When God Feels a Million Miles Away
What’s Psalm 22 about?
This is the psalm that begins with Jesus’s words from the cross – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But it’s so much more than a cry of despair. It’s a journey from the darkest abandonment to the brightest hope, showing us that even when God feels absent, He’s working out something magnificent.
The Full Context
Psalm 22 was written by David during one of the most brutal periods of his life – likely when he was fleeing from Saul or dealing with Absalom’s rebellion. Picture this: the anointed king of Israel, hiding in caves, surrounded by enemies, feeling completely abandoned by the very God who had promised to establish his throne forever. The historical context matters because this wasn’t just poetic angst – David was literally fighting for his life while watching his kingdom crumble around him.
What makes this psalm absolutely extraordinary is how it perfectly captures the human experience of feeling forsaken by God while simultaneously pointing forward to the ultimate expression of that abandonment – Jesus on the cross. The literary structure is brilliant: it starts in the depths of despair (verse 1), moves through detailed descriptions of suffering that would later mirror Christ’s crucifixion with uncanny precision, and then explodes into one of the most triumphant declarations of God’s faithfulness in all of Scripture. This isn’t just David’s story – it’s the story of every person who has ever wondered if God has forgotten them.
What the Ancient Words Tell Us
The opening line – “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani” – these are the actual Aramaic words Jesus cried out from the cross, quoting this very psalm. But here’s what’s fascinating: when David wrote “lama azavtani” in Hebrew (why have you forsaken me?), he used a word that doesn’t just mean “abandoned.” The Hebrew azav carries the weight of complete desertion, like a husband divorcing his wife or a mother abandoning her child at birth.
Grammar Geeks
The Hebrew verb azav appears in the perfect tense here, which in Hebrew doesn’t just indicate past action – it expresses a completed state of being. David isn’t saying “God is in the process of leaving me.” He’s saying “God has completely left me, and that abandonment is my current reality.”
But then David does something unexpected in verse 3. He calls God “holy” – qadosh – even while accusing Him of abandonment. This word means “set apart,” “completely other.” It’s the same word the angels cry out in Isaiah 6:3. David is essentially saying, “God, you feel absent, but I know you’re still the Holy One who dwells in the praises of Israel.”
The middle section of this psalm reads like a medical report of crucifixion written 1,000 years before crucifixion was even invented. Verse 14 describes bones being out of joint, verse 15 talks about strength drying up and tongue sticking to jaws, and verse 16 mentions pierced hands and feet. The Hebrew word for “pierced” (ka’aru) was so unusual that ancient scribes actually questioned it and some manuscripts read “like a lion” instead. But archaeological discoveries have confirmed that ka’aru indeed means “to pierce” or “to bore through.”
What Would the Original Audience Have Heard?
When ancient Israelites heard this psalm recited in the temple, they would have immediately connected it to their own experiences of feeling abandoned by God – during the exile, during foreign oppression, during times when the promises seemed empty. But they also would have heard something else: hope.
Did You Know?
In ancient Hebrew poetry, the turning point of a psalm (called the “hinge”) often comes exactly at the mathematical center. In Psalm 22, that hinge is verse 21: “Save me from the lion’s mouth; from the horns of the wild oxen you have answered me.” The verb tense suddenly shifts from pleading to confidence – “you HAVE answered me.”
The original audience would have recognized the covenant language throughout this psalm. When David calls God “my God” (Eli) twice in verse 1, he’s invoking the personal relationship that God established with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He’s essentially saying, “You promised to be our God, and we promised to be your people. So where are you?”
But they also would have heard the triumphant conclusion differently than we do. Verses 27-31 talk about “all the ends of the earth” remembering and turning to the Lord, and “a people yet unborn” being told about God’s deliverance. To the original audience, this sounded like the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham that through his seed, all nations would be blessed.
Wrestling with the Text
Here’s something that keeps me up at night: How can David move from “Why have you forsaken me?” to “I will declare your name to my brothers” (verse 22) without any apparent reason for the shift? There’s no voice from heaven, no miraculous rescue, no sudden change in circumstances. What happened?
Wait, That’s Strange…
The transition from despair to praise happens between verses 21 and 22 with no explanation. David goes from begging God to save him from lions to confidently declaring he’ll praise God in the assembly. Some scholars suggest this reflects the structure of Hebrew lament psalms, but that doesn’t fully explain the dramatic emotional shift.
I think the answer lies in verse 21: “you have answered me.” The Hebrew verb anah means “to respond” or “to pay attention to.” David suddenly realizes that God’s silence wasn’t absence – it was the kind of attention that goes deeper than immediate rescue. Sometimes God answers our cries not by changing our circumstances but by sustaining us through them.
This psalm also raises the uncomfortable question of why Jesus had to experience this level of forsakenness. If Jesus was truly God, how could God forsake God? The mystery deepens when you realize that Jesus didn’t just quote the first line of this psalm – He lived out the entire psalm. The mockery (verse 7-8), the physical suffering (verses 14-17), the gambling for clothes (verse 18) – it all happened exactly as David had written.
How This Changes Everything
Here’s what blows my mind about this psalm: it teaches us that feeling abandoned by God isn’t the opposite of faith – it’s often the prelude to breakthrough. David’s brutal honesty about his experience of God’s absence becomes the foundation for one of the most confident declarations of God’s faithfulness in the entire Bible.
“The psalm that begins in hell ends in heaven, and it shows us that the distance between those two places might be shorter than we think.”
When Jesus quoted this psalm from the cross, He wasn’t just expressing His agony – He was declaring that He was fulfilling it. Every prophecy, every detail, every moment of suffering was leading to the triumph that David foresaw. The cross wasn’t Plan B when Plan A failed. It was always the plan.
And here’s what this means for us: when we feel most abandoned by God, we might actually be closest to breakthrough. The psalm teaches us that God’s apparent absence often precedes His most powerful presence. David’s darkest moment becomes his doorway to declaring God’s faithfulness to future generations.
The final verses (28-31) paint a picture of global worship – “all families of nations will worship before you” – that we’re still seeing unfold today. Every time someone comes to faith in Jesus, every time the gospel spreads to another people group, every time believers gather to worship, we’re witnessing the fulfillment of what David saw in his moment of deepest despair.
Key Takeaway
Your feelings of abandonment don’t disqualify you from God’s love – they might be the very place where you discover just how relentless that love really is.
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