Unforsaken (Part 3)

The psalmist declares, in verse twenty-one, “You have answered me.”

What was the question?

Psa 22:1  My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? Why are You so far from helping Me, And from the words of My groaning?

What was God’s answer?

Psa 22:24  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, He heard.

God did not forsake Jesus on the Cross.  We can therefore see the question as somewhat rhetorical.  It was the crowd at the Cross who were convinced that God had forsaken Jesus.  He seemed far from helping Jesus; He seemed far from the words of His groaning.

He was not; the Cross was all part of the plan – a plan in which Jesus’ death on the Cross would be accepted as a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.

God was, at that very moment, “in Christ reconciling the world to Himself (Second Corinthians 5:19).

Those who teach that the Father, in fact, forsook Jesus, turning His back on Him, use Second Corinthians 5:21 as their proof text:

2Co 5:21  For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

The argument is that, since Jesus was “made… to be sin for us,” the Father had to turn His back to the Son.

What does it mean, Jesus was “made… to be sin for us?”  It means, I think, He was our sin offering, our Substitute, Who took our place.

It doesn’t have to mean Jesus was literally made sin.

Apologist Ron Rhodes stated it like this:

We conclude that the apostle Paul’s intended meaning in Second Corinthians 5:21 is that Jesus was always without sin actually, but at the cross He was made to be sin for us judicially.  While Jesus never committed a sin personally, He was made to be sin for us substitutionally.  

Just as the righteousness that is imputed to Christians in justification is extrinsic to them, so the sin that was imputed to Christ on the cross was extrinsic to Him and never in any sense contaminated His essential nature.

Thus, Jesus was “made” our sin offering.  He died instead of us, and His perfect righteousness was acceptable to pay our debt of sin.

The Cross solved the sin problem.  But it doesn’t end there.  As a result of the Cross, Jesus is highly exalted.
Here is how the apostle Paul put it:

Php 2:7  [Jesus] made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men.

Php 2:8  And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.

Php 2:9  Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name,

Php 2:10  that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth,

Php 2:11  and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Psalm twenty-two closes with its own description of the exaltation of Jesus to rule and to reign.

Psa 22:22  I will declare Your name to My brethren; In the midst of the assembly I will praise You.

In the original context of the psalm, David had come through his trial, and wanted to give the glory to God.  He probably called some sort of “assembly” to make his declaration.

Maybe it was the very first performance of this psalm.  Opening night, as it were.  In my Bible, the notation at the beginning of the psalm says, “To the Chief Musician.  Set to “The Deer of the Dawn.”

As to the future fulfillment of this, it looks forward to the return of Jesus, in His Second Coming, to be received by the Jews as their Messiah.

In the middle of the Tribulation, the antichrist reveals himself in an event Jesus called the abomination of desolation.  The Lord warned the Jews of that generation to flee into the wilderness; to do it immediately; and, if they did, they’d be kept safe by Him supernaturally for the entire last three-and-one-half years of the Great Tribulation.

Here is that future, as seen by Zechariah:

Zec 14:1  Behold, the day of the LORD is coming, And your spoil will be divided in your midst.

Zec 14:2  For I will gather all the nations to battle against Jerusalem; The city shall be taken, The houses rifled, And the women ravished. Half of the city shall go into captivity, But the remnant of the people shall not be cut off from the city.

Zec 14:3  Then the LORD will go forth And fight against those nations, As He fights in the day of battle.

Zec 14:4  And in that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, Which faces Jerusalem on the east. And the Mount of Olives shall be split in two, From east to west, Making a very large valley; Half of the mountain shall move toward the north And half of it toward the south.

Zec 14:5  Then you shall flee through My mountain valley, For the mountain valley shall reach to Azal. Yes, you shall flee As you fled from the earthquake In the days of Uzziah king of Judah. Thus the LORD my God will come, And all the saints with You.

The Jews will be saved:

Zec 12:10  “And I will pour on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and supplication; then they will look on Me whom they pierced. Yes, they will mourn for Him as one mourns for his only son, and grieve for Him as one grieves for a firstborn.
In the Revelation it says,

Rev 1:7  Behold, He is coming with clouds, and every eye will see Him, even they who pierced Him. And all the tribes of the earth will mourn because of Him. Even so, Amen.

