Psalm 22:6-21 - They Pierced My Hands And My Feet (GOOD FRIDAY)

Psalm 22 as a Prophetic Eyewitness of the Crucifixion

I'm gonna read Psalm 22, you may be seated. I'll give some reflections on that, and then we will close. As we just sang, but I am a worm and not a man, a reproach of men, and despised by the people. All who see me sneer at me, and they separate with the lip.

They wag the head saying, commit yourself to the Lord, let him deliver him, let him rescue him, because he delights in him. Yet you are he who brought me forth from the womb. You made me trust when upon my mother's breast, and upon you I was cast from birth.

You have been my God from my mother's womb. Be not far from me, for trouble is near, for there is none to help. Many bulls have surrounded me, strong bulls of Bashan have encircled me. They open wide their mouth at me as a raving and a roaring lion.

I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax, and it is melted within me. My strength is dried up like a pot shirt. My tongue cleaves to my jaws, and you lay me in the dust of death.

For dogs have encircled me, a band of evil doers have encompassed me. They pierced my hands and my feet. I can count all of my bones. They look and they stare at me. They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots,.

But you,.

But you, oh Lord, be not far off. Oh, you my help, hasten to my assistance, deliver my soul from the sword. My only life from the power of the dog, save me from the lion's mouth, from the horns of the wild ox, and you answer me.

The Weeping and Waiting of Good Friday

Tonight, we gather not to laugh, not to rejoice, at least not yet. Tonight we gather to weep. Tonight we remember the disciples who were scattered, hidden away in the upper room, not celebrating the resurrection.

In fact, they really didn't understand that it was coming. Tonight we remember the descent down into death, the awful, gory silence of the tomb that fell on Saturday, that fell upon the earth, that darkness that fell, that was darker and thicker than the deepest black hole.

This is the day that the sky turned black at noon. This is the day God was buried beneath the ground that he once spoke into existence. A ground that he once fashioned men from is now the ground he was being buried into.

This is the day where the laughter of fools rang louder than the prayers of the faithful. This is the day that our sin was not merely written into a book, but carved into the flesh of Christ. And tonight, we stop, and we look at that very man.

We don't avert our eyes from the cross. We don't sanitize the horror of it. We don't skip ahead to Sunday. We stay here. We wait here. We watch here, and we weep here. Because against the greatest darkness is the light most clearly seen.

Psalm 22 is that psalm that begins with, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And it's not just a scream from a splintered tree. It is God recording exactly what would happen to his own son 1 ,000 years before it did.

Here we see Jesus, not as we like to imagine him, clean, calm, composed, victorious even, but as he was in that moment, despised, rejected, pierced, naked, mocked, and alone. He wasn't yet lifted up on a throne, but on a Roman stake.

He wasn't yet crowned with all of the celebrations of heaven, but with thorns. He wasn't yet the triumph that happens on Easter. Right now, he cried out, and only silence answered him. And yet, this cry, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me, is not a cry of defeat.

It's the beginning of the deliverance. The crack of Calvary's whip is not the sound of God losing. It's the first echo of everything that will be made new. And the first notes of the redemption were sung by a suffering son.

The Humiliation of the Son in Psalm 22

For the next few moments, I want us to look at the middle of Psalm 22. And as we just read, and as we just sang moments ago, we're going to see the horror that Jesus went through for us, his people. And I would like to talk about the first thing is his humiliation that this psalm records, the humiliation of the son.

And I want to do that in two ways. I want to talk about his position himself and his position in the community. Psalm 22 reminds us that the royal son of David was not treated royally. He was, in fact, royally humiliated.

Scepter, crown of thorns, a purple robe, all given to mock him. David, speaking proleptically of Jesus, said in verse six, but I am a worm and not a man, a reproach of men and despised by my people. I want you to notice here that the Lion of Judah is not leaning into his lion-like nature, not yet.

And he's even not leaning into his stature as lamb. He calls himself instead a worm. And not just any worm, there is some evidence in the Hebrew text that this is a special kind of worm, although this is a generic term for maggots, for insects and larva and worms.

There's evidence in Leviticus that this is a particular kind of worm that produces a crimson dye called a crimson worm. Now, this is not the kind of worm that simply wriggles in the garden or resist when you try to put it on a hook.

This is a unique parasitic worm that was found in the ancient Near East, known for producing a red dye used in priestly robes and in tabernacle curtains. Exodus 26, verse one, Leviticus 14, four through six, uses this word for dye.

This is a crimson worm, the female crimson worm. When it's ready to give birth, she climbs a tree. She attaches herself permanently, impaled to the tree. So that she can't be removed without actually tearing her body apart.

