PSALM 22

Dr. Jeff Watson

May 28, 2006

Good Morning. This morning we all salute any man or woman who does or who has ever worn the uniform of the United States . And I stand before you as the son of a decorated World War 2 veteran who nearly paid the last full measure of devotion in Italy . And I’m sure for many of you when you think back to those you love, those you still share life with and those who’ve gone on before, your heart is full of gratitude for service and sacrifice and for how God has used our country in the world. And for which we continue to pray He will.

I can think of no greater pinning ceremony that the one that was addressed in our solo. The day one day when we will stand before the Lord and if counted worthy of a crown that we would surrender that in His presence because we only receive such a crown by His grace. And if there ever is a memorial, and we live in an area that is dotted with granite memorials here and there, the people to groups to achievements, there is no greater memorial that the memorial of that simple wooden stake on which our Savior hung for us.

In the last year I’ve been falling in love again with the Book of Psalms. I don’t know about you but I sometimes scratch my head and I think, “Wow, this is the biggest book of the Bible, the Book of Psalms, and yet it’s the one that we hear the least about in series of preaching.” People have a favorite text here and there, but we don’t systematically study the book, Israel ’s Hymnal. It’s a heartfelt hymnal. If I could I would like to invite you to go with me to Psalm 22, where the memorial of memorials is pre-figured in prophecy; where the good work of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Commander-in-Chief of our family of redemption, paid the ultimate sacrifice and earned the ultimate award, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Psalm 22 is the day of days, a dark day in human history, literally, figuratively and theologically. I appreciated Terry reading the first stanza of Psalm 22 today. It is not an easy passage and each Psalm is so different that it doesn’t lend itself easily to series of preachings or teachings; different authors from chapter to chapter, different settings, different centuries in which the Psalms were written, different character in each Poem, like, if you went into Psalm 1 you’d get a Psalm of wisdom—it would offer you wisdom about how to please God. If you went to Psalm 46, you’d get a Psalm of trust—how not to worry but to trust God for the big things and the little things. Here in Psalm 22 it’s neither a psalm of wisdom or nor a psalm of trust. It’s a Psalm of prophecy. Wow, that’s tough. I mean, I don’t read much poetry, and poetry is kind of challenging. It’s different than a narrative. But when poetry is interwoven, interlaced with prophecy, you really have to slow down. And that’s the benefit of difficult Scripture passages—they slow me down.  If I have a weakness in Scripture reading it’s to read quickly and to think I know what it’s going to say and so I turn off all the eagerness juices and move through the motions. Are you like that? Do you have someone in your life that you’ve known a long time, maybe it’s a child, or spouse, or parent, and you think you know them so you kind of turn the volume down and you know “here it comes again.” You package up their message because you’re so used to it that you don’t hear the nuances and the newness of what they’re saying to you or feeling today. Scripture can be that way. And Psalm 22 for me has slowed me down. It has stopped me in my tracks. It’s not really as easy passage because prophecy all by itself is tough, but poetry and top of prophecy is like toughness squared for me. Now, one of the things I’ve enjoyed about this is reading through and getting a basic feeling for the first stanza, which runs those first 21 verses, that Terry read. And then the second stanza which runs from verse 22 to the end. Read those two. Put them side-by-side as if they are separate poems and you go “Wow!” Two very different fields. The first one is dark and sad and melancholy. The second one is happy and bright and optimistic. The difference is so great that some people will go, “Well, see! It can’t be about Jesus, because if it was about Jesus then He must be multiple personality disordered.” I mean look at this! If it’s about Good Friday, how can you say happy things about Good Friday? In fact, it seems that stanza one reads about Jesus being abandoned by God, which is Good Friday, and the second stanza beginning in verse 22 is about Easter Sunday and His life evermore, which is about victory and hope in the ultimate sense. Now you know there are liberals, Jews, Christians, secular readers of literature who will circle this passage and go,  “Well, that cannot be about Jesus because David wrote it. Unless David understood what he was saying at the time, then it certainly can’t mean anything about a time beyond David. David is 10 centuries before Christ. David knew nothing or little about Christ, except when God Holy Spirit opened his eyelids briefly as a prophet to see the horizon of the future. But even the he little understood the details. To a very secular or liberal view this passage would say, “Can’t be about Jesus.” But no doubt—I’m kind of looking at your praise team and I figured out that they’re of different heights. Have you figured that out? Is it Sue, who’s the sunshine solo; is it Sue? She’s not the tallest and Bernt is not the shortest. I’m picturing myself, if I walk down in front and they lined up from shortest to tallest, that some people would show up in the back and some would show up in the front. Right?  And, almost like a mountain range, if you were walking down in the plain or in the valley and looked up over the mountain range, you’d see different peaks; you wouldn’t see all of Mount Bernt in the back, you’d see only that big head. And you would not even be able to tell from where you are in the valley, how close those mountains are to each other. They may be miles apart. But you pick up a piece of the horizon here, and a piece of it there, and a piece of it there. And prophecy is often that way.

