Psalms Lesson 5

Psalm 13 – Introduction to Psalm 22

 

Tonight we are working with Psalm 13, and again this is an individual lament Psalm.  These are the parts of an individual lament Psalm: the address, the lament, the petition, and the praise section, and somewhere in there you’ll find a trust section tacked in.  But those five parts will always be found in an individual lament Psalm.  And individual lament Psalm, obviously is written by an individual for an individual in an individual situation, and it’s a lament Psalm rather than a praise Psalm because the weight of the content favors the lament over the praise section.  In other words, visualize a see-saw and whichever end of the see-saw is heaviest, that makes whether it’s a lament or whether it is a praise Psalm. 

 

Again we come to a lament, and in this lament Psalm we have emphasis, of course, on David’s problem, not on the praise.  Let’s look at Psalm 13 and see if we can apply these categories.  This is a nice small Psalm, in direct contrast to the Psalm that we’re going to start tonight and be working on for the next few weeks, but let’s do Psalm 13 and look at the individual sections.  What are some guesses on the address part?  Verse 1 is usually a good guess, this is where the address is always, but the problem here, as you see, we have the same kind of thing we had in some of the other Psalms and that is the mix between the address and the lament.  This Psalm is an extremely short Psalm and you therefore would expect that some of these sections are going to be compressed, and so you can see verse 2, it would be the lament.  What verses would you find in the petition? Verses 3 and 4.  Now the praise section? I hear a division of opinion between verses

 5 and 6 and verse 6 alone.  There is an element of truth to both sides. 

 

Can anyone make the division with greater finesse?  [someone answers]  Why do you like to divide verse 5.  The first half is trust.  Besides the verb “trust” what other emphasis do you find in verse 5 that would suggest that this is a trust section?  [someone says but].  But, okay, anytime you see “now,” “but” or “but now” you’re usually looking at a section of the trust.  In other words, the trust is put in there and it’s a break.  In other words, you’ve been lament, lament, lament, lament, oh my problem, oh my problem, oh my problem, bang, you’re over now to God’s grace and His faithfulness, I am going to trust in Him.  That’s the switch over.

 

Let’s see if we can outline this Psalm a little bit.  If you were to outline this, and again by outline think in terms of an entire sentence, subject and predicate, to summarize the content of the though, how would be the most logical places of division in the Psalm.  Where would you make your divisions if you were to outline this thing?  [someone says 2-3] Between 2 and 3, how does that strike the rest of you, between verses 2 and 3.  We see nods and then we see blank expressions.  Any other place where you can see a break, just a natural break in the flow of thought.  Between 4 and 5?  How does that grab you?  Okay, between 4 and 5; this Psalm breaks down quite nicely this way, and how would you summarize the thought of verses 1 and 2?  [someone says something] Okay, David is asking the Lord how long will He allow this to go on, his enemies to triumph over him.  How long must he endure this. 

 

Then how would you summarize verses 3 and 4?  [someone says something] All right, David petitions the Lord to consider his situation and he uses as his tool, remember the idea of a Jew making a prayer and he’s always Jewing God, and this is a feature to Old Testament prayers that often Christians are very shy about doing.  But if you notice it’s a consistent feature of these Psalms, that the expression you hear, and it’s usually used in an off-color sense, but it has Biblical support, that you Jew God out of answered prayer, and here you see him putting leverage, you might say, on God. 

 

Okay, how would you summarize verses 5-6?  [someone says something]  David has absolute trust that God… what?  Absolute trust but what is he trusting in, can you specifically tie it down?  [some­­­­one answers] All right, specific trust that God will not permit his enemies to overtake him. 

 

All right, those are the three parts to the Psalm and now we can go through it verse by verse.  In verse 1, let’s come back to this first section, this is the complaint or the address, and so on, David complains about God’s lack of deliverance from his enemies.  “How long will You forget me, O LORD? Forever?  How long will You hide Your face from me? [2] How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? How long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?”  In the historical situation who were David’s enemies.  We haven’t gone through 1 Samuel but historically can some of you guess at some of David’s enemies.  Saul and his goon squad that he had sent out to beat up David.  And his enemies actually were his own brethren.  His enemies were mostly Jewish people.  Now later on as king he had enemies that were the Gentiles.  But in verses 1 and 2 he’s largely talking about his enemies as far as his own brethren are concerned. 