From that tree, she then lays eggs beneath her body and in a gruesome act of sacrificial motherhood, she dies so that her children may live. Her body becomes the shelter, her flesh becomes their food, her blood stains them red and then marks the wood with the dye upon which she died.

And then after three days, three days, the crimson worm, the shell turns white and flakes off like snow. And it reminds me of Isaiah 118, though your sins be as scarlet, they will be washed white as snow.

This is the worm Jesus compares himself to. A worm that even in its behavior imitates the gospel. Jesus is not just saying, I feel low, he is saying, I am the scarlet one, I am the crushed one, I am the dying one who gives my life for my children.

He is the worm who was nailed to the tree so that his blood could cover his own people. He is the worm whose death becomes our dye by marking us forever as belonging to him. He is that worm. That is the lowly position that the highest one sunk down into for us.

But it's more than just where he has gone. Look at the position that the Holy One of Israel was when gathered among the people of Jerusalem. He doesn't say that I was misunderstood. He doesn't say that people didn't like me.

He said I was despised. He doesn't say that I've had a bad day again. He says I'm not a man. Think of that. God incarnate stripped not only of his clothing but of his humanity, reduced, rejected, refused the dignity that should have been afforded him, regarded as less than humanity in the presence of the humanity he created.

He was a reproach, the butt of every joke. He was despised, the object of disgust. The people, his people wanted him dead so badly that they traded him in for a terrorist and then shouted for his blood like it were entertainment.

But even as they cursed him, he was declaring who he was over the cacophony of their demonic shrieking. He says in verse nine through 10, yet you, God, are he who brought me forth from the womb. You made me trust when upon my mother's breast you have been my God from my mother's womb.

On the cross, even a thousand years before it occurred, David records the thoughts of Jesus who remembered his own mother as he hanged there, who remembered the nearness of his father as he died before him.

Even now when the world says, Jesus, you are nothing, he remembers, I belong to God, I am yours, I am your son. Here hangs the second Adam, naked, humiliated, cast out of the city in the same way that Adam was cast out of the very first garden.

Here hangs the perfectly submissive Lamb who had done nothing wrong and yet lays down his life like a man for every wrong ever committed. He doesn't resist and he doesn't run and he doesn't rage, he trusts in God and if we really let that in, if we really look at him and not just sing about him, then something in us should start to break and it must break because this is not what he endured for some people.

This is what he endured for you because of his position of a worm and not as a man, because of his position of being despised and rejected by his own people, you and I can be set free. He also expresses his physical experience that humiliated him as well.

The Physical Suffering and Piercing of Christ

It wasn't just his position, it was also his physical experience. He says, I am poured out like water, Psalm 22, 14. He's not simply tired, he's drained. He is describing life and leaving his body like water slipping through open fingers.

His legs are trembling, his shoulders are aching, his blood is dripping, his circulatory system is emptying, his nervous system is shutting down. He says, my bones are out of joint because what the cross does is it pulls your arm so far apart that your body weight rips your shoulders out of socket, your joints become dislocated, the sinews in your body are like ropes stretched to the breaking point and every nervous ending in his system was screaming and yet there was no relief.

He says, my heart is like wax and it has melted within me. What he's saying is the pain, as terrible as it was physically, it was not just physical. He wasn't just experiencing emotional exhaustion, panic, dread, fight or flight or anxiety, this is spiritual suffering as well.

His heart, the holy heart, the one that had never entertained evil for a second now holds the full weight of sin, guilt, wrath and forsakenness and he can feel his heart melt and no one steps in to stop it.

He says in verse 15, my strength is dried up like a pot shirt, which is a way of saying that he is cracking like baked clay, like something that was abandoned in the sun, brittle, fragile and with an ounce more pressure will snap.

He says, my tongue cleaves to my jaws. He's choking on his own thirst, his lips are blistered at this point, his tongue is swollen at this point, the only moisture in his mouth is the iron tang of the taste of blood.

And then he screams as the nails beat and clang. He says in verse 16, they pierced my hands and my feet, a fact that never happened to King David. But as David wrote, you can almost wonder if he heard the clanging of the nails.

Nails that were not like nails you put into your sheetrock but railroad spikes that were positioned between the radius and the ulna of your wrist despite modern iconography where it puts it in the palm because in that point, your weight could be supported by bone and not by cartilage.

Your hands, your wrist would begin to swell, your capillaries burst, fluid would rush into the extremities of your wrist and feet to keep you hanging so that you don't fall down. The pain itself actually kept you hanging there longer.

The feet that walked on water, the feet that carried the good news, the feet that in this very moment was crushing the serpent was the very feet that was pierced and nailed to that splintered post. He goes on, he says, I can count all of my bones.

