The Soul’s Struggle for Faith

The Soul’s Struggle for Faith

A Cry of Anguish and a Song of Praise. Psalms 22

My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Far from my deliverance are the words of my groaning. O my God, I cry by day, but You do not answer; And by night, but I have no rest. Yet You are holy, O You who are enthroned upon the praises of Israel. In You our fathers trusted; They trusted and You delivered them. To You they cried out and were delivered; In You they trusted and were not disappointed. But I am a worm and not a man, A reproach of men and despised by the people. All who see me sneer at me; They separate with the lip, they wag the head, `saying,` “Commit yourself to the LORD; let Him deliver him; Let Him rescue him, because He delights in him.” Yet You are He who brought me forth from the womb; You made me trust when upon my mother’s breasts. Upon You I was cast from birth; You have been my God from my mother’s womb. Be not far from me, for trouble is near; For there is none to help. Many bulls have surrounded me; Strong bulls of Bashan have encircled me. They open wide their mouth at me, As a ravening and a roaring lion. I am poured out like water, And all my bones are out of joint; My heart is like wax; It is melted within me. My strength is dried up like a potsherd, And my tongue cleaves to my jaws; And You lay me in the dust of death. For dogs have surrounded me; A band of evildoers has encompassed me; They pierced my hands and my feet. I can count all my bones. They look, they stare at me; They divide my garments among them, And for my clothing they cast lots. But You, O LORD, be not far off; O You my help, hasten to my assistance. Deliver my soul from the sword, My only life from the power of the dog. Save me from the lion’s mouth; From the horns of the wild oxen You answer me. I will tell of Your name to my brethren; In the midst of the assembly I will praise You. You who fear the LORD, praise Him; All you descendants of Jacob, glorify Him, And stand in awe of Him, all you descendants of Israel. For He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; Nor has He hidden His face from him; But when he cried to Him for help, He heard. From You comes my praise in the great assembly; I shall pay my vows before those who fear Him. The afflicted will eat and be satisfied; Those who seek Him will praise the LORD. Let your heart live forever! All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD, And all the families of the nations will worship before You. For the kingdom is the LORD’s And He rules over the nations. All the prosperous of the earth will eat and worship, All those who go down to the dust will bow before Him, Even he who cannot keep his soul alive. Posterity will serve Him; It will be told of the Lord to the coming generation. They will come and will declare His righteousness To a people who will be born, that He has performed it.

The twenty-second Psalm had always been uniquely treasured by Christians because of the use Jesus made of the opening words of the Psalm “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?” as he hung upon Calvary. This Psalm is the first of three consecutive Psalms which picture three of the outstanding works of Christ. The 22^nd Psalm is the Psalm of the cross and reveals to us the Savior giving His life a ransom. The 23rd Psalm is the Psalm of the Shepherd and presents Jesus as an ever present Shepherd who leads His sheep and who ministers to their every need. The 24^th Psalm is the Psalm of the crown and presents Christ as the King.

The 22^nd Psalm is the picture of one man’s struggle from doubt to trust. “Backwards and forwards, from trust to complaint, from complaint to trust, rolls the troubled sea of thought.” The Psalm begins in the depths of desolation and frustration and ends upon the heights of fulfillment and realization. It begins in hopelessness and struggles upward and upward into the free air of faith. The Psalmist begins by crying, “My God why hast thou forsaken me” and ends by asserting that the story of his sorrow and suffering shall be good news to the whole world. We must ask who is the sufferer? The title ascribes the Psalm to David. Some scholars feel that the Psalm is descriptive of Jeremiah and others believe it describes the sufferings of God’s chosen people, Israel. But as we read the Psalm we cannot help but be struck with the startling correspondence of the details of the author’s sufferings with those of the crucifixion. Not only is the first verse quoted by Christ on Calvary but throughout the Psalm the minutest detail of the agony of crucifixion is described; we are even told of the parting of the garments, of the piercing of the hands and feet, of the intense thirst, of the excruciating agony, of the taunts of the staring gaping crowd gathered at the foot of the cross. Who the author of the Psalm is we cannot be certain. How much the suffering in this Psalm fitted his own particular cause, we do not know. Shining through the shadowy personality of the psalmist is the figure of the Son of Man; the sufferings depicted here are a prophecy of the suffering to be endured by Him “who was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities.”

The pathway of the study of this Psalm must be trodden reverently, the Psalm is divided into two main sections: verses 1-21a where we have increasing despair and verse 21b -31 where we have increasing joy. In the first section the Psalmist says that he cried unto God and God heard him not; in the second section we see that God heard him, The Psalm “begins with a cry of despair and goes down, and down, and down to the middle of the 21^st verse. Here the Psalmist prayer is heard and the mood changes entirely and it goes up, and up, and up till it ends with a triumphant cry.”

