Biblical Lament - "Ask" - Psalm 22

Christ pleaded, I thirst, quoting verse 15 of our psalm. And then in the darkest moment in the history of the whole world, Jesus opened his mouth and cried out,

my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

It's the most famous why in all of human history.

And it's verse one of our text tonight. And yet that psalm does not stay in that moment of why. It moves beyond that. Tonight we're gonna follow it where it goes. Three weeks ago, James opened up our series on lament by teaching us to turn to God in our pain. Two weeks ago, Matt taught us to complain well. We've seen turn, complain. Tonight, we're gonna look at Psalm 22 for the third step of biblical lament, and that is to ask, to ask boldly.

As we step into this text, I want you to ponder this question tonight. In your pain, is there something that you've stopped asking God for? In your pain, is there something that you've stopped asking God for? Here's the main point, there will be no sub points, just this one point tonight.

Because the forsaken son secured your welcome, ask God boldly. Because the forsaken son has secured your welcome, ask God boldly. You can turn in your Bibles, if you're using the Pew Bible, it's gonna be on page 457 to Psalm 22. Look with me at how the Psalm begins.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me?

I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest.

" This is a complaint, the same kind that we've seen and discussed in several other Psalms of Lament. And like in many other Psalms of Lament, the psalmist here, David, doesn't attempt to give an answer to the why question that he's just asked. He doesn't even try to give a reason for his own suffering. And God doesn't give him a reason either in the psalm. Instead, the psalm pivots on one crucial word. And it's one of the most important words in lamenting biblically.

Yet is faith talking back to feeling

Any thoughts on what that word might be from our text? Not rhetorical. Yet, exactly, yet. So verse 3 says,

yet you are holy.

Don't rush past that word. It's not soft or sentimental in this context. In this Psalm, we see three different times what the Puritan David Dixon called

an assault of sense

, of raw experience.

And each one is answered by faith's wrestling against it. That's what yet is. Yet is faith talking back to feeling. Everything in David's experience here says that God is far, that God is silent, that God has forsaken him. And faith plants its feet firmly and says yet.

Mark Rogoff, whose book has been guiding this devotional series on lament, describes what happens here with this word yet as an eclipse. because the why questions that are asking don't get answered. Instead, they're eclipsed. It moves into the shadow of something that's bigger than it. Not why is this happening, but instead, who is God? See, the pain here, it doesn't vanish. but God and not the why becomes the biggest thing in the room. So who is God according to Psalm 22?

Verses three through five tell us that he's holy and that he has a track record of faithfulness. It says in verse three,

in you our fathers trusted. They trusted and you delivered them. To you they cried and were rescued

and skipping forward

and were not put to shame.

When David's own experience felt like it was giving him nothing to stand on in this moment, he stands on what God has already done for others. Verses nine and 10 go on and say,

yet you are he who took me from the womb, from my mother's womb, you have been my God.

So this isn't God in some abstract sense. This is the God who had held David in his hands since before his first breath. Notice that's exactly why the distance hurts so much, the felt distance. You don't grieve the silence of a stranger. Some of you are in pain precisely because you know God well. And yet, that is exactly the grounds on which we can say yet.

Verse 19 holds two names of God for us side by side. It says,

but you, O Lord,

and then later in the verse it says,

O you, my help.

Lord is the covenant name of God, Yahweh, the God who keeps his word. And OU, my help, is speaking of God as one who meets personal needs. So God is both sovereign over all things, and God is also sovereign over our things as well. That is the move from why to who. This is where we have to look inwardly with an intense honesty.

What's the why that you've been circling? Maybe for weeks or months. Maybe for some of you, maybe even the same why circling it for years. Friends, months or years around the same why without hope is probably not biblical lament. In fact, it sounds like torture. Psalm 22 gives us another way. It's not a way that demands that you feel better about that why tonight. Instead, it's one that invites you to pray for grace, to receive that one word in the midst of your why. Yet. I don't understand, God, yet you are holy. God, this still hurts so much, yet you are the God who formed me in my mother's womb. Yet you are God. The simple turn releases us from the chains of endlessly and endlessly spiraling around the word why. And it frees us, but it frees us in a way without dismissing one ounce of that pain, to look at the one who is there, the who, to look at our God.

Urgent and specific requests

And look what happens on the other side of that yet. Verse 11,

be not far from me, for trouble is near. There is none to help.

And then in verses 19 through 20, hear how the ask grows from there. Verse 19,

do not be far off. Oh you, my help, come quickly to my aid. Deliver my soul from the sword.

And then skipping ahead,

save me from the mouth of the lion.

Do you hear that language? Deliver, come quickly, save me. These are urgent and specific requests.

They're requests that God has put here in the mouth of the King David in his songbook, that he's written into this hymnal, this prayer book, so that we, the people of God, could sing them and pray them back to him. But where does that kind of boldness come from? Certainly not from confidence in David himself. Instead, this is the kind of confidence that comes where a child is taking his father at his word. David asks boldly in Psalm 22, because the God of verses three through five has a track record of faithfulness, and the God of verse 19 is a covenant-keeping God. Bold prayer is simply praying God's promises back to him. And hear this because some of us need to. Bold doesn't mean polished. Think of the two stories in the Gospels of two different men who came to Jesus stammering in a very unpolished way.

