Psalm 36 is an exercise in contrast. David lays out two paths, when set side by side, it is clear which one is so much more appealing but we need the light of the more beautiful way to see the utter darkness of the lesser path. He starts with a simple observation, which may strike our modern sensibilities as hopelessly judgmental. He even claims divine origin for the “message in” his “heart” (v. 1). His conclusion, these “wicked” people are so lovestruck by gazing at their own reflections that they cannot see the wasting sickness that is their own sin, their mouths are so full of hatred and slander that they are its as if they are speaking with a mouth full of food, that which flows from their lives is neither wise or good, and on their beds, even their imaginative faculties are spent on self-serving courses of hedonism and idolatry. (vv. 2-4). David offers a thorough, scathing review of the “wicked.” 

Who are the wicked? Well, you have to remember, David doesn’t live in a cosmopolitan society, he’s not a 21st century New Yorker living at the intersection of every culture, ethnicity, and perspective in the world. He lives among a nation with a common ancestry and heritage. His neighbors are supposed to have one solitary devotion: faithfulness to Yahweh, the God of Israel.

What all this means is that David is not looking with judgmental disdain at the ignorant and uninitiated. He is talking about people that should know better. He then moves to a contemplation of the beauty of God. As thorough as the brokenness of his neighbors and compatriots who have rejected the God who formed them as a people, so much more is God brimming with life, love, justice. The human ingenuity towards sinfulness, destructive as it is, is nothing compared with the beauty of God:

 5 Your love, Lord, reaches to the heavens,
 your faithfulness to the skies.
6  Your righteousness is like the highest mountains,
your justice like the great deep.
You, Lord, preserve both people and animals.
7  How priceless is your unfailing love, O God!

And while the bed of the wicked is a place for a cartography of selfishness, the table of the Lord is a refuge and feast for all, a river of abundance flowing to every nation:

7b People take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
8 They feast on the abundance of your house;
 you give them drink from your river of delights.

And this picture of the Lord is not a glimpse of heaven, a snapshot of the transcendent that we long to immerse ourselves in fully. This gospel that God is beautiful on a scale that dwarfs the depths of of the deep, and the heights of Everest is an invitation to a life animated by God’s vision and vitality. David writes:

9 For with you is the fountain of life;
 in your light we see light.

His love is a fountain, a never-ending artesian spring cultivating an oasis of Eden in the midst of the foolish, the proud, and the wicked. His light illuminates the good, true, and the beautiful that stubbornly breaks the concrete of sin-hardened world. The deep life of God calls to the deep in us, let your fountains be found in him.

Psalm 33 is like turning your eyes to look at the sun. There is just so much radiance that it overwhelms us. The psalmist reflects on the power and majesty of God:

By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
and all their host by the breath of his mouth.
He gathered the waters of the sea as in a bottle;
he put the deep in storehouses.

This same word that brought the world to life continues as his relation to the world. He did not just speak forth creation, he communicates his presence and his word is true and powerful to accomplish his will as he “works in faithfulness” (v. 4). As the voice of God comes into focus we hear his character communicated, the Lord “loves righteousness and justice” (v. 5a). And he pours himself into the world, filling the earth to the brim with “steadfast love” (v. 5b).

Two responses are enjoined to the faithful congregation. The first is participation—pick up an instrument, lift your voices, make a joyful noise (v.1, 3). The native tongue of the Kingdom of God is praise and thanksgiving (v. 2). The second response, is not contradictory but is like a rest placed into the clef of music. The psalmist tells us to “stand in awe” (v. 8) and to feel the otherworldly magnitude of his presence. This God spoke the world into existence so all of our words should start with a mouth agape, in awesome wonder of his beauty.

He is the Lord’s true king, all the governments and the nations make their plans, they draw their battle lines, but they are puppet states (vv.10-11). They act as if they will remain forever, that they are the architects of the future with their political slogans and their empty promises of greatness but they cannot deliver (v 11b). The only nation that remains forever is the eternal kingdom of God, the people called out by him (v. 12).

The psalmist then paints the Lord, seated on the vast heights, overlooking the world. The author writes that he sees all mankind (vv. 13-14) and it can feel like his vision is like our own when we look at a large crowd. Yes, we can “see” the people in totality but we cannot possibly know the stories of each individual person. And again, considering the scale of this majestic God, it almost makes sense. How could a God so endowed with power, majesty, and so responsible for the managing of the world get caught up in the minutiae of mundane human existence?