 

Now the words “how long, wilt Thou forget me, O LORD?” and then I believe the King James has a question mark, and then it says, “Forever?”  Actually it should be “forever” tied into the same sentence; in other words, how long are you going to forget me Lord, forever?  Ever had that feeling?  David, apparently had no signs, that he sees, that God remembers him.  In other words, at this point David has only one thing going for him and that is the promise of God from the Word.  He has not confirmatory evidence in his experience that God is working in his life and that God is about to deliver him; all he has is the cold promise of the Word.  But he does not have, as it were, any warm hot experience to show that God is on His way of delivering him.  And so he makes this prayer, “How long will You hide Your face from me?” 

 

What do you again notice about this expression in verse 1 that should make you think of what we have covered time and time again about the concept of God and these intimate prayers of the Psalmist?  [someone answers] All right, God’s anger and in a larger sense, if God is angry then what kind of a God is God?  God is a personal God.  And again we’ll stop and pause and recall this to your mind, and throw it back to you, because over and over we have to bring this to mind, that our God is a personal God who gets angry at specifics we do.  Just as you cannot enter into a personal relationship with any other member of the human race without in that relationship running the risk that something you do, say or however you act is going to hack off the other person.  It is precisely the same thing in the Christian life.  This is why you can come to situations and a believer will come to you, oh, things were so much better before I became a Christian.  Exactly; now not on the eternal sense, but once you become a Christian you’re locked into a problem whether you know it or not. 

 

You are a member of God’s family and that means you’ve got a new Father.   Now you may have been raised in a situation where your father and mother didn’t lay the law down and didn’t demand, within the third divine institution any kind of discipline or maybe they overdid it; maybe they were too much the other way.  But whatever your background, when you come into the family of God, you come into a new household and you ought to start thinking of the Christian life as joining a new family, literally, which means you are now put under the authority of a new Father, and it therefore means He runs His household by His thumb; everything in that household is run by God Himself.  He is the perfect Father.  It doesn’t mean that God is a bully but it does mean that whereas before we were adopted into the family of God we could get away with raising hell and doing whatever else we like to do, once we are members of the family there’s a paddle hanging on the wall.  And the family is run according to different lines.  This means and explains why oftentimes believers, after they become believers, begin to have some problems in their life.  It’s because by grace God has begotten them, put them in His family and now He is, so to speak, every once in a while taking them out to the woodshed for a little operation. 

 

Now I don’t throw this out to show that God is always angry; I’m just saying that there is a certain character to His family which will be respected, period, over and out, no matter who you are, no matter who I am.  We’re in the family and we don’t have any say about how the family is run; He does.  So this is the thing, when he says thou “wilt hide Thou face from me,” it is a picture, a beautiful picture of God avoiding him.  Did you ever have somebody hide their face from you?  It doesn’t give you a real good feeling.  It’s a real thing…. it stimulates communication doesn’t it?  This is exactly what’s David is complaining about.  He is praying and he gets the thought that as he is praying God’s turning around, not looking at him; nobody’s listening up there.  Now obviously he’s not denying God’s omniscience, or His omnipresence, but he is saying that as far as God personally is concerned, he doesn’t wish to entertain David’s prayer request. 

 

So God has turned away.  And I want you to see the intensely personal vocabulary used in these Psalms. That word “face,” turn thy face is an intensely personal vocabulary.  I am convinced as Christians living in the last part of the 20th century that one of the central problems we face, and we have to fight this every day of our Christian life is that we drift, it’s like we’re in the middle of this tremendous stream, and we’re standing against the waters as they roar down the stream and the moment we start looking around and forgetting our footing, slowly the waters begin to push us down the stream and we have to fight to keep our footing against the stream of water.  And the stream of water at this point in the 20th century is that God is a mechanistic God; even Christians have this, oh yeah, God is personal, but… He’s about as personal as a computer operator.  In other words, if He sees something wrong He flips a few buttons, etc. and somehow down at the end of the line something drops out.  That is what I mean by Christians getting a mechanistic view of God.  This emphasis in verse 1, on the extreme personality of God, cannot be overdone in our generation. We have to, as it were, almost fight the other way, to make God so intensely personal that we fight against the whole culture that would say that God is a mechanistic God. 

