Why Read the Old Testament? (9)

 

Dear Friend,

 

Having pondered Psalm 22:1 – 21, let’s now turn our attention to the second section of Psalm 22, verses 22 – 31, we might call this “the rest of the story.” Let’s keep in mind that when Jesus cries, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” on the Cross, that He is invoking ALL of Psalm 22.

 

While verses 1 – 21 look pretty bleak, there is victory to come; it begins with verse 22:

 

“I will tell of Your name to My brethren; in the midst of the assembly I will praise You.”

 

There is a sense in which we could call Psalm 22:22 the core of the Gospel, for it is the Great Story of Redemption, the Greatest Rescue Story Ever Told. It ushers us into the Holy of Holies of John 17, as well as that Grand Proclamation of Revelation 21:7, “He who overcomes will inherit these things, and I will be his God and he will be My son.”

 

I will venture so far as to say that our failure to “see” Psalm 22:22 and the glorious message it proclaims is at the root of our anemic spiritual lives, our failure to witness, and our living beneath the inheritance which we have in our Lord Jesus Christ.

 

To begin, the proclamation that “I will tell of You name to My brethren; in the midst of the assembly I will praise you,” indicates that the Suffering One of verses 1 – 21 will come out of His suffering proclaiming the Name of Yahweh to His brothers and sisters. This is a cry of victory!

 

Then in verse 23 is the exhortation that the People of God, those who fear Him, are to praise Him. Why? “For He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, nor has He hidden His face from Him; but when He cried to Him for help, He heard.” (Verse 24).

 

In other words, as we read verse 24 we see that verses 1 – 21 are not the entire story, to be sure they are critical to the story, but they are not the entire story. Verse 24 tells us that, despite appearances, the Father did not “hide His face from Him; but when He cried to Him for help, He heard.”

 

The Cross was not the end of the story, for Easter was on its way. But even on the Cross…and we must not miss this…there is victory, for Jesus cries, “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit,” (Luke 23:46; Ps. 31:5), and “It is finished!” (John 19:30).

 

In Ps. 22:25 we see the Suffering One, now the Victorious One, again with His People – the Great Assembly.

 

Then in verses 26 – 31 we see the fruit of the Suffering One (John 12:24) as the Gospel spreads across the earth and all the families of the peoples worship God, declaring His righteousness – for we see the righteousness of God in God’s accepting the offering of the Suffering One, the Lamb of God.

 

Therefore, when Jesus cries, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me?” He is not only acknowledging and entering into Psalm 22:1 – 21, He is also declaring Psalm 22:22 – 31 as a glorious accomplished reality, as the fruit of the Cross, the fruit of His suffering, the assured outcome of those terrible and unfathomable hours on the Cross. (Hebrews 12:2)

 

But unless we read the Old Testament we will not see this, for we will have nothing to see. Also, if we primarily view the Old Testament as a series of isolated Messianic texts, thereby failing to see that the entire Old Testament is Messianic, we will not “see” Psalm 22, we will only see one verse of the Psalm without true context. We will not “see” that the cry of verse 1 invokes the entire Psalm with its glorious victory…a victory that includes us.

 

As we think about these things, let’s not forget that we are working with Luke 24:26, where Jesus asks, “Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?”

 

In Psalm 22 we see Christ suffering and entering into His glory.

 

In our next reflection, the Lord willing, I want us to return to Psalm 22:22 – for there are riches beyond measure in Christ in His proclamation.

 

How might Hebrews Chapter 2 help us see these riches?

 

Why Read the Old Testament? (8)

Dear Friend,

 

When Jesus cries, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?”, He is not only expressing His immediate Incarnational suffering with its deep and veiled mystery of sacrificial atonement, but He is also proclaiming His resurrection. Not only is He proclaiming His resurrection, but He is proclaiming our sonship in Him and the proclamation of the Gospel to all the peoples of the earth. He is also proclaiming the Eschaton, the gathering up of all things into Himself to the glory of the Father.

 

Isn’t this obvious?

 

This should be as obvious as it would have once been that when I say, “When in the course of human events,” or “We hold these truths to be self – evident, that all men are created equal,” that I am invoking the American Declaration of Independence and its historical context. But of course, neither is obvious today. What have we come to?

 

If I do not read the Old Testament, then when I read Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34, the cry of Jesus will be subject to my own thoughts and feelings and I will have only the immediate Biblical context in which to read it.

 

If I isolate certain Old Testament passages as Messianic, reading them primarily with an evidentiary lens, failing to read and see the Old Testament as holistically Messianic – then I will miss the glorious portrayal of the Firstborn Son of God in Jesus’ cry, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” I will fail to see the Son in His glory because I do not know and “see” Psalm 22, I see only one verse.

 

Whether I do not read the Old Testament because I think it irrelevant, or whether I primarily read it in an evidentiary fashion, focusing on isolated texts – I am rejecting the full revelation of Jesus Christ as well as the way that Jesus and the Apostles read and taught the Old Testament, with Jesus being the hermeneutic, the lens through which we see all Scripture, the focal point of all Scripture. Do we forget that Christianity should be Jesus Christ, and that Jesus Christ should certainly be Christianity?

 

Now then, what do you see when you read Psalm 22:1 – 21? What do you see when you read this passage alongside all four depictions of the crucifixion in the Gospels? Please take the time to do this – after all, this is the portrayal of the Crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ, is it too much to ask us to enter into the deepest mystery of the cosmos, the central point in the history of humanity, the glory of Divinity?  

