Psalms. Part 1 The prayers that Jesus might have prayed

Transcription

1 Psalms Part 1 The prayers that Jesus might have prayed The last prayer Jesus prayed came from the book of Psalms. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? he cried, which David wrote many years earlier in Psalm 22:1. The rest of that Psalm sounds like the kind of prayer Jesus might have prayed in the last hours and minutes of his life, too. So, was David inspired to write this Psalm to give us insight into what Jesus himself would be thinking and praying many years later? David was a man after God s own heart after all, so his heart and thoughts were very much in tune with Jesus heart and thoughts. And the tone of Psalm 22 is clearly one of heart- rending feelings, much of which David himself would have felt in the things he was also going through. The connection between Jesus and David is strong in other ways as well. The identifying sign, for instance, that Jesus was the Messiah was his title, Son of David. The Pharisees certainly knew the Messiah by that title. When Jesus asked them in Matthew 22:41-42, What about the Messiah? Whose son is he? they replied, The son of David. They used that title based on several prophecies in the Old Testament that a son of David would one day rise up to lead Israel - just like King David himself did - but this time in a kingdom that would last forever (2 Samuel 7:12-16, Isaiah 9:6-7, Jeremiah 33:17, and Psalm 89:3-4). But the Pharisees didn t accept Jesus as the son of David, despite Jesus descending directly from David. Matthew s gospel nails that down in the first chapter, stating plainly in the very first verse that Jesus is the son of David, and then he proves it by showing the direct line of descendants from David to Joseph, Jesus father. Paul confirms that later too, in Romans 1:3, that Jesus came as a human baby, born into King David s royal family line (Living Bible). And in Acts 2:30-31, Luke states that David himself knew that the Messiah would come from one of his descendants. The Jews of Jesus day could have known, therefore, that Jesus was the prophesied Messiah, but they expected him as a conquering hero, not as a suffering servant, despite the clear prophecies of his suffering in Isaiah 53:4-7 and Psalm 22. David, however, did understand that Jesus had to suffer first. His insight into Jesus was remarkable, more so than even Moses and Isaiah, who each touched on Jesus life as a human being, but in Psalms we see more clearly than anywhere else in the Old Testament the highs and lows that Jesus would feel and experience a thousand years later.

2 David and Jesus also shared an acute awareness of the Holy Spirit. Jesus first public statement was, The Spirit of the Lord is on me, Luke 4:18. Jesus was fully aware of whose power was firing his engines, and so was David. David begged God in Psalm 51:11, Do not cast me from your presence or take away your Holy Spirit from me. Who else in the Old Testament said anything like that? No one. No wonder David was able to voice what Jesus would be thinking and praying later on, because the Holy Spirit was inspiring David s thoughts and prayers too, and he knew it. The Holy Spirit also gave David a unique understanding of Jesus being divine, as we see in Psalms 110:1 where David wrote, The Lord says to my Lord: Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. The second Lord is referring to Jesus, as Paul confirmed later in Colossians 3:1, which states that Christ is seated at the right hand of God, and in 1 Corinthians 15:25, which predicts that Christ must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. But note how David calls this second being LORD as well. David understood that the second Lord was as much a Lord as the first Lord who was speaking to him. But that meant there were TWO Lords. Again, David s insight was remarkable. He knew, way back in the Old Testament, that God was a relationship of two divine Lords. And combining that with his awareness of the Holy Spirit meant that David must also have known that God was a TRINITY of Lords, all holy and divine. The Jews missed this point too, however. They understood that Christ - the Old Testament Messiah - is the son of David, Mark 12:35, but they zipped right over David talking of the Messiah as a Lord and there being two Lords in Psalm 110:1. So the Jews thought the Messiah was merely human - a great human, yes - but still human. They didn t cotton on that he was also divine. Jesus points this out in verse 35 when asking, How can the teachers of the law say that Christ is the son of David? when it s clear back in Psalm 110 that David himself, speaking by the Holy Spirit calls him LORD? verses For the son of David to be called Lord, he was obviously more than just human. He was also divine. And it was all there back in Psalm 110. If the Jews had recognized the extraordinary insight David had been given by the Holy Spirit into the Lordship of the Messiah, they would have seen Jesus for who he really was. Jesus reminded them of that too, in verse 36, when he said that David was speaking by the Holy Spirit, so what David was saying about the Messiah being divine was divinely inspired. But there are still Jews today who find that difficult to accept. It s such a pity because what David was inspired to write in Psalm 110 is amazing. He s writing the very words the Father spoke to Jesus after his ascension. But how on earth could David have known what the Father was going to say to Jesus hundreds of years into the future, and words that could only be heard by God? Only by the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit clearly wanted these things said, too. But why?

