Distance

Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 0-148 (Bible Reading Notes)

WHEN GOD SEEMS AT A DISTANCE

PSALM 22 (From ‘Encounter with God’ – Sunday 30 Jul 2000)

Have you ever been stressed by danger, sickness, or the loneliness of dying, to the point where you were ready to give God up?

Jesus’ cry on the cross (Matt 27:46), quoting this psalm (v 1), has given Christians special reason to study it, and to note how much of the detail in verses 1-18 fits the manner of his suffering and burial. But what did it mean in its original setting?

It may have originated in an experience of persecution, being adapted later as a liturgy for the sick or dying. In faith, it affirms the hope of restoration and thanksgiving (vs 22-31). The Israelites, often in peril from other nations, came to see it as the cry of a chosen people called to witness to their faith in God through extreme suffering. Latterly, some have applied it to the Holocaust experience.

Certainly, Christians should deplore, and in many cases repent of, the way Jewish people have been persecuted, but it is too much to say that the Jews collectively have been God’s servant suffering for the sins of the world. They too are sinners in need of a Saviour.

Reading the psalm in the light of the crucifixion, we realise that Christ’s greatest suffering may well have come from the apparent silence of God (v 2). Most believers know these moments, when a cry of desolation is wrung from our hearts. `Where is God when it hurts?’ we wonder, in the words of Philip Yancey’s book title. All we can do is say with Job, `Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.’ (Job 13:15) And God gives us the strength to express this hope as the psalmist did (vs 22-31). In Jesus’ resurrection it became fact. Now, victorious, he prepares for us a place in the future. (John 14:1,2) That is our confident hope!

Pray for any you know whose innocent suffering has distanced them from God, that the Spirit will bring them through.

– Brian Hill

Copyright Scripture Union, 2000

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