Some of what is in this Psalm made great sense in the life of King David. It’s local. It’s historical. It no doubt felt right and made sense to him when it came out, at least to a great degree. Maybe some of his burdens in the Syrian war, maybe some of his sadness with the rebellion of his son Absalom, maybe some of the persecution and sorrow that he felt when he fled from King Saul, in that persecution. No doubt as David composed this poem and sang it, maybe cried it, maybe danced it, certain phrases leapt out to him as being God-given ways to capture how he was feeling in the moment. But you know, I think sometimes he was just looking at Sue. He was looking at the nearer foreground of his own experience and yet there are times when God the Holy Spirit lifted his tongue or his pen to pick up on something beyond the foothills, on toward the greater peaks of this mountain range of Messianic prophecy. Some of it may even be centuries away, when the nation suffered as a whole—not just David as an individual, but the nation as a whole suffered and went off into deportation in Babylon. No doubt the nation felt some of the same sorrow and abandonment that King David felt. And yet, when you really look at the height of these words, when you come and recognize that Jesus uses these own words of Himself in the Gospel of Matthew; when you hear that the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews uses these words about Jesus as the Messiah, you appreciate that there is also that far off horizon—there is the individual, the national and the Christological perspectives in this poem. My great interest is in the Christological; that’s our memorial of memorials.

