Sermon Tone Analysis

Prayer

Today, we will be looking at a passage of Scripture in the New Testament and flipping back and forth to the Old.

So go ahead and turn with me to Psalm 22 but keep your finger here in Matthew 27.

I want to talk to you today about death scenes.

You know the scenes from every epic movie where the person dies.

We love and hate those scenes because they reveal something to us.

We love them for the heroism and the greatness of them, especially when the character responds well.

But we hate them because they seem unfair, especially when the character responds poorly.

Our secular culture genuinely does not know what to do with death.

It’s a unicorn for them.

They don’t know how to handle it and they don’t know how to process it.

Because in their vision of the world, everything is about progress.

So there to be an end to the progress is incomprehensible.

There is a reality that I want each of us to consider today: everyone of us will have a death scene in our story.

YOU WILL DIE.

There will come a day, whether it is 80 years from now or tomorrow, that death will come.

So a death scene is inevitable.

And how we live today is on par for how our death scene will go.

This is how Spurgeon describes Psalm 22.

It is the photograph of our Lord’s saddest hours, the record of his dying words, the container of his last tears, the memorial of his expiring joys.

David and his afflictions may be here in a very modified sense, but, as the star is concealed by the light of the sun, he who sees Jesus will probably neither see nor care to see David.…

We should read reverently, putting off our shoes from off our feet, as Moses did at the burning bush, for if there be holy ground anywhere in Scripture, it is in this Psalm”

This Psalm is mentioned or alluded to twenty times in the New Testament.

The authors of the New Testament saw this Psalm as fundamental to the outworking of Jesus’ life, death, burial, and resurrection.

In Acts 2, Peter in defending the resurrection and speaking of David says this...

Peter is saying that David prophesied about the coming Messiah.

He prophesied about the Anointed One that he would die.

And the way that he would sit on His throne forever was by being raised from the dead.

Psalm 22:1–2 (NKJV)

My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?

The Forsaken Worm (v.

1-11)

These first verses of Psalm 22 are the words that Jesus says from the cross.

Now as we consider this Psalm, I would argue that Jesus was not just thinking about these words while he was on the cross.

But he had the entirety of this Psalm in his mind as he prayed.

Now throughout this Psalm we will oscillate between David’s context and Jesus’ context.

David is speaking here of a time when he was pressed in by suffering.

He is experiencing suffering to the point of saying, “Why are you forsaking me?”

This is not the cry of someone who is having a lapse of faith.

David is NOT backsliding here.

He doesn’t have a broken relationship with the LORD.

This is the cry of someone who is disoriented to the presence of God.

David is disoriented from God’s protective presence.

All of us have a death bed scene.

Every single one of us will one day have a moment in time which will be our last.

But we all everyday have mini-death bed scenes.

Commentary on the Book of Psalms (Psalm 22)

There is not one of the godly who does not daily experience in himself the same thing.

According to the judgment of the flesh, he thinks he is cast off and forsaken by God, while he apprehends by faith the grace of God, which is hidden from the eye of sense and reason; and thus it comes to pass, that contrary affections are mingled and interwoven in the prayers of the faithful.

What Calvin is talking about is the agony and anguish which comes from living in a fallen world.

Moments where we are disoriented from the presence of God.

Moments where we doubt and wonder if God has forsaken us.

Post-Eden Experience

We have many other Psalms which would focus on David’s sin, like Psalm 51, but thats not what David is doing here.

He is focusing on the results of his sin.

Agony & Anguish

David is expressing in poetic form in Psalm 22, the agony and anguish of the results of the fall.

The results of the fall which create a separation from God’s presence.

David is not highlighting a specific sin, rather he is focusing on the results of sin.

The extreme physical and mental suffering which comes as a result of sin.

We as believers need this Psalm.

We need it because it gives language and categories for us to express our grief and anguish.

Since the fall of man, the human experience is one of experiencing grief and anguish.

And this cry we see from David, and then we see exampled in Christ on the cross is the cry of faith.

Now in spite of how David is feeling, listen to what he reminds himself.

David reminds Himself of the way that the people of Israel have trusted God in the past.

He looks back and remembers all of the ways that God has delivered His people in the past.

Past Deliverances

David is bolstering his faith in the middle of a terrifying trial.

He feels as though the Lord has forsaken him altogether.

“You are Holy”

He reminds himself first of the character of God.

That God is not like us.

He is altogether separate.

“Our fathers trusted..”

Secondly he reminds himself of all that God has done.

David then returns to his current situation...

What does David mean by referring to himself as “a worm”?

When David says that he is a worm, he means that he is the lowliest of all the creatures.

So low that he considered himself a worm.

A creature that humanity walks over and its residence is in the earth.

Notice that it is his trust in the Lord which makes him the object of mockery.

Scorned Worm

Now notice back in the gospels the way the crowds regarded Jesus hanging on the cross.

You would think these crowds were intentionally quoting from Psalm 22.

What we see David experience in Psalm 22, is realized and fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

He experienced the agony and the anguish that came from our sins being placed upon Him.

He experienced the forsakenness of being cut off from the Father because of sin.

Being despised and rejected on behalf of sinners.

Since Christ has been forsaken, we shall be accepted!

On the cross, we see Jesus Christ forsaken by his friends.

But more importantly we see Jesus actually becoming a curse for me and you.

Christian

“The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”

Or as Isaiah has said...

This Anointed One, this Messiah, has opened the way to God by becoming a curse for us.

Non-Christian

As you consider your own death bed experience, what comes to your mind?

What defense will you have when you stand before God?

Now David goes on and remembers how the Lord has dealt kindly with him personally.

David is saying that the Lord is the ONE who thrust him from his mother and since the time he was a baby, he trusted the LORD.