Pain to Praise | Psalm 22

INTRODUCTION

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” These are the words of Jesus on the cross. Many people cannot comprehend with this prayer because, “Can God forsake his own Son?” What do you do when you feel forsaken by all around you and now you feel even God has forsaken you? Well, this prayer was first prayed by David some 1000 years before Jesus in Psalm 22. David felt forsaken by God. This can cause pain.

Psalm 22 | Pain to Praise

Today, we are going to reflect on Psalm 22, a prayer of David. In fact, this is the most quoted psalm and Old Testament passage in the New Testament. This Psalm is a prayer in David’s pain. In Psalm 22, God invites us to give voice to our pain and despair because He can handle it. Let’s read this psalm:

Symmetry in its composition.

1-10

Transition: 11

12-21

22-31

Psalm 22

Feels forsaken by God

¹My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from saving me,

so far from my cries of anguish?

²My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,

by night, but I find no rest.

³Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One;

you are the one Israel praises.

⁴In you our ancestors put their trust;

they trusted and you delivered them.

⁵To you they cried out and were saved;

in you they trusted and were not put to shame.

Feels forsaken by people

⁶But I am a worm and not a man,

scorned by everyone, despised by the people.

⁷All who see me mock me;

they hurl insults, shaking their heads.

⁸“He trusts in the Lord,” they say,

“let the Lord rescue him.

Let him deliver him,

since he delights in him.”

⁹ Yet you brought me out of the womb;

you made me trust in you, even at my mother’s breast.

¹⁰From birth I was cast on you;

from my mother’s womb you have been my God.

Transition

¹¹Do not be far from me,

for trouble is near

and there is no one to help.

Lament

¹²Many bulls surround me;

strong bulls of Bashan encircle me.

¹³Roaring lions that tear their prey

open their mouths wide against me.

¹⁴I am poured out like water,

and all my bones are out of joint.

My heart has turned to wax;

it has melted within me.

¹⁵My mouth is dried up like a potsherd,

and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;

you lay me in the dust of death.

¹⁶Dogs surround me,

a pack of villains encircles me;

they pierce my hands and my feet.

¹⁷All my bones are on display;

people stare and gloat over me.

¹⁸They divide my clothes among them

and cast lots for my garment.

Three sentences of Petition

¹⁹But you, Lord, do not be far from me.

You are my strength; come quickly to help me.

²⁰Deliver me from the sword,

my precious life from the power of the dogs.

²¹Rescue me from the mouth of the lions;

save me from the horns of the wild oxen.

Praise

²²I will declare your name to my people;

in the assembly I will praise you.

²³You who fear the Lord, praise him!

All you descendants of Jacob, honor him!

Revere him, all you descendants of Israel!

²⁴For he has not despised or scorned

the suffering of the afflicted one;

he has not hidden his face from him

but has listened to his cry for help.

From you comes the theme of my praise in the great assembly;

before those who fear you, I will fulfil my vows.

The poor will eat and be satisfied;

those who seek the Lord will praise him—

may your hearts live forever!

²⁷All the ends of the earth

will remember and turn to the Lord,

and all the families of the nations

will bow down before him,

²⁸for dominion belongs to the Lord

and he rules over the nations.

²⁹All the rich of the earth will feast and worship;

all who go down to the dust will kneel before him—

those who cannot keep themselves alive.

³⁰Posterity will serve him;

future generations will be told about the Lord.

³¹They will proclaim his righteousness,

declaring to a people yet unborn:

He has done it!

The heading of our Psalm identifies this prayer with David.

Psalm 22

For the director of music. To the tune of “The Doe of the Morning.” A psalm of David.

This is talking about the melody to which this prayer was played for Israel’s worship in the temple. This was for a director of music.

This was originally a Psalm of David, generated out of a very difficult life experience, we don’t know what was that experience. So this is David’s experience of his prayer as to how he feels and what is happening to him. All of a sudden, this prayer of David passed on to his people. People of Israel are now singing and praying this prayer in their time of anguish and pain. This prayer is also sung in the temple worship. 1000 years later, Jesus is prayed this prayer on the cross. During those 1000 years, 1000’s of Israelites prayed this prayer. Even today, we are invited to use this prayer and pray through our pain.

So, Psalm 22 is for anybody who has felt abandoned by God.

Psalm 22:1-2

¹My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from saving me,

so far from my cries of anguish?

²My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,

by night, but I find no rest.

This Psalm begins with a disturbing scene. There is no description of his circumstances. Someone who knows and trusts in God is forsaken, and cries to God in agony and pain.

David is confused as to the absence of God.

Anybody who felt that confusing sense of absence of God in your life, this becomes your prayer immediately. This is how he begins with how he feels.

This is also a kind of protest.