But this psalm will not leave us to our illusions of an aloof sovereign, distant and seated on high, removed from the pain and moments of our everyday lives. The psalmist tells us that God knows every human heart because he has made each one of them (v. 15) and he sees each individual (v. 18). Apparently, part of the greatness of this God is the ability to concern himself with the smallness of our world. Psalm 33 tosses us into the current of God’s raging strength and then shows us the deep spring that feeds this river: the steadfast love of God that delivers our souls from death and provides for our daily needs (vv.18-19).

The last stanza of the prayer paints our current reality:

Our soul waits for the Lord;
he is our help and shield.
Our heart is glad in him,
because we trust in his holy name.
Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us,
even as we hope in you. (vv. 20-22)

We cannot long stare at greatness of this magnitude without being blinded. But what we find is that the glory of this God is not just great, not just awesome, or strong; it is good, kind, compassionate. Our world is awash in the warm sunlight of God’s love and—to channel Lewis—by its light we see everything else.

Psalm 28 is not a psalm that was written in one sitting. It is a psalm that slowly took its form like the way the sunrise defeats the darkness—there is a spark of hope that pierces the dark, irrevocably breaking its hold, but it takes time for the light to diffuse, permeating the starry dome, finger painting with the clouds. David begins, bearing witness to his own pleas. He is essentially saying, “I am doing it all right, I am trusting in you, I am bringing my needs before you, don’t ignore me.” 

David then turns his attention to those who ignore God’s ways. He describes those with long careers in rebellion against God. Eugene Peterson calls them “full-time employees of evil.” It seems kind of out of place at this point in the psalm. But sometimes, if we’re honest even with our less flattering emotions before God, we compare ourselves to others. We go on detours to the rough side of town, driving through with the windows up and the doors locked, harboring a sense of superiority. Is David’s judgmental attitude right, is it just? He would think so but but the answer is “probably not.” But that’s not really the question is it? The question that the psalms are asking is will you live your whole life before God? Will you bring every ounce of action, emotion, circumstance, fear, and triumph before the Lord? Will we open the inner sanctum of our lives to the holy of holies where God resides?

The psalm finishes with a joyful flourish. Time has elapsed, the ordeal has turned a corner. David rejoices:

Blessed be God—
He proved he’s on my side;
 he heard me praying.
I’ve thrown my lot in with him.
Now I’m jumping for joy,
 and shouting and singing my thanks to him.

David now speaks from the other side of the chasm, God hears, he is faithful. David responds in exuberant praise. He’s been proven to have chosen the winning team. He now holds both ends of the ordeal in his hands and can tie them into a bow, mark them down as another chapter in the story of God’s faithfulness. 

Perhaps the message of this psalm is the brief glimpse we get into the in-between, the point between the petition and the praise. In that time, David doesn’t lose his head, he doesn’t become somebody he’s not. David doesn’t become one of those who “moonlights for the Devil.” For the time being, he maintains his identity and thus holds onto the promises of God. This is reinforced by David’s ending praise.

Pain has a way of teaching us who God is and who we are. The hard-won fruit of this suffering is that David sees his identity clearly and he sees even more clearly who God is— David is the leader of God’s people and God is the salvation and refuge for all, leader and layperson alike. David’s task as a leader, in leading them to godliness, blessing, and safety then becomes clear: follow God, the shepherd and stay true to his own God-given identity.

Photo by Serrah Galos.

Fearless Trust

Psalm 27 invites us to a glimpse of a well-worn, mature faith. These words are not those of one freshly afoot on the road of life with God. These words are the embodiment of the image of the tree in Psalm 1, a life firmly rooted in God, watered by past experiences of God’s salvation, by the promises and hope of what the Lord has said. David writes as one well-schooled in the art of trusting God.

Perhaps most striking about David’s assurance is that chaos seems to be the vantage point from which he prays. He describes his circumstances with images of vandal hordes descending and all hell breaking loose (vv.2-3). David’s increased depth of trust and hope in God has not resulted in a diminishing of the very real threats that plague him. But David’s trust has reframed everything. In the midst of this anarchy, David is “calm as a baby, collected and cool” (vv.2-3). 

There is something so radically this-worldly about the shape the hope Psalm 27 invites us into. The pain and the danger are real but so is the reality that God is inviting us into counter-rhythms that syncopate the cadences of chaos with order and beauty. Two important practices stand out within the context of the psalm. He writes in vv.4-5:

I’m asking God for one thing,
only one thing:
To live with him in his house
my whole life long.
I’ll contemplate his beauty;
I’ll study at his feet.

