Psalm 22: The Account of the Cross, Written a Thousand Years Before It Happened

A thousand years before it happened, a man wrote down what a crucified person would say. He described the position of the bones, the thirst, the staring crowd, the soldiers gambling for the clothing, and the pierced hands and feet — centuries before that method of execution existed anywhere in the world.

And the Lord Jesus Christ, dying, quoted its first line.

This study follows the psalm through. It is worth reading with the passage open beside it.

1. The cry, and the word He does not use

"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?" (Psalm 22:1)

Notice what is absent before anything else.

Everywhere else He addresses God as Father. In the garden, at the tomb of Lazarus, in the great prayer of John 17, at His last breath in Luke. Everywhere.

Here it is My God, my God. Twice, and no more than that.

The relationship is not broken, but the language of it is laid aside, because in this hour He is not standing before God as the Son in communion. He is standing there as the sin offering.

And the second half of the verse is worse than the first. The words of my roaring: the sound is not composed. It is the noise a creature makes under intolerable pressure, and the Holy Ghost recorded it.

"O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent" (Psalm 22:2)

Thou hearest not. The One who always heard Him, and who said audibly from heaven twice that He was well pleased, does not answer.

2. The answer to the question

Now the verse everything turns on, and most readers pass straight over it.

He asks why. And the very next line is the answer — given by the Sufferer Himself, not by a bystander.

"But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel" (Psalm 22:3)

That is the whole doctrine of the atonement in four words.

Why was He forsaken? Not because God had stopped loving Him. Not because the Father was cruel or absent or overwhelmed. Because God is holy, and at that moment the One hanging there had been made sin, and holiness cannot look upon sin with allowance.

Read the sentence again and see what it is not. It is not a protest. There is no and yet thou art holy, no complaint at unfairness. It is a vindication of God, offered by the very Person suffering under His hand.

And here is the thing that ought to stop a reader: only one who was Himself perfectly holy could have vindicated the holiness of God in that position. Anybody else would have been getting what he deserved, and the sentence would have been merely true. From Him it is a declaration.

He then sets His case beside every other believer’s:

"Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver them. They cried unto thee, and were delivered: they trusted in thee, and were not confounded" (Psalm 22:4-5)

Every one of them cried and was delivered. He cried and was not. That is the loneliest comparison in Scripture, and He makes it Himself.

3. The One who never says "Father"

Before going further, stay with the opening address a moment longer, because it is unlike anything else He ever said.

Search the Gospels for how He speaks to God. In the garden: Abba, Father. At the tomb of Lazarus: Father, I thank thee. In the great prayer of John 17: Father, over and over. Praying for His murderers from the cross: Father, forgive them. With His last breath in Luke: Father, into thy hands.

Every recorded prayer of His life begins with that word.

Except one.

"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Psalm 22:1)

Twice My God, and not once Father. It is the only prayer in His whole life where the word is absent.

Do not conclude too much from that, and do not conclude too little. The relationship between the Father and the Son was not severed; the Trinity did not come apart on Calvary, and no orthodox believer should say it did.

But in that hour He was not standing before God in the enjoyment of sonship. He was standing there as an offering. And an offering does not address the altar as Father.

He laid the language of it aside so that we might be given it. And the very first thing He said when He came out of the grave was to send this message:

"Go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God" (John 20:17)

My Father, and your Father. He gave up the word for an afternoon so that it could be put permanently into your mouth.

4. The strange title at the top

The psalm carries an instruction to the musician, and it is one of the most haunting in the Psalter.

To the chief Musician upon Aijeleth Shahar. The Hebrew means the hind of the morning: a deer at dawn.

Nobody can be dogmatic about why that tune or that title was chosen, and we will not pretend otherwise. But consider the picture it puts in the mind: a hunted animal, gentle and defenceless, run down through the night and brought to bay as the light comes up.

Read the psalm and see whether it fits. The bulls close in. The dogs surround. The lion opens his mouth. And it ends at daybreak, with the hunted one alive and speaking.

Whether or not the title was chosen for that reason, the psalm itself is a night that ends in morning.

5. What He became in the eyes of men

"But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people" (Psalm 22:6)

The word chosen is the crimson worm, from which the scarlet dye was taken: the creature crushed to yield a colour. Whether or not that association was in view, the self-description stands: a worm, and no man. The One by whom all things were made.

"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" (Psalm 22:7-8)

Now set that beside the Gospel record. At the cross the chief priests said, almost word for word, He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he will have him.

They were quoting the psalm without knowing it. Men mocking the Son of God reached, unprompted, for a script written a thousand years before, and their sneer is in the text they were fulfilling.

6. Pierced, and the two verbs

Two details in this psalm convince careful readers more than any argument, and both are matters of precision.

