Sent to Suffer for Us

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You know, sometimes you’ll hear a song that works on multiple levels, because it has multiple meanings to it. And the one that comes to mind is one that I grew up hearing, American Pie. Bye-bye, Miss American Pie.

Some of you just had no reaction at all. Sometimes I don’t know if you know what I’m talking about or not. It’s a song that we heard growing up because my dad listened to the music from the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

I grew up singing along to that song, even though I had no idea what it meant. Although we grew up Baptist, so I’m pretty sure we changed Whiskey and Rye to Sweet Tea and Sprite or something like that. But we sang along with that song, and for the longest time, I had no idea what it was even about.

I remember dad one day explaining that it was about the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly. And that was really the main point of the song. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized there are layers of meanings to those lyrics.

I mean, there’s stuff in there about the Cold War. There’s stuff in there about Elvis. There’s stuff about the Beatles and Charles Manson.

I mean, there’s just a ton of stuff in that song. And there are still lyrics that people have no idea what Don McClain meant when he wrote that song. I mean, there’s just layer upon layer of meaning.

And some songs are like that. In fact, some of the best songs are like that. They’re just woven in such a way that you just peel back layer after layer of meaning.

Well, this morning we’re going to look at a song that’s a lot like that. I hope that’s not disrespectful to the Scriptures to compare it to that. But Psalm chapter 22, if you’ll turn there with me this morning, Psalm chapter 22 is one of those songs that has layers and layers of meaning.

Now, I want to be clear in what I’m saying here because I have said for years that any given passage of Scripture really has one correct interpretation. Now, it may have many correct applications. You may be able to take that interpretation of Scripture and apply it in a number of cases and a number of circumstances, but any given passage of Scripture has one meaning, one interpretation, what God intended it to have.

and I think one of the worst questions that we can ask in the course of Bible study is, well, what does that passage mean to you? Let me clue you in on something. It’s irrelevant what it means to you or what it means to me.

What’s relevant is what it means to the God who wrote it and the people he wrote it to. How he intended it and how they understood it is what matters. And yet, even at that, there are some of these passages of Scripture, especially in dealing with prophecy, where there’s one meaning, it just encompasses many layers.

We’ve looked at some of those in the book of Isaiah in recent months, where Isaiah was writing to the Israelites, and he was writing about a king who was going to come and rescue the Israelites, but at the same time there was another layer of meaning in that one interpretation where he’s pointing ahead to the coming of Christ, talking about how the Messiah would be born to a virgin. Well, Psalm chapter 22 is one of these chapters. When I say it has layers of meaning, I just want to be clear that I’m not saying, oh, the Scripture just means whatever we feel like it means, and it can mean multiple things.

No, there’s one interpretation. It can just have multiple layers. And so I’m going to ask you to turn there.

I think I’ve already asked you to turn there, but if I haven’t, if you turn with me to Psalm chapter 22, we’re going to look at this passage this morning because I want to start over the next several weeks leading up to Easter. I want to walk you through the road to the resurrection. The resurrection is one of my favorite things to talk about.

As a matter of fact, I’ve told you before, I have to be very careful that I don’t give you six weeks of information in one message. I have to restrain myself because I love talking about the resurrection. I love talking about the evidence for the resurrection, the historical fact of the resurrection, what it proves that if Jesus Christ is raised, if we can demonstrate historically and scientifically that Jesus Christ rose from the dead the way Scripture says he did, if that can be demonstrated, then it doesn’t matter what logical arguments you have over here.

Christianity is true. It has to be if he rose from the dead. But rather than just come in on Easter and say, let’s talk about the resurrection, I want to go back further and show you that God has had this plan that he’s been working out all along that he was talking about for years before about the resurrection, that the crucifixion and resurrection did not happen by accident.

I know there are people today who teach that, yes, Jesus was crucified, but it’s really because he said the wrong things to the Pharisees, and anybody can get themselves crucified if they try really hard. Hello, Jojo. Usually people wait until the invitation to come forward.

It’s a little distracting. You’ve got to expect those things with kids. Some people will teach that Jesus, it was an accident of history that he was crucified.

And if they say anything about the resurrection at all, they treat the whole thing like it was just a curiosity of history. It’s not an accident. It’s not a coincidence.

It’s not a curiosity of history. The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ are the center point of God’s entire plans for history. And so I want to take you down that road, starting with the Old Testament, maybe not the earliest place in the Old Testament that it talks about, the crucifixion and resurrection, but I do want to go back to the Old Testament and look at how God foretold all along that this was His plan.