The leper who said,

if you will, you can make me clean.

Or the father who barely got out, if you can. And then he goes on to say,

I believe, help my unbelief.

and neither one was quenched. Christ answered their trembling if with a gracious and resounding yes. Your weakest, shakiest prayer, the one you can barely get out, is not disqualified. It's received.

So let me ask again, and your pain, is there something that you've stopped asking for? The prodigal, the marriage, the diagnosis, the addiction. You don't need to explain away that pain to boldly ask God to help in the midst of it. Maybe you're wondering, like I'm tempted to, who am I to pray like that? Where does a sinner like me get to be bold with a holy God?

His curse fell on Christ

The Psalm answers, verse 24.

He has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, but has heard when he cried to him.

Even the closing words of the psalm in verse 31 says,

he has done it.

They sound like the seed of something. And in its messianic context, centuries later from the cross, the true singer of this psalm would cry, echoing this,

it is finished.

Bringing us back to verse one.

Why, oh God, have you forsaken me?

Church, that forsakenness of Christ was real. The man Jesus Christ was deprived of all felt comfort, all sensible consolation, because he really and truly was bearing the curse judicially in our place. That means something staggering for us if we're in Christ. means that the felt distance from God that we taste in our pain can never, and I mean never, be his curse on you. Because his curse fell on Christ. Christ got silence so that we in faith could hear, well done. Christ was cast out to die so that we could be brought into life in him.

That's exactly where the author of Hebrews takes us when he says,

we do not have a high priest who's unable to sympathize with our weaknesses. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace.

And so there's our grounds for bold asking, flawed though our asking may be. The grounds is welcome, purchased by our great high priest, who lived a life of lament, and who now stands in the midst of the congregation, interceding for you.

Thomas Watson, the Puritan, drawing on a picture that Ambrose gave, gives a picture of what our bold asks and Christ's intercession might look like. The metaphor is that of a little child bringing her mother a fistful of weeds and flowers mixed all together. I watched this happen a number of times at my own home. And of course, the mother receives the mixed weeds and flowers and smiles, and she picks out all of the weeds, and then she puts the flowers that are left over into a bouquet, but it's a bouquet of flowers that she has provided the vast majority of, and then she hands this beautiful bouquet to the father to her husband.

Ask boldly, even ask badly

That is what Christ does with our prayers. He intercedes and makes them acceptable to God. So ask boldly, even ask badly. He perfects the request. And so how do we ask boldly? The Psalms of Lament hand us all kinds of language that is ours to receive. There's many, many terms that you could find in the Psalms of Lament. Things like,

arise, O Lord. Grant us help. Remember your covenant. Let justice be done. Don't remember our sins. Restore us, don't be silent, teach me, vindicate me.

There's whole lists of psalms that go with each of these and I'd be happy to give them to you because really this is the types of requests that are the solution to a thousand pains of this broken world. So let's let these psalms give voice to our bold asks of God. If you're here tonight and you don't know Christ, then you can't yet pray this whole psalm. You can, though, pray the words of verse 21, simply saying,

save me, save me from the mouths of the lions.

And this is a prayer that Christ has never once refused. As Richard Sibbes says,

there is more mercy in Christ than there is sin in us.

Praise God for that.

There is more mercy in Christ than there is sin in us.

So cry out to him today for salvation. This is a gift that we could never deserve, but he has mercifully given.

Lean on this body

As we make these bold asks of God, maybe you find yourself here tonight saying, I just feel too weak, too tired, or too discouraged to even know where to begin. Brother or sister, there's hope. Because you don't have to find the strength within yourself. Look around the room. Really, look around the room. In God's gracious providence, there are some here tonight who are hurting. But not all. There are some who are rejoicing, and that is God's gracious gift too.

Too often when we are the discouraged one in the room, which most of us have been at some point, it's easy to view others' joy as some kind of obstacle to our transparency. We can convince ourselves that they just won't understand or I don't want to burden them. Friends, these are devious lies from the enemy. reality that we walk through different seasons at different times, that we have brothers and sisters on whom we can lean and depend when we're weak, and that they can ask bold prayers for us when we lack the strength to do it ourselves, that is God's gracious provision to us as a church. So lean on this body when you are weak. And if you find yourself as the one who's rejoicing in the room tonight and see another brother or sister who's in need and who's hurting, ask boldly on their behalf.

You don't need to have the solutions to their pain. As we've said, many of these laments never resolve the pain that they're addressing. They just fix our eyes on a God who is brighter than the darkness that we're experiencing. So don't try to give the hurting what God's word doesn't. The world is filled with pain. There's nothing to rush past here or try to explain away in that as we have hard conversations with people. Instead, turn to God together. Complain through tears if that's where God takes you.

And then let the why be eclipsed in the shadow of a more satisfying question, who? And ask boldly of the God who hears, who cares, and who sympathizes. I'm gonna close with the great consolation that verse 24 gives us.

For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted. and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard when he cried to him.

Praise be to God. Let's pray. Father, thank you that you do hear us in the midst of our affliction. Would we be a people that ask bold prayers of you? who intercede boldly for one another when we are weak. What great joy we have that you are a God who is so tender, so compassionate, and so merciful toward us. Help us to grow in the way that we respond to you. In Jesus' name, amen.