The first is a single clause, written when execution in Israel was by stoning — crucifixion was not practised by the Jews, was not yet devised by the Romans, and would not reach that land for centuries.

"For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet" (Psalm 22:16)

The second is a matter of grammar, and it is the detail that ought to stop a sceptic.

"They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture" (Psalm 22:18)

Two different verbs, describing two different actions. The garments were parted — divided up. The vesture was not divided at all; lots were cast for it.

Why the difference? The psalm does not say. Only the eyewitness account explains it: the outer clothes were split four ways among the soldiers, but the coat was seamless, woven from the top throughout, and they said to one another, let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be.

Two verbs in the psalm, two actions at the cross, and the reason for the difference supplied a thousand years later by men who had no idea they were completing a sentence.

7. Four animals, and what surrounded Him

The middle of the psalm is not a general lament. It names four creatures, and each one is a different attacker.

The bulls.

"Many bulls have compassed me: strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round" (Psalm 22:12)

Bashan was the rich pastureland east of Jordan, and its cattle were proverbial for size and condition. These are not scrawny beasts. They are the well-fed, the powerful, the prosperous, and they have formed a ring.

Stand at the cross and you can name them. The chief priests, the elders, the rulers: the men of position and comfort, closing in on somebody who had nowhere to lay His head.

The lion.

"They gaped upon me with their mouths, as a ravening and a roaring lion" (Psalm 22:13)

Scripture has one lion that roars in that manner, and the apostle Peter names him: your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.

Behind the visible enemies was an invisible one, and this is the hour Scripture had promised from Eden: the bruising of the heel, and the crushing of the head, both at once.

The dogs.

"For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet" (Psalm 22:16)

In Jewish speech dogs was the word for Gentiles, and it is the Gentile soldiers who did the actual nailing. Both halves of the human race are at the foot of that cross, and neither is innocent.

And the wild ox.

"Save me from the lion’s mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns" (Psalm 22:21)

The animal named there is a beast of enormous strength, and the horns are the point: the place where a creature’s power is concentrated and where a man is lifted and impaled.

Four attackers: the religious establishment, the devil, the nations, and raw brute force. He was surrounded by every kind of enemy there is, and the psalm records that He was heard from the horns.

8. What the crucifixion did to His body

We passed over these verses quickly. Go back and read them slowly, because they are the most detailed physical account of the cross in Scripture, and they were written by a man who had never seen one.

"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" (Psalm 22:14)

Poured out like water. Not spilled — poured, deliberately, as an offering is poured. The same figure the apostle Paul later used of his own life being spent.

All my bones are out of joint. Crucifixion suspends the whole body from the arms. The shoulders, elbows and wrists pull apart under the weight; the ribcage is dragged upward until breathing out requires pushing down on the nails in the feet. Every breath is a decision.

My heart is like wax. The physical heart failing under the strain, and, whatever the medical detail, a picture of everything solid inside a man giving way.

"My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death" (Psalm 22:15)

Dried up like a potsherd. A broken piece of pottery in the sun: no moisture left in it anywhere.

My tongue cleaveth to my jaws. This is the thirst, and it is worth remembering that the one who created every river on earth died unable to swallow.

"After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst" (John 19:28)

Read that reason again: that the scripture might be fulfilled. He said it deliberately, knowing which text He was completing.

And now the phrase in verse 15 that is easiest to read past, and hardest to take in:

Thou hast brought me into the dust of death.

Not they have. Not Rome, not the mob, not Judas. Thou. He addresses the hand that is doing it, and it is His Father’s.

"Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief" (Isaiah 53:10)

"I may tell all my bones: they look and stare upon me" (Psalm 22:17)

I may tell all my bones: He can count them. The body is stretched until the ribs stand out and every bone can be numbered by the sufferer Himself.

And around Him, an audience. They look and stare. Crucifixion was designed to be watched, positioned by a road so that people would pass and see. The psalm records the spectators before the Romans had invented the spectacle.

9. What He asked for, and what He did not

Look at what the Sufferer actually requests, because the shape of it is instructive.

"Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help" (Psalm 22:11)

"But be not thou far from me, O LORD: O my strength, haste thee to help me" (Psalm 22:19)

Twice, and both times the same thing: not take this away, but do not be far.

He does not ask to come down. He does not ask for the nails to be drawn or the crowd dispersed or the cup removed: that had been settled in the garden the night before. The one thing He asks for is nearness, and it is the one thing withheld.

That is worth carrying if you have ever prayed for God’s presence and felt nothing. He knows what that is. He asked twice and was not answered, and He was not being punished for a lack of faith.

