Jesus In The Dark - Mark 15:33-34 Series

So no, David didn’t believe God had forsaken him when he wrote v.1. He was just ex-pressing how he felt, then in section 2 he shifted from what he felt to what he knew, and that’s when praises started to flow. We’ll plan on covering that in some detail next time—that shift from feeling to knowing in section 2. And I want to also dive in to section 3 of the psalm, which is where it really gets interesting. And we’ll talk about whether the origi-nal readers could have known Psalm 22 was intended to be a messianic psalm. But tonight our focus is on section 1.

No Comfort

Even though Jesus knew God hadn’t really forsaken him, that didn’t change the way it felt. For the first time in Jesus’ life, he was suffering and there was no comfort, no strengthening, no ability to draw near to God at all. So much so that, judging by Jesus’ re-sponse, that was the most unbearable part of the whole crucifixion. When darkness envel-oped the whole land, the center of that darkness, the darkest spot of all, was the cross where Jesus hung agonizing under the curse of God. And everything that darkness means—emptiness, inability to see, disconnection from the world, danger, misery, gloom, despair, judgment, death —all of that crushed down on Jesus until he finally cried out. If the antici-pation of the cup made him sweat blood and almost killed him, what must the cup itself have been like?

Isn’t it an astonishing thing to realize Jesus knows from experience what it feels like to be distant from God?

The Gravity of Sin

How extreme must have been our guilt to require such a price! Our culture tries to im-agine there is no such thing as sin. You never hear the word used outside of Christian cir-cles unless it’s in mockery of the idea. But no matter how deep they bury their heads in the sand… , the inescapable reality is our sinfulness and indebtedness to God staggers the imagination and is so deep… , so pitch black, so incurable… , that nothing short of the sacrifice of the Son of God and the Father turning his face away from his own Son in his dying hours would be enough to pay that debt.

Forsaken to Save Us from Being Forsaken

And that cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”… —that cry encapsu-lates more than anything else what Jesus was saving us from by dying on the cross. Jesus endured the feeling of being forsaken in order to save us from the fate of actually being forsaken forever.

That’s where section 3 of Psalm 22 comes in. Look at how the psalm ends. Section 2 affirms that God will indeed hear the pray of his suffering servant and deliver him. And God will deliver him in such a way that this will be the result:

Psalm 22:27 All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him. 30 Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord. 31 They will proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn.

One man will suffer the extremes of darkness to the point where he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And God will respond by saving him in a way that brings light to people throughout the entire world, for generation after generation.