 

Verse 2, “How long shall I take counsel in my soul,” and “shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily?”  Now last week we dealt with the imperfect, the Hebrew imperfect and we said this imperfect usually comes across in your English translation as a future tense, but what else do we say about the Hebrew imperfect?  That when you see a future tense in the text, what else can that tense mean, from certain situations?  Remember sometimes in the Psalm we have to flip back and forth between a future and what other example can this imperfect mean?  “May,” okay, the nuance of permission, these are nuances, and the verb can carry these nuances with it, so we can translate it… let’s experiment with different translations and see which one you think fits verse 2.  “How long may I take counsel in my soul?”  Now that doesn’t sound right, but are there any other kind of nuances that you can think of to a verb, besides the nuance of permission.  Can you think of another kind of nuance that you might carry with a verb, besides just permission?  Let’s try this, a nuance of obligation.  “How long must I take counsel in my soul?” Do you think that fits?  In other words, be flexible, don’t get stuck with a translation.  When you’re in Hebrew poetry the translation is flexible. That’s what I’m trying to show you here; it’s not like walking through the narrative, where the translation is pretty well fixed.  This is poetry and it can be flexible.  So when you see this, obviously the translator has had to choose for you, but don’t necessarily limit yourself just to him; whenever you see this, ask yourself, would it read more powerfully in verse 2 to say, “How long must I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily?”  And I think that nuance of obligation fits much better into the situation.  It’s a lament, it’s a complaint. 

 

[2b] “How long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?”  Again you might attach the nuance of obligation, or you could make it future.  “How long must my enemy be exalted over me,” probably better a future here, “How long shall my enemy be exalted over me.”  What do you notice about this lament, in verse 2, that we noticed back in Psalm 12.  Remember three things about a lament.  One of them is missing here: the first person, the second person and the third person.  Which ones are present in this lament?  Which ones are present here?  The first and third are mentioned, the second one, God, is not, but again if this is the lament and it’s tied in with the address, you’ve already got the second person in the address.  Do you see that?  The second person is already there up in the address, verse 1.  So, “How long shall I take counsel,” or “How long must I take counsel in my soul,” the idea here is that he is trying to understand why, why, why, why, and he can’t get to an answer.  This is an admission that he can’t get to an answer.  How long must this process go on. 

 

And while the internal process is going on, the first part of verse 2, what is the external situation, last part of verse 2.  Do you see the internal and the external, over and over here combined?  What in Christian experience would answer to the internal and the external of David.  Here’s David internal, and here’s David external?  What would be some things that you could think of that would answer to the internal in the Christian life that would be a cause of Christian lament in a similar situation?  Frustration, mental attitude problems, etc.  The internal would be basically the same, in my nephesh, in my mind, in my soul. 

 

Now, when you come to the external, however, we could have lots of things in the Christian life here, we could have bodily disease, we could have physical problems, we could have situations in life, financial problems, business problems, all sorts of things here, but do you notice how in verse 2, as always in the Psalms, the external situation is linked with the internal state.  Again, may I suggest this is a place in the 20th century where we are, as it were, fighting against the whole thrust of the stream, because the tendency in the 20th century is to fragment your life into compartments and say I’ve got my little compartment over here, my business, I’ve got my little compartment, my school system, and then I’ve got my spiritual life.  So what do we do?  We disconnect and unplug the whole business area, success or failure, we unplug the academic success or failure.  All these things are completely disconnected and unplugged from our spiritual condition.  Now that is not Biblical.  My point is read these Psalms and as we read them let the cleansing word purge out all the waste material of the 20th century atmosphere as it constantly infringes upon our brain.  You’ve got to forcibly get rid of this stuff because it just cripples you in your Christian life because it’s human viewpoint that enters and it just enters by osmosis.  All you have to do is kind of be in the room and it leaks in, and it’s the same thing spiritually that we have to always… just like Henry Morris [can’t understand words] the second law, the second law always works; if you are relatively well ordered all you have to do is do nothing and in a while you’ll be in chaos and a wreck; you can see it in your physical body and you can see it spiritually.  To gain spiritually always requires an active series of choices. 