And then we come to the New Testament, and Jesus tells us that He knew this was His purpose for coming to earth. And I want to talk about that plan that God was laying out for centuries and for millennia before it happened, before we come back then and at Palm Sunday and Easter talk about the crucifixion and resurrection. So in Psalm 22 this morning, we’re going to look at the first 18 verses.

There’s more to the text, and later on in Psalm 22, there are other things that apply to the story of Jesus, but this morning I felt like we had time for about these first 18 verses. It says, starting in verse 1, My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why are you so far from my deliverance and from my words of groaning?

My God, I cry by day, but you do not answer. By night, yet I have no rest. But you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel. Our fathers trusted in you.

They trusted, and you rescued them. They cried to you and were set free. They trusted in you and were not disgraced.

Verse 6. but I am a worm and not a man, scorned by mankind and despised by everyone, despised by people. Everyone who sees me mocks me.

They sneer and shake their heads. He relies on the Lord. Let him save him.

Let the Lord rescue him since he takes pleasure in him. Verse 9, It was you who brought me out of the womb, making me secure at my mother’s breast. I was given over to you at birth. You have been my God from my mother’s womb.

Do not be far from me, because distress is near, and there’s no one to help. Many bulls surround me, strong ones of Bashan encircle me. They open their mouths against me, lions mauling and roaring.

I am poured out like water, and all my bones are disjointed. My heart is like wax melting within me. My strength is dried up like baked clay.

My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. You put me into the dust of the earth. For dogs have surrounded me.

A gang of evildoers has closed in on me. They pierced my hands and my feet. I can count all my bones.

People look and stare at me. They divided my garments among themselves, and they cast lots for my clothing. So this psalm, here in Psalm 22, the verses that we’ve looked at already and the ones that follow after later, this psalm is about David.

We don’t know for sure if it was written by David or someone close to David, but it was about David. As a matter of fact, I lean toward it was written by David. But it was certainly written about David and the experiences of David’s life, and it was written in the midst of a time of suffering for David.

And we don’t know exactly either which time of suffering. One of the things I like to do when I preach on a passage in Psalms, especially if it’s one of the ones that was written by David, I like to try to go back and line it up with what was going on in David’s life at that point and see if that gives us any insight into why he says the things he says. But this one, we really don’t have enough information to be sure about what period of time David was living in, what part of David’s story this was written in.

But we know that David had a lot of periods of suffering. whether it was running for his life from King Saul, whether it was finally coming to the throne in a multi-year civil war breaking out in Israel and him having to fight to reunify the country, whether it was his family falling apart as a result of his sin, whether it was his son rising up trying to stage a coup against him and him having to run for his life again and having to fight that off and eventually the only way to regain his God-given position was for his son to be killed. David experienced a lot of times of suffering.

And we don’t know which one of these Psalm 22 describes. But we do know from Psalm 22 and what David says here that it was a time when he felt distant from God. He starts out with, my God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

He felt distant from God. He was humiliated. He describes that in the text.

He calls himself a worm and not a man. He was afraid. He was exhausted.

He’s talking about his strength being poured out. He’s talking about his heart melting like wax. He was exhausted.

And we know that he was in great danger because he was surrounded by enemies. And so when we read this, we understand this from the standpoint of David being somebody who’s suffering, who’s calling out to God in the midst of his suffering, he doesn’t feel in that moment like God is answering him, and yet he expresses the faith, the confidence that he knows God will answer him and that God is hearing this, and that God is going to work all this out according to his own will. And I think there’s an important lesson for us in those circumstances, in what David has written here, because there will be times when we don’t feel like God is answering our prayers.

You know, we can pour our hearts out to God about something difficult we’re dealing with, and we can pour our hearts out to Him repeatedly because we recognize we can’t handle this, only He can. And we can pour out our hearts, and we can pour out our hearts, and yet nothing’s happening. And in our feelings, remember last week I told you facts, don’t care about your feelings.

In our feelings, we feel like God isn’t hearing and isn’t answering. And yet we still have the promise of His Word that is far more authoritative than our feelings ever will be. That His Word tells us He hears.

That His Word tells us He answers. His Word tells us that He has a plan. We know we have His promise that He won’t ever leave or forsake us.

So we come to those times when we feel like God isn’t hearing us or isn’t answering us. we can still, in spite of our feelings, we can still express the confidence that because of who God is and what God has promised, that we know He is at work, He is listening, and He will answer it and will care for it, work it out according to His will, not necessarily ours, in His timing, whether we feel like it or not. And that’s what David does here.

He expressed this feeling of distance. Why have you abandoned me? and yet he goes back in a few verses later and refers back to how the nation of Israel at times has cried out to God and he’s never abandoned them or forsaken them yet.

