Today’s Passage: Psalm 22
Psalm 13 gave this stretch of the series a template: name the pain plainly, ask for what is needed, choose trust before the answer arrives. Psalm 22 takes that same template and carries it further than any other lament in the Psalter, into suffering so specific and so total that a reader has to ask what kind of anguish could possibly have produced it. David wrote these words some thousand years before a Roman cross ever stood on a hill outside Jerusalem. And yet a man’s hands and feet are pierced here. His bones are pulled out of joint. His clothing is divided by men casting lots for it while he is still alive to watch them do it. This is the psalm Jesus prayed aloud from that actual cross, and it is worth reading today the way it was written: not as a prophecy inspected from a safe distance, but as a real prayer, prayed first by a suffering king and then, in the fullest sense, by the King.
As you read, hold this: Jesus prayed this exact psalm from the cross, and the psalm’s own turn from abandonment to worldwide praise previews exactly what His death would accomplish.
Psalm 22:1-5 (BSB)
¹ My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Why are You so far from saving me, so far from my words of groaning? ² I cry out by day, O my God, but You do not answer, and by night, but I have no rest. ³ Yet You are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel. ⁴ In You our fathers trusted; they trusted and You delivered them. ⁵ They cried out to You and were set free; they trusted in You and were not disappointed.
Word study "Forsaken" — azavtani (Psalm 22:1)
Hebrew: עֲזַבְתָּנִי (azavtani), pronounced ah-zav-TAH-nee, from the root עזב (azab), “to leave, to abandon, to forsake.” Strong’s H5800. This is not a mild word for distance or delay. It is the word for a covenant partner walking away, the same root Scripture uses when Israel is warned not to “forsake” the LORD or when the LORD promises never to “forsake” His people (Deuteronomy 31:6, Hebrews 13:5). David is not asking why God feels far away on an ordinary hard day. He is asking why the bond itself seems to have broken.
When Matthew records this same cry on Jesus’ lips, he does not simply translate it into Greek. He transliterates Jesus’ own words, a mix of Hebrew (“Eli, Eli”) and Aramaic (“lema sabachthani”), the languages Jesus actually spoke, and only then supplies the Greek translation for his readers:
"About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, 'Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?' which means, 'My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?'" Matthew 27:46 (BSB)
That detail matters. This is not merely a prediction fulfilled from a distance, a line written a thousand years earlier that happened to match what would eventually occur. This is Jesus reaching for an actual psalm of Israel’s worship, in His own words, and making it His own real prayer in His own real agony. The lament tradition this whole series has been teaching, that honest, unedited cry a believer is permitted to bring to God, became at the cross the very words of the Son of God. He did not endure the cross in silence, refusing to voice what He felt. He prayed it, using words His people had already been given for exactly this kind of hour.
But this cry is more than shared experience, more than Jesus simply feeling what any forsaken person feels. On the cross, the sinless Son was actually bearing, in the place of everyone who trusts Him, the judgment and separation from God that human sin deserved. He was there as a substitute, not only as a fellow sufferer, not because the bond between Father and Son had broken, but because He had taken on Himself the full weight of what sin earns, so that no one who comes to Him would ever need to bear that separation alone. Whatever forsakenness a reader has ever felt, Jesus has already prayed this same cry to His Father, out loud, from a place of real, substitutionary suffering no reader will ever have to enter.
Psalm 22:6-11 (BSB)
⁶ But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by men and despised by the people. ⁷ All who see me mock me; they sneer and shake their heads: ⁸ “He trusts in the LORD, let the LORD deliver him; let the LORD rescue him, since He delights in him.” ⁹ Yet You brought me forth from the womb; You made me secure at my mother’s breast. ¹⁰ From birth I was cast upon You; from my mother’s womb You have been my God. ¹¹ Be not far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help.
The mockery in verse 8 is aimed at the one place a suffering person often feels most exposed: their own faith. “He trusts in the LORD, let the LORD deliver him” is not simple cruelty. It is a taunt built specifically to make trust in God look foolish in front of a watching crowd. Matthew records this same taunt, nearly word for word, hurled at Jesus by the chief priests and scribes standing at the foot of the cross: “He trusts in God. Let God deliver Him now if He wants Him” (Matthew 27:43). A thousand years apart, the same insult, aimed the same way, at the same kind of trust. And yet the strophe does not end with the mockery. It turns immediately to something steadier underneath it, a trust “from birth,” from the womb itself, older than any insult and unshaken by it. The mockers could reach David’s reputation. They could not reach what verse 10 names: “From my mother’s womb You have been my God.”
