When we are afraid, we are made courageous by God’s presence. When we are angry at evil, we are made humble by his mercy. When we are filled with doubt, we are assured by his love. And when we are angry at God, we are overcome by his grace. Having processed these complex emotions, we come to a place of appropriate grief. We become emotionally exhausted and broken over what has happened. This is a good and right place to be, and Jesus is with us here too.
Oswald Chambers used to say that depression, or ordinary sadness, is part of being human; without it, no one would know what it means to experience joyful exaltation.[1] If sadness is necessary to being human, then we would expect our Savior to have also experienced this emotion. And as we read through the Gospels, we see Jesus grieving at Lazarus’s tomb, weeping over Jerusalem, and agonizing in the garden of Gethsemane. But we also have the Psalms as a record of Jesus’s prayers. Theologians have consistently said the psalms are the prayers of Christ spoken through the psalmists.[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “These same words which David spoke, therefore, the future Messiah spoke through him. The prayers of David were prayed also by Christ. Or better, Christ himself prayed them through his fore-runner David.”[3]
From the way Jesus quotes the Psalms in the Gospels, Bonhoeffer and others concluded that Jesus speaks the words of the psalms as his very own. Think of some common references you know: “Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me you evildoers!’” (Matthew 7:23, NIV; from Psalm 6:8). Or this one, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46, NIV; from Psalm 22:1).[4] In John 15:25 Jesus quotes Psalm 69:4 as his own words: “They hated me without reason” (NIV). This idea that the psalms are a record of the emotional struggles of our Savior will change the way you read and pray them. It will enable you to see an empathetic Savior who tasted every contour of the human experience. If we read that our Savior experienced grief and sadness, then we too should view it as normal, even necessary, to experience the deep sadness of human brokenness.
Perhaps no Psalm more clearly shows us a savior who empathizes with us in our grief yet sustains us with hope in the midst of it than Psalm 22. This psalm has two sections which specifically prophesy what Christ would accomplish on the cross. The first half describes with poignancy his suffering, and the second half exuberantly proclaims his victory.
Suffering
Jesus was nailed to the cross about nine o’clock in the morning and hung there until he was removed at three. From nine until noon he was tortured by people. Regardless of the mockery, scorn, and humiliation, Jesus did not retaliate. Instead, he ministered to others: he prayed, he asked John to take care of his mother, and he granted salvation to the thief beside him who begged for mercy.
However, at noon it all changed. Darkness covered the earth; the sun was eclipsed, cosmically reflecting what was happening to Jesus’s soul. What he had suffered so far at the hands of human beings could not accomplish our salvation. He had to suffer under the hand of God. Isaiah 53:10 (NIV) says that it was not his body but his soul, “his life," that [was made] an offering for sin.” Paul goes a step further and says that he was “made . . . to be sin” for us (2 Corinthians 5:21). It is this suffering that the psalmist explores in Psalm 22.
Forsaken (vv. 1–2)
One of the most obvious ways this psalm points to Jesus are the words of the first verse, the same words Jesus cried out on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God the Father poured out all the sins of his people on Jesus and then turned his back on him, because he cannot abide sin. How could it be that one person of the Trinity could forsake another and yet remain one God? It is difficult to understand. Luther said, “God forsaken by God, who can understand it?” Occasionally I am asked if we really believe that Christ descended into hell as we confess in the Apostles’ Creed. I say that we do not believe that he physically went to hell. However, he did experience all the torment of hell, which is being forsaken by God. It is right for someone to be disturbed by that thought; there is no way to mitigate the fact that he was forsaken by God because of our sin.
Reduced (vv. 3–5, 9–10, 19–20)
Furthermore, Jesus was reduced to the point of begging God to deliver him from his terror. He desperately pleaded with God to deliver him just like he delivered his covenant people in the past, saying, “In you our ancestors put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them. To you they cried out and were saved” (vv. 4–5, NIV). He pleads with God to care for him as he has since birth: “From birth I was cast on you” (v. 10, NIV). And in verses 19–20 he pleads for God to come quickly because he feels as if he is being ripped apart by ravenous dogs. There is no other way to say it: he is reduced to being a beggar.
