Psalm 22 — Ron Bailey

Psalm 22: The Sufferings and Glories of Christ

To have the lift, they shaked their heads, saying, he trusted on the Lord that he would deliver him. Let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him. For thou art he that took me out of the womb, for thou didst make me a hope when I was upon my mother's breast.

I was cast upon thee from the womb, thou art my God from my mother's belly. Be not far from me, for trouble is near, for there is none to help. Many bowls have compassed me, strong bowls of bastion have beset me round.

They gait upon me with their mouths as a ravening and a rolling lion. I am poured out like water, for all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax, it is melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a pot shard.

My tongue cleaveth to my jaws, and thou hast brought me into the dust of death. For dogs have compassed me, the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me, they pierced my hands and my feet. I may count all my bones, they look and stare upon me, they part my garments among them and cast lots upon my vesture.

But be not thou far from me, O Lord, O my strength, haste thee to help me. Deliver my soul from the sword, my darling from the power of the dog. Save me from the lion's mouth, thou hast heard me, from the horns of the unicorns.

I will declare thy name unto my brethren, in the midst of the great congregation will I praise thee. Ye that fear the Lord, praise him. All ye of the seed of Jacob, glorify him, and fear him, all ye of the seed of Israel.

For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, neither hath he hid his face from him, but when he cried unto him, he heard. My praise shall be of thee in the great congregation, I will pay my vows before them that fear him.

The meek shall eat and be satisfied, they shall praise the Lord that seek him. Your heart shall live forever. All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the Lord, and all the kindreds of the nation shall worship before him, for the kingdom is the Lord's, and he is the governor among the nations.

All they that be fat upon the earth shall eat and worship, all they that go down from the dust shall bow before him, and none can keep alive his own soul. A seed shall serve him. It shall be accounted to the Lord for a generation.

They shall come and shall declare his righteousness unto a people that shall be born, that he has done this. It really is an extraordinary piece of scripture, Psalm 22. I always have a secondary purpose when I preach.

Whatever the primary one is, the secondary one is always that God would enable us to see just the wonder of this book that he has trusted to us. It is an extraordinary gift of God. This record, not of all things, it doesn't pretend to be a chronicle of world events from the beginning to the end.

It is a very carefully selected God's eye view of events that God has recorded for our blessing, our admonition, our instruction. And in one or two different places in the scriptures, it tells us, without going into the mechanics of it, it tells us the underlying wonder of what God has done in this.

And you've got this classic phrase in the writing of Peter, when Peter says that what happened is that it was holy men of God who were being carried by the spirits when they wrote these things. He says that they inquired and sought diligently what these things meant.

They said these things, they wrote them, and then, in the aftermath of it, they began to consider what they had said and they'd written, and were amazed at the content of what they'd written. And the scripture says that they asked God what the significance was of these things that they had said.

And that God revealed to them that it was concerning coming grace, it was for the time to come. And then you have this little phrase in Peter, and he says it was the Spirit of Christ in them, testifying of things that should come, the sufferings and the glories that should follow.

And that little explanation is an explanation of so much of what we have recorded in the scripture. It was the Spirit of Christ in them, testifying. It's what John is referring to in the book of the Revelation, when he says that the Spirit of Jesus, the testimony of Jesus, rather, is the Spirit of prophecy.

What you have here is not a man-by-view, not even in the sense of a man who is receiving a clear revelation. What you have here, in the very heart of Revelation, the scripture, is actually the testimony of Jesus himself.

And the Spirit of Christ in a man, in this instance, in David, bearing testimony, bearing witness. I think the thing that we said last time that we were together which provoked this second session now, is the fact that this psalm, although we refer to it as the psalm of David, in absolute terms, is not the psalm of David.

This is not David's testimony, this is not David's experience, it's not David's psalm. His hands and feet were never pierced, they never cast garments, they cut rocks apart for his garments. He never had these experiences of this extreme thirst, of his tongue being stuck to the top of his mouth, or all his bones being out of joint, his soul being poured out to death.

This is not David's testimony, there's only one person of whom this is the testimony, and it's Jesus. And that's why the testimony of Jesus is the Spirit of prophecy. And something happened in an extraordinary way here, and I wouldn't even try to explain the mechanics of it if I could.

