Seeds for 03/29/2024 - Psalm 22:27-31
Scripture:
27 All the ends of the earth
will remember and turn to the Lord,
and all the families of the nations
will bow down before Him,
28 for dominion belongs to the Lord
and He rules over the nations.29 All the rich of the earth will feast and worship;
all who go down to the dust will kneel before Him—
those who cannot keep themselves alive.
30 Posterity will serve Him;
future generations will be told about the Lord.
31 They will proclaim His righteousness,
declaring to a people yet unborn:
He has done it!
Observation: For all the darkness and despair in the early verses, this psalm concludes on a surprisingly hopeful note.
Notice how expansive the psalmist’s language has become. All the ends of the earth, all the families of the nations, all the rich of the earth, all who go down to the dust. Everyone is swept up in the significance of what God has done.
The psalm began with the trials of one person. It continued with a strenuous back and forth wherein faith in God’s character and raw honesty about human desperation walk together stride for stride.
The psalm concludes in the final verses with the triumph of hope.
It traces the journey of Holy Week beginning Thursday night after the Last Supper—through the betrayal, denial, trial, abandonment, suffering, and crucifixion on Friday. If we only know the psalm from its famous first line on Jesus’ lips, however, then we will be prone to imagine it as preoccupied with the cross alone.
But this is not so. Reading the psalm all the way through shows us that it too anticipates the coming victory of Easter, when we “will proclaim His righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!”
Application:
What else might the Holy Spirit be speaking with you about in the text today?
Prayer: Lord, may even our darkest despair yield to the ultimate triumph of hope that was secured by you and is found in you. Amen.
“But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.” (Matthew 13:23)
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