Now I’d like to invite you to think with me about prophecy: that prophecy need not always make full sense to the speaker at the time they speak the words, or write the words. Nor do words of prophecy always have to make full sense to the hearers or the reader the first time that they hear or read the words. Example: If you have your New Testament you can pick up on this very principle. In the Gospel of John there is a High Priest (John chapter 12 verse 49). The High Priest Caiaphas is in the midst of Jesus’ arrest and betrayal and His ultimate indictment and crucifixion. And Caiaphas, (John 12—rather it’s the end of chapter 11, John 11 verse 50) Caiaphas says, “You do not realize that it’s better for you—you, the group—that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.” (John 11:50) “He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish people.” He used a very specific word hupere –Jesus died “on behalf of, instead of, as a pinch hitter for, as a proxy to the whole nation. Here’s Caiaphas thinking, “I want that man dead. I want him dead. But what I’m going to say to the masses is (sigh) it’s terrible that he has to go but it’s better that one go than all of us go. We wouldn’t want to have the whole nation perish, if we have a mass revolt here in Jerusalem . We’ve had so much trouble here; the Romans have put a governor in here, and that governor has been told one more massive uproar and we’re gonna bring in the troops and we gonna lay that city bare.” So Caiaphas says, “Look, we don’t want to lose our lives; we don’t want to be wiped out as a people. So, you have to settle—it’s better for one man to die than for all of us to die.” But when he speaks he uses a very specific substitutionary term. It’s better for one to die on behalf of the whole, than for the whole to die. The passage goes on to say he actually was prophesying that Jesus would die on behalf of the people. And not just the Jewish people but all the people. It’s really quite an amazing thing. He spoke a word of prophecy not quite aware of the import of his words. But according to the Gospel of John the import of his words was bigger than his brain at the moment. And the same thing happens on the other front, Say, take Jesus over in John 2, (John chapter 2 verse 19) Jesus says, “Destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three days. He’s referring to His body. In a hostile tit for tat He says that “destroy this temple and I will rebuild it in three days.” We know that because John 2:21 goes on to say “but the temple He had spoken of was His body.”  And yet the slander came up by a false witness that when Jesus spoke these words He, in fact, was claiming He was going to destroy Solomon’s Temple . In fact that shows up in Matthew 26. “Finally, two came forward—two false witnesses—and declared ‘this fellow said “I am able to destroy the Temple of God and rebuild it in three days”’”; which of course, He was able. It was not His intent to do so; He was capable of doing so. (Matthew chapter 26, verse 60-61) So sometimes words of prophecy don’t always make full sense to the speaker or writer at the time they first come out. Nor do the words of prophecy always make sense to the hearer or the reader the first time they encounter those words. In fact, the Apostle Peter, who himself was a prophet, tells us how this works. (Second Peter chapter 1) Peter says, “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy from Scripture came about by the prophets own interpretation.” In other words Psalm 22 did not come about because King David woke up one morning and said, “Hmmm! Feels like a prophecy day. I’m gonna work out; I’m gonna do some pushups, I’m gonna pray myself hot and let myself go.” He didn’t turn on his prophecy switch. Verse 21 goes on “For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man.” The prophet doesn’t say, “Mmm, I want a really little prophecy today.” or “I want a really big prophecy today.” Or “I want to look out two centuries…naw, two millennia.” It’s not in their origin, but holy men and women spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. It’s almost like the word of a wind carrying along a boat with the power of the wind in its sails. Or a momma dog picking up its puppy dogs by the back of its neck and carrying it along. The prophet him or herself is carried along by a force much greater than themselves. That’s Psalm 22. That’s the ultimate message that King David pens though it has some import in his day and in his life, though it no doubt has some import for the nation, it is most precious in that it points us back to Calvary . It is the most frequently quoted Psalm in the New Testament.  It is spoken by Jesus Himself, and by the apostles about Jesus. We have no sure guidance in its meaning. So let’s take a look at it,

Verse 1 in stanza 1, Jesus describes His abandonment by God. In fact we often hear this in the original, “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani”.  We hear it sometimes in Hebrew and sometimes in Aramaic. Here, King David speaks it in Hebrew, and it’s really not hard. “El” is the word for God; you hear it in “El Shaddai,”  “El Elyon,” “Elohim,” El,  (Ale—like EL) Can you say that—EL? El—it’s not the kind you drink, this is like the kind you worship—EL. And in Hebrew you just pack other words on top of it. You just like have Velcro and you add things to it, so that little pronoun “i” is the first person pronoun. So E-li means my God; my God, can you say “El-i”? E-li, my God. And Jesus was commonly speaking Palestinian Aramaic. That’s how people spoke in His region; it’s a cousin dialect of Hebrew. He could read classical Hebrew; He did in the synagogue in Capernaum .

