Psalm 22
Psalm 22 is in one sense well known, beyond most of the psalms, and yet, I venture to say, a psalm with depths of meaning in it that none of us have plumbed, and one feels in meditating upon it, as if one were on the edge of a mighty ocean. This psalm, written by David, could not possibly describe the experience of David. According to 1 Peter 1:10-11, David himself enquired diligently into the meaning of what he wrote. If you read the Old Testament by itself you would not get so much out of it, but let the light of the New Testament shine in upon it, and it is very wonderful in its depths of meaning.
The Psalm begins with a cry uttered in all its intensity a thousand years later upon the Cross. It begins with a sob from the depth of a spirit so anguished that none of us can ever know its unparalleled anguish and grief.
At the beginning of the Psalm we get the cry, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” In contrast the sufferer speaks of two classes of people, who turned to the Lord in their distress, and were heard. He says, “Our fathers trusted in Thee: they trusted, and Thou didst deliver them”; and if we were to follow that line up to the narratives of the martyrs of different ages, we should find that in their hour of deepest trial they were upheld by the shining of the glory of an open heaven, and I believe in many cases they were rendered superior to the pains of the faggot and the flame. Then again in verse 24 we read, “He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted,” neither has He hid His face from him; but when he cried to Him, He heard. And why? Why does God succour the martyrs and the afflicted, and yet forsake the blessed One on the Cross? Why?
I pray God that the solemn meaning of this psalm may take hold of some of the lives here and alter them permanently. When we speak about the Cross it is the centre of all history.
“In the cross of Christ I glory
Tow’ring o’er the wrecks of time,
All the light of sacred story
Gathers round its head sublime.”
A wonderful theme is the Cross: there is nothing like it. It would be well if we fixed our minds upon the Cross with all the depths of its meaning, and seek to come under its wonderful influence.
The cross sets forth the exceeding love of God. His righteousness is shown—“Thou art holy, O Thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.” Who was the holy Sufferer?—we know from the New Testament He was the eternal Son of God—the One that was ever in the Father’s bosom; the One who, being in the form of God, took upon Himself the form of a bondslave, and became obedient to death, even the death of the Cross.
We know that ever as He went through His pathway here the sound of His every footstep was sweetest music in the ears of God. Every word was a treasured memory in the Father’s mind. Every act that He did was altogether and only delightful to Him. Aye, and if there was one act in which He showed above all His obedience and in which He was dearest to God, it was when He was put upon that Cross and endured the forsaking of God’s face. Think of the glory of His Person! Think of what He was doing there! Think of the abominableness and the pollution and the horribleness of sin! He bore it there and God’s judgment fell upon Him because of it, and if you are a Christian at all you will say goodbye to sin. You won’t play with it. You won’t toy with it. You won’t sow to the flesh, for if you do you will show that you do not appreciate what Jesus suffered because of it, and if you do sow to the flesh, you will of the flesh assuredly reap corruption.
May God move our spirits as we meditate on this psalm. There is nothing so affecting as the mighty love of God displayed at the Cross as nowhere else.
The second thing I want to say is this. If the Cross shows forth the wonderful love of God it likewise shows the utter evil of man’s heart. It says later on in the Psalm, “They pierced My hands and My feet “the foreshadowing of a punishment unknown at that time, but invented by the cruel ingenuity of the Romans. What had those hands done? They had touched the leper; touched the ears of the deaf man; touched the eyes of the blind man; they brake the loaves and fishes and multiplied them to satisfy the hunger of the thousands who gathered around Him. His hands only acted in blessing man for God’s glory. His feet? Oh! those feet! What we owe to them. “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of Him that brings good tidings.” They crucified those hands, and those feet, and the robber-soldiers gambled for His clothes at the foot of the Cross. I see in that great scene the display of the mighty love of God and I am attracted to God, and at the same time I see the awful wickedness of man, and I turn from myself in loathing and shame. It is an impressive thing to see these two sides of the Cross.
