God’s Prayer Book – All things unto the Messiah; suffering and victorious.

Class Outline:

Thursday November 3, 2022

 

Fruchtenbaum states, “The Book of Psalms could be summarized in a single sentence:

 

“The Psalms are the poetic versions of the messages of the Law and the Prophets.”

 

God’s holy history comes to fulfillment in the sending of the Messiah. Jesus revealed that the Psalter prophesied about Him.

 

LUK 24:44-45

Now He said to them, "These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled."  45 Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures,

 

What a Bible study this was.

 

Our whole life can be Him.

 

COL 3:4

Christ, who is our life

 

Paul writes in this sentence that when Christ, who is our life, appears, then also we shall appear with Him in glory. He is our life, so much so, that when He appears, we are right there with Him sharing in His glory, not separate, but His body and He fills us all in all.

 

So, I do not mean like Him, though that is true, but we don’t want to use the words “like Him” to mean something separate from Him, as in “that meat is like chicken.”

 

When in prayer with these psalms, there can be several things to focus on; from His birth to His second coming. Every aspect of His program is contained in The Psalms. His birth will give us the joy of Christmas. His suffering will break our hearts. His resurrection and glory at the right hand of God will excite our happiness. What He is and does must affect us deeply, which requires our faith and alertness. All of His aspects and experiences will make us thankful that we are saved in Him and by Him, and that He, the greatest King of kings, is ours forever and that our whole lives can be Him.

 

Psa 22 and 69 are the passion psalms.

 

PSA 22:1

My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?

Far from my deliverance are the words of my groaning.

 

Jesus Christ was the first Jew to ever to personally address God as “Father.” When Jesus says PSA 22:1 from the cross, it is the only place in the gospel accounts that He addresses God as “My God.” On every other occasion (over 170x), He calls God “Father.”

 

PSA 22:8

"Commit yourself to the Lord; let Him deliver him;

Let Him rescue him, because He delights in him."

 

Ps 22:14-18

I am poured out like water,

And all my bones are out of joint;

My heart is like wax;

It is melted within me.

15 My strength is dried up like a potsherd,

And my tongue cleaves to my jaws;

And You lay me in the dust of death.

16 For dogs have surrounded me;

A band of evildoers has encompassed me;

They pierced my hands and my feet.

17 I can count all my bones.

They look, they stare at me;

18 They divide my garments among them,

And for my clothing they cast lots.

 

After six hours on the cross, Jesus said, “I thirst.” During this time He suffered the outpouring of God’s wrath for our sins, the pangs of Hell itself.

 

He was nailed to the cross naked. His bones protruded and below Him they cast lots for His inner garment.

 

These psalms are given to us so that we will frequently meditate and pray about the incredible suffering of our Lord and that it was done for us - to save us.

 

So, how can we pray this? Since David did, and it is a part of the psalms that God has given us, we can pray them as well. But since they are the words of Christ, we should find ourselves being cautious. These prayers that pertain to suffering, would only apply to suffering in our own lives that was like Christ’s suffering.

 

Php 3:10

that I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death

 

We can only rightfully pray these lines when we are, or have, participated in Christ’s suffering. We would lack understanding and reverence if we prayed them in reference to deserved suffering for sin or for things that are not really suffering at all (but we think are suffering because we are weak).

 

His redemption of the church and His resurrection fellowship with them is in vs. 22.

 

PSA 22:22

I will tell of Your name to my brethren;

In the midst of the assembly I will praise You.

 

V. 22 and the remainder of the psalm show Him alive, and also show us as His brethren, meaning that He was successful as our substitute and that He rose from the dead. If He lives, we shall live with Him. The resurrection is such a joy and comfort.

 

Though David wrote these lines, the writer of Hebrews puts them in the mouth of Christ.

 

HEB 2:11-12

for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brethren, 12 saying,

 

"I will proclaim Thy name to My brethren,

In the midst of the congregation I will sing Thy praise."

 

In the context of Heb 2, just after this, He became like us, flesh and blood (blood and flesh), so that He could defeat death and the devil for us - to free us and make us alive in Him.

 

He became us so that we could become Him.

 

The result of the suffering Savior is the victorious Savior. Who among us could do anything remotely like Him. Believers who are proud of good works have never pondered any work of Christ and understood His unstained perfection. We are victorious only because He conquered and freed us from slavery. He gave us victory by His favor and absolutely no merit came from us. For this we should rejoice.

 

The writer of this psalm, David, danced before the Ark as it was being brought into Jerusalem and taken up the hill to the tent he had constructed for it. He danced with such abandon that one of his wives thought that he was making a fool of himself. David didn’t care whether he was making a fool of himself or not. He was rejoicing in the Lord.

 

There are a lot of ethics and morals in the Christian life, and sometimes, when we look only at them, it can all seem like cold religion. Now, we must never toss away of self-justify the strict morality of God’s law, but at the same time we must rejoice to the level of David over the joy of having the Lord as your own. Morality is the righteousness of God’s life. To forsake it is to forsake Him. Yet in keeping commandments, we must have joy, and this takes bold faith and clear thinking.

 

The Psalms are to give us joy. They are songs about our Beloved Savior and Husband. When we pray them, sing them; when we are dutifully going to church on a rainy night or laboring in our prayers, ourselves find a certain joy as when we gather together at a thanksgiving service or Christmas service and enjoy the more electric atmosphere of royal family, friends, special food, and favorite holiday songs.

 

What I’m getting at is for us not to separate any thing, event, or day from another. When the Israelites started to see the Temple and the rituals as something apart from God, rather than the things of God Himself, the rituals became a substitute for and rival to God. To us, reading the Bible, Bible study, prayer, coming to church, serving, and loving our neighbor are all things of God and so, in a way that David saw the Ark of the Covenant, it was not separate from God but a manifestation of Him and therefore God Himself. Of course, when we get to the eternal state, we will see Him face to face, but until then, The Psalms, our prayers, etc. are our meeting with the reality of God, face to face.

 

In fact, everything in life takes on this challenge. If I work, who is it unto? If I love, whose love is it? If I am a husband or a wife, to whom am I responsible? If I am a slave, whom do I serve? If I am a master, to whom am I responsible? Once something can be thought of separately from Christ, it will become separate from Him, and it will take on a rebellious nature, a cancerous life of its own. I remember when I was young enough to think that the big Catholic church I went to was the same thing as God. That building was in my mind no different that God, and especially on Christmas Eve, it was magic. Growing up, they became separate and it was just a building (rightly so). This, however, we must not do with our everyday Christian lives. Everything we do is unto and in Him who is in us and is all in all.