 

All right, now we come to verses 3 and 4, David’s petition.  In David’s petition, again the first, second and third person, notice, “me,” first person, “O LORD my God” second person, verse 4, “Lest mine enemy,” third person.  So you have the first person, second person, third person all present in that petition.  “Consider and hear me, O LORD my God; lighten my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death.”  Now that is an idiom, which if you are studying and maybe you’re reading a Psalm by yourself and you come across something like that and you say “lighten my eyes,” don’t just read it over at forty miles an hour and say gee, that’s an interesting thought, “lighten my eyes,” what do you mean, take a flashlight and look at the eyelids.  What does “lighten my eyes” mean?  Don’t just read it over and think you know what it means, you don’t know what it means. 

 

I bet nobody in this room knows what it means.  [someone says something] Okay, illumination mentally and spiritually, but there is a way this expression is usually used, it’s connected with that truly, but there’s a specific section that this expression is used in and to see this, turn to 1 Samuel 14:27.  Spiritual illumination but I want you to notice, as always in the Old Testament that the spiritual is connected with the physical, linked, nephesh, spirit in body, therefore you can be influenced in your soul by physical deterioration as well as spiritual deterioration. 

 

1 Samuel 14:27 let’s read it.  “But Jonathan heard not when his father charged the people with the oath; wherefore, he put forth the end of the rod that was in his hand, and dipped it in an honey­comb, and put his hand to his mouth; and his eyes were enlightened.”  Now there’s the Hebrew expression.  Now in that context what does it mean?  What is it talking about that happened to Jonathan here.  [someone says something] Okay, he’s physically refreshed, he had a rise in blood sugar here, he took some fuel aboard, “and his eyes were enlightened,” and it’s an expression… by the way, let’s use our imagination, how do you think the expression got started among the Jewish people that always looked to visible signs?  [someone answers] It’s an empirical observation.  Do you see how many of these Hebrew idioms that start by simple, physical observation.  There’s nothing great esoteric metaphysical about this, it’s a common physical expression. 

 

All right, back to Psalm 13, he says in verse 3, “lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death.”  Now, what does this seem to suggest about the way this is used in Psalm 13?  Think of how it was used in 1 Samuel, “lighten mine eyes, lest” what happens?  What’s it obviously saying?  He dies, again we see something come up in the Psalms, a theme over and over, that these Psalms apparently were all written out of a very few circumstances in his life, where the pressure was really on David, and when it was really on him, he was just about to be killed physically.

 

Verse 4, “Lest mine enemy say,” now verse 4 connects probably how, his enemies would kill him.  “Lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him; and those who trouble me rejoice when I am moved.”  How does verse 4 act as a lever in prayer?  [someone answers] All right, David’s reputation is linked to God’s reputation, and if his enemies are going to prevail against him, what would that do to the promise that God had made to David about who was going to be king?  It would attack the immutability of God.  Let’s to back to the character of God; God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, God is omniscience, God is omnipresent, omnipotent, immutable, eternal.  Now if God is all these things, and Satan always wants to assassinate the character of God, if he can gain David and God by His immutability has made a promise, David, you shall live, and that promise is destroyed by the pressure of his enemies, that is a reflection on the attribute of immutability.  So therefore what has happened to the character of God in the process.  It’s been destroyed, hasn’t it; it’s been discredited. 

 

Now this, if you’re a smart Christian, this is why predestination should mean so much in your prayer life.  God has promised every Christian in Romans 8:19 that you will be “conformed to the image of His Son.”  That is a promise He makes to you about your life.  And if you are down in defeat, you’re just like David here; what does David say?  If I am allowed to fall, then God’s character is besmirched, it’s blotted out.  So therefore, when you claim victory and you ask God to provide you with needs, you can throw this promise back into God’s face and say now God, You promised to conform me to the person of Your Son; now the way I’m going I’m not being conformed to Your Son; the way I am in this particular situation is no testimony at all to Your work in my life; nobody sees it; now Father, You made a promise and now if that promise…

 