1. Contemplative Prayer

First, David invites us to the disciplines of contemplative prayer, silence and solitude. David’s world much, much like our own, moves at a frenzied pace. We are constantly being discipled by the antichrist rhythms of noise, notifications, news, and the normalization of violence. David knows that the only response is to retreat. A retreat not away from this world but a retreat into the refuge of God’s presence. Thomas Merton writes that when Christians forsake contemplation they substitute the “truth of life” for “fiction and mythology” bringing about the “alienation of the believer, so that his [sic] religious zeal becomes political fanaticism.”  David instead of leaning into the madness, embraces silence and solitude. He writes of the presence of God:

 That’s the only quiet, secure place
in a noisy world,
The perfect getaway,
far from the buzz of traffic.

2. Immersive Worship

Second, David immerses himself in worship both private and communal. Even on the way to church, he’s already singing his own songs:

I’m headed for his place to offer anthems
that will raise the roof!
Already I’m singing God-songs;
I’m making music to God.

Worship is the eruption of joy and gratitude, not a response fueled by emotivism, but a quiet resolve to contemplate what God has done and to voice heartfelt thanksgiving for it. Worship is the antidote to our own poisonous obsession with self, our propensity to live at the mercy of our circumstances and our ever-changing whims. Worship in the face of great trial is not a denial of our situation. Rather it is God’s invitation to to view the world from his own vantage point, to be with God and find that in all things he is drawing near to us.

This Exuberant Earth

David expresses one final plea, “You’ve always been right there for me; don’t turn your back on me now. Don’t throw me out, don’t abandon me; you’ve always kept the door open” (vv. 9-10). He asks for guidance, he needs God to show him the way. He writes:

Point me down your highway, God;
direct me along a well-lighted street;

And he ends his prayer in one final, resolved, steadfast, radically hopeful expression of trust. Again, what’s remarkable about this ending stanza is that this resolution is not reserved for another life. He finds hope right here in the midst of the confines of this world, this place, amongst these people and these circumstances. He knows that God won’t quit on him and so, grizzled veteran of faith and trust in God that he is, he won’t quit on God. He holds fast to the hope that God’s goodness will reveal itself again, right here in this “exuberant earth.” Don’t quit. God is faithful. In the beautiful translation of Eugene Peterson:

I’m sure now I’ll see God’s goodness
in the exuberant earth.
Stay with God!
Take heart. Don’t quit.
I’ll say it again:
Stay with God.

In honor of the life and legacy of Eugene Peterson, I will be using the Message version of the psalms as our text. Psalm 26 sounds, on its face, like the self-righteous protestations of a deluded legalist. Is David really placing wagers on his own integrity (v. 1) in the presence of a holy, all-seeing God? He even invites God to perform open-heart surgery on him, examining the hidden caverns of his life (v. 2). So what are we to do with a psalm that most of us would never claim is true of our own experience? How do we pray this along with David with a straight face?

What David expresses here is a visceral, unflinching trust. It may sound as though he is unwilling to confess his own sinfulness but that misses the point. This psalm is not about who David is, this psalm is about who God is. The steadfast love of God is the branch that David clings to, holding fast in the rushing currents of falsehood and idolatry. Left to his own devices, David would be swept along with the sinners, the devious, the frauds. But David’s life is not defined merely by his own actions, his life flows from a deep river of confession, worship, and prayer.

I scrub my hands with purest soap,
then join hands with the others in the great circle,
dancing around your altar, God,
Singing God-songs at the top of my lungs,
telling God-stories.
God, I love living with you;
your house glows with your glory. 

The Message, vv.6-8

He expresses his trust in the means that God has provided for purification. He recalls rapturous times of worship in the presence of God and the community. His life is shaped by story and song both of what God has done and his own experience with God. Everything for him starts from a deep and personal encounter with God.

David invites us to a faith that is embraced in momentary acts of faithfulness, where the words of our mouths and the state of our hearts are constantly presented to God for examination. God’s presence is a fire, engulfing and purifying every corner of his life. We can trust that God’s presence will not simply rubber stamp our agendas, or provide us with good feelings to get us through the day, but it will provide a way forward, a way of openness, of integrity, of transformation.