Tormented (vv. 6–8, 12–18)
While Jesus’s greatest suffering was at the hand of God, his physical and emotional torment at the hands of men cannot be discounted.
- Bleeds (v. 6). He bleeds and no one gives aid. No one extends pity to a worm oozing its life substance. So it is with Christ: a human being is bleeding from gaping wounds, and fellow humans merely stand and watch as if he were a worm.
- Mocked (vv. 7–8, 12–13). He is mocked by those who should be his friends. The very people he has wept over, the very ones he begged to come to him, now mock him: “He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, ‘I am the Son of God’” (Matthew 27:43, NIV).
- Died (vv. 14–16). Jesus completely experienced death. His body was racked with the pain of dislocated joints; his heart began to fail as he slowly suffocated; and he was desperately thirsty. If you have ever been at the bedside of a lucid dying human being, you know that their greatest luxury is simply moisture for their lips. Finally, he experienced the indignity of one whose possessions are divided before he dies. He endured it all because of our sins.
Jesus promises that he will never leave us nor forsake us (Heb. 13:5). That promise extends to every part of our human experience, even our suffering and grief, because none have ever been acquainted with grief like Jesus (Isaiah 53:3). However disillusioned or grieved you may feel, you will never feel it alone. As you grieve, hear Jesus saying to you in this psalm, “I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matt. 28:20).
Victory
And it is because of Jesus’ constant presence that we are people who grieve with hope (1 Thess. 4:13). We see this in Psalm 22 through a dramatic change of disposition that occurs between verses 20 and 21. However, it is a bit obscured by the NIV translation. The verb translated “save” is literally, “you have heard me.” If translated that way, the verse would then read, “Rescue me from the mouth of the lions, from the horns of the wild oxen. You have heard me!” The Savior declares that he has been heard; a note of victory has been sounded. What is the victory? It is indicated by the verses that follow—he has won the salvation of his elect.
Family (vv. 21–30)
Jesus now declares to his people that he has achieved their salvation. Notice how he is transformed in his perspective from being completely alone, even separated from God, to being surrounded with new family members, saying, “I will declare your name to my people; in the assembly I will praise you” (v. 22, NIV).
Finished (v. 31)
David concludes this psalm this way: “They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!” (v. 31, emphasis added). The final words of the verse were also repeated by Jesus on the cross when he said, “It is finished” (John 19:30).
Most every religion besides Christianity, and even some under the guise of Christianity, declare that one must atone for his own sins in whole or in part. Some teach that one must atone for his sins in order to avoid a worse reincarnation in the next life. Others prescribe self-atonement so that one can gain more wives, even a planet in the life to come. Others insist that atonement is procured through keeping the sacraments or through a certain quota of good works. In other words, in their minds, the work of atonement is never done. For some it is not even finished after one dies. In stark contrast to these beliefs, Jesus declared from the cross, “It is finished.” He accomplished salvation. He covered the sins of all who will ask him to do so. If you have asked him, your sins are covered. There is nothing else to be done. There is a life after death yet to be lived, and its certainty is secure.
Though the pain of losing one you love still lingers, perhaps until the end of your life here on earth, because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, all those who die in him will rise to newness of life, never to die again (Romans 6:1-11). We are not promised a life free from any suffering, but we are promised a Savior who will sustain us through it. When Jesus grieves with us, he does not do so as one defeated. He too grieves with the hope of the resurrection and new life he accomplished on our behalf.
Jesus is with us in our present experience of grief, but he has also gone before us to a reality we have not yet tasted. This life is not all there is. In Christ, the best is yet to come.
[1] Oswald Chambers, “Taking the Initiative against Depression,” My Utmost for His Highest, February 17, https://utmost.org/ taking-the-initiative-against-depression.
[2] Authorities like Andrew Bonar and George Horne said that such was the consensus of the early church. They say men like Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Arnobius, Cassiodorus, Hilary, Pros- per, and Tertullian all viewed the Psalms as the prayers of Christ.
[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible, trans. Eberhard Bethge (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1970), 18–19.
[4] For other examples compare, Matthew 21:13 with Psalm 118:26; John 13:18 with Psalm 41:9; Matthew 16:27 with Psalm 62:12.
This article was excerpted from Soul Anatomy.