Taking a Closer Look at Psalm 22
A Familiar Psalm
Let’s look closely at Psalm 22 together. And because it’s a long psalm, we’re going to look at only a few selected verses that give us the storyline of the whole thing. You’re going to find when we jump into this psalm, that it’s remarkably familiar to you, or at least its first verse is. But I want to see where the whole psalm goes, not just where it starts. Let’s read.
To the choir master. According to the Doe of the Dawn. A Psalm of David.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me from the words of my groaning? Oh my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest.
Moving to verse 12:
Many bulls encompass me; strong bulls of Bashan surround me; they open wide their mouths at me, like a ravening and roaring lion. I’m poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast; my strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death.
Moving to verse 21:
Save me from the mouth of the lion! You have rescued me from the horns of the wild oxen! I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you: You who fear the Lord, praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him, and stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel! For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard when he cried to him.
To verse 27:
All of the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nation shall worship before you. For kingship belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations.
We’ll stop there. As I said, this psalm is likely, at least in its beginning, a very familiar psalm to you. Psalm 22:1 is what Jesus himself says when he’s up on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Because of this, it’s likely, at least in some degree, familiar to us from Good Friday services or through preaching from the Gospels.
Songs of the Son
Daniel Stevens
Songs of the Son examines 9 psalms highlighted in Hebrews to reveal the preincarnate glory of Christ in the Old Testament.
And even for apologetic purposes, Psalm 22 often gets used because here, in this psalm of David, we do seem to have a description of Jesus’s death at the crucifixion—that his joints are stretched out, his heart melts away like wax, and we even find within it people dividing his garments and casting lots (Ps. 22:18). So Psalm 22 does meet us with the crucifixion scene. It is a prophecy, even as it is a psalm, telling us of how Jesus was to die. And Jesus wanted us to see it that way.
But is that all that’s here? The reason why I didn’t stop at those portions and why I wanted us to read through the latter half of the psalm is that this isn’t just one scene, but it’s a story. Psalm 22 begins with this cry of seeming abandonment from God. It goes through the suffering of the speaker. It says down “to the dust of death” in verse 15.
But that isn’t where the psalm ends. The psalm moves from the death of the speaker, as far as we can tell, from this last cry to be saved to the declaration: “You have rescued me.”
Verse 21 breaks into two halves. And as is not typical of the psalms, between the two lines suddenly everything has changed. “Save me” and “You have rescued me.” This one who starts speaking in desperation and in a sense of abandonment by God—in “the dust of death”—ends up declaring that he has been delivered.
Jesus is not only the reason why we worship; he is our worship leader.
And this deliverance goes on to greater effect. It’s not only that this one person has been saved from death, but as we see, “the ends of the earth shall remember.” And indeed at the end of it, “Posterity shall serve him; this shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation” that he has done it. This rescue from death of the speaker is told to all nations for all time, and the whole earth praises God because of this. This isn’t just the cross; this is more. This is deliverance and deliverance for all people. This leads us, even though it doesn’t explicitly use the name of Jesus, to see the story of a man who is executed in public, who dies, who comes up from that death in rescue, and for that rescue is praised, and God receives praise from all the earth. It might seem that there’s nothing else to add, that we already have the story of the New Testament here.
Singing His Praise
But I want to see what happens when we look from this psalm to a specific citation in the New Testament book of Hebrews. In Hebrews 2, we find a discussion of how Jesus helps us humans—us mortal sinners. And we find in verse 11 of chapter two and onwards:
He who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers, saying, “I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation, I will sing your praise.”
Here, the epistle to the Hebrews cites a passage from Psalm 22 that we wouldn’t expect. This isn’t the cry of dereliction on the cross, nor is it the declaration of resurrection, nor is it the future look towards nations and generations being saved.
But it’s a line that you may have missed. “I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will sing your praise.” And the author of Hebrews uses this to say that those who are saved by Jesus—those who are sanctified by Jesus the sanctifier—are all united to him. We’re all of one family, and he’s not ashamed to call us brothers.
And for a scriptural basis for that, he goes to Psalm 22. And in the midst of this psalm that speaks of resurrection and the salvation of the nations, we have this not only as a grand sweeping storyline but close and familial. And Jesus stops in the middle of that to talk about his people as his brothers, as those that he’s not ashamed of, as those that are all of one family with him. And as we look back then from Hebrews to the psalm, what we find is that it’s not only that praise goes to God because of the the deliverance that comes through Jesus, but that Jesus leads us in singing those praises. The praise from all the earth comes because he is the one who in the congregation declares the name of the Lord to us.
And he is the one who praises the Father and who leads us in praising the Father. Jesus is not only the reason why we worship; he is our worship leader. And we find, then, that this psalm that tells about Jesus isn’t just something kind of shadowy about David that then corresponds to him, but is a way that Jesus, as the leader of worship, shows us how we should praise God for what he has done. We go through the psalm, we find the story of Jesus, and, again, we find ourselves in it as those rescued, as those united to Jesus, and then as those who he leads in praising the Father, because in the words of Psalm 22, “he has done it.”
Daniel Stevens is the author of Songs of the Son: Reading the Psalms with the Author of Hebrews.
