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22. Psalm 22

¹ My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
   Why are you so far from saving me,
   so far from my cries of anguish?
² My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
   by night, but I find no rest. Or night, and am not silent

    ³ Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One;
   you are the one Israel praises. Or Yet you are holy, / enthroned on the praises of Israel
⁴ In you our ancestors put their trust;
   they trusted and you delivered them.
⁵ To you they cried out and were saved;
   in you they trusted and were not put to shame.

    ⁶ But I am a worm and not a man,
   scorned by everyone, despised by the people.
⁷ All who see me mock me;
   they hurl insults, shaking their heads.
⁸ “He trusts in the LORD,” they say,
   “let the LORD rescue him.
Let him deliver him,
   since he delights in him.”

    ⁹ Yet you brought me out of the womb;
   you made me trust in you, even at my mother’s breast.
¹⁰ From birth I was cast on you;
   from my mother’s womb you have been my God.

    ¹¹ Do not be far from me,
   for trouble is near
   and there is no one to help.

    ¹² Many bulls surround me;
   strong bulls of Bashan encircle me.
¹³ Roaring lions that tear their prey
   open their mouths wide against me.
¹⁴ I am poured out like water,
   and all my bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax;
   it has melted within me.
¹⁵ My mouth Probable reading of the original Hebrew text; Masoretic Text strength is dried up like a potsherd,
   and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
   you lay me in the dust of death.

    ¹⁶ Dogs surround me,
   a pack of villains encircles me;
   they pierce Dead Sea Scrolls and some manuscripts of the Masoretic Text, Septuagint and Syriac; most manuscripts of the Masoretic Text me, / like a lion my hands and my feet.
¹⁷ All my bones are on display;
   people stare and gloat over me.
¹⁸ They divide my clothes among them
   and cast lots for my garment.

    ¹⁹ But you, LORD, do not be far from me.
   You are my strength; come quickly to help me.
²⁰ Deliver me from the sword,
   my precious life from the power of the dogs.
²¹ Rescue me from the mouth of the lions;
   save me from the horns of the wild oxen.

    ²² I will declare your name to my people;
   in the assembly I will praise you.
²³ You who fear the LORD, praise him!
   All you descendants of Jacob, honor him!
   Revere him, all you descendants of Israel!
²⁴ For he has not despised or scorned
   the suffering of the afflicted one;
he has not hidden his face from him
   but has listened to his cry for help.

    ²⁵ From you comes the theme of my praise in the great assembly;
   before those who fear you Hebrew him I will fulfill my vows.
²⁶ The poor will eat and be satisfied;
   those who seek the LORD will praise him—
   may your hearts live forever!

    ²⁷ All the ends of the earth
   will remember and turn to the LORD,
and all the families of the nations
   will bow down before him,
²⁸ for dominion belongs to the LORD
   and he rules over the nations.

    ²⁹ All the rich of the earth will feast and worship;
   all who go down to the dust will kneel before him—
   those who cannot keep themselves alive.
³⁰ Posterity will serve him;
   future generations will be told about the Lord.
³¹ They will proclaim his righteousness,
   declaring to a people yet unborn:
   He has done it!

6. But I am a worm, and not a man. David does not murmur against God as if God had dealt hardly with him; but in bewailing his condition, he says, in order the more effectually to induce God to show him mercy, that he is not accounted so much as a man. This, it is true, seems at first sight to have a tendency to discourage the mind, or rather to destroy faith; but it will appear more clearly from the sequel, that so far from this being the case, David declares how miserable his condition is, that by this means he may encourage himself in the hope of obtaining relief. He therefore argues that it could not be but that God would at length stretch forth his hand to save him; to save him, I say, who was so severely afflicted, and on the brink of despair. If God has had compassion on all who have ever been afflicted, although afflicted only in a moderate degree, how could he forsake his servant when plunged in the lowest abyss of all calamities? Whenever, therefore, we are overwhelmed under a great weight of afflictions, we ought rather to take from this an argument to encourage us to hope for deliverance, than suffer ourselves to fall into despair. If God so severely exercised his most eminent servant David, and abased him so far that he had not a place even among the most despised of men, let us not take it ill, if, after his example, we are brought low. We ought, however, principally to call to our remembrance the Son of God, in whose person we know this also was fulfilled, as Isaiah had predicted,

“He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” (Isaiah 53:3)

By these words of the prophet we are furnished with a sufficient refutation of the frivolous subtlety of those who have philosophised upon the word worm, as if David here pointed out some singular mystery in the generation of Christ; whereas his meaning simply is, that he had been abased beneath all men, and, as it were, cut off from the number of living beings. The fact that the Son of God suffered himself to be reduced to such ignominy, yea, descended even to hell, is so far from obscuring, in any respect, his celestial glory, that it is rather a bright mirror from which is reflected his unparalleled grace towards us.