And notice how He describes His own life in the next request:

"Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog" (Psalm 22:20)

My darling renders a word meaning my only one: the solitary, precious, irreplaceable thing. He is speaking of His own life, and He calls it what a man calls an only child.

He knew exactly what He was handing over. Nobody took it cheaply, least of all Him.

10. He had trusted since before He could speak

Between the mockery and the animals, there is a quiet passage that is easy to miss.

"But thou art he that took me out of the womb: thou didst make me hope when I was upon my mother’s breasts" (Psalm 22:9)

"I was cast upon thee from the womb: thou art my God from my mother’s belly" (Psalm 22:10)

He is answering the taunt of verse 8 — he trusted on the LORD that he would deliver him, and His answer is: yes, and I have done so since before I could form a word.

Read those two verses as the testimony of a man being executed and you will find them almost unbearable. Everything He is now suffering has come to Him while trusting, and He does not stop.

They are also a quiet witness to the incarnation. He was carried, delivered, nursed, held. The One who upholds all things by the word of His power once had to be supported to sit upright.

11. The hinge: verse twenty-one

The psalm has been one long descent. Petition after petition, and no reply. Then this:

"Save me from the lion’s mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns" (Psalm 22:21)

The verse begins asking and ends answered.

And here is the fact that settles it, which you can verify in any translation: from this point to the end of the psalm there is not one more request. Twenty-one verses of pleading, and then ten verses in which nothing whatever is asked for.

Something has happened between the two halves, and the psalm does not describe it. It only changes tense.

That silence is the grave, and what follows is spoken by a Man who is out of it.

12. The first word after the resurrection

"I will declare thy name unto my brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee" (Psalm 22:22)

Two things here, and both are extraordinary.

First: the word brethren. He has just been forsaken, alone, called a worm. The first thing He says on the other side is to name a family.

And He did it. On the resurrection morning the message He sent was: go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.

He had never called them that before the cross. He calls them that the moment He is out of it. Whatever He accomplished there, this was part of it: the making of brothers.

And the New Testament takes this very verse and puts it in His mouth as the risen One:

"For both he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren, Saying, I will declare thy name unto my brethren, in the midst of the church will I sing praise unto thee" (Hebrews 2:11-12)

He is not ashamed. That is the comment of the Holy Ghost on it.

Second: He is the one leading the praise. Not receiving it from a distance — in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee. When believers gather to worship, the psalm says there is a Voice in the middle of it, and it is His.

13. The audience widens six times

Follow the circle after the resurrection, because it does not stop growing, and each ring is larger than the last.

First, the brethren. A handful of frightened men, most of whom had run.

"I will declare thy name unto my brethren" (Psalm 22:22)

Then the congregation: the gathered assembly of His people, where He Himself leads the praise.

"My praise shall be of thee in the great congregation: I will pay my vows before them that fear him" (Psalm 22:25)

Then the whole nation of Israel, seed of Jacob and all the seed of Israel, called to glorify Him.

Then the meek and the hungry, and note what is promised them:

"The meek shall eat and be satisfied: they shall praise the LORD that seek him: your heart shall live for ever" (Psalm 22:26)

Shall eat and be satisfied. The psalm that began with a man unable to swallow ends with a table where the poor are filled.

Then the nations.

"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" (Psalm 22:27-28)

Then everybody, rich and dying alike, and this verse is remarkable:

"All they that be fat upon 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" (Psalm 22:29)

The prosperous and the dying at the same table. And the reason given underneath both: none can keep alive his own soul. The successful man and the man in the last bed have exactly one thing in common, and it is the thing that matters.

And finally, people not yet born.

"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" (Psalm 22:30-31)

From eleven frightened men to the unborn. You are inside the last verse of this psalm. Somebody declared it to you because somebody declared it to them, and the chain runs back without a break to a man getting up out of a grave.

14. The three psalms that belong together

There is a reason Psalm 22 is followed by the two psalms that follow it, and reading them as a set opens all three.

In Psalm 22 the Shepherd dies. Forsaken, pierced, brought into the dust of death.

"I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep" (John 10:11)

In Psalm 23 the Shepherd lives, and the sheep is cared for through the valley.

"The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want" (Psalm 23:1)

"Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep" (Hebrews 13:20)

And in Psalm 24 the Shepherd returns in glory, and the gates are told to open for a King.

"Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in" (Psalm 24:7)

"And when the chief Shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away" (1 Peter 5:4)

The Good Shepherd who dies; the Great Shepherd brought again from the dead; the Chief Shepherd who appears. Cross, care, and crown, and the order is fixed, because there is no second without the first and no third without the second.

15. The psalm with no sin in it

Something is missing from Psalm 22, and its absence is the loudest thing in it.

