O Lord, the king
rejoices in the strength You give; he takes great delight in the deliverance
You provide. – Psalm 21:1 (NET)
The first seven
verses of the twenty-first Psalm is an amazing passage of Scripture that can serve
to point directly to Jesus, the Lord of all While it is the twenty-second
Psalm generally gets far more attention for its part in directing readers to
the cross of Christ, from its opening cry of “My God, my God, why have you
abandoned me?” (22:1a), through the remainder of the Psalm that seems to point
quite explicitly to the ordeal of the cross to which Jesus would be subjected,
the twenty-first Psalm deserves similar consideration.
If Jesus could look
upon the twenty-second Psalm, seeing Himself and His messianic vocation in that
Psalm in order to gain insight into what it was that potentially awaited Him at
the end of His human journey and His revolutionary movement, then surely He
could have looked at the twenty-first Psalm as that which could have served to strengthen
Him for the purpose of taking on that mission.
Because the record of
the Gospel narratives has Jesus referring to Himself as the Son of God and the
Son of Man, which were both messianic titles that spoke, in general, of Israel,
and more specifically, of Israel’s king, it can be surmised that Jesus
understood Himself to be the long-awaited Messiah for Israel. Naturally, it would be after the event of
Resurrection that His disciples also came to understand that Jesus was the
Messiah, making sense of His previously questionable statements about Himself,
while also reversing the natural conclusions that would have been drawn
following His crucifixion, which was that He had failed in His purpose and
cause.
Because of the
messianic (kingly) sensibility, Psalms which spoke of the king of Israel could
naturally and understandably be a great source of direction, comfort, strength,
and encouragement for Jesus. As He looked forward to what it was that He
would be and do for Israel, Jesus could quite easily insert Himself into this
Psalm, trusting implicitly in the covenant God of Israel and say, “O Lord, the
king rejoices in the strength You give” (21:1a). To willingly endure the
Roman cross, which was the direction that Jesus would have known that His life
and work were taking Him, would take a great deal of strength.
With a confident
assurance in the faithfulness of the Creator God, as informed by Israel’s
history as recorded in Scripture, Jesus could stand in confident assurance in
the deliverance that His God would provide (21:1b). What would be the
appearance to be taken by that deliverance? The deliverance in which
Jesus would be able to take great delight was the assurance of the deliverance
from death. Jesus trusted that, as He took Israel’s curse upon Himself,
as Israel’s King and representative, and entered into death (exile from life),
that the covenant God of Israel, the One who promised and demonstrated faithfulness
to His people whether good or evil (depending on their response to Him), would
be faithful to deliver Him, to redeem Him from that exile by granting Him a renewed
life on the other side of the grave and of the ghastly and highly demonstrative
and definitive means that took Him there.
Of course, because the
Creator God’s Messiah was not only Israel’s King, but a King for all nations
and all peoples, when Jesus, as the Messiah, entered into death on behalf of
Israel, it could also be said that He entered into death (curse, exile) on behalf
of all mankind. If that is true, then when He was delivered from death
and its curse, so too was all mankind delivered as well, with the proof and seal
of that deliverance predicated on the response which causes an individual to believe
in Him as Lord of all. From then on, all that would come to be in union
with Christ (believing Him to be the crucified and Resurrected Lord of all),
would have gained the ultimate victory over death and its corruption.
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