David wrote in Hebrew; “Eli” shows up in some Gospels as “Eloi” because in Aramaic “Elo-a” is the same word for God. El, Elo-A, and they still stick their little “i” on the end of it. The same way to stick a Velcro pronoun right there. Eli, my God, my God. Why? “Ma” means what in Hebrew and in Aramaic. “Ma”…can you say “ma”? “Ma”, it means what. And “la” means to or for and they stick it on the front and that’s Velcro on the front of the word, lama, like “Why,” lama, lama, why? My God, my God, Eli, Eli, lama? In Hebrew, asavthani, why did you abandon me? Sabachthani, in Aramaic. It’s real simple. Asav is abandon; Sabach is abandon in Hebrew and Aramaic. Tha, stuck on the end means you; why did you abandon me? Asavtha, why did you abandon me? Sabachtha ni, why did you abandon me? Jesus utters these words not in a theatrical sense, but in a very deep perfectly genuine personal sense. We have a hard time portraying this in our passion shows. The Jesus that we see is so healthy and has to be heard on the back row. “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani!! (loud) But in reality, the Jesus that we worship was straining to breathe. These words were so muted when they came out, that the people who were a little distance away—you see, there was this circle of execution. There’s at least three people being executed, there’s at least a four-men execution squad, and almost like this platform—it’s put in a conspicuous place so the public will see. It’s like the Williamsburg stocks, you’re hung out there in public, nearly naked, being tortured and killed, so that people will go, “Mommy, what did that man do?” “Honey, let’s look and see. There’s his name, Jesus; there’s his hometown, Nazareth ; what did he do? King of the Jews, what does that mean? Oh, treason. He claimed to be king of the Jews. Don’t ever claim to be king. Let’s go, honey.” And it’s like there’s a concourse right here, a foot path, a highway, people are coming and going; the noise of traffic is there; blowing their horns, animals bleating, and the passers-by are supposed to learn their lesson by looking at the sorry convict. And the average person who’s a loved one is across the road. That is no doubt where Simon Peter was, from a distance—he followed from a distance. Somewhere in the course of Jesus’ suffering, when He gets hung on that cross around 9 AM, Mary makes her way and she comes across. She stands near the cross (John 19:28). That woman had courage and guts. I think she was willing to be killed; it didn’t really matter. She wasn’t willing to be far away from her son. She’s there. And John goes with her; and some of the women who supported her. One I think is her sister. And some other women are standing near her like a small grove of oak trees. Not saying a word, but they’re there. They’re up against her; she can feel them. Some of the people who hear Jesus speak these words don’t even understand what He said. Do you remember? Some people, like, “I don’t know, I think he’s calling for Eli…Elijah. I heard that…Eli. I think he’s calling for Elijah. I think he wants like a rescue from heaven. He wants that chariot to come down and snatch him away.” “Oh, okay.” Wrong! That’s not what He said. I only make the point to say that He was not bolting this out like some healthy, theatrical player. Here’s a man who hasn’t eaten since Thursday night. He’s a man’s man; I believe He’s a stonemason. In the Gospels, He and His father are described as the “techton,” the “techton” of their town. That’s onomatopoetic; that means the word is invented from the sound it makes. Tech, tech, tech, tech; tech, tech, tech, tech; tech, tech, tech, tech; oomph, boom! These are stonemasons; they have forearms about this big. They’ve got no neck. They’re marines. We don’t know what Jesus looked like, but if you’ve got pictures of Him tall and skinny and blue-eyed, and kind of blond and a long straight nose, about 6 foot 2 or 3, I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all. I think He’s, He’s a SEAL. He’s tough; He’s all muscle. And He’s struggling to just breathe. He’s been hammered during the night by professional soldiers, some of whom were using Billy clubs. And in fact the very word that’s used is in the imperfect tense, that they kept on hitting Him, jhuptah, jhuptah, jhuptah. They kept hammering Him, not just with fists, which