He Has Done It: Reading the Psalms with Christ in View
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?" — Psalm 22:1 (ESV)
I began studying the psalms during the pandemic season with the women in my church. I’ll confess that while some people just love the psalms, I wasn’t one of them. Perhaps it was because I don’t like to admit my weakness, and I struggled to pray along. Or it could be that I tend to like Paul’s more straightforward writing. Poetry requires me to exercise another part of my brain I didn’t think I had.
With that as a backdrop, I set out to learn all about genre, parallelism and imagery with my friends. I shared my discoveries with them as we looked more deeply at some popular favorites. (You can find some of the fruits of this study in my blog series.)
But one angle that I discovered really deepened my appreciation of the psalter. Remember how Jesus told the two discouraged disciples on the Emmaus road that he “interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself”? (Luke 24:27) What about the psalms? How does this portion of scripture point us to him?
Seeing Christ in the Psalms
As I’ve been learning about understanding the psalms (or even in any part of the Bible), I realize how often I put myself in the center of my interpretation, as if these are here for me. I think about characters in the Old Testament looking for ways I can emulate them or as warnings for sins to avoid. However, while that may be helpful to some extent, the end result is the Bible becomes a mishmash of tips and hacks instead of a cohesive message.
Over the past few posts, we have been watching God unfold his story. For the sake of space, we had to make some major jumps, but the thread running underneath all these posts is God has been building toward one Person, through every story, every system, every covenant. The Psalms are no different.
However, Psalms does something different from all the previous weeks — it doesn't just point to Christ through events or institutions. It puts words in His mouth. Or rather, it puts His words on David's lips centuries before He speaks them.
First Peter 1:10–11 tells us the prophets were searching and inquiring carefully about the grace that was to come, that the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. If this is so, we can see that while David was writing about himself, the Spirit helped him pen words about Someone whose suffering would surpass his own.
An Example in Psalm 22
The original readers of Psalm 22 may have wondered whose precise experience it was describing. Some details exceeded anything David himself endured. Remember: David wrote this psalm centuries before crucifixion even existed as a method of execution. But there it is:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me: Jesus uses these exact words from the cross (Matthew 27:46). These words are his real experience as he bore the full weight of our sin.
All who see me mock me...He trusts in the Lord; let him deliver him: without realizing it, his mockers echo this (almost) word for word (Matthew 27:39–43). Though David was speaking of his own mockers, Jesus’ hecklers said them to him.
They have pierced my hands and feet: this was written before crucifixion was practiced.
They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots: an interesting detail that John records explicitly as fulfillment. The unbelieving soldiers certainly did not realize they were doing exactly what was described in this psalm (John 19:23–24).
He has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one...but has listened to his cry: we see how God viewed this sacrifice. The Father did not abandon Him but answered his cry by raising him from the dead.
He has done it: The Hebrew that ends Psalm 22:31 carries the same message as the Greek of John 19:30: “It is finished!” The work is completed, the mission accomplished. It means he did not just terminate this but he carried out the full task.
Though David was writing about his own suffering in real time, he was also writing about his descendant to come, his own Lord and Savior. This song has been preserved and sung by the saints (such as the disciples on the Emmaus road) and even his enemies throughout the centuries without knowing it. Even in the psalms
David was writing about his own suffering. And by the Spirit, he was writing about Jesus. The travelers on the Emmaus Road had been singing this psalm their whole lives without recognizing the One it described. As he said, “everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled (Luke 24:44).” Psalm 22 is a key place.
What This Means For Us
Knowing that the Psalms were always about Him should change how we read them. It is easy to jump to the quick connection that this psalm is describing my experience. However, if remember that Jesus has prayed these exact same psalms, from a much darker place with higher stakes—and God answered Him—we can have hope.
As Nancy Guthrie points out in her Bible study, The Wisdom of God, that means we can pray these psalms in three ways:
We can pray them as songs we sing to Him as our sympathetic high priest (Heb. 4:16). He has been through every single experience we go through today and he fully understands.
We can pray them as songs we sing about Him. So many of the psalms are musical meditations of the truth of God’s character—and as a member of the Godhead, Christ shares these as well. He is the mighty King, the one who sees us and keeps us—and for those reasons we can hold fast to him as we rehearse these truths.
Lastly, we can pray them as songs Jesus sings with us. Admittedly, this is where I am most stretched. When Jesus lived on earth, all he had was the New Testament. The gospels and epistles weren’t written yet. But the psalter was compiled by then. He also turned to the psalms.
Knowing that my Savior has gone before me and uttered the words of Psalm 1 in his desire to be the blessed man, or clung to Psalm 23 as he walked through the shadow of the valley of death, or Psalm 131 as he declared his humble faith in the Father, shows me how to become more like Him.