And we see that we can, just like David, we can feel like we’re distant from God, and yet we know that if we’ve got our feelings over here saying one thing, and the promise of God’s Word over here saying another thing, one of these things doesn’t matter. our confidence rests in the promises of God, not in our feelings. So Israel looked at this story about David, at this song about David, not a story, but a song.

They looked at Psalm chapter 22, and they said this is a song about David’s suffering, but the nation of Israel largely interpreted it as applying to them. That David at that point becomes a stand-in for them, and what David experienced, Israel said that’s about us, we’re experiencing that as well. The nation of Israel said this is about our suffering because they had suffered tremendously.

And just like David, some of Israel’s suffering was because they were faithful to God, and they suffered for being faithful to God at the hands of people who despised God. And just like David, some of their suffering was because they had been unfaithful to God. And we find the same thing to be true in our lives.

You know, a lot of times we’ll look at bad things happening to us and, Well, if I was in the middle of God’s will, this wouldn’t be happening. Go tell that story to anybody in Fox’s book of martyrs. They will tell you that’s not exactly the case.

Sometimes we suffer because we’re in the middle of God’s will. Sometimes we suffer because we have sinned against God. Sometimes we suffer just because we live in a fallen world and suffering is part of the package.

But Israel had suffered tremendously. You go back through their history, there was slavery, they were being attacked constantly by people on all sides, they were taken into exile, they were invaded, I don’t know how many times. The whole Old Testament is one story after another of the suffering of Israel, and yet in all of these circumstances we see God never leaving or forsaking them no matter how they felt.

God was faithful to His promises. and so not only would they see a song like this even though they recognize that it’s about David they’d say this applies to us as well and even though we’ve had these times of suffering and we felt distant from God we have his promise that he’s always here with us we know that he’ll never forget us in our suffering and Israel for as many times as they had suffered they had also seen God triumph over that suffering because there was not a time of exile that God did not bring them back from. You go through the Old Testament, there was not a time of slavery that God did not liberate them.

There was not an invasion that God did not eventually repel and restore them into the land. God had been faithful to them, and God had had the ultimate triumph in every situation, every circumstance of suffering that Israel had experienced. And Israel had to recognize, just like David, that even though sometimes we feel like God is not listening, God is not paying attention, God does not have a plan, that God said he does.

And what he said matters far more than what we feel about it. And I want to be clear here too, when I’m talking about the nation of Israel, you know, God triumphed in every event of their suffering. That doesn’t mean that things worked out perfectly for every individual in Israel.

There were some people who died in those invasions. There were some people who never saw liberation from slavery. This is not to say that we will never have problems as Christians.

All right? It’s not to say that people in Israel would never have problems as long as God was watching over them. Of course they did.

We’re just talking about God’s promise to the nation of Israel that he would never forget them, that he would never leave them, and that he had a plan for them. So they understood this as a story about their suffering, and ultimately you read down further in chapter 22 than what we have time to today, They recognized that God would ultimately triumph in the midst of their suffering. But there’s an additional layer of meaning to this.

That they couldn’t see and that we can see, not because we’re more brilliant than they are, but we have the benefit of hindsight. And we can see how this was fulfilled. We can see how this illustrates not only that God has a plan in the midst of our suffering, but that God was working that plan all throughout David’s suffering and all throughout Israel’s suffering.

because ultimately to deal with their greatest problem, God was going to bring somebody from the nation of Israel and from the house and lineage of David to come and suffer for them for their suffering. And that’s really the ultimate fulfillment of what it talks about here in Psalm 22. God’s answer to Israel’s suffering was to send Jesus to suffer on their behalf.

Now that didn’t mean they didn’t suffer. That didn’t mean that their suffering was imaginary. What it means is God, through the suffering of Jesus, redeemed their suffering and gave it a purpose and used it in His plan to bring an ultimate triumph over sin.

Israel, as we’ve talked about, felt forsaken. Verses 1 and 2 indicate this feeling of forsakenness, this feeling of abandonment. Verse 1 says, My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

So when Israel felt forsaken, so did Jesus. If you go to Matthew 27, 46, you can turn there if you want, or it’s a familiar passage to many of us. It says about three in the afternoon, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

Or forsaken, some of your Bibles may say. They felt forsaken in their suffering. So did Jesus.

Jesus felt forsaken. He felt abandoned, felt abandoned by the Father when he came to suffer on their behalf. And this has puzzled a lot of people for a lot of years, and I’ll admit I’ve kind of struggled with understanding that.

How does God feel disconnected from God? How does that work. You know, the Father and the Son feeling disconnected from each other.