3 Well, think what these words would have meant to Jesus later. As a Jew he would have feasted on the Old Testament scriptures, and in particular the Psalms. But in Psalm 16:10 and in Psalms 22 and 110, Jesus would be reading and singing words that were clearly about himself - shockingly about himself in Psalm 22, in the agony he would be facing on the cross, but wonderfully about himself in Psalm 110, in the victory that the cross would bring. The Psalms also provided him with raw insight into the innermost thoughts and agonies of life as a human being, most of which Jesus would have felt more deeply than any man. Imagine Jesus in the depths of despair searching for words to express his agony and desperate need for help when he was overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death in Matthew 26:38. The Psalms would have provided those words for him, inspired by the Holy Spirit in a man like David who understood and experienced similar agonies himself. And the Holy Spirit had all this ready for Jesus years ahead of his arrival on Earth, inspired through a human very much like Jesus in heart and temperament, who shared his feelings and could write those feelings down so well, too. But that s what the Psalms are for. As C. S. Lewis points out in his Reflections on Psalms, the Psalms are food for the soul, a feast for believers, because here are words inspired and provided by the Spirit himself, that men and women after God s own heart can feast on to get a feel of God s heart, and be filled with God s heart as they sing or pray them. They re even more meaningful to a Christian knowing that Jesus delighted in the Psalms for exactly the same reasons. Jesus clearly loved the Psalms, even the writing style too, because he often used the same poetic style himself in his teachings in Matthew 5, 6 and 7. The Psalms, therefore, are more than mere memorable poetry. They ve been supplied for us by the Holy Spirit to give us insight into Jesus, both the divine side of him and his human side, because that s what the Spirit loves to do. The Spirit loves bringing glory to me, Jesus said in John 14:14, by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. But the Holy Spirit was already doing that - years before Jesus said this in John 14 - by taking snippets of both Jesus humanity and his divinity ( what is mine ) and making them known to us in the Psalms. C. S. Lewis describes the Psalms as a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible. Up to the writing of Psalms, God had only been briefly and partly seen by Moses, and only heard by a select few. To everyone else he was invisible and inaudible, except through inanimate things like thunder and trumpets, or through messages from angels and prophets. But who really knew God? Who knew that God had a human side to him? Or that God could express emotions just like ours, and feel despair just like we do? We d eventually see all these things about God when Jesus came to us as a human being in THE Incarnation, but before that there wasn t much, apart from the Psalms, that wonderfully revealed the humanity of God.