apparently they did, but also with their Billy clubs; and He was scourged. Some people died of scourging just from blood loss. Jesus is so weakened, no doubt dehydrated, that He can’t even carry His patibula, the cross beam—they recycled those. They kept them in piles, at the judgment hall, at the courthouse. And when it was your turn to go to the gallows, they’d trip you over backwards, they’d tie your arms to it and you’d pick up and carry your own. And you’d go a mile or two to the place of execution. Part of that was so that the people who are watching could get the message. Don’t do what this guy did. Part of it was to weaken you, so you didn’t remain on the cross for a long time. Although some people who had been brutalized less than Jesus lasted for days on the cross. Some people were there days. Jesus can’t even get to Golgotha . Now this is a man who just earlier in the week has cleansed the Temple . And if you look at slide one, you get a sense of how this week opened up. Slide two invites you to remember how Jesus came in to the city, and it was a very fascinating week. He came into the city from the eastern side, from where Bethany is. And, He comes into the city, if you can picture it, with hundreds of thousands of Jews who’ve come to worship. That city bloats to ten times its normal size during this week. People are bivouacked all over the place. Food is in scarce supply. It is just throbbing. The average person, even if they’re wealthy and they’re riding an animal gets off their animal at the one mile marker at Bethany , and walks in singing the Hallel songs. They’re now a part of the crowd.  They’re with the people. Jesus has no animal, but by the eye of prophecy, spots an animal, sends His men on ahead, and they secure the animal. And when He gets to the one-mile marker, He gets up on top of it. He, in fact, carries out the very enthronement that is being described in Zachariah 9:9; He is the One to whom they sing. He rides into the city on the back of this animal, with a gold and green carpet laid in front of Him of palm fronds. The people have been singing out to Him, “Hosanna, Hosanna, deliver us now. Lead a military insurrection of the people and overthrow the Roman occupation army. Deliver us now, physically, politically, militarily.” You know, Jesus doesn’t move through that crowd giving people high-fives, or grinning like a politician. Remember what the Gospels say? He weeps. He rides in weeping. He hears their beckon for deliverance, but deep down knows that they don’t understand the deliverance that they need. He goes not to the palace, but straight to the Temple and He sees that they had not met the grounds of repentance. They are not ready for redemption. They don’t even see their own sin. They only see their oppressors. They want their circumstances to change; they’re not yet ready to see that they need their heart to change. Jesus inspects the Temple , comes back the next day and cleanses it, curses the fig tree that has leaves, like the nation, but no fruit at heart, and it withers. In so doing, the religious leaders have moved to the periphery and had begun to simmer with bitterness. They want to figure how to take this guy out, but not in public because they’re no match for Him in public, with the crowd there. So enjoys great public days of preaching and teaching—Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and by Thursday night He has this last meal with His men. The devil comes and fills Judas’ heart and he abandons the room and goes out to get his coins for Jesus’ life. And Jesus, singing the psalms with His men, move out from Jerusalem across the deep Kidron Valley and move up into this grove of knotty trees where so often they have prayed. As He goes, He likely lifts up what we now call the High Priestly prayer of John 17. He prays for His men, not that they would be taken from the world, but that they would be kept in the world. And He goes through three lonely seasons of prayer in Gethsemane before He’s arrested, amid the snores of His men. Jesus has now been arrested, gone through a six-stage trial and He can’t make it to Golgotha with this patibula on His back. He’s been hammered; and he keeps falling in the street. And so they draft somebody and put the patibula on his back and Jesus just has to get Himself to the place of execution.