[tape turns] … he had to sire a son, he could commit the sin unto death too, but he had to sire a son before he did, and he had to sire the right son before he did.  But in our case you could argue, as the point was just raised, well what about the sin unto death, we could commit the sin unto death, which is when God physically removes us.  But even the sin unto death does what?  The sin unto death is to conform us to Christ.  Now how He changes up the scales, etc. we don’t know but here’s the interesting thing about the sin unto death; it’s very interesting when you study it out, and that is you have a believer going along in life and he may be on negative volition or some­thing, and gets into a situation, and God begins to discipline him, and begins to box him in, and he doesn’t like that, and so he says well, I’ve always got one out, the situation is going to get too bad, but I have always one card in my hand that I can play and that’s suicide.  But you know, the interesting thing about it is what does God have around him?  See, that doesn’t even work, because in the sin unto death, which it could be, in the sin unto death the believer goes face to face with the Lord, and he is evaluated and so forth, and meets the Lord at the bema seat, and so he’s got an experience ahead of him also. And besides, no believer, and you stop and think of this from the standpoint of eternal security and God’s sovereignty, do you realize that you can’t take your life unless God lets you and allows you to do it.  You may think you can try, but you’re not going to.  [someone says something]  All right, in some cases you can rebound out of it but apparently there are some cases where the person, like in Saul’s case, gets to a point where apparently he becomes so hardened that he just checks out.  But that is something that only God the Holy Spirit would know and so therefore we can never presuppose that.

 

Let’s look further in verse 4, the enemy, if they triumph over David, the enemy is going to do something, they’re going to “rejoice when I am moved.”  They’re going to rejoice, and the idea here is that it is not that the enemy just wants to clobber David.  It is rather that the enemy wants to thwart the plan of God, and they’re rejoicing in verse 4 is not just rejoicing because they clobbered David; it is rejoicing because they have actually stopped, they think, the plan of God.  And of course, if they were successful they could rejoice, couldn’t they, because they had stopped the plan of God. 

 

Okay, now verses 5-6, here’s the trust section.  He makes his petition and here’s an interesting point because we’ve had this question come up a number of times and that is, how do you suppose these psalmists knew when their prayer got answered.  Look again at verses 5 and 6.  Does it look like to you, as you read verses 5-6, that David has (a) known that God has heard his prayer and the answer is on the way, or (b) the answer has arrived?  It sounds like a, that God has not answered in all the details, but he has the assurance that the answer is on the way.  How do you get that?  The future tense in verse 5 and verse 6, it is an imperfect.  And if you try this other nuance type thing, it just doesn’t make sense, the future tense is the only thing that makes sense here, and so therefore we’re left with the future tense and so he says my heart will rejoice in thy salvation; I will sing unto the Lord. 

 

Now, first in verse 5, it says “I have trusted in Your mercy,” now here is how you can tell, how David in this case knew that the answer was on the way.  Here’s how he knew.  He made his petition, and in his conscience, since his conscience was clean when he made the petition, his conscience was aware of what God’s will… of the fact that God had heard him, and that his trust had been genuine.  In other words, in verse 5 David is essentially saying the converse… well, he’s saying the same thing as 1 John 3; turn to 1 John 3.  I realize that to some of you inexperienced in prayer this will sound a bit subjective, but those of you who have had some experience in prayer you’ll see what John is talking about here in 1 John 3:20, “If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart and knows all things.” Now the phrase, “God is greater than our heart” refers to omniscience, and what John is saying there is that “if our heart condemn us,” don’t think you can cover it up; in other words, here’s the conscience condemning, and you say oh quick put it in the corner, put it in the corner, and you try to bury it.  And John says don’t bother, God is greater than our heart and knows all things.  There’s His omniscience, so you’re not going to bury anything that is not going to be true to God.  So John is saying this, friend, if your conscience is bothering you, you can be assured there’s something wrong.  Now it might be possible there’s something wrong and your conscience not tell, but it can’t be possible that your real conscience tells you something’s wrong and it’s really not wrong.  Now you can have false guilt, but false guilt is something else again.  I’m talking about true guilt coming out of the conscience.  In this case, John says, if you’re getting this kind of stuff, just relax and don’t try to cover it up because God is greater than our heart and knows all things.  Verse 21, “Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God.”  In other words, the prayer has been made and there’s no flack from the conscience.  Instead there is an assurance, John says. 

