objectivity of the atonement, the efficacy of redemption, its self-standing and independent power.

The average Christian understands that Jesus is the Savior of sinners. But, if pressed, he will say that what Jesus did requires yet something else to be done by us. He might not put it this way, but it is his position nonetheless, that Jesus did not do everything that must be done to get a person to heaven. There is a part that man must play and without that human part, Christ’s part is incomplete, ineffectual. This is put in many different ways. Sometimes it is said that Christ made salvation possible, but that man, with his faith in Christ, turns that possibility into an actuality. Sometimes it is put much more crudely. Christ cast one vote for you; the Devil cast one vote against you; and it is up to you to break the tie! That is how laymen speak and sometimes not very theologically astute preachers.

Theologians suggest more sophisticated explanations, but they are after the same thing and their views amount to the same thing: viz. Christ’s work as our Redeemer is not in and of itself sufficient to bring men to God. They propose different theories of the atonement, that is, different explanations of precisely what Jesus was doing when he suffered on the cross. Typical Christian lay people, because they read their Bibles and sing the church’s hymns, think that Jesus was paying for their sins on the cross. They think that he was suffering in their place the punishment their sins deserved, he was, in other words, bearing their guilt before the judgment of God, so that they would not have to suffer that punishment themselves. He was being punished so that they would not have to be. He was taking their sins upon himself and, by enduring the wrath of God against those sins, was exhausting that wrath and satisfying divine justice on our behalf.

“For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.” [1 Pet. 3:18]

But that is not what most teachers of Christian theology think and teach today. They will speak of Christ’s suffering and death as a demonstration of his love, a love that compels a corresponding and answering love in our hearts. Or they will speak of his suffering as a demonstration of God’s moral rule in the world. Or, more obscurely, they will describe Christ’s atonement as a vicarious repentance: that is, he doesn’t suffer the punishment of our sins in our place, but he does sorrow for them and repudiate them in our place. Or they will say that Christ’s suffering had the effect of reducing our obligation, so that now the price of heaven is not obedience to God’s law but simply the single work of faith in Christ. And on it goes with variations on a few themes. Others think that the relationship between Christ’s sufferings and our salvation is mysterious and cannot be explained. They are like the English preacher of the 19th century, F.W. Robertson, of whom it was once said that he believed that Christ did something or other, that somehow or other, had some connection or other with salvation. But what all of these views have in common is that Christ himself, his sufferings, his death on the cross, is not a complete explanation of our salvation. What he did was necessary, but it was not sufficient. Something else is needed.

Now what may not be clear to many is that all of this hesitation to confess Christ’s bearing of the guilt of our sins in our place, all of this unwillingness to confess that Christ was punished for us and as our substitute, is, in fact, an unwillingness to confess the objectivity and definiteness of Christ’s atoning and redeeming work. Their concern is precisely this: if we say that Christ paid for our sins on the cross; if we say that he bore the punishment of our sins in our place, if we say that Christ took our place and endured the divine judgment against us for our sins, we are as much as saying that our entire salvation was his doing. Indeed, we are in fact saying that he accomplished our salvation, achieved it, and made it certain. For how can God ever condemn us for sins that have already been punished and guilt that has already been discharged? If Christ took away our sins and our liability to be punished for our sins – having already been punished for them in our place – then what place is left for man, for his free will, for his faith, for his repentance, for his obedience? What is more, if Christ suffered in our place for our sins, if he endured their punishment so that justice has already been satisfied on our behalf, then either everyone is already saved – whether or not they yet know it – or Christ did not die for everyone. The inexorable logic of this position has often been dismissed but it has never been got round. For, surely, if your sins have been dealt with on the cross, so that you have no longer any guilt before God, then are you not saved? Is it not your sins that have separated you from God, and if your sins have been removed, then are you not reconciled to God? Is not Toplady correct in setting forth this argument in his hymn:

If thou my pardon has secured

And freely in my room endured

            The whole of wrath divine,

Payment God cannot twice demand,

First from my bleeding surety’s hand

            And then again from mine.