I wouldn't try. The wonder that happens here is a man who is open to God, who is God-conscious at some point in his experience, knows, hears within him a witness, hears within him words that are not his words, sees things that are not the perceptions of his eyes, and then recounts them.

He echoes these things. You see why some of the old Puritan theologians used to question whether Psalm 22 was prophecy or history. What they were doing really is they were thinking of prophecy in terms of the predictive element of prophecy.

But that's only one part of prophecy. Prophecy is an extraordinary thing. When I talk to younger ones, I often say, well, when someone suddenly knows what God is thinking and expresses it, that is prophecy.

And there was a point in time in the experience of David when David knew what God was thinking. He heard what God was saying. He touched something deep in the Spirit. One of the things that says in the book of Hebrews concerning the Lord Jesus Christ's death upon the cross is that it was through the eternal Spirit that he offered himself without spot to God.

Although it was a physical event in time-space, as we would call it, although it happened at a point in time and an exact geographical spot, that's to say it's real in the terms of what we usually know as real, there's something much more wonderful about the cross than that.

It is an eternal event. It is an eternal event. It was something that was accomplished in the Spirit. Let me illustrate, if I can, that idea to you of just something I read sort of quite widely at different times, and I'm interested in people's insights, and I remember reading this man isn't a Christian at all but he was talking about history generally, and he made this comment, and he said that to have a sense of history, you have to have a sense of loss.

Now, I like history, I think it's fascinating. But I do have a sense of loss about history. These things have gone beyond us, you can't reclaim them. You want to in some ways to reach out and touch them and find more about them, but you do have a sense of loss.

But I have absolutely no sense of loss about the cross. I don't have any sense that it's moving away from me, that it's moving beyond my reach, that it's a lingering memory which is now fading. I don't have any of that sense.

There's something about the cross which is eternal, and eternal things don't grow old. That's really what we mean when we sing in the poetry of hymns that the blood of Jesus will never lose its power, or we sing about the blood continuing to flow.

These are poetic ways of saying, this is an eternal event, this is a moment in time captured here by this man. If there was one thing I would love to be able to do, I would love to be able to write poetry.

I can't do it, I can't even remember it except silly verses, I don't often understand it, unless it's got the pictures of Rupert at the top to explain what's happening, then I can understand it. But the wonderful thing about poets is they have this ability to freeze a moment in time, to give you time to look at it.

Things happen and they pass so quickly. But some people, some artists have this ability to capture a moment, to give you time to look at it. And what you've got here in Psalm 22 is this man who had a very great poetic ability given to him by God anyway, this sweet singer of Israel, David, who has captured this moment in the Spirit and we have it here.

We can go within that darkness, into that veil, and see what was really happening. We can hear again and examine again the testimony of Jesus, hear what he's saying, hear what's taking place. Maybe you know this, that the very last words that I chose at this point just to leave as they are here in the A .V., verse 31 says, They shall come and shall declare his righteousness unto a people that shall be born, that he hath done this.

Maybe you know that those words could literally be translated, that it is finished. So you've got this extraordinary psalm which begins with the word, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? And ends with this triumphant note, it is finished.

This is no accident. This is something extraordinary and in many ways Psalm 22 is one of the greatest examples of the wonder of what we have in the Scripture. People in other generations used to read the Bible, what they call Christocentrically.

That's to say they used to read it to find out more about Christ. Now theologians these days have moved in one way which is good and another way which is dangerous because they will now say, well you need to read a passage of Scripture in its context.

You need to understand the cultural context, you need to understand the historical context, you need to understand what book came before another. Yes, yes, yes, yes, it's all true and yet it's not the whole truth.

I don't know of a single verse in the New Testament where it quotes the Old Testament where it quotes it in context. I don't know of a single instance in the New Testament where it quotes an Old Testament verse in context.

It always seems to take them out of its context. It captures the spirit of something because it's not just the historical context, it's something much more wonderful. That's why I sometimes say, maybe I've said it here, that I actually have three testaments.

I have an Old Testament and I have a New Testament and I have an Old Testament read in the light of the New Testament. All three are wonderful revelations. God has given us something here which is not just locked in time, it's part of the eternal nature of what he's doing in revealing truth to us from this Scripture.