David beautifully conveys the meaning of life: God, I love living with you. David’s life before God expresses the poles of this life: exuberant displays of abandon in the congregation where everything is in its right place and a life of contemplative nearness in the midst of ambiguity and brokenness, a life lived up close to God. Openness, vulnerability, this is the life that is oriented to God’s presence. Trust is the foundation of this life, a trust that says God is exactly who he has shown himself to be, abundant steadfast love and thus, I can trust that I am exactly who he says I am: beloved.

Christian faith is not neurotic dependency but childlike trust. We do not have a God who forever indulges our whims but a God whom we trust with our destinies.” -Eugene Peterson

Read Psalm 25

Psalm 25 is an exercise in contrast. David is struggling, burdened by the consequences of his sin. The gravity of his guilt is like a millstone around his neck. He cries out :

Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted. Relieve the troubles of my heart, and bring me out of my distress. Consider my affliction and my trouble, and forgive all my sins.^[1]vv. 16-18

The consequences of his decisions have laid a heavy burden upon him. Crushed under the weight of his guilt, unable to move, David remembers another way. He considers the ways of the Lord:

Be mindful of your mercy, O LORD, and of your steadfast love, for they have been from of old.  Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions; according to your steadfast love remember me, for your goodness’ sake, O LORD!  Good and upright is the LORD; therefore he instructs sinners in the way.  He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble his way.  All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his decrees.^[2]vv.6-10

Maybe you have been here. Stuck, heavy-laden by the accumulation of your own sin. It’s an impossible place to be in. Walking through the world feels like you are walking on the ocean floor with intense pressure compressing your very soul. And its here at the moment when our soul feels the heaviest that its actually the lightest. David says:

To you, O Lord, I lift my soul.

Lifting our souls to God from the depths is not like Atlas lifting the world. In lifting our souls to God we find that the Lord is not a pallbearer struggling to hoist our unwieldy, oaken casket.  Rather, his mercy makes our struggles as light as a feather. He does not downplay our rebellions or make them out to be somehow less than they are. Rather, he exhausts them by taking the weight upon his shoulders, thus emptying sin of all its weight. We can lift our souls to the Lord when we can’t even lift one foot in front of the other because he has made known to us his ways, and his way is easy and his burden is light.

Lift Your Soul

Are you weary? Are you heavy laden? Does each day feel like you carry the weight of the world? Lift your soul to the God of your salvation. Wait on him.

Envision the route that you travel to church each week. Maybe you drive past suburban strip malls and dozens of other churches. Perhaps you navigate the subways, hoping not to see a rat playing on the tracks and hurrying past homeless people who somehow managed to survive another night. Now think about the space you meet in to worship. Perhaps you meet in a sleek, refurbished warehouse, maybe you meet in a school cafeteria or someone’s home. Maybe you even meet in a building that was designed for the sole purpose of being a church. Whether you travel by foot, car, or train and whether you meet in a comedy club or a traditional church building there is a striking dissonance that confronts us all as we enter the doors to worship.

The earth is the Lord’s and and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.

This is the claim of Psalm 24. The worshipper, upon entering the temple of Solomon, hears this big opening chord resounding, inviting her to worship. But then she thinks about her journey, even to arrive at the temple. How could all of it, all of the things she has seen, all of the places she traversed, all of the people she crossed paths with—how could it all of it be the Lord’s? It doesn’t add up. Some of it seemed so mundane, some of it so painfully commercial, some of it just plain evil. And then the people. So many people going about their days, so many of them with no thought of God or existence. They belong to the Lord?

The world that we live in and the world of worship seem like two completely different worlds altogether. But there it is right there, the earth is the Lord’s, not some other place, not heaven, this place, this town, this neighborhood, these people.

So how do we begin to reconcile these two worlds? Psalm 24 presents us with a radical reorienting of our imagination and a subsequent way of walking in the world. First, we have to allow our imaginations to be recalibrated. The questions, presented in call-and-response fashion at the end of the psalm are not questions seeking an answer but rhetorical questions inviting remembrance. “Who is the King of glory?” Who is the king that can hold under his reign the world that we just walked through and the world of worship? Who is the king that doesn’t further separate them into secular and sacred but harmonizes them? The answer given is the same answer given to Moses when he asks the blazing bush, who should I say has sent me? The divine name—the Lord. To declare that the Lord is Lord of all of existence is not to exercise blind faith but to shape our imaginations to the mold of the kingdom. Worship is a discipline of seeing that changes the way we view everything.