Read the other great psalms of suffering and you will find confession running through them — mine iniquities are gone over mine head, my sin is ever before me, O God, thou knowest my foolishness. Sufferers in Scripture examine themselves.

There is not one syllable of it here.

Thirty-one verses of the most extreme suffering in the Bible, and no admission of wrongdoing, no request for pardon, no search me and try me. And it is not defiance either: He justifies God in verse 3 without a word of self-defence.

There is only one Man in history of whom that combination could be true: suffering the worst, deserving none of it, and not protesting.

"Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth: who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not" (1 Peter 2:22-23)

The absence of confession is the proof of the substitution. He had nothing to confess, which is precisely why He could carry what we have.

16. Why this psalm is the sin offering

There is a set of psalms that answer to the offerings of Leviticus, and this one answers to the sin offering: the offering that was not of a sweet savour, whose body was carried outside the camp and burned on the ground.

"Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate" (Hebrews 13:12)

Everything in Psalm 22 fits that. There is no fragrance in it and no fellowship. God does not answer. The word Father is absent. The sufferer is outside, exposed, watched, and abandoned.

Which is why the two Gospels that carry the sin and trespass aspects, and only those two — record Him quoting its opening line, and neither records a word of communion at the end.

"For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him" (2 Corinthians 5:21)

That verse is Psalm 22 in one sentence. The first half is verses 1 to 21. The second half is verses 22 to 31.

17. If you are the one in the dark half

A word before the close, because this psalm has been a companion to suffering believers for three thousand years and it should not be left as a study.

You may say it out loud. The strongest complaint in Scripture is in the mouth of the sinless Son of God, preserved by the Holy Ghost, and set to music for public singing. Nobody edited it down. If your prayers have gone bitter, you are not disqualified; you are in the Psalter.

Unanswered is not unheard. Verse 2 says thou hearest not. Verse 24 says when he cried unto him, he heard. Both are true of the same event, and the second is the truth about the first. The silence was not absence. It was the sound of your sin being dealt with.

And the psalm does not end where it hurts. Twenty-one verses of darkness, ten of widening praise, and no petition after the turn. If yours is still in the first half, the structure of this psalm is the shape of your life and not just of His.

"For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning" (Psalm 30:5)

The hind of the morning, again. Hunted through the night, and alive when the light comes up.

18. The mockers read from a script they did not know

Set the psalm and the Gospel side by side and something happens that ought to be more famous than it is.

Here is what the psalm says the onlookers will do:

"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" (Psalm 22:7-8)

Now the record of what they actually did, a thousand years later:

"And they that passed by reviled him, wagging their heads" (Matthew 27:39)

"He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he will have him: for he said, I am the Son of God" (Matthew 27:43)

Line them up.

They shake the head — wagging their heads. He trusted on the LORD that he would deliver him — He trusted in God; let him deliver him now. Seeing he delighted in him — if he will have him.

They are quoting it. Not deliberately: they would have bitten their tongues off first. But the words came out of their mouths in the order a psalm had set down before Rome existed.

Think about what that means. The mockery was prophesied. Not merely the crucifixion, not merely the piercing and the dice, but the specific sneer of the specific men standing there.

And the sneer was theologically correct. He trusted in God: He had, since before He could speak. Let him deliver him — God could have, in a moment. They stated the truth and drew exactly the wrong conclusion from it, which is the most dangerous thing a religious man can do.

19. The word "forsaken", and the three hours

Everything in this psalm turns on one word, and it is worth handling carefully, because loose talk here does real damage.

The Hebrew behind forsaken carries the sense of being left, abandoned, let go of: the word you would use of a man releasing his grip on something he was holding.

Now set beside it what happened at midday.

"Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour" (Matthew 27:45)

Noon to three. Three hours in which the sun was blotted out over the whole land, and at the end of them, and not before, the cry came.

Whatever passed between the Father and the Son in that darkness is not described, and we should not pretend to describe it. Scripture drew a curtain over those three hours, and reverence keeps it drawn.

But we can say what made it necessary, and Scripture is plain about that:

"Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity" (Habakkuk 1:13)

"For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin" (2 Corinthians 5:21)

Put those two verses together and you have the darkness. A God who cannot look upon iniquity, and a Son who has been made sin. Something had to give, and what gave was the light.

And now two cautions, because people go wrong here in opposite directions.

Some speak as though the Father hated the Son in that hour, or turned on Him in fury. That is not Scripture and it is not true. He was never more pleasing to His Father than while obeying unto death; the offering was of a sweet savour even while it was being judged.

Others empty the word until it means nothing: a feeling, a mood, a subjective impression of abandonment. But He said why, and He was not mistaken about His own experience. Something real happened, and He is the only one who has ever been through it.

Hold both. Beloved, and forsaken. Not contradictory: the second is what the first was willing to do.