If sin is our problem and Christ died for our sins, are we not all saved? But doesn’t the Bible seem plainly to teach that all are not saved? Are we then shut up to believing that Christ did not intend to save everyone when he went to the cross? Are we not forced to accept some form of the view that he died for his elect only and not for everyone if, by dying, he made salvation a certainty?

This is the argument and these are the questions that have swirled from time immemorial around the question of Christ’s work on the cross, his work as our Redeemer from sin and death.

I want, tonight, simply to remind you of how often we find in the Bible what we find so emphatically in the 22nd Psalm, namely this strong emphasis on the definiteness, the objectivity, the efficacy of Christ’s atonement, and so the certainty of the accomplishment of its purpose.

You have it here in Psalm 22 in a classic form. The Lord’s sufferings are represented in dramatic language. We easily see the Lord Christ on the cross as we listen to David’s description of his anguish. And what will be the result of his sufferings? The salvation of the nations of the earth, of generations yet unborn, of both kings and peasants everywhere. There is nothing uncertain about the outcome of the King’s sufferings. Salvation cascades from them. The King who suffered makes people from the entire world participants in the fruit of his suffering. [Delitzsch, 327]

You have the very same thing in the great song of the Suffering Servant in Isa. 52-53. What will be the result of his suffering for our sin? He will sprinkle many nations; he will see his offspring and prolong his days; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many; he will divide the spoils with the strong.

And these general statements become only the more specific as we move into the New Testament.

The angel tells Matthew that the son to be born to his virgin wife, “will save his people from their sins.”

Jesus himself says that “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” [By the payment of a ransom, those in bondage are set free.] “I am the good shepherd…I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.” “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand.” And lest the point be missed or minimized he goes on in that place to tell the Pharisees who opposed him that they did not believe because they were not his sheep! We might have expected him to say that they were not his sheep because they did not believe, but he says that they did not believe because they were not his sheep, for he gives eternal life to his sheep by laying down his life for them.

And Paul says many things to the same effect, not least in this great passage in Romans 5:

“You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him. For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.”

Do you see the point. When we were God’s enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his son. We might very well have expected Paul to say that we were reconciled to God by believing in Jesus – after all a person isn’t justified except by faith – but that is not what Paul says. He says we were reconciled to God by Christ’s death for us while we were still his enemies. It was not because we became God’s friends that our sins were forgiven; we became God’s friends because Christ had already dealt with our sins on the cross – even though you and I were not to live for another 2000 years! Paul could not be clearer: it is Christ’s death that puts us right with God, as if we never needed even to think about faith or repentance or following the Lord. It all happened when Christ died for us.

And then Paul goes on famously to say that as in Adam all died, so in Christ were many made righteous. He sees salvation as taking place in the atoning work of Christ, his suffering and his death on the cross. He doesn’t say that it begins there, he says that it happens there! We were made alive by the obedience of Christ; by what he did in discharging the assignment he had been given by his father. You can describe salvation and the Bible often does, without saying a thing about our faith or our repentance or our obedience or our perseverance. You can describe salvation, and the Bible often does, simply by describing what Christ did. But the reverse is not true. You cannot describe salvation by only talking about our faith and the Bible does not. The suffering and death of Jesus Christ is a sufficient explanation, our faith is not.

And the Bible often says so. Indeed, the Bible speaks this way all the time! It explains salvation entirely in terms of what Christ did on the cross. His suffering for us saved us. It didn’t partially save us, it didn’t put us in the way of being saved if we did something else, it didn’t make salvation a possibility. It saved us. As Charles Spurgeon, the greatest preacher of the 19th century, put it:

“We say Christ so died that he infallibly secured the salvation of a multitude that no man can number, who through Christ’s death not only may be saved, but are saved, must be saved, and cannot by any possibility run the hazard of being anything but saved.”

