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PSALM 22:6-11
(Reading: Matthew 27:32-44; Psalm 22:1-11)
So Hated – Yet So Loved!
Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ…
This psalm begins with the most terrible sense of isolation.
Here is a man all alone.
He’s cut off from God’s loving presence.
This would have to be the worst experience.
Perhaps you’ve heard of examples of something a little like it.
Not that it could be quite the same because that could never be.
A situation, though, where they were cut off.
Maybe you’ve been through this yourself.
There’s an expression for being in these circumstances.
It’s called, “Being sent to Coventry”.
That’s when everyone else refuses to have anything to do with you.
At West Point Military Academy it’s the severest punishment there is except for being expelled.
Nobody talks to you.
It’s like you just don’t exist.
That’s what this man of Psalm 22 goes through in a much worse degree because it’s the Lord himself keeping away from him.
He is so far from God in the verses 1 and 2.
And yet he knows he’s so near to him, which he recognises in the verses 3 till 5.
There he witnesses to God always being with his people.
We know this is something David didn’t experience as badly as this.
He was prophesying of what the Messiah would go through.
Now, in the verses 6 till 11, we come to another extreme punishment Christ went through.
Something which David also definitely didn’t have to this degree.
Because here this sufferer moves from being completely left alone to being totally hated.
It’s not now what God doesn’t do – because he’s hidden his mercy - but what man does.
In the words of the first aspect to the text, THIS HURTS BECAUSE HE BELONGS.
Congregation, it’s all quite clear with the way verse 6 begins.
For what could more graphically describe someone so badly treated by others than the word, “worm”?
A worm – the weakest of creatures.
An animal as low as you could get – the one who is so often crushed, and definitely helpless, powerless and unnoticed.
And when a worm is crushed what can it do?
It’s only flesh.
It has no strength accept the strength to suffer.
This organism shows what you mean when you say, “I’ve never felt so low!”
Listen to how verse 6 starts: “But I am a worm and not a man…”
Here’s some lowering for One who is the great “I am”, the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, the King over all kings.
Here he is the lowest of the low!
Now, man is himself only a worm anyway.
But to put it like this, especially by adding that he is “not a man”, really brings it home as to what Jesus will be going through.
In verses 4 and 5 we see that the privileges and blessings which belonged to his forefathers he couldn’t have while deserted by God.
Now the verses 6 through 8 of the text go on to tell us that even the common acts of humanity are denied to Him.
He is absolutely hated – he’s completely shut off from the society of men.
It’s an echo which comes to fuller force in the second half of Isaiah’s prophecy.
In chapter 49 verse 7 there it is said that the Messiah will be despised and abhorred by the nation.
And in chapter 52 verse 14 there his appearance is described as being “marred beyond human likeness.”
The Christ will really be put down in the most despicable way.
Matthew 27 showed that through five different derisions he went through.
All the people were unanimous in their mocking laughter – priests and people, Jews and Gentiles, soldiers and civilians.
All exactly at the time he was completely helpless and about to die.
He came to his own but his own received him not.
Isn’t that how John 1 verse 11 describes all this?
But the cruellest taunt of all is that of verse 8.
This has the most biting, sarcastic irony in it.
This would have stung the suffering servant deep down.
Perhaps you’re familiar with that childhood retort, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”
But they do, don’t they?
How many times don’t abusive text messages on a cell phone, taunting on the playground, or nasty remarks on social media, become factors in teenagers committing suicide?
So, what could hurt the true man of God more than his God being put down before him?
And that’s what the unbelievers do.
Because they argue from the wrong idea that God is here to do what we want him to do.
Have they seen nothing?
Don’t they realise that we would never treat God as just a button we push?
Well, yes they do.
But now they’re trying to push our button.
They do the devil’s deed.
Indeed, wasn’t it Satan who tempted Jesus in Matthew 4 this way.
In verse 3 there he says, “tell these stones to become bread.”
Then in verse 6 he said to him, “throw yourself down.”
And in Matthew 27 verse 40 his henchmen cry out to the Lord, “Come down from the cross.”
It’s at this point that Jesus’ own parable of ‘The Tenants’ is being exactly fulfilled.
This is the parable in Matthew 21, the verses 33 till 46.
There Jesus tells of how wicked tenants seized and beat and even killed the servants of the landlord who came to collect his rightful rent.
Those servants coming to the tenants symbolised the prophets of the Old Testament coming to the people of Israel.
Then, in a final act of resolving the issue, the landlord sent his own son.
“They will respect my son,” he said.
But those tenants thought they could get the whole inheritance by murdering him.
And so they did.
But that only made their end all the more wretched.
That’s what’s happening in our text.
This is the rejection of the greater Son of David by the people of David.
The very people who should have seen in this man the lineage and character of Israel’s royalty treat him worse than the lowliest life in the nation.
I mean, who insults someone in their last dying moments?
Even if their crimes were the most horrendous no one mocks them in this way at this time!
Congregation, this can only be the response of those who are hell-bent against the Lord.