God, if you are listening, I have been crying out day and night to you. This is not okay. If you are aware that I am crying out day and night, you would answer me immediately.”

There is a kind of emotional outburst.

“God, why are you not paying attention to me?” This is not angry protest, he is taking his protest to his God. He is talking “my God.” Biblical protest and lament is based on relationship. He is talking, “my God”. He assumes that God is his God and that God cares. The absence of God is even more painful. He cries out, “My God.”

APPLICATION

Have you ever felt God is absent in your life when you go through pain?

ILLUSTRATION

Psalm 22:3-5

³Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One;

you are the one Israel praises.

⁴In you our ancestors put their trust;

they trusted and you delivered them.

⁵To you they cried out and were saved;

in you they trusted and were not put to shame.

David is referring to how God has proven his faithfulness in the past. David Reminds God of his past salvation. There have been times in the past where people cried out to you and you totally responded.

When David said:

Psalm 22:4-5

“⁴In you our ancestors put their trust;

they trusted and you delivered them.

⁵To you they cried out and were saved;

in you they trusted and were not put to shame.

What story is coming to your mind? This is the foundation story of the OT. This is the story of Israel’s salvation. It is the story of the Exodus. They were in slavery, oppressed. They cried out to YAHWEH, he sent a deliverer and saved them out of Egypt.

So in the midst his feelings, he cannot see God, he cannot feel the presence of God, but he knows how God has responded in the past. He is reminding God that God has been faithful in the past. David is asking, “God why are you not doing the same kind of thing right now?”

This is a legitimate question. You are not alone in asking that question to God.

Apparently God invites us to remind him of his past salvation when we feel the lack of the presence of God and salvation in our lives now.

Psalm 22:6-8

⁶But I am a worm and not a man, (he feels less than human, isolated)

scorned by everyone, despised by the people.

⁷All who see me mock me; (He is abandoned by people, earlier he said he was abandoned by God).

they hurl insults, shaking their heads.

⁸“He trusts in the Lord,” they say,

“let the Lord rescue him.

Let him deliver him,

since he delights in him.”

He takes a deep dive into his isolation.

He is articulating his isolation to God. This often happens in situations of sickness, the covid-19 isolation, the death of a loved one, when deserted by your best friends, a family member is sick. You are going through grief and tragedy, you do not know how to talk to people. He just prays it to God, he just pours it out to God.

Psalm 22:9-11

⁹ Yet you brought me out of the womb;

you made me trust in you, even at my mother’s breast.

¹⁰From birth I was cast on you;

from my mother’s womb you have been my God.

¹¹Do not be far from me,

for trouble is near

and there is no one to help.

He is feeling isolated and abandoned, yet he knows God is working in his life.

God is depicted as a midwife here.

This is one of the unique descriptions of God in the whole Bible. The midwifery image of God. You brought me out of the womb, laid me at my mother’s breast.

He knows that God is the author of his life. He knows that God is responsible for man’s existence. And he knows that God is so close to him and has been since his first breath. He depicts God as his midwife, a strong maternal presence that has always been with him. “God, I know you care about me, where are you?”

Many of us do not talk to God like this. But I think we are allowed to pray like this and ask God questions when we do not understand. We can articulate our grief and our emotions and our feelings to God.

Psalm 22:12-13

¹²Many bulls surround me;

strong bulls of Bashan encircle me.

¹³Roaring lions that tear their prey

open their mouths wide against me.

This is a very common metaphor in Psalms to describe circumstances that are very hostile or dangerous situations or dangerous people. These bulls and lions are the most uncontrollable creatures that humans can think of. The circumstances seem completely out of control for David which is what David says with these metaphors.

Psalm 22:14-15

¹⁴I am poured out like water,

and all my bones are out of joint. (No coherence (logic) or cohesion (unity) in my mind, feels very disoriented)

My heart has turned to wax;

it has melted within me. (image of fear)

¹⁵My mouth is dried up like a potsherd,

and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;

you lay me in the dust of death. (here is the image if death)

He is alive but he feels like he is buried in the earth alive. How many of you have felt that. You are alive but you are as good as dead, there is no point in your existence. An image of actually being forced down into death by force. He has no energy, he is lying in the dirt. He is dry, no vigour, no vitality, no life, no purpose.

Psalm 22:16-18

¹⁶Dogs surround me, (dogs are scavengers in their culture, no many people had pet dogs then)

a pack of villains encircles me;

they pierce my hands and my feet.

¹⁷All my bones are on display;

people stare and gloat over me.

¹⁸They divide my clothes among them

and cast lots for my garment.

He is in this place of isolation and pain and grief. He feels like he is dying and he cannot hold his life together. The people around him close in and try to take advantage of him. They are gambling for his possessions. He feels completely helpless and isolated. His pain is so intense. It is only now he moves into request mode.

David made a very brief request of 3 short sentences.