It is altogether true that we must believe in Christ and follow him. But it is altogether true that the Bible explains the salvation of sinners by the suffering and cross of Christ. It is Christ who saves us, not Christ plus, not Christ and! This explains why Paul can sum up his entire message as “the message of the cross” (1 Cor. 1:18), that his way of preaching that message was shaped by a concern that the cross not be emptied of its power (1:17), that the suffering he endured for the sake of the gospel was “for the cross of Christ” (Gal. 6:12), that he refused to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ (Gal. 6:14), and that Christ’s triumph, on behalf of the father, was achieved through his blood shed on the cross (Col. 1:20).

It is important for every Christian to appreciate how utterly central and determinative the suffering and death of Jesus Christ is for everything in our salvation. Everything comes from that. He turned away God’s wrath from us there, on the cross; he reconciled us to God there, on the cross; he paid the ransom to deliver us from bondage there, on the cross. Everything else comes to us from the cross, we add nothing to it. Our fate was settled there and only there.

And if, as the Bible seems rather clearly to say and quite often to say, that means that Christ, saving us by his suffering and death on the cross, cannot have died for everyone, lest everyone be saved, it was always understood that the primary importance of that admission, the importance of that assertion – controversial as it has always been – was nothing else but to protect against any diminishment whatsoever the perfection and the supreme accomplishment of Christ on the cross. As Calvin would say, those doctrines of sovereign grace were “a sentinel posted around the cross.” That is, those doctrines all, in their own way, confirmed the point that Christ saves sinners, that he saved them by his suffering and death, and that they owe their eternal life completely, utterly, unqualifiedly to him and to what he suffered for them, and to no one else, least of all themselves. We all must appreciate the importance of this. The entire, wonderful apparatus of sovereign grace in the Bible – election, the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, the gift of faith, the keeping power of the Holy Spirit by which believers, in spite of their sin and weakness remain united to Christ all their lives – all of this is seen in terms of and in relation to the atoning work of Christ, his obedience, his suffering and his death. We are elect or chosen in Christ; we are, by the sovereign power of the Holy Spirit, born again, regenerated, made new creatures in Christ; the Father by the Spirit draws us to Christ, the Holy Spirit keeps us in Christ. Christ is the salvation. Sovereign grace brings us to him.

Christian people, captivated by the glory of the doctrines of grace, can often forget this and lose that biblical sense of Christocentricity. But that is why if an Arminian, who denies sovereign grace, loves the Lord Jesus and trusts him, the error is not so great an error as it might be. For the entire purpose of divine grace is that we fix our hearts, our faith upon Jesus Christ our Redeemer. And so, if a person has such faith in and love for Christ, sovereign grace has done its holy work, whether or not the man or woman understands this.

And now back to our psalm, which is an example of this Christocentricity in salvation so characteristic of the Bible. Here in Psalm 22, as in so many biblical texts, we pass directly from Christ’s sufferings to the salvation of the world. It passes by the necessity of our faith, it passes by the mission of gospel preaching, all that happens in human life and in human hearts is simply the consequence of the sufferings and the triumph of the Messianic king. All of those things, important as they are, all of those parts of salvation that take place in us are only the after-effects of what Christ did for us, they come from his sufferings and owe their importance to it, and draw their power from it. Because of what the suffering King has done “all the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord and all the families of the nations will bow down before him.” Posterity will serve him, people yet unborn. And why? Because “he has done it!”

One of the great commentators on the Psalms concludes his exposition of Psalm 22 with this comment on the last words of the psalm, “for he has done it,” which are the translation of single three letter verb in Hebrew:

“This one word, so full of meaning…implying the carrying through of the work of redemption, which is prefigured in David, comprehends everything within itself. … It is the last word of the Psalm, just as tetelestai [“it is finished”] is the last word of the Crucified One. The substance of the gospel in its preparatory history and its fulfillment, of the declaration concerning God which passes from generation to generation, is this, that God has accomplished what he planned when he anointed the son of Jesse and the Son of David as mediator in his work of redemption; that he accomplished it by leading the former through affliction to the throne, and making the cross…a ladder leading up to heaven.” [Delitzsch, 327-328]

That is our hope, our message, and the basis of our love and our joy as Christians. He has done it! Many nowadays want Christ to be their helper; but the Redeemer is an Almighty King. And what he did accomplishes the purpose for which he did it!