 

Now that assurance that John is talking about in 1 John 3 is exactly the assurance David is talking about in Psalm 13; I have trusted in God, “in Thy mercy,” Thy mercy is God’s grace, God’s gracious hand extended.  So therefore he’s saying look, I’ve got confidence, I’ve trusted in God’s mercy and my conscience is clean in my prayer.  And so therefore that’s why he says in verse 5, I have trusted the Lord, and now “my heart will rejoice in Your deliverance.”  The word “salvation” in verse 5 of Psalm 13, speaks of the future real life historic concrete answer to David’s prayer.  It has not yet come, this is why he is not yet rejoicing in the salvation, but he is saying Father, I’m getting ready for the answer, and I’m preparing myself so that when that answer comes, You’re going to see me rejoicing in it.  David anticipates with joy the coming answer of God.

Now in verse 6, “I will sing unto the LORD, because,” now here we have one of those beautiful switches in the tense that makes a dead text come alive spiritually.  “Will sing” is future, “I will sing unto the LORD, because,” now obviously it’s a past tense, you say how can a past tense be used for the future?  All right, the idea is that you’ve got this future tense out here, point in time, on a time scale, at that time in the future, “I will sing,” so let’s put the word “sing” out here, that’s the time when he is going to sing in the future, but now if you’re transported, suppose you take a time machine and you’re transported out in time to that moment when you’re going to sing, if you stand on that moment… see, you start back here, but if you could get a time machine and go all the way out to that moment, and look back this way, you would see blessing, blessing, blessing, blessing, blessing, blessing.  And you would say “God has dealt,” past tense, “bountifully with me.”  This is why the past tense is used in verse 6, the last part.  The past tense is what it’s going to look like when the answer comes.  Then David will “sing unto the LORD, because He has dealt bountifully with me.” 

 

Now here’s another interesting thing, you’ll notice this in your spiritual life, over and over and over again, a little observation.  Probably many of you have noticed this already by yourself, when I point it out to you more of you will say oh yes, I’ve seen that operate, and that is you’re going through some sort of a hairy situation, and you ask for God’s help and all the time it seems like you’re not getting an answer, you’re not getting an answer, you’re not getting an answer,  you’re not getting an answer, but then all of a sudden some day you wake up and you see that He has answered it, you are out of the situation, and then you look back and you say, hey, you know, there was something there, there was something there, there was something there, there was something there, all these little details, but it isn’t apparently until you get way down at the end that you can look back and say oh yeah, God did know what He was doing after all, because all the pieces fit together.  But they don’t seem to fit together while you’re going through it.  While you’re actually going through it on a moment by moment basis, very rarely has it been my experience that the pieces fall together.  It’s only after you’ve been through it, and then look back that the pieces fit.  And then you say oh, yeah.  And this is why we have the future tense in the passage. 

 

Are there any questions on Psalm 13? [someone says something]  No, we never established whether David was being disciplined or whether this was just training simply because I don’t think we’ve got enough information to ascertain that.  Now this Psalm, unlike Psalm 6 that we talked about, Psalm 6 had some clear indication of rebound, this one, obviously he’s in fellowship by the time he’s making the prayer, but we don’t have any hint as to whether this is discipline or this simply is part of the training that he has as a believer.  It may just be a tough situation. 

 

I’d like to start tonight on the next Psalm because this is going to be a long one, it’s going to take several weeks to go through, but it’s one of the most famous Psalms in the Psalter and I think you’re ready for it now that I’ve drilled you on small ones, and we’ve got the parts, and now I’ll think you’ll be ready for Psalm 22 which is one of the great Messianic Psalms that speaks of Jesus Christ, and you talk about the mind of Christ, here it is; Psalm 22.  This is what Jesus Christ prayed on the cross, and so we’re ready to analyze Psalm 22.  Psalm 22 is an individual lament Psalm and your assignment for next time will be to find the five sections in Psalm 22; see if you can identify those five sections.  Now remember you’re dealing with a large, long Psalm.  It’s an exciting Psalm, we’re going to see some fantastic details about the person of Jesus Christ, but in spite of all this, don’t lose the forest for the trees. Our purpose is to give you the structure of these Psalms.