The Cross was the D-Day that guarantees the V-Day!

Psa 22:23  You who fear the LORD, praise Him! All you descendants of Jacob, glorify Him, And fear Him, all you offspring of Israel!

“Jacob” and “Israel” refer to ethnic Jews – the physical descendants of Abraham – who will be saved in that glorious Second Coming of Jesus.

Today there is a resurgence of teaching that when the New Testament mentions Israel, somehow it means all who are believers in Jesus, whether they are Jews or Gentiles.

They say Jesus was the true Israel; and all who are in Him are Israel.

We reject that.  The New Testament consistently maintains distinctions between Jews and Gentiles, and between Israel and the church.

God must fulfill His unconditional promises to the physical descendants of Abraham; and that’s just what He is going to do through the Great Tribulation.

Psa 22:24  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, He heard.

The crowd at the Cross, thinking Jesus forsaken, were directed by Jesus to Psalm twenty-two.  In the first twenty or so verses, they would see the crucifixion predicted at least a thousand years prior; and they’d see words they themselves were speaking.

A valid conclusion, to a thoughtful person, would be “God has not despised nor abhorred Jesus; He hasn’t hidden His face from Him; He heard Him, and is accepting His sacrifice for my sins, and the sins of the whole world.”

Psa 22:25  My praise shall be of You in the great assembly; I will pay My vows before those who fear Him.

The “great assembly” probably refers to folks, in the Millennial Kingdom, who come from all over the earth, to worship the Lord.  For His part, Jesus gives praise to His Father.

What “vows” will Jesus keep?  It’s a way of saying that He totally, completely, and absolutely fulfilled everything in God’s Word.  It’s an amplification of His cry from the Cross, “It is finished.”

William MacDonald, in his excellent Believers Bible Commentary, suggests that there is a change in speakers for the remaining verses of the psalm.  He says, “Now the Holy Spirit speaks, describing the ideal conditions that will prevail during the peace and prosperity of the Millennium.”

Psa 22:26  The poor shall eat and be satisfied; Those who seek Him will praise the LORD. Let your heart live forever!

Psa 22:27  All the ends of the world Shall remember and turn to the LORD, And all the families of the nations Shall worship before You.

Psa 22:28  For the kingdom is the LORD’s, And He rules over the nations.

This is a general summary of the conditions that will prevail in the Kingdom.  We will never achieve such a kingdom of men.  It requires the righteous benevolent theocracy of Jesus Christ.

Psa 22:29  All the prosperous of the earth Shall eat and worship; All those who go down to the dust Shall bow before Him, Even he who cannot keep himself alive.

This is simply a way of describing the frailty of human life.  It is appointed to all men to die, “to go down to the dust.”

No one can “keep himself alive” can also be translated, “no one can keep alive his own soul.”  Spiritual life is in view – a spiritual life that can only be yours by grace, through faith, in Jesus Christ.

Psa 22:30  A posterity shall serve Him. It will be recounted of the Lord to the next generation,

Psa 22:31  They will come and declare His righteousness to a people who will be born, That He has done this.

The Kingdom of Heaven on earth is called the Millennium because it lasts one-thousand years.  Multitudes will be born to human parents.  There will be great need for evangelism, as folks will still need to get saved.

Jesus, on the Cross, was therefore assuring the Jews that their promised kingdom was still to come.  It must be postponed, because of their rejection of Him.

But He will establish it, at His Second Coming, when all Israel is saved.

Unforsaken Part 2

“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

I’ve taken a stand on this – that God the Father did not “forsake” His Son.

I think verse twenty four of Psalm 22 proves it – or, at least, it gives my argument credibility.

Psa 22:24  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, He heard.

Since it seems so controversial to say Jesus was unforsaken, let me marshall three other passages of Scripture:

John 10:30  “I and my Father are one.”

John 16:32  “You [disciples] will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me.”

2 Corinthians 5:19  “…God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.”

Regardless the position we take, the psalm proceeds, and in these middle verses we have a description of the crucifixion itself.

Crucifixion did not begin with the Romans; it was a method of execution that had developed centuries earlier in the ancient near East.

The Medes and the Persians practiced this gruesome torture method as well as the Carthaginians and the Egyptians, and later it was adopted among the Greeks and finally the Romans in the first century.

Crucifixion was mentioned in history from about the 6th century BC to the 4th century AD.

The Roman emperor, Constantine, banned crucifixion out of reverence for Jesus Christ.

The Romans called it by its Latin word crucifixus which means to “fix on a cross.”  The first century Roman cross consisted of two large wooden beams, a stake and a crossbeam (patibulum).  The crossbeam was locked into place at the very top of the perpendicular stake, or near the top.

There were various methods of performing the execution. Usually, the condemned man, after being whipped, or “scourged,” dragged or carried on his shoulders the crossbeam of his cross to the place of punishment, where the upright shaft was already fixed in the ground.  Stripped of his clothing either then or earlier at his scourging, he was bound fast with outstretched arms to the crossbeam or nailed firmly to it through the wrists.  The crossbeam was then raised high against the upright shaft and made fast to it about 9 to 12 feet from the ground.

Next, the feet were tightly bound or nailed to the upright shaft.  A ledge inserted about halfway up the upright shaft gave some support to the body; evidence for a similar ledge for the feet is rare and late.

Over the criminal’s head was placed a notice stating his name and his crime.  Death, apparently caused by exhaustion or by heart failure, could be hastened by shattering the legs (crurifragium) with an iron club, so that shock and asphyxiation soon ended his life.

David, the psalmist, was born, we think, 1040BC.  That means his writings predated crucifixion by several centuries.

It makes Psalm 22 all the more remarkable in that he accurately described the physical experiences of Jesus on the Cross way before crucifixion was conceived as a form of execution.

Psa 22:14  I am poured out like water, And all My bones are out of joint; My heart is like wax; It has melted within Me.

Psa 22:15  My strength is dried up like a potsherd, And My tongue clings to My jaws; You have brought Me to the dust of death.

Psa 22:16  For dogs have surrounded Me; The congregation of the wicked has enclosed Me. They pierced My hands and My feet;

Psa 22:17  I can count all My bones. They look and stare at Me.

A few of these comments could apply to any number of things.  But some are quite specific to the agony of crucifixion.

“I am poured out like water.”  We would label this dehydration. Blood loss from His Roman scourging would, by itself, cause severe dehydration.  Remember, too, some hours earlier Jesus had sweat great drops of blood while wrestling in prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Then, too, He would have perspired profusely on the Cross.

Dehydration is serious.  It leads to any number of physical symptoms, including delirium and unconsciousness if left untreated.

“All my bones are out of joint.”  Some years ago, a medical doctor, David Terasaka, wrote an article, Medical Aspects of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ.  It’s a classic, and I highly recommend it if you want to get into the details way deeper.

Regarding Jesus’ out-of-joint bones, the good doctor wrote, “when the cross was erected upright, there was tremendous strain put on the wrists, arms and shoulders, resulting in a dislocation of the joints.”

“My heart is like wax.”  I’m not sure what to make of this wax heart analogy.  J. Vernon McGee says,

He died of a broken heart.  Many doctors have said that a ruptured heart would have produced what John meticulously recorded – “but one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water” (John 19:34).

Let me paraphrase that.  “I saw that Roman soldier put the spear in His side and there came out blood and water – not just blood but blood and water.”

John took note of that and recorded it.  May I say to you, Jesus died of a broken heart.

“My strength is dried up like a potsherd, And My tongue clings to My jaws.”  No surprise here – that the Lord would be thirsty, and have a lack of moisture.

“They pierced my hands and my feet.”  Whoa!  Definitely crucifixion.

“I can count all my bones.”  The stress on the hanging body, and the dislocation of the joints, would accentuate the presence of the bones.

And, gruesomely, some of His bones would have been exposed by the scourging He’d received.