20. The psalm that curses nobody

Here is a comparison that reveals something about the Sufferer, and hardly anybody makes it.

Psalm 69 is the other great psalm of the cross: the one quoted for the gall and vinegar, and for the zeal that ate Him up. And Psalm 69 does something Psalm 22 never does:

"Let their table become a snare before them: and that which should have been for their welfare, let it become a trap" (Psalm 69:22)

"Let their habitation be desolate; and let none dwell in their tents" (Psalm 69:25)

That is imprecation: a call for judgment on enemies, and it is entirely righteous. Those who reject Him will be judged, and Scripture does not apologise for saying so.

Now search Psalm 22 for one line like it.

There is not one. Thirty-one verses; bulls, dogs, lion, piercing, stripping, staring, gambling, and not a single word of judgment called down on any of them.

He describes exactly what they are doing. He never asks for anything to be done to them.

And the Gospel tells us what He was saying instead, in the very hours the psalm covers:

"Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34)

Psalm 22 has no curse in it because the man in it was praying for the people crucifying Him.

If you have been wronged and cannot let go of it, that is not a rebuke. It is an invitation to look at Somebody who had more grounds than you will ever have and used none of them.

21. A worm, and no man

Go back to verse 6, because a single word there deserves a section of its own.

"But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people" (Psalm 22:6)

The word is not the general term for a crawling thing. It is the name of a specific creature: the one from which the ancient world obtained its crimson dye.

To get the colour, the creature had to be crushed. Its life yielded the scarlet that dyed the curtains of the tabernacle and the thread of the priestly garments. You could not have the red without the death.

We will not build doctrine on a natural-history detail, and we do not need to. The point stands from the text alone: He calls Himself the crushed thing that yields the colour.

And note the second half of the line: and no man. Not merely lower than other men — out of the category altogether, in His own estimate of how He was being treated.

Set that beside what He is called at the end of the Bible, and the distance is the whole gospel:

"Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood" (Revelation 5:9)

22. He was heard, and the veil came down

The hinge said thou hast heard me. The New Testament confirms it in a verse that surprises most readers:

"Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared" (Hebrews 5:7)

And was heard. Not and was refused. He was not delivered from death: He was delivered through it, which was the request all along, and the answer came on the third morning.

And in the moment the psalm turns, something happened in the temple that nobody outside the priesthood should have seen:

"And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom" (Matthew 27:51)

From the top to the bottom. Nobody standing on a floor tears a curtain that way. It was opened from the side nobody could reach.

The psalm goes from forsaken to I will declare thy name unto my brethren; the temple goes from a closed room to an open one. The same event did both.

And the first man to say the right thing about Him was not a priest or a disciple but a Roman soldier who had watched the whole thing:

"Truly this was the Son of God" (Matthew 27:54)

The psalm promised that the ends of the earth would remember and turn. The first of them was standing at the foot of the cross before the body was cold.

23. How to pray a psalm like this

A practical section, because this psalm has been prayed by believers in extremity for three thousand years and there is a right and a wrong way to use it.

First, it is His before it is yours. There are things in it that were never true of you and never will be, no sin in you to be absent, no world to be redeemed by your suffering. Read it as His, and let it be His.

Second, it is yours because it was His. The reason a believer may borrow this language is that the One who first used it is not ashamed to call you His brother, and He gave you the words along with everything else.

"For both he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren" (Hebrews 2:11)

Third, pray it whole. The commonest misuse is to stop at verse 21 — to take the darkness and leave the deliverance. But nobody in Scripture prays the first half without the second, and if you can only manage the first half today, know that the second is written and waiting and belongs to the same psalm.

And fourth, notice that it ends in company. It begins with one man alone in the dark and ends with a congregation, a nation, the nations, and a generation unborn. Suffering isolates; this psalm ends by putting the sufferer in the middle of a crowd, leading the singing.

24. The man who wrote it never went through it

Step back from the psalm and ask a question that is easy to skip: who wrote this, and what was happening to him?

David wrote it. And here is the difficulty that ought to stop every honest reader: nothing in this psalm ever happened to David.

He was hunted, betrayed, exiled and grieved, and none of that is here. He was never pierced in his hands and his feet. His clothes were never gambled for. He never had his bones pulled out of joint. He was never surrounded by dogs while dying in public. And he did not die forsaken; he died old and in his bed.

"For David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell on sleep, and was laid unto his fathers, and saw corruption" (Acts 13:36)

So a man is describing, in the first person and in the past tense, an execution he never suffered, by a method not yet invented, and he is doing it with anatomical precision.

The New Testament gives the explanation without embarrassment:

"Therefore being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him, that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne; He seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ" (Acts 2:30-31)

He was not writing autobiography. He was being carried.