It begins with these events, you know these are the words of Jesus, heard I think by David, not created by David, heard and captured here in Psalm 22. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Quite often modern evangelists, maybe not so much now, but they would often focus in on the physical sufferings of the Lord Jesus.

I have heard some astonishingly gory sermons about all the consequences of crucifixion, of what happened at every particular stage to the body and the emotions and the pain that was felt. To me it's interesting that the Bible never does that.

It's not because it's not true, it's because it's not the Bible's focus. The physical suffering was very, very real, but the focus of the Bible is caught here in this phrase, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

The suffering of the cross was this that the old theologians used to call the cry of dereliction. Ever been in a derelict building, utterly abandoned, lifeless, a wreck, a ruin? That's his cry. It comes from someone who is utterly abandoned.

Not just someone who is feeling as though he was abandoned, not someone who is going through some difficult time, but someone who really is absolutely abandoned. When it speaks of the Lord Jesus Christ being given over in the gospel, it uses a word which really means to hand over, it speaks of Judas handing him over.

In the book of Romans it actually speaks of God handing him over. God abandoned him. God handed him over. You need to kind of get a feel of that. If you've got something that's fairly weighty, a Bible, whatever it is, you try to explain that at one point and give it to someone and be conscious of the moment when the weight passes from you into the hands of somebody else.

And becomes at that moment somebody else's total responsibility and you have handed it over. It's no longer in your hands. This is what happened on the cross. The Father handed him over and he felt it, he knew it.

And this cry comes, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? What is behind all this forsaking? This is not just a psychological experience, this is a spiritual reality. Most often in the New Testament when you get the prayers of the Lord Jesus, you'll find that he speaks of God as my Father and on one occasion, more than one occasion, as Abba, Father.

Here he refers to him as my God. Still the personal pronoun, still my, but there's something missing now. There's something missing which was the hallmark of his whole experience upon the earth. John in his Gospel says this, we beheld his glory.

The glory as of and only begotten with the Father. And John's whole Gospel is an account of the relationship of the Father and the Son as they go together, they work together in perfect fellowship, in perfect harmony.

And at this point in time there's something missing from it. This is no longer my Father, still my God, still submitted to God's will, but the sense of fellowship, the relationship is gone. It's gone.

His determination to do the will of God has not gone. His yieldedness to the will of God has not gone. But that intimacy which was his strength, which was the explanation of the way in which he lived his life, it's gone.

It's my God, my God now. Why has thou forsaken me? What happened on the cross was really quite amazing. We do need to turn to, or in our mind at least, to the epistles of the New Testament to really discover what it was that took place.

You have a progressive revelation in the Scriptures. God reveals things to us bit by bit as we're able to receive them. And you get things like the fact that John the Baptist spoke of the Lord Jesus and he said, that's him, that's the Lamb of God who bears away the sins of the world.

And you've got in that language the sense of someone carrying the burden, carrying the responsibility, carrying our sin. It's absolutely true, but it's not the whole truth. The whole truth is more profound than that.

And Peter writes in his epistle, he says, who his own, in his own body, on the tree for our sins. That's taken it to another degree. Not just carrying something externally, but he's taken it into himself, in his own body.

He has become, and it's left to Paul to use this language, he became sin. He became sin. He who knew no sin, he became sin, that we might become the righteousness of God in him. And the kind of language that the Bible uses is breathtaking.

I don't know whether you... When I hear that story that Vicki told this morning, when you think of an image of the Lord Jesus, if you were to say, well, what is your favorite image that he has used to express who he is?

You might say, well, the shepherd, or the lamb, or the door, or the vine, the snake. Is that your favorite picture? It was Jesus' picture when he spoke to the people in John chapter 3. As Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man.

Isn't that breathtaking? Isn't that kind of chance for you? The snake? Not the lamb, not the picture of the submission, the innocence. Not the door, the picture of the wide open arms of God, ready to receive.

But the snake? This thing which somehow in the Bible is used as the point of origin of evil for the whole human race. This thing that was injected into our humanness, which has touched every single one of us.

He became this. Not just bearing the sins, but became identified so completely with that, that I will only go as far as Paul and no farther. He became sin. And I will not explain it. He became sin. I can see some of the things that he says to illustrate it.

