Jesus: From Genesis to Revelation

Day 5: The Psalms of the Cross and the Resurrection

Reading

Historical Context

Psalm 22 is attributed to David – la-menatzzeach al-ayyelet ha-shachar mizmor le-David, “to the choirmaster: according to The Doe of the Dawn, a psalm of David.” The phrase ayyelet ha-shachar (“doe of the dawn” or “deer of the morning”) is likely a tune name, but its imagery – a vulnerable creature at the first light – resonates hauntingly with the psalm’s content: a figure hunted, exposed, and ultimately vindicated at the breaking of a new day. David composed the psalm from within his own experience of persecution – likely during the years Saul pursued him through the wilderness of Judah – but the language consistently exceeds anything David himself endured. The psalm’s details do not describe David’s biography. They describe someone else’s death.

The psalm opens with one of the most searing cries in all of Scripture: eli eli lamah azavtani – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1). The word azavtani (“you have forsaken me”) uses the same verb applied to a husband who abandons a wife (Isaiah 54:6) or a mother who forsakes her nursing child (Isaiah 49:15). This is not the complaint of one who feels distant from God. It is the cry of one who experiences the severing of a relationship that was constitutive of his identity. The psalmist is defined by his relationship to God – “from my mother’s womb you have been my God” (22:10) – and the forsakenness is experienced as an ontological rupture.

The physical descriptions that follow are extraordinary for their specificity. “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast” (22:14). “My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death” (22:15). “They have pierced my hands and my feet” (22:16) – a line whose Hebrew text (ka’ari, “like a lion,” or karu, “they have dug/pierced”) has been debated for centuries, but whose oldest textual witnesses (the Septuagint and a Dead Sea Scroll fragment) support the reading “pierced.” “They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots” (22:18). David was never crucified. His hands and feet were never pierced. His garments were never divided by lot-casting soldiers. These details describe a form of execution that did not exist in David’s era – crucifixion would not be developed as a method of capital punishment until the Persians and later the Romans perfected it, centuries after the psalm was written.

Psalm 16, also attributed to David – mikhtam le-David, a “miktam of David,” a term of uncertain meaning possibly related to inscription or engraving – expresses quiet confidence in God’s presence and protection. The psalm’s emotional register is the polar opposite of Psalm 22’s anguish. “I have set the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken” (16:8). The Hebrew lo emmot (“I shall not be shaken/moved”) expresses unshakable stability. But the psalm reaches its theological climax in verses 9-11: “Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices; my flesh also dwells secure. For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption. You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (16:9-11). The word shachat (“corruption” or “the pit”) refers to the physical decomposition of the body in the grave. David claims that God will not allow his “holy one” (chasid) to undergo this decomposition. But David died. David was buried. David’s body saw corruption. The psalm therefore makes a promise that its own author could not fulfill – a promise that reaches past David toward a descendant whose body would enter the grave and exit it intact, whose flesh would dwell secure in a way David’s never did.

Christ in This Day

Jesus chose the opening words of Psalm 22 as his cry from the cross. “About the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Matthew 27:46). This is not a random expression of despair. It is a deliberate citation – the first line of a psalm that every Jewish listener would have recognized, a psalm whose subsequent verses describe precisely what was happening to Jesus at that moment. By quoting the psalm’s opening, Jesus identifies himself as the psalm’s speaker. He is the one whose bones are out of joint, whose heart has melted like wax, whose hands and feet are pierced, whose garments are being divided by soldiers casting lots at the foot of his cross. John’s Gospel makes the fulfillment explicit: “When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his garments and divided them into four parts, one part for each soldier; also his tunic. But the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom, so they said to one another, ‘Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it shall be.’ This was to fulfill the Scripture which says, ‘They divided my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots’” (John 19:23-24). A detail written into a psalm a thousand years before the event, describing a method of execution that would not exist for centuries, fulfilled by soldiers who had never read the psalm and had no intention of fulfilling prophecy.

But Psalm 22 does not end in death. It turns – suddenly, dramatically – toward praise and universal worship. “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you” (22:27). “Posterity shall serve him; it shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation; they shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn, that he has done it” (22:30-31). The final phrase – ki asah, “for he has done it” – is a shout of completed work. The suffering of the psalm’s first half gives way to a global harvest in the second half. The cross leads to the nations. The forsakenness leads to universal worship. The author of Hebrews identifies Jesus as the speaker of Psalm 22:22 – “I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will sing your praise” – and applies it to Christ’s relationship with his church (Hebrews 2:12). The one who cried “Why have you forsaken me?” now stands in the midst of the congregation and sings. The desolation was temporary. The praise is eternal.