Psalm 22:12-18 (BSB)
¹² Many bulls surround me; strong bulls of Bashan encircle me. ¹³ They open their jaws against me like lions that roar and maul. ¹⁴ I am poured out like water, and all my bones are disjointed. My heart is like wax; it melts away within me. ¹⁵ My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. You lay me in the dust of death. ¹⁶ For dogs surround me; a band of evil men encircles me; they have pierced my hands and feet. ¹⁷ I can count all my bones; they stare and gloat over me. ¹⁸ They divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing.
Context A description with no explanation in David's own lifetime
This strophe is the most physically exact description of suffering anywhere in the Psalter, and some of its details do not match anything in David’s own world. Crucifixion, a punishment that stretches a body until the bones separate at the joints and pins the hands and feet in place, was a Roman method of execution. It did not exist in Israel a thousand years before Rome ever ruled there; David had no such execution in his own world to describe from experience. Verse 16’s “they have pierced my hands and feet” is, worth noting honestly, debated in the Hebrew manuscript tradition: the majority Masoretic Text reading is “like a lion at my hands and feet,” while the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Greek Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate, and the Syriac all support “pierced.” BSB follows that second reading, the same reading the earliest church took for granted: a psalm written a thousand years before Rome ever practiced crucifixion in Judea already described, in stark physical detail, exactly what would be done to the Messiah’s body. Whichever reading came first in the original composition, the church did not need to argue about it to see what verse 18 makes unmistakable: soldiers, at an execution David could not have witnessed, dividing a condemned man’s garments by casting lots for them.
That last detail happened exactly as written, not as a vague echo but as a reported fact, at the foot of Jesus’ cross:
"When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they divided His garments into four parts, one for each soldier, with the tunic remaining. It was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom. So they said to one another, 'Let us not tear it. Instead, let us cast lots to see who will get it.' This was to fulfill the Scripture: 'They divided My garments among them, and cast lots for My clothing.' So that is what the soldiers did." John 19:23-24 (BSB)
John does not simply notice a resemblance. He names it: this happened “to fulfill the Scripture.” Roman soldiers, almost certainly with no idea Psalm 22 existed, acted out its eighteenth verse at the foot of the cross because it was simply the ordinary practice at an execution to divide a condemned man’s clothing. Nothing about their actions was staged for effect. And that is exactly what makes verse 18 so striking: it was fulfilled in the most unremarkable, procedural way imaginable, soldiers doing what soldiers always did, and Scripture had already named it a thousand years before there was a cross for it to happen at.
Psalm 22:19-21 (BSB)
¹⁹ But You, O LORD, be not far off; O my Strength, come quickly to help me. ²⁰ Deliver my soul from the sword, my precious life from the power of wild dogs. ²¹ Save me from the mouth of the lion; at the horns of the wild oxen You have answered me!
The plea here gathers up every threat already named, sword, wild dogs, lion, wild oxen, and asks God plainly to act. Then something happens inside a single verse that is easy to read past too quickly. Verse 21 opens as a request, “save me,” and closes, in the very same breath, as a statement of fact: “You have answered me.” No verse in between reports what changed. No messenger arrives, no enemy retreats on the page. The psalm simply moves, mid-sentence, from asking to trusting the asking is already heard, the same shape Psalm 13 traced across its final two verses, only here compressed into half of one, and it is only the first hint of a far larger turn still to come.
Psalm 22:22-26 (BSB)
²² I will proclaim Your name to my brothers; I will praise You in the assembly. ²³ You who fear the LORD, praise Him! All descendants of Jacob, honor Him! All offspring of Israel, revere Him! ²⁴ For He has not despised or detested the torment of the afflicted. He has not hidden His face from him, but has attended to his cry for help. ²⁵ My praise for You resounds in the great assembly; I will fulfill my vows before those who fear You. ²⁶ The poor will eat and be satisfied; those who seek the LORD will praise Him. May your hearts live forever!