The reason he says this, the reason David says this is because when Jesus was scourged with those 40 lashings, those lashings had nine leather straps that were coming off of it. The nickname for it was the cat of nine tails.

And as they would fling that at the body, the Roman lectors would fling it at the body, it would wrap around the body of the sufferer. And at the end and at the tip of those leather straps were pieces of bone and glass and shards of clay or pots.

And as they would embed themselves in the flesh, they would stick there and then the ripping motion would rip hunks of human flesh off of the sufferer so that by 40 lashes it was generally accepted if the lector had done his job that there would be ribs and bones that were showing.

So when he says I can count all my bones, he was not being metaphorical. He was so emaciated, so stretched, so exposed that his bones were looking up at him from below. This is not the kind of Jesus that is painted in pastel portraits or coloring books, this is the Jesus who was wasting away before the eyes of men.

He says they look, they stare at me, they divide my garments among them and for my clothing they cast lots. Does Psalm 22 sound more like a eyewitness report of the crucifixion than a song that was written a thousand years before it happened?

As he hangs there in agony, naked, ashamed, he remembers how his possessions, the last article of clothing that he owned was taken away from him so that it could be gambled over by soldiers who cared more about his shirt than the body.

Hanging before them. This is the humiliation of the son and if your heart is not breaking yet, remember this, it wasn't the cruelty of the Romans alone, it wasn't the bloodthirstiness of the Jews, it was you and it was I who put him there.

Every lie, every lust, every idol, every sin positioned us and positioned him. That is what it cost. That is how low that we were and how low he went to lift us up. That's the first thing that we see in Psalm 22 is that this Christ went down in humiliation.

The Hatred of the Crowd and the Demonic Mockery of the Cross

We also see the hatred, the pure, unadulterated hatred of the crowds. Standing at that scene that day, there was no kindness in the mobs, there was no compassion, there was no hesitation, there was only hate in its purest, rawest, public, loudest form.

He was already writhing in pain, he was already suffocating, he was already bleeding and in a sense, they had already won but the Psalm doesn't tell us just that they brutalized him, it tells us the kind of men, the kind of motivation that was surrounding the Lord of glory.

They didn't cry, they didn't cover their faces. In many executions, you witness them, you have a family who is watching a person who is being executed and many will cover their faces at the horror of it, these did not, they didn't, they laughed.

David says, all who see me sneer at me, they separate with the lift, they wag their head saying, commit yourself to the Lord, let him deliver you, let him rescue you because he delights in him. They stared at him but not with pity, they sneered at him like he was beneath them, they looked into the bruised and swollen and bloodstained face of the son of God and they mocked him and it says, they separated the lip which is an ancient Middle Eastern gesture of contempt, it is a curling of the lip in smug disdain as if to say, you disgust me.

They wag their head, instead of walking away, instead of going home, instead of realizing that, hey, mission accomplished, we murdered him, they stood there wagging their head, shaking it from side to side, hoping that even till the last second that his eyesight worked, that he would see and experience their hatred and then they dared mock his faith and his relationship with God.

They said, let him, God, let him commit himself to the Lord, let the son commit himself to the father, let the Lord deliver him if he delights in him. They were mocking the very Trinitarian love that existed before time and space and they used the name of God, his father, as a taunt over him, as a mockery and as a cruelty, this was beyond psychopathy, this was demonic.

The same voice that hissed in Eden, did God really say, is now the same voice escaping the lips of the men who crushed him, saying, does God really care? This is not neutrality, this is not indifference, this is hostility, jeering, joy-dearing pain, this is the voice of Satan on the lips of men.

And here again, we must feel the shock of it because if it were not for the grace of Christ, that same voice would have been on your and my vocal cords as well. And we would have joined in the mockery and in the sneering.

He says, many bulls have surrounded me, many strong bulls of Bashan have encircled me, they open wide their mouth at me as a raving and a roaring lion. Bashan is an area that's very near to the Mount of Transfiguration.

Og is a very famous king of Bashan. Bashan in the book of Enoch is the place where hell entered earth, where the watchers in the book of Enoch come down and step foot on earth and pervert humanity. It is the place where local custom believe that the gate of hell actually is in Bashan.

So according to a Jewish mind, Bashan is the place where hell and earth collide. What kind of bulls were encircling Jesus? Bulls of Bashan, he says. The demonic raging bulls, red-eyed and pouncing him.

He wasn't in this moment just hanging, he was hunted. David uses beastly imagery here, bulls and lions. The crowd is not described like human beings, they have become monsters, snorting, bellowing and roaring.