"The Spirit of the LORD spake by me, and his word was in my tongue" (2 Samuel 23:2)

And Peter tells us the prophets did not fully understand what they were handling: they searched their own writings, trying to work out what the Spirit in them was pointing at when He testified beforehand of the sufferings of Christ.

Which means David, writing this, was in the position of a man taking dictation in a language he only half knew. He felt the grief. He did not know the address.

25. The cry that was misheard

One detail in the Gospel record is easy to pass over and repays attention.

He did not quote the psalm in Hebrew, the language of the scroll. He quoted it in Aramaic, the language of the street: the language people actually spoke at home.

"And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46)

And the crowd got it wrong.

"Some of them that stood there, when they heard that, said, This man calleth for Elias" (Matthew 27:47)

Eli sounded to them like Elijah. So at the most important moment in human history, standing close enough to hear Him, they misheard the Son of God calling on His Father as a man calling for a dead prophet, and then stood around waiting to see whether anybody would come.

There is something sobering in that for anybody who thinks nearness to the facts is the same as understanding them. They were within earshot of the atonement and they got the first word wrong.

But notice also what the mistake proves. He said it aloud, in the common tongue, loudly enough for a crowd to hear and misquote. This was not a private groan. He wanted it on the record, and it is.

26. But thou art holy — taking the answer seriously

We gave verse 3 a short section early on. It deserves a longer one, because it is the hinge on which the whole doctrine of the cross turns.

"But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel" (Psalm 22:3)

Holiness is the attribute Scripture repeats three times over and never doubles for anything else. No angel cries eternal, eternal, eternal or loving, loving, loving. One thing is said three times:

"And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory" (Isaiah 6:3)

Now understand what that does to the question in verse 1.

People ask why God could not simply forgive without a cross — why the blood, why the darkness, why any of it. The question assumes that forgiveness is a matter of God relaxing.

But a judge who waves away a crime because he is fond of the criminal is not merciful. He is corrupt. If God simply overlooked sin, He would cease to be holy, and a God who is not holy is not worth worshipping and could not be trusted with the universe.

So the cross is not God finding a way around His own nature. It is God satisfying it. The sin was punished; the sinner was spared; and the holiness that made the darkness necessary is the same holiness that makes your forgiveness safe.

Read the second half of the verse too, because it is unexpectedly tender. Thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel. God is described as dwelling in the praise of His people, and the One saying it is at that moment receiving none, only mockery.

He acknowledges God as enthroned on worship, from a place where He is getting nothing but insults.

27. Everyone else was delivered

Verses 4 and 5 look like padding. They are not; they are the loneliest comparison in Scripture and He makes it Himself.

"Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver them. They cried unto thee, and were delivered: they trusted in thee, and were not confounded" (Psalm 22:4-5)

Count the pattern: trusted — delivered. Cried — delivered. Trusted, not confounded. Three times, and every time the same outcome.

He is running through the history of His own nation. Israel at the Red Sea, cried and was delivered. Daniel in the den, delivered. The three in the furnace, delivered. Hezekiah, Jonah, David himself — every one of them cried and every one of them was answered.

He is the exception. The only one in the entire record who trusted perfectly and was not delivered.

And He states it without self-pity and without accusation. He simply lays His case beside theirs and lets the difference stand.

Here is why it matters to you. He was not delivered so that you could be. The pattern of verses 4 and 5 — cried, and delivered — is the pattern that now holds for everybody who comes to God through Him, and it holds because it was broken once, deliberately, for Him.

28. The vows He came to pay

On the far side of the resurrection there is a line that raises a question most readers pass over.

"My praise shall be of thee in the great congregation: I will pay my vows before them that fear him" (Psalm 22:25)

I will pay my vows. What vows? When did He make them, and to whom?

Scripture answers by putting words in His mouth at the point of His coming into the world:

"Wherefore when he cometh into the world, he saith, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared me... Then said I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of me,) to do thy will, O God" (Hebrews 10:5,7)

The vow was made before He arrived. Not at the manger, not at the Jordan — in the counsels of eternity, before there was a body to be prepared or a world to be saved.

And a vow is not a wish. It is a binding undertaking. When He says in the psalm that He will pay it, He is speaking as a man who has come out the other side of the darkness with the obligation discharged in full.

Which is worth holding when you doubt your salvation. Your standing does not rest on the strength of a promise you made to God. It rests on the payment of a vow He made about you before you existed.

29. Which name does He declare?

The first word after the resurrection was a promise to declare a name. It is worth asking which one.