Verse one implies that Jesus really did feel abandoned by God. Jesus felt the collective feeling that you would have or I would have if you put together all the loneliness, all the sadness, all the real and perceived guilt that you feel when you were estranged; when you’ve done the wrong thing and you knew what you ought to do and you didn’t do it; when you’ve been where you shouldn’t have been and done what you shouldn’t have done. Pile it all up, that’s how it felt on Jesus’ shoulders. One of the things that this does, I think it’s far beyond the perception of abandonment. It, in fact, is abandonment. When Jesus gets on that cross from 9 AM to 12 noon it’s lit. But at 12 Noon the place goes black. Do you remember? Slide three helps me go right to that Good Friday, that peak of the abandonment. Jesus is on the cross; He’s straining to breathe. The people who are nearby can’t quite make out all that He said, at least the ones who are from a distance—picture it this way:  this is a marine, this is a stonemason, this is a man’s man. But picture yourself; have you ever done pull-ups or chin-ups? They’re not so easy, are they? Well, picture instead of grabbing that bar, that you’ve instead been nailed to that bar with one-inch wooden spikes through your wrists. Now, you’ve got this involuntary tremoring going on; you’ve got injury to your tendons and muscles. And now this whole chin-up bar has been lifted and descended into a barrel of water. Picture that Jesus has water higher that His head. For Him to breathe, the weight of His body, as you see, is kind of collapsing, so it’s very difficult for a person to fill their lungs with air. They have to kind of pull themselves up to get a breath. They have to try to pull themselves up to get a breath. Picture the water line as here, so, yes, He can rest for 10 or 20 seconds but He’s got to pull up and get another lung full of air. Once He’s up, they don’t let His legs dangle; they slightly bend Him at the knee and they drive another spike through both insteps in one against the stake so He can push up or He can pull up or He can pull up. He’s wrestling for air. He’s become highly dehydrated in the Mediterranean sun. In fact, by noon the sun disappears. Probably, the best scholars suggest, a sandstorm has come in, and they can blow in like a hurry in the Middle East . And the place goes dark. It’s spooky! And not only does Jesus feel abandoned, He is abandoned. He’s judicially abandoned by God. He’s not abandoned in affection, or in spiritual intention, but He’s abandoned judicially. This is where the prophet Isaiah is eloquent, “It pleased Him, God the Father, to bruise Him, the Son.” The Apostle Paul is eloquent too, “ He, the Father, made Him, the Son, to be the sin-bearer for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” It’s the substitutionary atonement. Have you ever been in a courtroom? Have you ever heard a judge pronounce judgment? As soon as the judge slams the gavel and pronounces the person guilty and what their sentence will be, do you see the judge come down and give the guy a chest bump? Do you see the judge say, “Hey man, meet me out in front of the courthouse. I’ll pick you up in five minutes; we’ll go get a drink.”? There’s not a closure between the two, there’s a distancing. The convict is taken away, out of our presence, off to a prison, out of our society, out of our sight. They’re often taken away from their loved ones, their family, right in front of them. There’s no lonelier feeling for a parent than to see their child go off, sometimes in leg chains and prison jumpsuits. Jesus is abandoned by God judicially. As the story goes on He cries out—it says (verse 2) day and night. Some will say, “Well, it can’t be David because, it can’t be Jesus because He wasn’t on the cross at night.” But this is, no doubt, a marism; in poetry, day and night are like the two ends of a parenthesis; day and night; the rich and the poor, the famous and the common; it’s them and everyone in between. In fact Jesus’ suffering began Thursday night in Gethsemane . The classic understanding of the passion is it goes from Thursday night through His death on Friday afternoon at three. But the point of a marism in poetry is to say, “I cry out constantly, all the time, day and night; I’m here moaning and groaning and urging and praying and I’m not being delivered.” There’s a desperate sense of constancy. Why has He been abandoned (verse 1)? The answer is in verse 3; “because You are the Holy One, You are the praise of Israel ; You are just and holy and You must punish sin. Why have You abandoned me? Because You must.” The perfect Lamb that was slain was abandoned by the priest. The innocence of the Lamb was transferred to the confessors. And the sins of the confessors was transferred to the Lamb. (Verse 6 and following) “He is despised, a worm, not a man, scorned, He’s mocked, insults are hurled at Him. They shake their heads. That’s exactly what happened, as He hung there from 9 AM to 3 PM. People got in His face, some people came by, looked at Him, and said, “You should never have done what you did. How stupid can you be to be calling yourself king.” People spit in His face; the soldiers, the other thieves, people got their self-righteous kick out of mocking Jesus. The greatest mockery was, “If you really are who you said you were, you get yourself down. Now, go ahead and show us.” “You know He claimed to be the Son of God, if he was, umm…either God is not really capable, or a…doesn’t really care about him; or maybe He really isn’t the Son of God…yeah! That’s it.” The Gospel accounts are full of the mockery. And yet our Lord’s sentiment that comes back in verse 9 is the tenderness of His mother. It’s amazing that in the midst of this suffering, here’s a man who suffers for six hours, three in light, three in darkness, struggling to breathe. His muscles are burning with acid. And yet He thinks of His mother. And in prayer He reminds the Father, “You’ve brought me out of the world. You were like my own personal midwife. I was conceived in Nazareth and delivered in Bethlehem . You brought me out of the womb, and You taught me how to trust You even while I was nursing. How could this ever be said of David or the nation? Jesus, in some mysterious way, as an infant, began the faith life walk that most of us stumble into years into our life. Here He is. He said, “From birth I was cast upon you; from my mother’s womb you have been my God. Don’t be so far from me.” (Verse 12) “Bulls have surrounded me, strong bulls, lions, opening their mouths wide.” This is Judas circling; this is the devil empowering Judas; these are the false witnesses; these are the soldiers who came to arrest Him; these are the soldiers who brutalized Him; these are the thieves who are hurling insults at Him; these are the passers-by who are caught up in their own shallow pride. Jesus describes His body, words that cannot ever express David or the nation. “My bones are out of joint;” His shoulders have now subluxed. “My heart is turned to wax.” His heart is filling up with fluid in the pericardium. His heart is strangling. Ultimately, people who die on the cross die of acute asphyxiation that brings on heart attack. “My heart is melted within me; my strength is dried up like a potsherd.” He’s as dry as a piece of old clay pottery that’s been in the earth for centuries. “My tongue has been super glued to the roof of my mouth; I can’t even spit.”  And He turns away from anything that would give Him a narcotic from pain. But when He seeks to express His last sentence, He accepts a sponge that has, like, cheap wine, to wet His lips and tongue so He can get out His last sigh, and His record, “It is finished.” It’s at this very moment, 3 PM Friday afternoon, that not only does He pull Himself up for the last time, grab enough lung-full of air to say, “It is finished.” And then He screams out and dies, that the veil in the Temple is ripped from top to bottom. This is an amazing thing. When the Greek armies had come through before they had torn this curtain down, had put it between two warhorses and had tried to tear it apart. In their sacrilege for all that was holy in Israel , they tried to tear this apart. And it wouldn’t tear: it was five inches thick, according to Josephus; it was as thick as a man’s hands, spread that way, woven that thick; thirty feet high, ten feet wide. But in that moment there’s a CLAP of lightning inside the Temple . The thing splits from top to bottom; there’s an earthquake, Jesus dies, and some dead people around Jerusalem come back to life, and walk into Jerusalem . Is it any wonder that in the early weeks following Jesus’ resurrection, that as many as three thousand were converted at a time? And a great company of priests became obedient to the faith. Jesus (verse 16) describes His hands and His feet pierced; never true of David or the nation. In fact, in David’s day, this kind of execution was not even on the earth. There was capital punishment in David’s day; the Old Testament spoke of three kinds: typically, stoning, but also burning and strangling. But never by crucifixion. Later Gentile armies invented this, but David, by the Holy Spirit, foresaw it in prophecy. The beauty of verse 22 is that Jesus has not only suffered on the day of days, but slide 4 takes us to the best news, which is that Jesus, on Good Sunday, on the Good Sunday that followed the dark Friday, came alive again. He passed right through those burial wrappings and walked out. And He didn’t just walk out, but He hung around for weeks. Jesus was seen and touched by many, many people who were wide-awake. Jesus wasn’t a ghost, or a phantom. Jesus was physical; He was corporeal; people could look at His wounds, they could inspect them. He could eat a meal with His followers. Beauty of beauties when that early Sunday morning came and these faithful ladies were making their way toward the tomb, they didn’t expect to see a risen Savior; they expected to anoint a body that had begun to stink. And they were worried about who would move the stone for them. This huge boulder had been rolled into place and it had been loaded with a trip-string to make sure there was proof if someone tampered with the grave. The officials had put a wad of wax on the mountain-side and on the boulder; they put the official insignia into the hot wax, and they attached the string in the midst of the wax in both places. So if anyone moves the stone with however many servants or animals they might need, it’ll be evidence that it has been tampered with. They posted soldiers at the tomb. But before the ladies get to the tomb, they feel this earthquake. They don’t know what it’s about and they keep coming. Turns out that an angel is there waiting for them and when they come and they see the door open and the boulder’s been moved, I’m sure they don’t put two and two together in that moment, but they discover that God, the Creator of all, has, rolled the boulder aside with that earthquake—not to let Jesus out, but to let the world in. They peer into the darkness of that sepulcher that had no one else buried in it but Jesus, and all of a sudden the brilliant light of the angel comes on and the angel reads their mind and says, “He’s not here; He’s risen.” And before long Jesus kindly appears to those ladies. Before He ever appears to His men or to the crowds, He appears to those ladies. And Jesus is alive forevermore. In fact, He appears not only to those ladies, but to John and Peter, to the ten disciples that night; by the next Sunday night the eleven with Thomas; He appears to the two disciples on the Emmaus Road; He appears to small numbers of disciples all the way up to crowds of 500 in Galilee and elsewhere, and then is seen as He ascends into heaven on day 40. Jesus is seen and touched by many people wide-awake. And the story that follows in the last stanza is about the Good News. Jesus can now declare in the congregation to His brethren that He has been delivered, not from the cross, but through it. And redemption has been secured. (Verse 25) He declares that He will fulfill His vows. That is, He will pay His tribute at what we now believe in Revelation 19 is the Lamb’s Supper, a great celebration where we come into His presence; and we’re not just all white people or black people or Asian people or Hispanic people. We’re people from every tribe and kindred and tongue and nation. We are the cosmopolitan redemptees of the world. And He is the One who has purchased that redemption for us. He can now say in verse 26, “The poor will eat and be satisfied.” When was that ever true in David’s day that all the poor ate and were satisfied? He can say (verse 27), “ All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will bow down before Him. When could that ever be said in Israel ’s history, that all the nations of the world have bowed their knee to the Messiah? This is yet to be. This is the ultimate high peak of prophecy, that Jesus in His suffering and abandonment of Good Friday would later celebrate with the redemption and the ascension of Easter Sunday and eternity following.

Look at verse 30—do you ever see yourself in prophecy? Well, it’s here. Verse 30 says that posterity will serve Him. Future generations will be told about the Lord—that’s us! Twenty centuries after that terror happened we were told. We were told. We were told about this stonemason’s son, who died on this lonely hill outside of this small capital in the Middle East . We were told! And. In fact, the largest religion in the world is Christianity. People have been told throughout the centuries, throughout the nations, this Good News of the One who suffered that terrible death for us. (Verse 31) “They will proclaim His righteousness to a people yet unborn. He has done it. He has done it! That’s the conclusion. That’s the exclamation mark of this beautiful prophecy. I want to encourage you as you read the Psalms to not run away from the hard psalms, the tricky poems and the prophetic lines. There’s an exquisite detail, metaphoric, but accurate and it portrays the future in ways that often point right to Jesus. Jesus is the bull’s-eye of prophetic message. And He has predicted that you and I will one day stand before Him. You know there are a lot of prophecies in the Bible yet to be fulfilled. It’s up to you to decide if they’re true or not. Whether you believe them to be true or not; whether you’ll let them govern your behavior now. It’s only a person of faith who can hear the music of the future; who can hear the truth and prophecy and hope of God’s Word and begin to dance to that music now. Some of you are dancing to music that you cannot record. You hear, you believe, you live in such a way as your life is converging toward that destiny. People around you are looking at you like, “You are crazy. What’re you doing? What are you listening to?” Can’t you hear it? It’s the Word of God. It’s a still small voice. It’s the apostle who said “Someday every tongue will confess Jesus is Lord. Someday every knee will bow.” The question is will you practice what it’s like to be well oriented to that day now? Will you learn to bow your knee now? Will you learn to confess with your tongue now? Or are you ashamed of Jesus? Do you back off and hide when you’re put into places of conflict and opportunity? Jesus wasn’t ashamed of you. When He hung there for those sad hours, He looked right down through the centuries; He saw you, and He saw you, and though He humanly wanted to not drink that cup, He took courage and drank the cup for you, for me.

I’d like to invite you to pray with me as we close and to secure that relationship if for you it’s uncertain.

Lord Jesus, we thank You for not only suffering for us on that terrible Friday, but for giving us hope to see it in advance by the Word of prophecy. And giving us the patient centuries that followed to understand it and to share it. We know that You’re patient, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

We love you for reaching out to the thief on your either side and being able to offer that beautiful promise before the day is out, today you will be with me in paradise. Thank you for not holding it against him that he had sinned so grievously as to be brought there and had joined in early on to the wicked banter. Thank you for loving him, for list to his simple faith when he said, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

Lord today for any man or woman or young person, in the hearing of my voice that is yet to make that commitment, we pray that this would be a day when they become like that thief. That they might say in the quiet of their own heart, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And may they hear back with a certain assurance of the Holy Spirit, Your words back to them, “Today, or whenever you take your last breath, that day you will be with me in paradise.” We pray in Christ’s Name. Amen.