Second, how do we live in a world such as this? When we walk out of the doors, squinting in the bright sunlight with our minds freshly challenged to see in a new way,does it change anything about how we actually live? The psalmist tell us that the ones who will stand in his holy place are those who “have clean hands and pure hearts, who do not lift up their souls to what is false, and do not swear deceitfully.” Many have thought clean hands and pure hearts required avoidance, like Pilate constantly washing his hands of the world. But Jesus shows us that the path towards purity of heart and hand is not avoidance, rather it is incarnation. Clean hands and pure hearts are not the product of avoiding stain from the world. They are hands that bear the scars of Jesus, the one who ascended the hill of the Lord, on behalf of the world. When we as Christians walk the world as he did, in love and in service, we live out of the overflow of the new imaginations shaped in corporate worship. We live out the declaration that the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it when we see every corner of our lives “charged with the grandeur of the glory of God.”^[1]Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur. We live out that every person is beckoned by the freedom and love of God when we lift Jesus up and he draws all people to himself.^[2]John 12v32

The psalm invites us, lift up your head, that the King of Glory may come in. In worship we hear the call afresh, lift up your head, see the world as it really is. Stand in the holy place of God’s presence so that you might see all the world is infused with the glory of his Spirit.

The 23rd psalm is so simple in its beauty, so evocative in its imagery. For generations, it has inspired artists and comforted mourners. I want to connect this psalm with my reflections on Psalm 21 and Psalm 22. Psalm 21 is triumphant, God will demonstrate his power. Psalm 22 is apoplectic, “My God why have you forsaken me?” Psalm 22 screams the questions that Psalm 21 should rightfully raise, “Is God’s victory and hope certain even in the darkest moments of life?” In Psalm 23, the psalmist no longer has a voice to shout his objections in the assembly, rather he whispers them in sobs all alone in the dark. Psalm 23 takes the question, “How?”, to its fullest extent and in doing so gives us a glimpse into the heart of the Gospel of Jesus: “How does God keep his promises in the valley of the shadow of death?”

You see, the promises of God always run the risk of disintegrating into platitudes. Quasi-spiritual assurances like, “everything happens for a reason” or “God works everything for the good of those who love him” are nice and all but don’t do us a lot of good when we are lost in the abyss, traversing treacherous terrain, surrounded by predators, exhausted from walking and fear. Ideas are nice, they are content of faith, but in the face of certain death, I need more.

Enter Psalm 23. The psalmist proclaims, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.” He proclaims the tender care of the Lord in sustaining and guiding him. David expresses the innocent bliss of trusting in God to provide. But then, almost on a dime, he turns from the sunlight to the shadow. “Even though I walk through the darkest valley ^[1]I still like the feel of the  traditional translation “valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”

Did you catch that? The question of God-forsakenness in Psalm 22 is given its free expression to deconstruct any notions of simplistic faith. What about the valley of the shadow death? Am I forsaken there? How are you going to keep your promises there? According to Psalm 23, God will not merely decree his will from far off in Heaven, he will not leave us to rest on cliches while we wallow in the darkness, he won’t even miraculously light up that darkness in a demonstration of sheer power. No, none of this will do. How will God keep his promises? He himself will come to us. He is right there, walking in he valley of the shadow of death as he walked in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening.

Psalm 23 doesn’t just tell us we are not abandoned, that we will not be forgotten or forsaken. It shows us. The Lord is our shepherd, we don’t have to be afraid not simply because he is powerful, good, full of justice and mercy. He of course is all of those things and more. We don’t have to be afraid because he is here. His rod, his staff, his table. Even in the darkest hour, he comes to us.

What is in me that needs to die before I die?   Lent, for all its caricatures of giving up chocolate or not drinking so much red wine, is the seasonal embodiment of Jesus’ promise that those who wish to find their life must lose it.  Lent is a journey away from petty idolatries and distractions towards a life focused on the Jesus way—the way of sacrifice and meekness, the way that , incidentally, happens to lead to truth and life.  As Christians around the world receive the ashes tomorrow and we hear the sobering words, “Remember from dust you have come and to dust you shall return,” we are not engaging in an exercise of cynical fatalism or morbid asceticism.  Nor are we merely wallowing in self-righteous self-pity.  Rather, we are taking the first step, with Jesus, towards Jerusalem:  towards the upper room, towards Gethsemane and Golgotha, and ultimately, the empty tomb.