What I understand this to mean is Jesus took the full weight of our sin on himself and for the first time would have experienced what that separation felt like because now sin is in the way. Just like our sin stands between us and that relationship with God, that sin is a barrier between us and God. Jesus took that sin on himself and suddenly there’s a barrier between him and the holiness of the father.

It doesn’t mean that Jesus himself was a sinner. He was not. What it means is Jesus bore the consequences of our sin.

And I think in that moment, he felt the effects of that separation. So Israel felt forsaken. So did Jesus when he came to die for them.

They felt the weight of their sin. We see this in verse six, where David wrote, I am a worm and not a man. Now, we need to be careful.

This is not a blasphemous thing about Jesus that, oh, we’re calling him less than a man. It’s not describing what David was or what Jesus became. It’s describing how they were treated.

Because if you read it in conjunction with the rest of the verse, I’m a worm and not a man, scorned by mankind and despised by people. Everyone who sees me mocks me. It’s talking here about the way that he was treated and what he felt.

But I discovered something else about this word, this word in Hebrew that’s translated worm here. And again, I’m not a Hebrew expert. But when I was reading about this word, several sources said that it described a crimson red color.

It’s a word that means a worm, but it’s also a word that means a crimson red color. And several people wrote that it was a word that indicated blood guilt, a sense of guiltiness. So in saying I’m a worm, what he’s talking about is feeling the full weight of sin and being treated as a sinner, being treated as guilty, being treated.

Do you ever feel like you’re the scapegoat of something? Like some people think everything’s always your fault? I know people who never want to take responsibility for their choices.

They always want to make it somebody else’s fault. Don’t be that person either. Have you ever felt that feeling like everything I do is wrong and everybody just is mad at me?

I think we all at some point in our lives feel that way. Now take that and magnify it. I feel the weight of all this sin I feel the weight of all this shame I feel it when he says I am a worm and not a man it’s not saying that Jesus or David either one literally turned into something less than a human being it’s describing the weight of this sin and the weight of the guilt of this sin so David felt this way and Israel felt this way but more importantly Jesus felt this way when he took responsibility for their sins.

2 Corinthians tells us that God made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Jesus had no sin of his own, but the Father made him to become sin. In other words, the Father put the full weight of our sins.

You take all the sin off of our shoulders, collectively, and you put it right there on Jesus Christ, and that’s what he was struggling under the weight of. I think even more than the cross that he carried. He was struggling under the weight of that sin.

When he says, I’m a worm and not a man, it’s because he felt the full weight of that sin for them. And they talk in this passage, talks about David being mocked and Israel feeling like they were mocked. They were mocked.

The countries around them were constantly mocking them and mocking God, but you know what? Jesus experienced the same thing. They were mocked, so was Jesus.

in Matthew 27 there are a couple of examples of that one verse says the people knelt down before him and mocked him crying out hail king of the jews now they didn’t mean that with any sincerity oh my goodness it’s the king of the jews no they were mocking they were mocking like when one when one of my kids will get demanding and I’ll say oh right this minute your majesty do I really think they’re the king of anything? Maybe the king of being demanding or queen of being demanding. Oh, right away, your majesty.

It’s kind of a little bit of a mocking tone. They were mocking Jesus. That’s why they’d put him on the cross because of this claim of being king of the Jews.

And so they were mocking him for it. And verse 39 of Matthew 27 said, those who passed by were yelling insults at him shaking their heads. Now there may be some kind of cultural significance to this, the idea of shaking their heads.

I couldn’t find it. All I can picture is them yelling. Have you ever seen these people that yell at each other in Walmart?

Or elsewhere. I just, I see it at Walmart because that’s what we have here in town. But people, I saw a lady yesterday yelling at one of her kids in Walmart and they get to go and they’ll just shake their head while they’re yelling the whole body.

That’s what I picture. I could be wrong in this, but that’s what I picture. They’re mocking Jesus, and they’re insulting Jesus, and they’re just getting into it so much, and they’re so angry, their heads are shaking.

All right? Jesus was mocked. The answer to Israel’s mocking was that Jesus was mocked too.

They were broken. Verses 14 and 15 talk about that they were broken. So was Jesus.

Now he was so broken in terms of a lack of strength and I’ve read the descriptions of the scourging that would have taken place before his crucifixion that already his the skin on his back would have been gone from the beating of the cat with the cat of nine tails. The skin on his back would have been gone. Some of the muscle would have already been ripped open.

You might have even been able to see some of the bone. Then being made to carry a wooden cross, Jesus was already running low on strength from a human perspective. Already running low on strength.