Because it’s that terrible judgment they’ll soon be facing.
Mind you, don’t try raising that with them!
That will make them really mad.
They’ll soon be stringing you up as well!
Remind them about what God’s Word says and you’re being a fundamentalist.
Show them in your life the difference faith makes and you’re being a religious nut.
But don’t they quickly point out when knowing and showing God’s will doesn’t seem to be working out for you?
And even if things do seem to go well for you, they’re waiting around the corner to trip you up!
Yet!
That’s the conjunction which turns the text around.
As verse 9 begins, “Yet…”.
So what could change things here?
How have things become different?
Well, they haven’t.
The first aspect still applies – HE HURTS BECAUSE HE BELONGS.
At this time something stronger comes through this, however.
In the words of the second aspect to the text, THIS COMFORTS BECAUSE HE TRUSTS.
You see, congregation, what this “yet” introduces is something similar to what verse 3 brought in.
For there he looked higher.
Here he looks deeper.
That’s why he says in verse 9, “Yet you are he who took me from the womb, you made me trust you at my mother’s breasts.”
Having set his mind on God’s glory and fame in verses 3 till 5, David now focuses on his personal, life-long care of him.
This is about the Father’s compassionate love.
Here Charles Spurgeon notes, “Our birth was our weakest and most perilous period of existence; if we were then secured by Omnipotent tenderness, surely we have no reason to suspect that divine goodness will fail us now?
“He who was our God when we left our mother, will be with us when we return to mother earth, and will keep us from perishing in the belly of hell.”
This is what we read of in Psalm 71 the verses 5 and 6.
There the psalmist testifies, “For you have been my hope, O Sovereign LORD, my confidence since my youth.
“From birth I have relied on you; you brought me forth from my mother’s womb.
“I will ever praise you.”
Exactly when you would think this man would be full of doubt, he looks a different way.
Instead of looking at those around him he looks within.
He see how it is he has got to where he is.
And where is that?
In the safe-keeping of the Lord God no less!
For trust and safety go hand-in-hand.
Bishop Hooper of Gloucester showed the same.
When Queen Mary, the strongly Roman Catholic monarch, came to the throne, after Edward VI the strongly Protestant king had died young, he didn’t flee.
After being committed to prison in September 1553 for his faith, he wrote, “All men and women have this life and this world appointed unto them for their winter and season of storms.
“The summer draweth near, and then shall we be fresh, orient, sweet, amiable, pleasant, acceptable, immortal, and blessed, for ever and ever; and no man shall take it from us.
“We must therefore, in the meantime, learn out of this verse to say unto God, whether it be winter or summer pleasure or pain, liberty or imprisonment, life or death, ‘Truly God is loving unto Israel, even unto such as be of a clean heart.’”
Hooper recommended in a letter to his wife this psalm because it taught “patience and consolation” at a time “when the mind can take no understanding, nor the heart any joy of God’s promises.”
His enemies hoped that being tortured and especially being roped to the stake would weaken that.
But with unflinching courage he met the tortures of the fire.
Even when the torture became all the more prolonged because of the greenness of the wood and its lack of quantity!
He had the ultimate confidence because he trusted.
And there he followed the example of his Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
Congregation, at times like that in church history trouble is very near.
Then it may seem like there is no one to help.
At least no one who is in a position of power.
But if that’s what our Master went through in the worst possible way, who are we to think that it’s unbearable when it comes our way?
For its then – of all times – that we’re actually driven back to God.
THIS COMFORTS BECAUSE HE TRUSTS.
Dear believer, remember this is a prayer.
What we hear in verse 11 with the cry to God that trouble is near, and there’s no one to help, is a man in prayer.
In fact, verse 11 is the loudest cry for help thus far in this psalm.
Here the words are very direct for the first time.
You see, dear friend, we weren’t made to be alone.
It’s when we are so alone that we particularly realise this.
And you are never actually really alone.
The Lord is always with you.
He doesn’t let you down.
But we let him down.
While we know that Jesus had to tread the winepress alone, yet how much it would have hurt that all his disciples had deserted him.
Mark 14 verse 50 says that they all fled.
Christ had laid it all in his Father’s hands, though.
He confesses in verse 10 that he is completely dependent on him.
In God’s time he knows he will be delivered.
Let’s do the same.
Let’s look to him when trouble is near and there’s no one there.
But let’s also do that when it seems you’ve got everything here!
Amen.
PRAYER:
Let’s pray…
O loving Heavenly Father, as your dearly loved children we lay our prayer before you now.
If there be any among us who feel that hurt and that aloneness because of what they are in you please comfort them through their trust in you.
Give them the strength to keep on going, even if sometimes that means even more scorn and insult.
Help them to look to Jesus.
It was for the joy put before him that he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and now sits at your right hand.
May his example inspire each one of us.
In his saving name alone, we pray, Amen.
* As a matter of courtesy please advise Rev. Sjirk Bajema, if you plan to use this sermon in a worship service. Thank-you.
(c) Copyright 2020, Rev. Sjirk Bajema
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