“My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not, and in the night season, and am not silent.” This cry of the mental anguish is one of the most poignant and penetrating in the annals of the human race. The why of this complaint is not the why of impatience or despair, not the sinful questioning of the one whose heart rebels against his chastening, but rather the cry of a lost child who cannot understand why his father has left him, and who longs to see his father’s face again. This is the cry that could have escaped from the lips of that young lad in Kansas who was kidnapped and so brutally murdered. He was kidnapped from his father, separated from his love and protection and could not understand why. In the hour of deep distress no doubt he called upon his father to help him. All of us at sometime or another in our lives has had a similar spiritual experience. We have been in the valley of desolation, surrounded by darkness which has hid the face of God. We cried for deliverance and it seems as if no deliverance was at hand. Although this is the experience of all, the voice that ran through the darkness on Calvary was the cry of Him who experienced its force in supreme measure. The separation that Christ experienced was real in every sense of the word because in that hour he “who knew no sin was made sin for us,” He was bearing “our sin in His body on the tree” and God the Holy One cannot look upon sin. “None but He have known the mortal agony of utter separation from God. None but He clung to God with absolute trust even in the hour of great darkness.”

In verses 3-5 the Psalmist appeals to the past, asserting that history witnesses to the trustworthiness and compassion of God. “But thou art holy, O thou that enthroned the praises of Israel. Our fathers trusted in thee and were confounded.” When doubt and despair lay hold of you, fight against it by laying hold of the goodness of God in days gone by. Remember that He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He who cared yesterday for you will do the same today, tomorrow and every tomorrow. The Psalmist in 27:13 said, “I had fainted unless I believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”

“Such remembrance makes the contrast of present sufferings and of a far off God more bitter; and so a fresh wave of agony rolls over the Psalmist soul. He feels himself crushed and as incapable as a worm bruised in all its soft length by an armed heel. “But I am a worm; and no man; a reproach of men, despised of the people. All that they see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the hand, saying, he trusted on the Lord that He would deliver him: let Him deliver him, seeing that He delighted in Him.” (Verses 6-8) “The taunts that wounded the Psalmist have long since fallen dumb, and the wounds are all healed; but the immortal words are engraved forever upon the heart of the world.” No suffering is more acute than that of a sensitive soul, brimming over with love and yet met with scorn, mockery, and rejection. No man has ever felt that pang more than Jesus felt it. He who is love Himself, came to help men and yet was received not; “He came unto His own and His own received Him not; He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” It is His sorrows that are painted here.

The Psalmist takes the complaint of the first verse and turns it into a prayer to God: “Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help.” (Verse 11) Faith does not rest with plaintively crying “why art thou so far.” In the next section of the psalm (verses 12-18) the full wave of trouble engulfs the Psalmist and he describes it thus: “Many bulls have compassed me ….. They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.” What ever experiences of the psalmist this is meant to describe it is an adequate description of the agony that took place at Calvary when the Prince of Glory died. We see those who sitting down watched Him, their staring, gaping eyes; we see the awful perspiration of the sufferer brought about by His intense physical agony – I am poured out like water. We see evidence of the awful thirst that resulted: my tongue cleaveth to my jaws. We see the stretching of the body hanging there: all my bones are out of joint …. I tell all my bones. We learn of the parting of the garment, of the casting of lots for the seamless robe.

This first section of the psalm ends with a prayer: “But be not far from me, O Lord: O my strength, haste thee to help me. Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling (my only life) from the power of the dog. Save me from the lion’s mouth, from the unicorn’s horn.” Once again the soul has risen upon the crest of the wave of faith, and looking into the very face of God pleads for deliverance from physical suffering, mental anguish and spiritual doubts. And not for the first time we have the assurance that God is standing by, that He has not hid His face, that He has not utterly forsaken His beloved. The Psalmist proclaims: “Thou hast heard me.”

When the assurance comes that the ears of God are open to the prayers of His children; when faith has risen above doubt and the Psalmist is reassured that “the eternal God is his refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms,” he breaks forth in a hymn of praise and dedication: Psalm 22:22-31. He vows to publish abroad the good news of God, he shall praise God before all people, he will pay his vows, life for the Lord before all the people. He calls upon the whole host of Israel to join him in a hymn of praise unto the Lord.

As the psalm draws to a close we behold the universal effects of the Psalmist deliverance: Psalm 22:27-31. These verses speak to us of that day when the” knowledge of God shall cover the face of the earth as the waters cover the sea.” Certainly consequences so great as this did not result from the personal experience of one who lived in ancient Israel. Consequences so wide spread could result from only one life, the life of Him “who humbled himself and became obedient to death on the cross. Wherefore God hath highly exalted him and given him a name above every name and at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue shall confess that He is Lord to the glory of God the Father.” With great anticipation we look forward to that day when the “kingdoms of this world shall become the Kingdom of our Lord and His Christ.”

Will you notice the clause with which this psalm ends: “He hath done this.” In the Hebrew it is one word, meaning “it is finished.” This was the sixth word from the cross. The forth word was the one with which the psalm begins: “My God why hast thou forsaken me.” Because He was willing to endure the physical suffering depicted in this psalm; because He was willing to come to the hour of separation from the Father, your salvation and mine is finished. “Tis done, Tis done, the great transaction is done.” But no one word can express adequately all that was accomplished in that great sacrifice. It will take all of eternity to fully understand “the length and the breadth, the height and the depth of the love of God for us.” It will take all of eternity to fully experience the benefits of the atoning death of Christ: “For eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, not has it entered into the mind of man what God has prepared for them who love Him.”

Dr. Robert W Kirkpatrick

Presbyterian Church Saint Albans, W Va. June 26, 1960