 

Now to help you analyze Psalm 22, the first thing I’d like you to do is conduct a form analysis of Psalm 22, by that I mean find these five sections: the address, the lament, the petition, the praise, and the trust sections.  I don’t think you should have too much trouble in this because they’re all pretty clear.  So the first thing, read Psalm 22 over and see if you can spot the sections.  As we go through this famous Messianic Psalm, remember this is called a Messianic Psalm because this content wise emphasizes the person of Christ.

 

So the second thing I want you to do besides the form analysis of Psalm 22 is I want you to decide what kind of a Messianic Psalm this is.  I’ll give you five kinds of Messianic Psalms, five possibilities that this Psalm could be.  And these are again, categories, and they are categories to help you start thinking a bit about prophecy, and how God historically prophesied future events in history.  You can see from the heading of Psalm 22 it’s a Psalm of David.  But have you ever noticed one verse 1 before?  Certainly some of you must have sat through some Easter service somewhere where they spoke on the last words on the cross.  And obviously these are some of the last words on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”  This is a prophecy, and apparently from what we’re going to discuss this next time, did Jesus actually recite the entire Psalm as He hung on the cross, or was just the content on His mind, or how does this Psalm relate to the person of Christ.

 

But here are the five categories; these are the five possibilities. These are developed by a German scholar in the 19th century, a man by the name of Delitzsch, and Dr. Delitzsch was one of the great students of Messianic prophesies in the Old Testament and he developed this analysis.  One he called typically Messianic.  A typically Messianic Psalm connects with Christ in the following way: it a typically Messianic Psalm there will be one part of the psalmist experiences that will be a type of Christ’s experiences; it’s got to be a specific part, it doesn’t have to be the whole Psalm.  Be careful of that because you get confused; obviously all of them are typically Messianic if you want to be nitpicky about it.  But a typically Messianic Psalm you might say is the least Messianic of all the Psalms in the sense that only a detail here and there corresponds between the psalmist’s experience and Christ’s experience.  So we call that type/antitype, typically Messianic Psalm. 

 

A second kind of Messianic Psalm is a typical prophetic Messianic Psalm.  A typical prophetic Messianic Psalm is a more intense version of the typical Messianic Psalm in this way: there will be some aspect of the psalmists experience that is exaggerated by hyperbole, a metaphor, there is some exaggerations of his experience that could not be historically true of the psalmist, but could be historically true of Christ.  So in the typical prophetic Messianic Psalm you’ve got exaggeration, what appears to be wild exaggerations which find their literal fulfillment in Christ’s experience on earth.  That’s a typical prophetic Messianic Psalm. 

 

The third kind of Messianic Psalm, the indirectly Messianic Psalm and I don’t know why Dr. Delitzsch called it indirectly Messianic, I would prefer to call this the Royal Psalms, but what he’s talking about by indirectly Messianic is that the Psalm pertains to the royal house of David and is finally fulfilled in the great coming seed of David, the final end of the Davidic line, Jesus Christ.  I prefer to call these the Royal Psalms. 

Let me give you an example of a Royal Psalm; Psalm 2, here’s a Royal Psalm.  “Why do the heathen rage, and  the peoples imagine a vain thing? [2] The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against His Christ [anointed], saying [3] Let us break their bonds asunder, and cast away their cords from us.” And that’s the one where God laughs, and He says in verse 6, “I have set My king upon My holy hill of Zion. [7] I will declare the decree:  The LORD has said unto me, Thou art My Son; this day have I begotten Thee.”  Now the Jewish kings were the kings of Zion, and so Psalm 2 dealt with the mechanics of the royal house of David.  They were the kings that God had decreed to rule on Mount Zion, but if you look at verse 8, and if you look at verse 12, it suggests to you that something in Psalm 2 just doesn’t fit what we know of the historic line of David.  David never fulfilled verse 8, nor verse 12.  So therefore, a Royal Psalm pertains to the royal house of David, but again as you read it you know there’s something here that points further than just the royal house. 