 

Please read and reread Psalm 22:1 – 21, and then carefully read each Gospel account of the Crucifixion – looking at the Psalm and then the Gospel each time. What do you see?

 

How might you explain what you see to others?

 

I am thinking right now of the African – American spiritual, “Where You There When They Crucified My Lord?”

 

As you work through Psalm 22:1 – 21 and the four Gospel passages of the Crucifixion, how would you answer the question?

 

Where you there?

Why Read the Old Testament? (7)

Dear Friend,

 

Now let’s ponder Psalm 22 as it relates to Luke 24:26, “Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?”

 

When we read Jesus’ cry, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Mt. 27:46; Mk, 15:34), what do we think? What do we see?

 

At one level, we may read this cry as a Messianic fulfillment of Psalm 22. That is, we can say that Psalm 22 is a prophecy of the Messiah’s death by crucifixion. This is like looking at Micah 5:2 and seeing it as a prophecy of the Messiah’s birth in Bethlehem. When we look at passages such as Micah 5:2 and Psalm 22 in this fashion we are looking at them as evidence that Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecies and that therefore Jesus must be the Messiah, the Christ.

 

I have seen lists of Old Testament verses that Jesus fulfilled and that are used as evidence that Jesus is the Messiah. Is this the best way to read the Old Testament? Is this even reading the Old Testament, or is it rather using the Old Testament, picking this verse and that verse, or at times using elements of this extended passage or that passage (such as Psalm 22 or Isaiah 53)? How did Jesus and the Apostles read and “see” the Old Testament?

 

Another way to read Jesus’ cry, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” is to read it theologically. We ought to be comfortable with the words “theology” and “theological” because they have to do with how we think about God, how we “see” God, how we read the Word of God, how we share our understanding of God with others and how we receive the understanding of God that others share with us.

 

We all do theology, whether we want to use the word theology or not. Our theology may be slovenly or it may be well formed, it may be thoughtful or it may depend on our changeable feelings, it may be childish or it may reflect maturity – it may be built upon a solid foundation or upon shifting sand.

 

This cry of Jesus on the Cross, in the context of darkness enveloping the land, speaks to us of the mystery of the Atonement, of the sacrifice of the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29, 36; Rev. Chapter 5). Veiled from our view is the holy and terrible transaction of which we read in 2 Corinthians 5:21:

 

“He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him."

 

Yet, there is more to see, more to see theologically, more to see holistically. If we limit our reading of Psalm 22 to the evidentiary (in the usual sense of the word) we have not read the Old Testament as Jesus and the Apostles read it, we have not taught it as they taught it.

 

For when Jesus cries, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” He is invoking not simply Psalm 22:1, He is invoking the entirety of Psalm 22 – He is calling to mind all of Psalm 22 – and if we do not know the entire Psalm we will not experience what Jesus is doing – and if we are content in not knowing the entire Psalm then we will never experience the depth and breath and height of the cry, “My God, My God.”

 

If we only read the Old Testament in an evidentiary fashion, we will not understand what Luke means when he writes, “Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures.” (Luke 24:27). That is, if we isolate certain Old Testament passages as “Messianic” rather than seeing the entire Old Testament as Messianic, we will miss so much of Jesus Christ in both the Old and New Testaments that we will fail to have a Biblical interpretive lens for all Scripture – for that lens is Jesus Christ, always Jesus Christ. Jesus must always be our hermeneutic.

 

Let’s try to illustrate this.

 

If I say, “When in the course of human events,” or “We hold these truths to be self – evident, that all men are created equal,” what am I doing? I am invoking the American Declaration of Independence. In previous generations there would have been a reasonable expectation that my listeners would have known both the text of the document and the historical context of the document. I would not have needed to take the time to read the entire document or to set the historical context of the document, for my audience – from farmers to shopkeepers to doctors to mechanics - would have understood the basics of the Declaration of Independence and the historical context surrounding the document.

 

Similarly, if I say, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union,” or “Fourscore and twenty years ago,” or “Yesterday, December 7, 1941,” or “I have a dream,” or “Ask not what your country can do for you,” there would have been a time when the average American would have immediately known that I was invoking the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, the Day of Infamy speech, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial, and John Kenney’s inaugural address – and they would have known the historical contexts – they would have known the stories and the substance of the documents.

 

One morning around 2018 I was in an adult Sunday school class that was in the book of Exodus. The passage that morning was Chapter 12, the Passover. The Sunday school curriculum was published by a denomination that professed a high view of Scripture, and this series of lessons was written by a Ph.D. within the denomination. As I read the Sunday school material I was shocked that there was no mention of Jesus as our Passover Lamb (1 Cor. 5:7). I listened to the class discussion, hoping that someone would mention Jesus, expecting that someone would mention Jesus, anticipating that someone would mention Jesus. After all, the leaders of the congregation were in the class. After all, most members of the class had been in the congregation for years and years. After all, the pastors who had preceded me had loved Jesus and the Bible.

 

Finally, when it became apparent that no one saw Jesus and the Gospel in Exodus Chapter 12, I intervened as pastor and reset the lesson – focusing on Jesus. Of course, I suppose we could say that there was a greater lesson to be learned – that we had become so utterly dumb with respect to the Bible that we could no longer see Jesus…but I think that lesson passed us by.

 

Why should we read the Old Testament? So that we may see Jesus as Jesus chooses to reveal Himself.

 

The Lord willing, we’ll continue with Psalm 22 in our next reflection.