I can see, for example, the way in which when he speaks of his own death upon the cross, he refers to it as a baptism. And he says, I have a baptism to be baptized with. And you don't. You don't know that part of the truth of baptism is all about identification and unification.

It's all about union. The way that they used to dye clothes in ancient times was to take some white linen or something like that and to plunge it to baptize it. This was the language they used. To baptize it into a dye.

And then when they brought it out, you had this amazing thing in which two things which had been separate, that's to say the white linen and the purple dye, have now become inseparably one. They have united.

And the dye is through every warp and weave, every thread of it. The two are now absolutely one. Something happened on the cross that is beyond our understanding. I think it will always be beyond our understanding.

Something happened in which Jesus so identified himself with the human race, not just in what we have done, not just in the sins, but he identified himself with what we have become. He identified himself with what we have become.

Shortly we'll be in the season of Christmas when we begin to think of this, of this staged identification with the human race. The way he comes into our world to become one of us. He is not God dressed up as a human being.

He is God become human. There's a wonderful phrase in one of Michael Codd's songs when he speaks of this babe bearing undiminished deity. A wonderful phrase. God never ceased to be God, but he did become fully human.

He became 100 human. It was the first step in his identification with the human race. Then he began to know, and there are further identifications, of suffering, of pain, of loneliness, of growing up in obscurity, under oppression, and all these things.

Then of seeing the people, of living with them, of working with them, of ministering to them. We see his ministry, we see the high point of his identification on the cross where he not only bears the sins of the world, but in this Bible language he became sin.

He is absolutely at that point united with the human race. You must remember that when you think about baptism in the spirit. Because it's the counterpart. It's when God so identifies us with him, so puts us into him that we become one with him.

Not that we become God, we are never deified, but we become one with him. In something which is, in that sense, inseparable. Where the two have become one. Jesus used that kind of language. He did things, you know, with language, which really do take your breath away.

I mean, he used this illustration of his own relationship with his father. And he said, I am the father of one. I am in the father. And the father is in me. This isn't just union. This isn't just two things tied together.

This is absolute harmony of person. You can tie a dog and a cat together by the tails and you've got union. But that's not what you call unity. And it isn't just proximity. It's not just that they're close together.

It's this, I am in the father and the father is in me. I mean, geographically, in space, there's no way of expressing it, is there? You can illustrate something that's in something, but if you illustrate that something is in something else, it's kind of one of the rules of our life, that you can only have something smaller that's in something that's bigger.

But that isn't the way it works. Because he is in the father and the father is in me. And neither are diminished. And if that isn't extraordinary enough, later on he begins to speak of the coming of the Spirit and he says, in that day you'll know that I am in my father and you are in me.

And I am in you. And he now gathers his own people, his own born-again ones, into this expression that he has used to describe the absolute intimacy and oneness that he has with the father. And he makes us part of it.

Take my breath away, I don't know what it does for you. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? If you've got your Bible open and you look at verse 6, you've got the statement here, I am a worm, no man.

There are some Christian teachers today who are uncomfortable with what they call worm theology. Have you heard this? Well, yeah, there's a book out I think called something like that. And what's behind it is that they don't think that worm theology is healthy for Christians.

They really think it's much more important that they have good self-esteem and that they have a healthy self-image. And worm theology works counter to that. Well, I want to tell you that that's the way it is.

That's the way the cookie crumbles. God spoke to Jacob and said, Fear not, thou worm, Jacob. It doesn't matter what you are if God says, fear not. If God says, I'm with you, if God says this, this is not the end of the story.

To recognise that we are worms, what am I saying in this? I am a worm and no man, the testimony of Jesus. In Isaiah, right at the end of Isaiah 52, which really should be part of Isaiah 53, you've got this little phrase where it says, His face was marred more than the face of a man.

It's the Bible's way of saying that something happened at this point that Isaiah is saying, where his suffering, what happened to him, was so extreme, so absolute, that he was hardly recognisable as a human being.

But then neither are you. Did you know that? You are hardly recognisable as a human being. You are not what God had in his mind when he said, let us make man, let us make woman. When he said that, he said, let us make them in our image.