 

But notice again, Psalm 2 is not specific to David; Psalm 2 could be any member of the royal family that was sitting on the throne, it could have been Solomon, it could have been David, it could have been Uzziah, it could have been Josiah, it could have been Hezekiah, it could have been any of these men.  So your Royal Psalm is not specific to a person, it’s directed to the entire house.

 

Fourth, the purely prophetic Messianic Psalm; here, in the purely prophetic Messianic Psalm, this is a further development over type two. See, type one is weaker, type two is stronger, type four is even stronger than type two, and in type four, a purely prophetic Messianic Psalm is when things are so exaggerated and so idealized that they couldn’t pertain in any way to any historic key and therefore, can only relate to Jesus Christ.  In a purely prophetic Psalm the only person of which it speaks can be Messiah, Jesus Christ; Messiah Jesus, that’s the only person that fits the content of the Psalm perfectly in every area, and no king fits any part of it.  So purely prophetic is when it gets… the idealization reaches an extreme.  An example of this would be Psalm 110, this is a purely prophetic Psalm that apparently could be only applied to Jesus Christ.  This is the famous one the New Testament quotes more than any other Psalm, when it deals with the person of Christ that is.

 

Verse 4, “The LORD has sworn and will not repent, Thou art a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek.”  That was not directed to any Jewish king because the Melchizedekian priesthood was a Gentile priesthood, so here you have an idealization and that idealization is fulfilled only in the person of Christ.

 

Then we finally have the fifth kind of Psalm, and this, Dr. Delitzsch calls eschatologically Yahwestic Psalm, Psalm 96, eschatologically Yahwestic, the Psalms between 96 and 99 generally fit this category.  Look at Psalm 97 and tell me, what do you notice about these kind of Psalms?  Does anybody know what eschatological means?  It’s the end times, and it’s Yahwestic, meaning Jehovah centered.  Dr. Delitzsch is pointing out these eschatologically Yahwestic Psalms deal with what Jehovah Himself is going to do at the end times.  This is extremely, extremely important because these are the Psalms that prove Messiah must be God, because the role that Jehovah is going to perform in the end time now connects up with Messiah.  So that whereas the other Psalms you could argue and argue and argue well, it doesn’t really prove the deity of Messiah, when you hit these eschatologically Yahwestic Psalms you’ve got no choice, Messiah has to be Jehovah.  He has to be or He doesn’t fit any of these.  Let’s look at Psalm 97, “The LORD reigns; let the earth rejoice… [2] Clouds and darkness are round about him; righteousness and justice are the habitation of His throne. [3] A fire goes before Him, and burns up His enemies round about.”

Verse 5, “The hills melted like wax at the presence of the LORD, at the presence of the Lord of the whole earth. [6] The heavens declare His righteousness, and all the peoples see His glory.” Verse 8, “Zion heard, and was glad; and the daughters of Judah rejoiced because of Thy judgments, O LORD. [9] For thou, LORD, art high above all the earth; Thou art exalted far above all gods.”  And it goes on and on, this is all at the end time and it’s God bringing in His kingdom.

 

So these are five things.  Now here’s the second part of your assignment; the first is identify the five parts of Psalm 22, form analysis.  The second part of your assignment is decide which category of these five Psalm 22 falls into.  I predict that you’ll have a divided opinion on two categories; that’s all right, there are two out of five that there’s a debate among scholars where they fit so we won’t decide that issue.  But decide which if the five Psalm 22 fits. 

 

One closing question, since we’re working with a Messianic Psalm, as you begin to study this Messianic Psalm I want you to ask yourself a question: (And I don’t want you to answer it tonight) I want you to ask yourself a question because although some of you can answer it words tonight, after you read through a Messianic Psalm you’ll be able to answer it in spirit and in truth.  Why could Jesus Christ not have come before the time of an Israelite king.  What was necessary through all this prophets of getting a king on the throne of Israel, writing all these Psalms about the king of the Psalms in Israel, why was all this process necessary before Jesus Christ could do His ministry?  Why could not Jesus Christ have come in Moses’ day, without going through all this preparation about the King of Israel, and writing all these Psalms about Messiah?  And I want you to, as we go through this, to think why are these necessary to understand the person of Christ.  Why?  They are absolutely, but why.  Okay.