Psalm 22:19-21

¹⁹But you, Lord, do not be far from me.

You are my strength; come quickly to help me.

²⁰Deliver me from the sword,

my precious life from the power of the dogs.

²¹Rescue me from the mouth of the lions;

save me from the horns of the wild oxen.

This is a small section of request. He assumes that it is much more important to him that he articulates what is happening to him in his grief than his request now. But his petition is very small.

When we go through times of hardship and grief and stress and tragedy and loss, stuff happens inside of us that we don’t understand, we really get not words to pray. Things get distorted in us that we do not even know how to make sense of it.

It seems to me that biblical culture of prayer and lament

This is God’s way of inviting us to process with what is happening to us, this is God’s way given for us to deal with our pain, anxiety and stress.

All of a sudden David’s human words to God becomes God’s word to us as to how to speak to God during our suffering. He is inviting us to do this and to name what is wrong. Draw attention to it and to hold that contradiction together. Ask God how his great God can let me go through this situation and how can I connect what is happening in my life to God’s love, compassion and grace. I cannot understand it and I have got to name it and talk to God about it. This is Biblical lament and Biblical protest. Not being angry at God but to pour out our hearts honestly to God.

This is very powerful. How you put your words to his Psalm I don’t know. But you can put words to your situation and pray like this to God.

Something really important happens here. After verse 21, there is a shift in the prayer.

There is a turn from lament and request to protest to praise.

Psalm 22:22

I will declare your name to my people;

in the assembly I will praise you.

Yes, David experienced pain and sorrow. He was lamenting and he poured out his lament to God, but at some point he experienced deliverance from this. So, now David’s prayers are answered. He goes to the assembly of the people, the temple and he shares his testimony with other people.

Psalm 22:22

I will declare your name to my people;

in the assembly I will praise you.

Here is what David is going to say. Imagine David standing in the temple after his deliverance and saying this in the temple:

Psalm 22:23-24

²³You who fear the Lord, praise him!

All you descendants of Jacob, honor him!

Revere him, all you descendants of Israel!

²⁴For he has not despised or scorned

the suffering of the afflicted one;

he has not hidden his face from him

but has listened to his cry for help.

David is now testifying that God has heard him and answered him.

He says God:

Psalm 22:25

From you comes the theme of my praise in the great assembly;

before those who fear you, I will fulfil my vows.

This usually involves offering an animal as sacrifice to thank God for delivering him. Normally, for such answered prayers you thank God with an thank offering and then have a good party. You invite all your friends and you tell the story of God’s faithfulness to you. This is a part of lament and prayer.  When you find an answer, when there is resolution, you do discover God’s healing and deliverance, you just do not walk away alone, you go to the temple, thank God and then throw a party for God’s people testifying about God.

He says:

Psalm 22:26

The poor will eat and be satisfied;

those who seek the Lord will praise him—

may your hearts live forever!

He is at the feast and he is praying and thanking God.

How many of us invite others in our lives when God answers our prayers for thanksgiving? This is to celebrate moments of deliverance and answered prayers, and God leading us through that dark night of our lives. This is because when you struggle you are inviting others to pray with you and now you celebrate the deliverance of God with other people. So, people share in his grief, and also share in his joy. This way people all realize God’s purpose in trials and pain and they get to understand if God can do that in his life during his dark days, God can do that in my life as well.

2 Corinthians 1:3-4

³ Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, ⁴ who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. 

David ends the prayer like this:

Psalm 22:27-29

²⁷All the ends of the earth

will remember and turn to the Lord,

and all the families of the nations

will bow down before him,

²⁸for dominion belongs to the Lord

and he rules over the nations.

²⁹All the rich of the earth will feast and worship;

all who go down to the dust will kneel before him—

those who cannot keep themselves alive.

Isaiah 25:6-8

⁶ On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
the best of meats and the finest of wines.
⁷ On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
⁸     he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
from all the earth.
The Lord has spoken.

David thinks of his own story of his tragedy in his life.

He called out to God, he had to lament and pray through those emotions, and at some point David met the answer to his prayers. He went to the temple to thank God. Then he invited other people and shared in the celebration of God’s mercy and grace he experienced in his life.

Now as he ends his prayer, David sees the story of what he went through just as a small little example of what God is doing in the whole of his world, as he meets the evil and the suffering of the world with God’s mercy and salvation in people’s life.

David’s own life story reminds David of the big story that God is set on redeeming and rescuing this whole world. So, David ends by saying that I could pray to God and praise God on the other side of my suffering, he sees that all creation is headed to this praise on the other side of suffering. All nations will come and worship for God is the King. The rich of the earth, even those who are going into the dust, this is the image of death. Earlier he said that I am in the dust of death. He apparently has the idea that God’s commitment and mercy to our world even reaches beyond the power of death. Even death cannot stop God’s ultimate purposes to save and to heal his people. So he ends by saying:

Psalm 22:30-31

³⁰Posterity (future generation of people) will serve him;

future generations will be told about the Lord.