And you and I were intended to be living revelations of what God is like. Which means that neither of us has ever seen a real man or a real woman. There's a fascinating phrase in one of C .S. Lewis' books when they go to Venus, it's called Perilandra, or Voyage to Venus, or something like that, and they go through, they re-enact the events of the Earth's creation.

And this is the time of Venus' creation, and they have their own first man and first woman, and they have their own center, and they have their own first crisis. And there's a man from Earth who is part of the unfolding of these events.

I won't spoil the book for you, but it's good to read, it deals with some important issues. And when they get to the end of it, they have this point in time in which they're all kind of gathered round at the great coronation of the man and the woman on Venus.

And all the creation are gathered together in this glorious celebration. And the man from Earth is there too, and they want him to be part of it. But he's actually on his face on the ground, he can't stand what he's seeing.

And they want him to be part of it, and he uses this phrase, and he says, don't lift me up, let me stay where I am. I've never seen a real man or a real woman. I've lived all my life among shadows and broken images.

You and I have lived all our lives among shadows and broken images. You've never seen a human being. You've never seen what God meant when he said, let's make him our image and our likeness. Unless you've seen Jesus.

Only in him was this will of God perfectly expressed. Only this man was God able to say, this is my beloved son, in whom I'm well pleased. But there comes a time here when the only man ever to have fulfilled God's expectations, the only man ever to have fulfilled God's destiny for the human race, this man enters into an experience where his testimony, and you know he always spoke truth, his testimony has had a worm, and no man.

He has passed into our experience. He has become what we have become. You know these parts, he trusted on the Lord that he would deliver him, these parts are caught in the gospel story of it, of the people who said, he trusted in God, let's wait and see what happens.

You've got this kind of language that it uses here, verse 11, Be not far from me, for trouble is near, and there is none to help me. Many bowls have encompassed me, strong bowls of bastion have beset me around.

They gaped upon me with their mouths as the ravening and the roaring lion. I am poured out like water, all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax, it's melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a pot shard, my tongue clears to my joys.

Joys thou hast brought me into the dust of death, for dogs have encompassed me. There's a part of this psalm that we haven't read yet. It's that little bit that you hardly ever read that comes just before the first verse, where it says this, To the chief physician upon Agileth Shaha.

I'll tell you a secret about these complicated words. If you speak them with confidence, no one will ever question you. Your guess as to how you'd pronounce it is as good as mine, but it actually means the hind of the morning, a young deer.

It's an amazing picture. You see, what has this got to do with the hind of the morning, this young deer? Because at this point in which we have reached the psalm now, you find the young deer hunted to death with the packs of the dogs around it.

You see it exhausted. You see all its strength gone. This hind of the morning, this one who with heaven's glory, this one who, you get this picture, I get this picture in the gospels, that the angels are always hovering this upstage, just wanting to come into the events, wanting to serve him, wanting to deliver him, wanting to minister to him.

And just one word and they would, but they're forbidden. He has to take this journey alone. He has to run like the hind of the morning. And he's hunted to death with the packs and the dogs around him.

Let me read that passage again and think now of the hunt. Verse 13. They gazed upon me with their mouths as a rathoming and a roaring lion. I am poured out like water. All my bones are at a joint. My heart is like wax.

It's melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a pot shard. My tongue clings to my jaws. Thou hast brought me into the dust of death, for dogs have compassed me. In the midst of all this, he speaks about bowls compassing him.

And you get this picture in the language that's used of an amazing conspiracy and an amazing gathering together. It's as though all the forces and powers of hell have become focused at this point of time in history.

It's all there. One of the things it says in Isaiah 53 when it speaks about all our iniquities were laid upon him, it actually says all our iniquities were gathered together upon him. And this is a gathering.

This is a fearful gathering. This is a gathering of evil and hostility undisguised. It's seen now for what it really was and what it's always been and what it still is in the unregenerate heart. The thing that happened in the Gospels and it goes on constantly, where the Lord Jesus...

Well, the Gospel writers keep on saying this was going to happen, they were going to arrest him, but they couldn't because the hour was not yet come. And you've got this theme, it keeps on going, the hour has not yet come, the hour has not yet come.