Study notes The turn nothing in the text explains
Verse 21 already began a turn, a private one: a plea for rescue that closes, in the very same breath, as a claim only the one praying could yet see, “You have answered me!” Read what happens next, and notice what is missing between the two strophes: an explanation. By verse 22 that private claim has become public praise, spoken in a full assembly, already speaking of “brothers.” Nothing on the page reports the moment deliverance actually arrived to justify it. The psalm changes register a second time, more completely than before, without transition, the way this whole series has already learned to expect from Israel’s honest prayers: praise is not withheld until the crisis is fully explained away.
The book of Hebrews reads verse 22 as more than a poetic turn. It reads it as Christ’s own words, spoken to His Father about the family He was making: “For both the One who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers. He says: ‘I will proclaim Your name to My brothers; I will sing Your praises in the assembly’” (Hebrews 2:11-12). Notice the slightly different wording, “sing Your praises” rather than “praise You”: Hebrews is quoting the ancient Greek translation of this psalm rather than the Hebrew directly, one more small sign of how thoroughly the earliest church had this psalm in its bones. The Jesus who cried “why have You forsaken me” in verse 1 is, on Hebrews’ reading, the same voice declaring in verse 22 that everyone who trusts Him is now family, a brother or sister He is “not ashamed” to call His own. Abandonment and adoption, in the very same psalm.
Psalm 22:27-31 (BSB)
²⁷ All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD. All the families of the nations will bow down before Him. ²⁸ For dominion belongs to the LORD and He rules over the nations. ²⁹ All the rich of the earth will feast and worship; all who go down to the dust will kneel before Him—even those unable to preserve their lives. ³⁰ Posterity will serve Him; they will declare the Lord to a new generation. ³¹ They will come and proclaim His righteousness to a people yet unborn—all that He has done.
The psalm that began with one man, alone, asking why he had been forsaken ends by picturing “all the ends of the earth,” every family of every nation, generations not yet born, turning to worship the same God. Nothing in the wording explains this widening on its own terms; it is simply where honest lament, carried all the way through, arrives. That shape, abandonment giving way to a worship too large for any one people to contain, is exactly the shape of the gospel this whole series keeps circling back to: the cross looked, in the moment, like the most forsaken hour in history. It became, in the resurrection and in every nation that has since turned to Christ, the reason “the ends of the earth” actually do remember and turn to the LORD. Psalm 22 does not merely predict the cross’s suffering. It previews what that suffering would go on to accomplish.
Personal Application
- Jesus did not endure silently; He prayed. It would be possible to imagine a Messiah who simply absorbed the cross’s pain without a word. Instead, He reached for an actual psalm His people already prayed and made its cry His own, out loud. What does it change to know that when you cannot find your own words for suffering, Jesus Himself once reached for words His Father had already given His people?
- Your own “why have You forsaken me” moments. This psalm gives permission to pray abandonment honestly rather than suppress it, the same permission Psalm 13 gave one day ago, now carried to its furthest point. Is there a forsakenness in your own life you have been managing quietly instead of praying plainly, in something like these exact words?
- Abandonment was not the end of the story, for Him or for you. Verse 22 turns from the cross’s abandonment to public praise, with no transition explained, and by the psalm’s final verses that praise has widened into worldwide worship. Where in your own life is trust asked to hold that same shape, believing the turn is coming before anything visible has changed?
Pray to Close
The truth to carry from this psalm: on the cross, Jesus bore, in the place of everyone who trusts Him, the judgment and separation from the Father that sin deserved, so that no one who comes to Him would ever be forsaken by God again. That is the God to whom you can bring your own forsakenness honestly now, certain He has not turned His face away from you.
Praise: that Jesus did not merely predict this psalm from a distance but prayed it, in real anguish, in His own words, so that no reader would ever have to feel forsaken alone.
Confess: any forsakenness that has been managed quietly, or reasoned away, rather than prayed honestly the way this whole psalm prays it.
Ask: for the same confidence verse 24 names, that God has “not hidden His face” from the afflicted, and for a heart willing to trust the turn toward praise before it is fully visible.
Worship for Today
Come Behold the Wondrous Mystery · Matt Boswell & Matt Papa
This modern hymn stands at the very mystery Psalm 22 lives inside: that the One who could rightly ask “why have You forsaken me” from the cross was there, in that abandonment, accomplishing an exchange no reader could accomplish for themselves. It moves the same direction the psalm moves, from wonder at the cost of the cross toward the certainty of what that cost secured, and it never asks a listener to look away from either half. Let it carry today’s psalm forward, into the same praise Psalm 22 could not help but reach by its final verse.
Listen: