The following comes from Hal Lindsey's book "The Promise of Bible Prophecy."
"Perhaps no other statement that Jesus made has provoked more curiosity and controversy than His cry from the cross, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me"? (Matthew 27:46)
I don't believe Jesus asked the question because He didn't know the answer. It's that he wanted us to find out what it was, and sending us back to David's prophetic Psalm from where it is quoted, was a good place to begin.
The Psalms make many predictions concerning the Messiah but the clearest and most graphic of these is Psalm 22. King David wrote this around 1000 B.C., yet the circumstances described in this Psalm don't fit anything that ever happened in the life of David himself as so many of his other Psalms do. David ruled the most powerful kingdom of his day and yet never fell into his enemies' hands even during his darkest times, as this Psalm describes of it's central figure. David died a peaceful death in old age too, while this personage in Psalm 22 dies in great suffering and humiliation.
What we have before us in Psalm 22, is a very personal prophecy of how Messiah felt in His sufferings and how He viewed the things going on around Him. David, in the power of the Spirit, speaks as if he were the Messiah, feeling His emotions and discouragement as if they were his own.
In one of the most amazing usages of prophecy anywhere in literature, David describes in unbelievably realistic terms the plight of one going through the torture of crucifixion. Yet, crucifixion was a Phoenician and Roman custom unknown to the Jews until approximately 400 years after David wrote this Psalm...
Listen to the description of the actual sufferings which happened to Jesus on the cross, 1000 years after the Psalmist described it:
"I am poured out like water..." This describes Jesus' heavy perspiration as He suffered in the intense Middle-Eastern sun.
"All My bones are out of joint..." This is one of the most excruciating results of hanging suspended by outstretched arms. The muscles fatigue and stretch. The bones are pulled out of joint by the persons own weight.
"My heart is like wax, it is melted into My bowels..." Many feel that Jesus' heart ruptured from the stress and the pericardial sack surrounding the heart filled with blood.
"My strength is dried up like a fragment of pottery, and My tongue cleaves to My jaws..." This describes the horrible thirst from dehydration and lack of water in the scorching sun. In Psalm 69:21 this thirst is specifically predicted, "...for My thirst they gave Me vinegar to drink."
"They pierced My hands and feet" Nothing in ancient Jewish means of punishment involved the piercing of hands and feet. The Jews' main means of execution was stoning. And yet, here is the Messiah, saying through David's pen, that one day His hands and feet would be pierced.
In some ways, the most unusual prediction in Psalm 22 is this, "They divide My garments among them and for My clothing they cast lots" (verse 18). This seemingly insignificant detail was thrown in by the Psalmist at the instruction of the Spirit of God. Little did the Roman soldiers know the drama they were engulfed in when they decided to gamble for Jesus' garment. They were no students of Jewish prophecy and yet as they knelt there, indifferently shooting dice at the foot of the cross in fulfillment of prophecy, above them on the cross, the eternal destiny of mankind was being settled (John 19:23-24).
I'm reminded here of the question posed by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews so long ago, "What makes us think that we can escape if we are indifferent to this great salvation announced by the Lord Jesus Himself, and passed on to us by those who heard Him speak?" (Hebrews 2:3)"
By George Konig
April 16, 2006
www.georgekonig.org
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