And so Mark chapter 15 tells us they forced a man coming in from the country to carry Jesus’s cross. It’s because Jesus didn’t have the strength at that point after being beaten the way he was to carry his cross up the hill. And we know that Jesus hung there on the cross for about six hours.

And it would have been exhausting for him. Because people, I always thought for years, and people still think this, that when you’re crucified, you die from loss of blood. Now that’s going to be a complicating factor.

In the case for Christ, they talk about hypovolemic shock, low blood pressure from loss of blood. But what actually kills you in crucifixion is suffocation. From being put in this stress position like this, and he would have had to pull up for six hours for every breath he took.

He’s going to be worn out. He’s going to be exhausted, have no strength left. He’s in a desperate situation.

They beat him severely. They drove nails through his hands. By the way, in their culture, to describe the hand, you could also include the wrist. The nail would have been driven through the wrist where it could hold.

That’s not a contradiction with the Bible. They would have described that as part of the hand. he would have been nailed through this area and through his feet he’d been beaten severely he’d been made to lug that cross I know that by the time he got to where his death was approaching Jesus was a broken man in every physical sense of the word but when Israel felt like they were broken when they felt like they had no strength left in their suffering Jesus was broken for them they were surrounded by evildoers so was Jesus.

There were the mobs of the angry people. The Roman soldiers were there, the thieves who were crucified on either side of him. He was surrounded by evil people just as they were.

They were brutalized. Verse 17 talks about being able to count all my bones. The people look and stare at them.

They were brutalized. So was Jesus. Not only would his bones, some of them had been laid bare by the scourging, like I said, but we also know that in fulfillment of prophecy, not one of them was broken, John 19 tells us.

He was beaten as brutally as they could without immediately killing him because they wanted to prolong the suffering. Israel, they described being robbed in verse 18. They divided my garments and cast lots among them.

Mark 15 tells us of Jesus. They crucified him and divided his clothes, casting lots for them to decide what each would get. So we need to understand that as much as this passage describes David, or as much as it describes the nation of Israel, it also describes how Jesus would suffer on their behalf so that their sins could be forgiven.

That God’s plan was not just for David to suffer, it was not just for Israel to suffer, but through their suffering, He would bring a Messiah into the world who would come from the nation of Israel and from the house and lineage of David to come and be the sacrifice for their sins. Their suffering had a purpose, and it was to lead to the one who would suffer for them the ultimate suffering so that they could experience God’s ultimate triumph over sin. And the good news, the good news in all of this, is that that forgiveness is not just available to the nation of Israel, that forgiveness is available to all of us because Jesus suffered on our behalf too.

When he cried out, just like this passage says, My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? When Jesus was mocked, just as it describes in the middle of this passage, when Jesus’ strength was poured out, when his heart melted like wax within him, when he was surrounded by evildoers, when they did the indignity of taking what little he had and gambling for it, When Jesus suffered all the things that are described here in chapter 22, a thousand years before they happened, Jesus suffered them a thousand years after they were described. He did that for the nation of Israel, and He did it for us so that we could be forgiven.

He died to pay for our sins. And we need to understand, too, that if we’re in those times of suffering, we feel alienated from God, estranged from God, separated from God. The biggest cause of that feeling, I mean, sometimes we feel that way just because we feel that way.

But the big cause of that, what really causes that feeling is our sin. Because our sin has separated us from Him. Our sin has separated us from God.

Jesus Christ came to die on the cross to fulfill God’s plans that He’d had for thousands of years so that our sins could be forgiven. You and I could never earn our forgiveness. We could never, ever, ever do enough to get ourselves right with God.

So Jesus came and He took responsibility for the sins on Himself. That’s why He bore that sin. That’s why He took the full weight of it.

It was for us because we couldn’t do anything about it. And He took responsibility for those sins and He was nailed to the cross in our place. It should have been us.

And He was mocked and He was scourged and He suffered to pay for our sins. so that we could be forgiven. It’s been God’s plan all along.

God can also use suffering in our lives as part of His plan to bring us or to bring others to Jesus. So this morning, if you’re suffering, especially if you’re struggling with that feeling of being distant from God, you know you’re not right with God, you know you’ve sinned against Him, You feel like He could never love you. You feel like He could never forgive you for what you’ve done.

You feel like no matter what I do, I can’t be right with God. You’re absolutely right. No matter what you do, you can’t be right with God.

Jesus paid for your sins so that you could be. And it wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a coincidence.

It wasn’t a moment where something happened and God said, well, didn’t see that coming, but I guess I can use this. No, it was God’s plan all along. he told us about it a thousand years before it happened and he worked day in and day out to bring all of these plans to fruition so that salvation could be provided in Jesus Christ and so that we could still be forgiven today