"I will declare thy name unto my brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee" (Psalm 22:22)

He had already said, on the last night, what He had been doing and would go on doing:

"I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world" (John 17:6)

"And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them" (John 17:26)

Read the reason at the end of that verse, because it is the warmest sentence in the Gospel of John. The purpose of declaring the name is that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them.

Not a lesser love. Not a smaller portion suited to smaller people. The same love the Father has for the Son, placed in you.

And the name declared is Father: the very word He laid down in verse 1 and could not use in the dark. He went into the psalm unable to say it and came out of the psalm teaching it to His brethren.

That is the whole distance travelled between verse 1 and verse 22, and it was travelled for you.

30. Out of joint, and not one broken

Two statements about His bones sit in two different psalms, and holding them together shows a precision no forger would have attempted.

"I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint" (Psalm 22:14)

"He keepeth all his bones: not one of them is broken" (Psalm 34:20)

Out of joint, yet not one broken. Dislocated, but not fractured. Those are different things, and both had to be true at once.

Crucifixion could take days, and the bodies had to be down before the sabbath. So soldiers were sent to break the legs of the three men, which ended it quickly, because a man who cannot push up on his feet cannot draw breath.

They broke the legs of the first. They broke the legs of the second. Then:

"But when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs" (John 19:33)

They arrived with the hammer and found the work done.

"For these things were done, that the scripture should be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken" (John 19:36)

That command goes back to the Passover lamb, of which it was written that no bone of it should be broken. A rule about a supper in Egypt fifteen hundred years earlier governed what a Roman soldier did with a mallet on a Friday afternoon.

And notice the timing. He died before they reached Him. Nobody ended His life; He laid it down, and at the exact moment that left every prophecy standing.

31. A table at the end of it

The psalm that opens with a man unable to swallow closes with people eating.

"The meek shall eat and be satisfied: they shall praise the LORD that seek him: your heart shall live for ever" (Psalm 22:26)

Shall eat and be satisfied. Not merely fed — satisfied, which is a larger word and much harder to come by.

And who is at that table? Not the strong. The meek, and, three verses later, all they that go down to the dust sitting beside all they that be fat upon earth. The comfortable and the dying, at one table, on one footing.

There is one table in Scripture like that, and He instituted it the night before the psalm was fulfilled.

"For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come" (1 Corinthians 11:26)

The psalm ends with a meal because the sufferings it describes made one possible. He was emptied so that they could be filled; He was refused so that they could be satisfied.

And note the last clause: your heart shall live for ever. Everything before it in this psalm is about dying. The last word about the guests is that they will not.

32. The congregation, before there was one

Something appears in verse 22 that had no existence when the psalm was written.

"For both he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren, Saying, I will declare thy name unto my brethren, in the midst of the church will I sing praise unto thee" (Hebrews 2:11-12)

David knew the assembly of Israel: a nation, gathered by birth. The New Testament takes his line and applies it to a company gathered not by descent but by sanctification — in the midst of the church: the very thing the psalm was purchasing while it was being written down.

So on the far side of verse 21 there is a body of people who did not exist on the near side. The darkness of the first half created the congregation of the second.

And He is not standing outside it, receiving. He is inside it, singing. When believers gather, there is a Voice in the middle leading the praise, and it belongs to the One who was forsaken.

33. They shall come

The last thing to notice is a verb.

"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" (Psalm 22:30-31)

They shall come. Not they shall wait. The generation that receives this goes somewhere and tells somebody, and that is how the psalm reaches its last audience.

This is the mechanism God chose. Not writing in the sky; people who declare. Every believer alive received it because somebody came and said it.

"How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?" (Romans 10:14)

And the psalm tells you what to declare, which takes the pressure off. Not your experience, not your arguments — his righteousness, and the fact that he hath done this. You are not asked to persuade anybody. You are asked to report a finished thing.

"After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb" (Revelation 7:9)

A number nobody can count, out of every nation on earth, standing before the Lamb.

That crowd is the answer to the cry in verse 1. He asked why in the dark and was not told. This is what the darkness bought, and He sees it, and He is satisfied.

34. The fourth of seven

He spoke seven times from the cross, and this psalm supplies the fourth. Lay them in order and something appears that no single Gospel shows on its own.

First, for His executioners:

"Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34)

Second, for a dying criminal:

"And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43)

Third, for His mother:

"When Jesus therefore saw his mother, and the disciple standing by, whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son!" (John 19:26)

Three sayings, and not one of them about Himself. His first three concerns while dying were other people.

Then the darkness falls, and for three hours nothing is recorded at all. And out of it comes the fourth:

"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Psalm 22:1)

Then the last three come quickly: I thirst, It is finished, and finally:

"And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit" (Luke 23:46)

Now look at how He addresses God across the seven.

The first saying: Father. The fourth: My God. The seventh: Father again.

