Psalm 22

Yet You are holy…, 22:3a

From the anguish of despair and crucifixion to victory and praise, Psalm 22 stands with Isaiah 53 as a pillar bearing testimony to the love of God in Christ manifested in the Cross and Resurrection. They are double rainbows, beginning in the lives of David and Isaiah, arching upward into the prophetic heavens and reaching downward atop a hill outside Jerusalem known as Calvary and Golgotha, into the earth on Good Friday and out of the earth on Easter morning.

Psalm 22 begins: My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Far from my deliverance are the words of my groaning. O my God, I cry by day, but You do not answer; and by night, but I have no rest. Yet You are holy…

In the midst of apparent abandonment King David worships Yahweh; in the midst of the mystery of the Cross Jesus Christ worships His Father, He worships our God.

We have not only been called to contemplate Christ’s sufferings, we have been called to share His sufferings, and in that calling we have been called to worship our Father. Participation in the sufferings of Christ is a key theme throughout the New Testament, yet it is a theme we ignore and gloss over.

If we look at the Cross afar off on this Good Friday we will live lives of safety; but Christ bids us embrace the Cross, to follow Him in the fellowship of His sufferings, to joyfully and in worship lay down our lives for Him and others, to know His sufferings as a way of life in order that we might be transformed into His image and be broken bread and poured out wine for others.

Paul writes in Philippians Chapter 3: That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship [communion] of His sufferings, being conformed to His death…

Yet You are holy…