Psalm 16’s promise – “you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption” – becomes the theological backbone of the earliest Christian preaching. Peter, standing before thousands at Pentecost, quotes Psalm 16:8-11 at length and then delivers the interpretive key: “Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses” (Acts 2:29-32). Peter’s argument is simple and devastating. David wrote the psalm. David died and was buried. David’s tomb is still here – you can visit it. Therefore the psalm is not about David. It is about David’s descendant whose body the grave could not hold, whose flesh did not see corruption, who walked out of the tomb on the third day. Paul makes the identical argument in Pisidian Antioch: “David, after he had served the purpose of God in his own generation, fell asleep and was laid with his fathers and saw corruption, but he whom God raised up did not see corruption” (Acts 13:36-37). The psalm’s logic is irrefutable: either Psalm 16:10 failed, or it speaks of someone other than David. The resurrection of Jesus is the vindication of the psalm.

Together, these two psalms voice the complete experience of the Christ: the forsakenness of bearing the world’s sin (Psalm 22) and the confidence that God will not leave him in the grave (Psalm 16). The cry and the assurance. The cross and the empty tomb. The dereliction and the vindication. They are two movements of a single symphony – written centuries apart, by the same human author, fulfilled in a single weekend in Jerusalem.

Key Themes

Connections

Old Testament Roots

Psalm 22’s opening cry echoes the lament tradition of the Psalter (cf. Psalm 13:1 – “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?”; Psalm 42:9 – “Why have you forgotten me?”), but intensifies it beyond any other psalm. The “pierced hands and feet” connect to the servant who is “pierced for our transgressions” in Isaiah 53:5. The garments divided by lot recall the priestly garments of Exodus 28 – the high priest’s clothing, now stripped from the ultimate priest. Psalm 16’s confidence that the holy one will not see corruption connects to Daniel 12:2’s promise of resurrection from dust and to Isaiah 53:10’s declaration that the slain servant will prolong his days.

New Testament Echoes

Matthew 27:35-46 records the fulfillment of Psalm 22 in the crucifixion – the divided garments, the mocking, the cry of dereliction. John 19:23-24 explicitly cites Psalm 22:18 as fulfilled in the soldiers’ lot-casting. Hebrews 2:12 identifies Jesus as the speaker of Psalm 22:22, applying the psalm’s turn from suffering to praise to Christ’s relationship with his church. Acts 2:25-32 is Peter’s Pentecost sermon, where Psalm 16:8-11 becomes the scriptural proof of the resurrection. Acts 13:35-37 is Paul’s parallel argument in Pisidian Antioch. Together, these passages show that the earliest Christian preaching was built on these two psalms as foundational texts for understanding the cross and the empty tomb.

Parallel Passages

Psalm 69 – another psalm of the righteous sufferer, with details fulfilled in the passion (vinegar offered for thirst, 69:21; cf. John 19:28-29). Isaiah 50:6 – the servant who gives his back to strikers and does not hide his face from spitting. Jonah 2 – the prayer from the belly of the fish, where death and deliverance mirror the pattern of Psalm 22’s descent and Psalm 16’s vindication. Hosea 6:2 – “After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up” – a text whose “third day” resonance the early church connected to Christ’s resurrection.

Reflection Questions

  1. Jesus chose the opening words of Psalm 22 – not a prayer of trust, not a declaration of victory, but a cry of forsakenness – as his final public utterance before death. What does it mean that the Son of God experienced genuine abandonment by the Father? How does this shape your understanding of what the cross actually cost?

  2. Psalm 22 moves from the most devastating cry in Scripture to the most expansive vision of global worship: “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD.” The structure of the psalm mirrors the structure of the gospel – suffering that leads to glory, a cross that produces a harvest. Where in your own life has God brought praise out of what felt like forsakenness?

  3. Peter argued at Pentecost that Psalm 16 could not be about David, because David died and his tomb was still standing. The psalm points past its author to someone whose body the grave could not hold. How does the resurrection of Jesus – as the fulfillment of a psalm written a thousand years earlier – strengthen your confidence that God keeps promises across centuries?

Prayer

God of the forsaken and the risen, you inspired David to write words he could not fully understand – a cry of abandonment that would echo from the lips of your Son on a Roman cross, and a promise of incorruption that David’s own body could not keep. We worship you as the God who plans across millennia, who hides the portrait of the crucified and risen Christ in psalms written a thousand years before the event. Thank you that the cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was not the end of the story – that the psalm turns to praise, that the cross gives way to resurrection, that the one whose hands and feet were pierced now stands in the midst of the congregation and sings. You did not abandon your holy one to Sheol. You did not let his flesh see corruption. And because he lives, the promise holds for us: the grave is temporary, the dust will give back what it swallowed, and in your presence there is fullness of joy forevermore. Through Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord. Amen.