There was a prediction that not a bone of His would be broken (Psalm 34:20 & John 19:36).  It was possible to drive the nails in such a way as to avoid breaking any bones.

You’d be hard-pressed to identify another form of execution that had all these elements.

No, David was definitely prophesying the Cross of Jesus Christ.

“For dogs have surrounded Me; The congregation of the wicked has enclosed Me.”  Jews regularly called Gentiles “dogs,” but I hardly think that this expression would ever be found on the lips of Jesus.

True, the Syrophonecian woman, who came seeking a healing from Jesus for her child, was referred to as a dog.  But the word Jesus chose was one that described a cherished pet – not a mongrel.

This might be still another reference to demonic forces surrounding the Cross.

We don’t really know what goes on in the realm we cannot see.  We get an occasional glimpse of the angelic/demonic realm in the Bible:

We know from Daniel that angels oppose each other.

We know from the Revelation angels war against each other.

We know angels wield swords.

Who can say what was happening, spiritually, to the sinless Son of God while He was surrounded by demons?

Psa 22:18  They divide My garments among them, And for My clothing they cast lots.

Most of the secular historical sources I consulted say this was not a regular custom.  It was, quite simply, a prophecy that we see fulfilled at the Cross.

BTW: Christians cite this as a prohibition on gambling or games of chance.  While I think gambling is stupid, and can be sin for individuals, casting lots was something believers did, with God’s blessing.

Let’s be careful the conclusions we draw; let’s be thoughtful.  Let’s always first try to understand the Bible in its original context.

This scene of almost indescribable suffering and horror and shame suddenly has a declaration of hope:

Psa 22:19  But You, O LORD, do not be far from Me; O My Strength, hasten to help Me!

Psa 22:20  Deliver Me from the sword, My precious life from the power of the dog.

Psa 22:21  Save Me from the lion’s mouth And from the horns of the wild oxen! You have answered Me.

Since He died, physically, it seems that the “sword,” the “power of the dog,” the “lion’s mouth,” and the “horns of the wild oxen” must all refer to spiritual things, to spiritual foes, from whom He was delivered.

Jesus died, but His death, as we saw on Sunday, was a victory over death.  The devil would have been better served keeping Jesus off of the Cross.

Indeed, as we’ve pointed out, Satan tried to kill Jesus in many other ways, throughout history, and during His lifetime.

Satan started by trying to prevent the promised Savior from being born:

Perhaps thinking Adam and Eve’s son, Abel, was the promised Seed, Satan incited Cain to kill his brother.

Satan next tried to corrupt the human race during the times of Noah, by having demons produce unnatural offspring with human women.

Satan tried genocide when Pharaoh ordered the midwives to kill the Jewish babies.

The Book of Esther records a second attempt at genocide of the Jews.

When Jesus was born, Satan incited King Herod to kill all the infants under two years of age.

When Jesus began His public ministry, the crowd at His synagogue wanted to throw Him off a cliff.

Then He tempted Jesus to avoid the Cross – first, in the wilderness temptation by offering Jesus the kingdoms of the world without having to die.  Second, by inciting Peter to discourage Jesus from completing His mission.

Satan might have been hoping the Sanhedrin would stone Jesus for blasphemy; but they, by God’s providence, urged Pilate to have Jesus crucified.

Having failed for some four thousand years to prevent the first coming of Jesus, he is trying to thwart His Second Coming, primarily by again seeking the genocide of all Jews.

According to the scholars, the last part of verse twenty-one breaks off from the rest and is a separate exclamation, “You have heard!”

Jesus was certain He’d been heard; and that His deliverance was certain.

From an earthly perspective, He was forsaken, abandoned, cursed.

Nothing could be further from the truth!  God was, at that very moment, in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself.

Death was being defeated; the devil and his forces vanquished.

When you are suffering in any way… From an earthly perspective, you seem forsaken, abandoned, even cursed.

Something else is going on; something spiritual is always going on.

You must believe, in your heart, that God could never leave you; never forsake you.

Cry out, and believe, “You have heard!”