He begins with the word, loses it in the middle, and takes it up again at the end. The fourth saying is the hinge of the seven, and Psalm 22 is what He reached for when He got there.

And the seventh saying is a psalm too: the words of another sufferer, taken up and used as a dying prayer. Jewish mothers taught that verse to children as a bedtime prayer.

He went into the dark quoting Scripture and came out of it quoting Scripture, and the last thing He did before dying was to say the words a child says before sleep.

35. If God is silent with you

One more word, for the reader this psalm was preserved for.

There is a particular grief in praying and hearing nothing. Trouble is bearable when God seems near; the unbearable thing is trouble plus silence, and that combination is what verse 2 describes.

"O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent" (Psalm 22:2)

Three things this psalm gives you, and no other passage gives all three.

The silence is not proof of rejection. The one Man God loved perfectly got the longest silence in Scripture. Whatever your silence means, it cannot mean what you fear it means.

The silence is not permanent. The psalm records both sides — thou hearest not at the start, when he cried unto him, he heard at the end — about the same event. The second verse was true, and so was the twenty-fourth, and only time separated them.

And the silence was purchased. This is the thing to hold onto. He was met with silence so that you would not be. Whatever else is happening in your dark stretch, forsaken is not on the list, and the reason is in this psalm.

"For he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee" (Hebrews 13:5)

He can promise that because He has already been through the alternative.

36. The last three words

Now look at how it ends.

"They shall come, and shall declare his righteousness unto a people that shall be born, that he hath done this" (Psalm 22:31)

That he hath done this.

In the Hebrew that is a single verb of completed action, and it closes the psalm.

Now recall what the Lord Jesus Christ said with His last breath, in the Gospel that presents Him as the burnt offering:

"When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost" (John 19:30)

He began the day quoting the first line of this psalm, and He ended it with the last.

The forsaking cry at the beginning; the finished work at the end. Between them, the whole of the psalm was being carried out in front of the people watching, and only one Man in Jerusalem that afternoon knew which text was being read.

He was not quoting a poem about somebody else’s suffering. He was reciting the account of His own, written for Him before He came.

And a last thing to hold. This psalm has no confession of sin in it, not one line, which is unique among the psalms of suffering. There is nothing to repent of anywhere in it, and yet it is the darkest of them all.

Because the sin in question was never His.

"For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him" (2 Corinthians 5:21)

If you have read this and found it true, do not leave it as a study. The psalm ends with a people not yet born hearing that He hath done this, and the only thing left to do with a finished work is to receive it.

Let us Pray:

Our beloved, holy and gracious Father, we come before Your throne of grace through the precious name and perfect merit of our Lord Jesus Christ, who alone has opened the way into Your presence.

We thank You for Your beloved Son, and for Him who told the most religious man of his day that he must be born again. We praise You for Your preserved Word, which declares "Ye must be born again" (John 3:7), and which cannot be broken.

We confess before You that we have trusted forms and ceremonies to do what only the new birth can do. Forgive us, we pray, and cleanse us, for You are faithful and just to forgive us our sins.

We beseech You for every soul reading these words who is yet without Christ. Send forth Your Holy Ghost to convince them of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment; open their understanding; and draw them to Your Son before this day is done.

Strengthen Your people who read it. Comfort the discouraged, establish the wavering, and let none go away empty. And use this message to bring every religious soul who reads it from ceremony to Christ Himself, for Your glory and not for ours.

We pray all of this to You, O God, our Holy and Heavenly Father, in the precious name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, by the power and anointing of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The Most Important Prayer You Will Ever Pray

Before you close this page, one question matters more than everything you have just read: if you died tonight, do you know where you would be?

You cannot be saved by joining a church, by being baptized, by giving money, or by living a decent life. Salvation is not a wage that is earned; it is a gift that is received. Every one of us has sinned, the wages of sin is death, and there is a real hell prepared for sin, but the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died on the cross in the sinner's place, was buried, and rose again the third day.

If you know yourself to be a sinner, and you are willing to turn from your sin and trust Him alone, then speak to God now. There are no magic words, but if these words are the cry of your heart, pray them and mean them:

After You Have Prayed

1. Tell somebody today. "That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" (Romans 10:9).

2. Begin reading the Bible. Start with the Gospel of John, then Acts, then Romans. Read a little every day. "As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby" (1 Peter 2:2).

3. Talk to your Father every day. You may now come boldly, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. No appointment is needed and no man's permission.

4. Find a Bible-believing church and be baptized. Not to be saved: you already are, but in obedience, and as the public confession of what has happened to you.

5. Rest in this, and do not be shaken by your feelings. "He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life" (John 5:24). You will still sin; when you do, confess it and go on — "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9).