He says, for dogs have surrounded me, a band of evildoers have encompassed me. They're not civilized people at this point. They've been reduced by the enemy to a pack of hungry dogs, a Middle Eastern swarm of dogs that eat the carcasses of their prey and that wait to rip it from limb to limb.

This is what sin does to humans. It dehumanizes. It takes men and makes them into animals. It turns image bearers into beast. And these beasts have circled the bleeding and the bruised savior, and they're crying out in delight.

They look upon the man who had done nothing wrong, who had only ever healed, ever helped, ever hoped, and they're snarling at him like a rabid dog against a innocent boy. The priests who should have interceded with mercy were the ones who were inciting the mobs.

The Romans who should have ensured justice are the ones who were enforcing brutality. The crowd who just five days were crying out, Hosanna was now screaming for his death. This wasn't just an execution.

This was a hellish parade of hatred on earth against the only righteous man. They circled him, they mocked him, they baited him, they hated him, and he did all of it, walked through every second of it with silence.

This was the fullness of fallen humanity mocking the very mercy of God as it bled and died before them. And he bore it all, every insult, every sneer, every beastly growl of rebellion, he bore it so that you and I could be forgiven.

The apex of human rebellion, he took upon himself in perfect innocence so that you and I could be healed. And the only way that you and I could be healed, elevated up out of our sin and shame is that he must first descend.

The Dust of Death and the Hidden Messiah

After the cross, he is hidden in the belly of the earth for three days. I preached this passage out of order and Derek sang this song out of order because in Hebrew poetry, the point often comes in the middle and not in the end.

When we watch a movie, the point comes at the end. When we listen to a song, the climax comes at the end. When we read a novel, all the threads come back together again in the end. But in Hebrew poetry, the end comes in the very center.

Why do you think in the center of this poem, he says, you lay me in the dust of the earth? Because the point for which he came was to first ascend. To a place where there were no more cries. To a place where there was no more mockery.

To a place where there was no more movement, no sound, just dust, just death. The crowds at that point had dispersed. The soldiers had walked away. The sky had cleared and the son of God was hastily placed in a dusty tomb because the people who were placing him there were trying to make it to Sabbath.

The one who once formed Adam in the dust is now being placed in it, buried in it. The hands that flung the stars into motion are now folded in silence. The one who proclaimed the great benediction and blessing that God's face would shine upon you is now veiled by bloody linen.

The heart that beat with love for sinners stopped and it was silent. All of this was anticipated 1 ,000 years before it happened. Holy Spirit-inspired prophecy of the event. When David recorded, you lay me in the dust.

Dust in Hebrew, the word afar is not poetry, it's humiliation. It's what a man returns to when he dies. If you remember in the creation account, it began with chaos. It began with the spirit hovering over the waters of chaos and then systematically God orders chaos.

God brings order to the water and the sky and the land. God brings order by making the different sun, moon and stars, the birds and the trees and the plants and the creeping things and man. He took the dust in Genesis 2, a symbol of chaos, a symbol of formlessness, a symbol of void and he unvoided it.

He ordered it. He put it together into a little being that he called man and he breathed life into it and the punishment upon that man for his sin is that he would return back to the dust because dust is a symbol of chaos.

It's a symbol of being undone. It's a symbol of every cell in your body that is held together by electrical connections of electrons being disconnected again. The most holy and corruptible flesh of Christ is now being laid into a grave to rot, to become disordered, decomposed, disconnected, thrown back into the dust, all hidden from the eyes of man and this is where the Psalm, at least this part of it, comes to a disturbing end.

No one is looking at him now. No one is jeering or sneering. No one is mocking because he's gone. Not up, not glorified, not yet. First, he must go down and he must go down into the dust and he must rescue us from the chaos our sin created and this is where the tension lives in the hiddenness of it all.

The king who one day, every tongue will confess, every knee will bow in this moment was completely alone. The Messiah was not up and marching or leading his armies in dominion, he was buried. The one who radiates pure glory was wrapped and veiled and hidden and in that silence and in that sealed darkness, his disciples were not left with answers but they were left with a litany of questions.

Was everything that he did for nothing? Was that the plan of God? Is the dust, is the chaos gonna have the final word? That question isn't answered on Friday. That question's answered on Sunday. Tonight, we hang in the tension that the disciples hang and we wait because the cross tonight has spoken, Sunday the grave will answer.

Let's pray. Lord, we thank you that in every element of this psalm you are pictured as savior from the worm to the dust. Lord, help us to see what our sin has caused. Help us in righteousness to repent and help us enjoy a joy that is coming.

In Jesus' name we pray, amen.