4 But why was it so important to reveal the humanity of God? Well, if God only has a divine side to him and no human side, how can he relate to us? The difference between holy divinity and frail humanity is surely too great for any close relationship or meeting of minds and hearts to be possible. It s the same for us in our world too - we relate much more easily to animals that look and act in almost human ways, like dogs, whose eyes, face and temperament reflect many of our own emotions. And the more UNlike us an animal is, like a shrew or a crocodile, the more we keep our distance from it. Sharing likenesses makes it much easier to relate. It s the same in friendship and marriage. So, if God is just divine and we are only human, what likenesses do we share that enable him and us to relate? And it s not just a problem for God being able to relate to us, either. It s also a problem for us being able to relate to him, because how on earth do we relate to a God who isn t like us? The answer to all these questions is in Psalms. It s simple: God is BOTH human AND divine, and the Holy Spirit gave that insight to David. David understood that the son who would come from his royal line was also Lord. He d be human, yes, because he d descend directly from David himself, but he was also Lord, holy and divine. There s only one conclusion, therefore - that the promised Messiah and ruler of the everlasting kingdom that would come from one of David s direct descendants, was both human and divine. Paul confirmed that later too, in Colossians 2:9, that in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form. Both Deity and Humanity existed in Jesus, the son of David and the Messiah. And it s in the Psalms that we see this revealed. The implication of this revelation is enlightening, because it means God and humans DO share a likeness, in that we re both fully human. There isn t anything in our humanity that God doesn t share, in fact, the proof being Jesus. Jesus showed that God can be human too, and totally human, sharing exactly the same feelings and emotions that we have. It s utterly possible for God to relate to us, then. Jesus shows us that God is a human God. He s divine, yes, but he s also human like us, just as Jesus was divine but also human like us. We re on the road to understanding God properly, then, when we see God has a fully human side to him as well. When we pray, therefore, we re praying to a God who is as much human as we are. And being as human as we are he can relate to us easily and totally, and so can we to him. And the first real inkling we get of God s humanity is in Psalms, in those very human prayers that Jesus would himself pray later, inspired by the Holy Spirit through a man like David who grasped that God was human too. That s why David could relate so well to God personally, because he knew he was talking to a God who could relate to him. But of course God understood what David was going through, because David s humanity was a reflection of his own.

5 No wonder the Psalms cover the whole spectrum of human emotion. They are wonderful evidence that God relates to everything we go through as humans. He s not some distant being who gets rather tired of us being so emotional. If he was, then why would the Holy Spirit take the words of a man like David, who expressed his feelings so freely, and make them into the longest book of the Bible for our benefit? In Psalms God shows us his human side, that he not only understands how we feel, he loves us sharing with him how we feel too. God had no problem with the way David spoke to him, and to make sure we understand that, there are several Psalms that show Jesus speaking to God the same way. And Jesus was God. So here we have God speaking to God, or the Lord speaking to the Lord, in the language of our emotions. God was using our human language to express himself. How more human could God be than that? No wonder David spoke so openly and freely to God. God understood human emotion. He used human emotion himself. And it s just the kind of emotion we feel too. Psalm 22, for instance, could be just as much a prayer of ours as it was a prayer of Jesus, like Psalm 22:1-2: Why are you so far from saving me, so far from heeding my groans? O my God, I cry out by day but you do not answer, and by night but you are silent. And isn t that how we feel when a pressing need is filling our thoughts? Where s God when we need him? Why isn t he answering? Why doesn t he stop the pain, relieve the situation, and get me out of this mess? But in Matthew 26:37 we see Jesus being just as sorrowful and troubled too. He was in agony mentally, immensely sad, and deeply anxious. He was facing an impossible situation with no solution, and no relief or escape. How on earth was he going to cope? So he prayed, but the horrible sense of doom still filled his thoughts. He prayed again, but that prayer didn t offer any promise of relief either. The third time he prayed, you can almost hear him crying the words of Psalm 22, Why are you so far from saving me? because without God doing something, he was done. But Jesus was willing to put himself through this, so we could read his thoughts and know that he too has been to the depths of human despair. He felt it like we do. He expressed it like we do. He questioned whether God was even listening like we do. He too wondered how he was ever going to get through what he could see coming. So there s no problem then, is there, if we speak as openly and freely as he did? He was God and said these things, and if God could sink that low, it s no shame if we do. And if he was reduced to tears of utter despair, it s no embarrassment if we are. Such is the power of Psalms. They free us to be what God created us to be, because he s that way too. We re free to pray the Psalms exactly as they re written, because Jesus did, and so did David. They are the thoughts of men after God s own heart his very human heart.