And then at last the Holy Sufferer comes to a point where he says, “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 horns of the unicorns.” There came a moment in that crucifixion when there was the impenetrable darkness, and He was utterly forsaken of God, all the wrath of God against sin poured upon our blessed Saviour; and then He cried, “It is finished.” This psalm begins with one cry, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” and ends with another, for the last verse says, “They shall come, and shall declare His righteousness to a people that shall be born, that He has done this;” in other words, that “It is finished.” At that triumphant cry the darkness vanished, and as He dismissed His spirit, He said, “Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit—He was heard from the horns of the unicorns.
Think of the extraordinary way in which Scripture is put together. People that tell us the Bible is not inspired must have very strange spectacles. In one verse it speaks of the lion’s mouth and the horns of the unicorns, setting forth the extremity of His sorrow on the cross as from man’s side, and then He says, “I will declare Thy Name to My brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I praise Thee.” That is triumph; it is resurrection and the fruit of His suffering and death, as seen in a multitude that He can call “My brethren.”
What has the blessed Lord undergone all this for? He might have been alone in His glory, but He wanted brethren, He wanted companions, He wanted those that He might have around Himself, to gratify the love of His heart and the love of His Father’s heart. Hebrews 2:12 permits us to apply this 22nd Psalm, which in strict interpretation refers to Israel, to the present time. Hebrews 2:12 says, “I will declare Thy Name to My brethren, in the midst of the Church will I sing praise to Thee.” The longer I live the more I am impressed with the wonderful wisdom of God in putting believers together in assembly. It is a very bad sign when we are not attending the meetings—God puts believers together like-minded ones. You may go out into the world, become depressed, and bewildered, and then you may come into a company like this and be refreshed and comforted, and get a little foretaste of the glory.
Verse 26 says, “The meek shall eat and be satisfied,” and verse 29, “All they that be fat upon earth shall eat and worship.” Now there is a good deal said about eating in Scripture. You remember in the Gospel of John, chapter 6, where the Lord speaks about eating His flesh and drinking His blood—as a proof that we have life, and the way to maintain that life. “Why should there be this remarkable simile of eating in Scripture again and again?” The answer is, Eating is the strongest expression of assimilation. If I put money in my pocket I may lose it, my pocket may be picked, but no person can take from me the breakfast that I had yesterday morning—the cleverest doctors and chemists in the world could not extract it from me. I have assimilated it—it has gone in a hundred different ways to succour my body in its different parts—blood, flesh, hair, skin and secretions of various sorts. It is important that we should consider how far we as Christians are really assimilating—making things our own.
It says here, “The meek shall eat and be satisfied.” Now what is meant by “the meek”? You remember what the Lord said in the perfection of His Manhood down here—“I am meek and lowly in heart.” Think of Him in Manhood down here, He who “was God over all, blessed for evermore,” that He should say “I am meek” is very instructive. What does “meek” mean? I answer, The meek is one that is not occupied with self. Then I must be occupied with something else, for nature abhors a vacuum. If I am not occupied with self, then I must be occupied with something else. If we are not occupied with self, we are set free to be occupied with Christ. “The meek shall eat and be satisfied.” Oh! the satisfaction that there is in feeding upon the mighty love of God, and upon Christ as the expression of it! “The meek shall eat and be satisfied,” and if you are satisfied, you will want nothing else. You won’t want the world, and its pleasures and its associations.
Then it goes on to say that “they that be fat upon earth shall eat and worship. “The fat upon earth” sets forth those that assimilate largely and with profit that which is communicated in the Word. What is the Father seeking from each one of us? John 4 tells us that the Father is seeking worshippers.
It is the appropriation of these divine things that so fills the heart that there is the overflow, and that is what the Lord wants. I am sure it is possible for a person to be under the shelter of the blood, and yet to be living so carelessly—perhaps even worse than carelessly—that they have never experienced the slightest sensation of what worship means. Worship is a wonderful thing. One knows so little about it oneself, but there are times when the soul is so in the contemplation of God and Christ and all these divine things brought to us, that one can only fall before the Father’s face, or before the Lord, and worship.
If we do not know what it is to be meek, and to eat and be satisfied, and above all to worship, what is the remedy? Let your heart be divinely moved by the first verse of our psalm. Get to understand the wonderful meaning of the Cross of Christ. You owe all your everlasting blessing to it.
Nothing humbles us or wins the heart like the Cross.