The ashen cross smudged on the foreheads of faithful children, women, and men declares with the psalmist that we are but a breath, a flower cut from the bush that dies as soon as it flourishes (Ps. 103).  Furthermore, we wear the dark marks of our humanity and our failure to live in proper relationship with God, one another, and creation.  We have sinned and sin leaving mangled relationships in every part of its scorched-earth wake needs more than just a simple, “sorry.”   Ash Wednesday, as the gateway to the lenten season, is a funeral for our idolatrous lives, the clear-eyed acknowledgment that we have sinned and we will die.  We clothe ourselves in ashes and sackcloth mourning our own shortcomings, repenting of our sins.  And yet underlying even this judgment is an indescribable current of hope that looks to a day when God himself will clothe our feeble mortal bodies with the imperishable garments of eternity (1 Cor. 15).

When I, as a pastor, impose the ashes, I look into the face of people I love and walk with everyday and tell them one of the two or three truest things I am capable of saying to them:  “You are going to die.”  When Christ talked to his disciples of his impending sacrifice he followed up with an equally cryptic statement:  “But in three days I will rise again” (Mark 8:31).  The Messiah, according to Peter and many of his contemporaries, was supposed to restore the Kingdom.  He couldn’t exactly manage those affairs from the grave.  But the disciples, as a microcosm for the world at large, fail to understand what Jesus is telling them.   When Jesus is telling his disciples, “I am going to die,” he is in the same breath saying, “I am going to live and you are too!”  We would have God form a bureaucracy and give us a cushy job.   Instead he offers us himself and his eternal kingdom.  God’s life offered to us is always better than the one we would dream up for ourselves.  Even our imaginations need resurrecting.

But first, the dying.  There is no get-rich-quick scheme in the kingdom of God, no life-hacks for eternity.  There is no way to resurrection except through death.  Jesus, as the incarnate Son of God, died everyday to his own wants and desires and submitted to the will of the Father.  Lent is a 40-day period where we practice the art of dying well—the art of dying like Jesus.   But just as Jesus’ death is not ultimately about death, we don’t die merely for the sake of dying.  We die so that we may live.  We fast so that we may feast.  We deny ourselves so that we might share.  We allow the Spirit to do meticulous surgery on our hearts so that those renewed hearts might beat for God and for others.  So the question of lent remains what needs to die in us before we die?  What needs to die in us so that we may live?  “The world is not conclusion,” Emily Dickinson wrote.  Death is not the end.  But the only way to resurrection is to come and die.

The juxtaposition between Psalm 21 and Psalm 22 could not be more striking. Look at the end of Ps. 21:

Be exalted, O Lord, in your strength! We will sing and praise your power.

Now read the beginning of Ps. 22:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? In many ways the bookends of these two psalms frame the Christian life.

Psalm 22 tests the integrity of the promises of Ps 21. It’s one thing to declare in the sanctuary that “your hand will find out all your enemies; your right hand will find out those who hate you” and another to be tortured mercilessly at the hands of those very same enemies. And the question the two psalms ask together, “Do these promises hold up in the darkest nights of the soul?” Psalm 22 moves us from the comfort of the congregation to the bloodthirsty chaos of a lynch mob. You can hear the thuggish mocking of the strong bulls ^[1]Psalm 22v12 and the ravenous lions ^[2]Psalm 22v13 surround our psalmist.

As the people who follow the crucified Jesus, we walk the line of trust and hope, resting in the promises of God and being literally God-abandoned, stretched to our breaking and pierced by this life.  If the promises of God are true, promises for life from barrenness, life from exile, life from death, then they have to be true in our moments of God-forsakenness.

This psalm contains such stunning poetry that finds its fullest manifestation in Jesus. As he is poured out like water, as his bones are jolted from their joints, and his heart melts like a candle that has been forgotten about, ultimately to be laid in the dust of death.^[3]Ps. 22vv14-18 is so hauntingly beautiful and bears witness to so much of the pain of life; Jesus holds on to the promise. He holds on to the promises of God that God will hear and save^[4]Ps. 22vv19-21, that the poor shall have their share ^[5]Ps. 22vv26, that the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the Lord like waters cover the seas ^[6]Ps. 22vv27-28, and that his arm is long enough to reach even to the grave ^[7]Ps. 22vv29-30.

The line between victory and utter defeat is  tear-soaked, blood-stained, anguish-ridden faith. Are the promises of God true? Ps. 21 says they are true in the congregation in the songs of the people of God. Ps. 22 says, yes, they are even true in the blackest night, in the curses of the enemies of God. The cross is simultaneously the place where all hope is lost and the only place that hope is possible. Jesus, holds onto the promises of God with nail-pierced hands, this is faith that proves God’s word true.