And then, right on the eve, right on the moment of the arrest and the crucifixion, you've got Jesus and he says, my hour has come. But in Luke's Gospel, you've got another little phrase and he says this, and he says, when he's talking about those who arrested him, he says, this is your hour and the power of darkness.

There's something that took place on the cross that really is extraordinary. It is the ultimate revelation of everything. It's the revelation of what evil is really all about. Evil is about fear side.

It's about the murder of God. Evil is really all about... You know, don't you, that essentially sin is a conflict of wills. Whatever your definition of sin is, it has to have that in the centre of it.

Sin is somebody, some created being, saying no to God. That's what it is. But lots of it is hidden. Lots of it is hidden, I think, in God's mercy for us. Lots of it is hidden because we've learned to put a veneer of sophistication over things and we've learned to get on with one another because it suits us.

Because if I'm nice to my neighbor, my neighbor's nice to me. But when you get right down, when you get right down to the bottom line, when all the restraints are taken off and the ultimate question is who is going to survive, you'll hear this cry that's part of the human race's experience.

We will not have this man to reign over us. And ultimately the choice is you crown him or you crucify him and there are no other options. There are no other options. And it's here, at this event at the cross, where all that God is, God's own love, He commends, He demonstrates His love towards us, to the Romans, that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

What you have on the cross is a revelation of God and a revelation of that that is opposed to God. And it's all here. It's out of the corners now. It's no longer hiding, it's no longer pretending, it's no longer subdued, it's now what it really always has been.

At one and the same time you have the synchronization of two hours, my hour and the hour of Diopolis. And they are met here in this person who hangs on this cross. He is the battlefield. It meets here in Him.

This one who has lost everything. It's all been taken away from him. He's lost his friends. He's lost his followers. He's lost a sense of his father's fellowship and companionship. It's gone. And naked physically and spiritually he goes through to pay the price for us.

The bow, the ovation, they beset me around. I have a friend, he's probably a friend to quite a few of you as well, who is a professional photographer who specializes in cattle. And he got used to, when there were cattle shows, before foot and mouth, that was how he used to make his living, going to these places and taking these amazing pictures, portraits of unique kinds of cattle.

And I remember talking to him one day, and we were just talking about cattle in particular. And he just, it just came out, he just talked about the amazing power that bulls have. What an immensely strong animal they were.

And he was telling me of a time when one of, someone that he knew was actually in a kind of a ring with a bull, and the bull just leaned on him. He said, and we could hear the ribs cracking. We could, the bull was leaning on him.

These creatures had immense power. I don't know what you think of the most powerful animal, but people living in this part of the world wouldn't have seen, they wouldn't have seen the power of elephants, they wouldn't have heard of it, they wouldn't have seen the power of other things.

To them, the thing which symbolized power was a creature called the aurochs, the wild ass. It was an enormous creature with a widespread horn and of immense power. It was the ultimate in power as far as they were concerned.

It's the beginning of the Hebrew alphabet. That shape, that way, is actually a bull's head. That's what it is. It's kind of right deep down in the psyche of what they were. As we refer to him, as we refer to bulls, and coming out when he's talking about them being able to count his bones and all the rest of it.

You come down to this part here in verse 20, and he says, save my soul, his strength is all gone. We'll go back to verse 19 to pick that up. Be not thou far from me, O Lord, O my strength. He has none of his own.

Haste thee to help me, deliver my soul from the sword. We can go into Zechariah if we have the time and see there when it speaks about the sword being unsheathed and raised against the shepherd, but you can follow it through.

My darling, my only one, my soul, from the power of the dog, literally from the paw of the dog. I'm a dog person. We've always had dogs in our family. Maybe this might save you getting your fingers bitten sometimes, but I'm going to tell you now.

One of the reasons you should not pat a strange dog on the head is because a mother dog subdues her pups by putting her paw on their head. She dominates them by pushing their head down. Now if you go up to a strange dog and you put your paw on its head and it doesn't know you, it'll fight back.

It thinks you've taken the first move against it, so it'll fight back. But this image of the paw holding down, dominating, it's here. My darling, from the paw of the dog. This does immense powers here that are being unleashed at this time.

It's as though God in His mercy had always restrained the wickedness of the human race, had always restrained the wickedness of the enemy, but at this point He takes His hands off and you see what it's all about.