³¹They will proclaim his righteousness,

declaring to a people yet unborn:

He has done it!

He envisions like this unending gathering of all generations, all bringing in their stories of suffering and pain and how God met them and delivered them. This goes on and on in the future to all eternity. This is Psalm 22.

Go back to the first line.

Psalm 22:1

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Some of you may be sitting in the contradiction of your lives, you have promises from God, you are in trouble, pain, suffering and you have no idea how God is going to bring his deliverance in your life. How could you invite your friends and have a party?

Some of you have friends who you care about deeply who are in the midst of this cry of anguish and they don’t see God’s faithfulness at work in this story. They don’t see their prayers answered.

So, what do you do if you are in your death bed or things are totally out of control and will never be able to make it to second half of the psalm? You do not see the deliverance in your life. What do you do?

This is where I think the importance of Jesus quoting this psalm prayer as he hangs on the cross becomes so important to us. So, when you read Jesus’ crucifixion scene in particular, there are over 20 places where the gospel writers draw attention to and use language or draw connection between what is happening to Jesus on the cross and little details in this prayer of Psalm 22.

• The piercing of the hands and feet.
• The gambling over the clothing.
• The insults that people yelled at Jesus.

They are very similar to the language of Psalm 22. Jesus took the words of this very Psalm on His lips.

So, what is happening right there? We see this now as a Psalm about Jesus, but Psalm 22 is not actually predicting anything. When we read Isaiah, we are told that a Messiah, a King is going to come.

Psalm 22 is a prayer of lament and Pain.

David’s prayer become a pattern of prayer that was so powerful that it became the payer of 1000’s of others after David to pray through their times of suffering. So what Jesus is doing is he is taking up the suffering of his great ancestor, David but all of the 1000’s of people who have prayed this prayer after David, but before Jesus as if Jesus is himself identifying with the suffering of humanity.

So, the great paradox of Jesus saying, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” That on the cross, God becomes God forsaken. He does not just sympathize with human suffering, he actually self identifies with it by entering into it.

APPLICATION

This creates a space for you and I as Christians to pray the first half of this prayer because we sometimes may not see the deliverance for what we prayed for in this side of Jesus’ return. We may never see the full answer to those prayers and those anguished prayers.

But Jesus taking this prayer gives me an anchor to hold onto because God did not despise and scorn the suffering of Jesus, did he? God did not hide his face ultimately from Jesus. Jesus is God entering into our suffering, our anguish so that he can conquer it and heal it by his love.

I may never experience the second part of Psalm 22 but Jesus did after his resurrection. As I follow Jesus, I put my trust in him and I just hang on to Jesus for my dear life, so that what was true of Jesus in his resurrection will become true of me one day. I may experience my deliverance now, I may experience my deliverance later or I may experience that in the new creation, I have no idea but I will cling onto Jesus.

This is David’s prayer. This is Jesus’ prayer and this is meant to be our prayer too during our trials and pain and lament. God who delivered Jesus out of his suffering and death will ultimately deliver me either in this world on in the new creation.

Life Application

• God’s People Can Sometimes Go Through Pain.
• Lament Prayer Is God’s Ways To Process Our Pain. Lament Is Pouring Our Hearts Honestly To God.
• Share Our Sorrows And Joys With God’s Community.
• Sufferings Are Real And Sometimes We May Not Be Able To See Deliverance Now And Here.
• We Can Hold On In Our Suffering Because Of Jesus’ Death And Glorification.
• God Who Delivered Jesus Out Of His Suffering And Death Will Ultimately Deliver Me.

1 Peter 4:12-16

¹²Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. ¹³But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed. ¹⁴If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you. ¹⁵If you suffer, it should not be as a murderer or thief or any other kind of criminal, or even as a meddler. ¹⁶However, if you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name.

1 Peter 4:19

So then, those who suffer according to God’s will should commit themselves to their faithful Creator and continue to do good.

CONCLUSION

Some of you are in the middle of your pain and grief and you are wrestling with it now. You may have a loved one, whom you care about in the grief or someone dear to you have passed away. Pray this prayer and put your words to this prayer. God cares for you. He does not just care but he has done something about it, this is Jesus’ pain, life, death and resurrection is a model for us.

Brothers and sisters, God is on our side and He has entered into the suffering of this world to share our pain. He can handle it and He will transform it with the Resurrection power of Jesus. It was to share our pain that He carried His cross. As we come to Him in prayer, broken and needy people, He opens His arms, to take our cries of agony as His own and to redeem them in light of His death and resurrection.

Let us close with a word of prayer.