I had a guy ask me recently why Jesus Christ would say on the Cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

His reasoning was something like, “If He was God, why any statement of doubt, and if He was truly dying for the sins of the world, why not cry out something like, ‘Bless you, Father, for what is being accomplished through my death.’ ”

Part of the answer is Christ’s words were spoken in fulfillment of Old Testament Scripture about Him, and for the benefit of those standing at the foot of the Cross who knew this.

Specifically, those present at His death knew He was “living out” Psalm 22, which begins, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?”

“There are seven times Jesus Christ speaks from the Cross and every time He quoted Scripture; He referenced specific verses,” explains my pastor, Richard Jordan, in a study I have on tape. “He went through and said, ‘Okay, that verse’s fulfilled, now the next one’s being fulfilled,’ and He literally was trusting the verses, and walking by faith in the verses. Every time He spoke, He demonstrated He had God’s Word in His mind.”

Four different psalms speak directly about Christ’s death and Psalm 22 is known as the “sin-offering psalm,” meaning it’s about Christ as the sin-bearer.

The first “my God,” in Psalm 22:1 is a reference to God the Father, and the second, “my God,” is to God the Spirit, both of whom have forsaken God the Son as He’s been made the sin offering—where His soul is made a sacrifice for sin.

Psalm 22, written by David at least 1,000 years before the time of Christ, represents one the two most common chapters in the Old Testament for teaching the crucifixion, delivering unbelievable prophetic details realized at Christ’s death. The other is Isaiah 53, which pre-dates Christ by at least 700 years.

In Psalm 22 are at least 33 specific details, or particulars, about the crucifixion that came true.

“The marvel and the miracle of Psalm 22 is that it so precisely describes the crucifixion of Christ when crucifixion was a Roman practice; a Roman custom,” says Jordan. “It was unknown to the Jews in David’s day. The Jews executed people by stoning them. They didn’t crucify—that was one of these Gentile inventions that came along with the Greco-Roman Empire. So the psalm’s written at a time when the details aren’t even something the writer would know of what he’s describing!”

As Jordan explains, the psalm is written in two sections. The first half (through the first half of the 21st verse) is about the sufferings of Christ, and the second half (beginning in the middle of verse 21 to the end of the chapter) relays the glory, deliverance and resurrection to follow.

“There’s the Lord Jesus on the Cross, crying in that three hours of darkness, and that cry, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,’ pierces the darkness that was upon the land,” says Jordan. “When it says in Luke 23:44 that ‘there was darkness over all the earth’ from the sixth to the ninth hour, it’s more than physical darkness. There descended a spiritual darkness, a spiritual battle that went on beyond the flesh-and-blood battle the people could see. . .

“And it’s passages like Psalm 22 where you can go beyond the physical descriptions that are there in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and into the thinking of Christ, getting into His mind about what’s going on and seeing what His thinking process is.”

When a Believer prays, it’s a verbal communication with God internally through the inner man, and in Psalm 22, we are given insight into the inner-man mental processes of Christ.

“If I’m praying and you’re watching me pray, but you don’t know I’m praying because you can’t hear what’s going on inside of me, the only way you can know what’s going on inside of me is if I verbalize it,” explains Jordan. “There’s all kind of things going on in your head, but if you don’t verbalize it, nobody knows about it.”

In Psalm 22:2, Christ cries, “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.”

“He’s on the Cross, it’s daytime, He’s crying,” says Jordan. “It turns dark, He’s crying. Notice how in the next verse, though, he says—and to me this is one of those touching things about how Christ, even at this extremity, is going to justify God and what He’s doing—‘But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.’

“If God is holy and Christ is being forsaken, then what’s happening? The Lord Jesus Christ understands why God has forsaken him because God in this hour is making Him sin.”

The Apostle Paul is the one to tell us Christ delivered us from the power of darkness (from the authority of the satanic policy of evil) and “translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son” by virtue of the Cross—by Christ literally going into that darkness to rescue us.

Psalm 22 represents this transaction Paul refers to when he says God made Christ “to be sin for us,” taking upon Himself our second death and being made a curse for us.

Christ says in verses 6-8, “But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people.

“All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head saying,

“He trusted on the LORD that he would deliver him: let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him.”

“The soul in hell is described as a worm—when a lost man goes to hell, his soul is described as their worm that dieth not—and when Christ says, ‘I’m a worm and not a man,’ He was literally suffering, experiencing personally in His inner man, the transformation that the Bible calls the ‘second death,’ the ultimate penalty of sin,” says Jordan. “It’s spiritual death and it’s more than being separated from God; it’s the wrath of God upon sin and the degenerative consequences of sin.

“What you and I should spend eternity experiencing in the lake of fire He was taking right there. Why did God forsake him? Because that’s what’s going on. The psalm opens up with the epitome of all the sufferings of the Cross coming from the hand of God.”

And as if that wasn’t enough, Christ was despised by the people, who He says “shoot out the lip,” or scorn him.

“Isn’t it fascinating how the psalmist knew exactly what these birds around the cross were going to be saying?” says Jordan. “Matthew 27 says they’re wagging their heads, mocking him, saying, ‘Save thyself if thy be the Son of God—come down from the cross and we’ll believe you.’ Bunch of liars.

“So you’ve got the people filing by, wagging their tongues, mocking him. Then you’ve got the leaders of Israel, saying, ‘C’mon,’ and the psalmist back in Psalm 22 already put the words in their mouth a thousand years before! You talk about the power of God’s word—that’s a startling thing in verses 7 and 8!”

On display starting in verse 9 is Christ’s thinking in response to the rejection of Israel and the mockery of the people and the nation’s leaders.

He says, “But thou art he that took me out of the womb: thou didst make me hope when I was upon my mother’s breasts.

“I was cast upon thee from the womb: thou art my God from my mother’s belly.

“Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help.

“ Many bulls have compassed me: strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round.

“They gaped upon me with their mouths, as a ravening and a roaring lion.”

Of this passage, Jordan reasons, “You remember what He told His disciples? All of you are going to do what? Forsake me. He was left alone. He walked that path all by Himself, and when He got there, even God the Father and God the Spirit forsook Him for what was going on in His soul.”

Christ’s reference to the “strong bulls of Bashan” has to do with the religious leaders of Israel and their involvement with the doctrines of Baal worship, the vehicle that carries along the satanic religious ideology and got its original foothold in the nation through the tribe of Dan. (Judges 17 and 18)

In Deut. 33:22, Moses wrote, “Dan is a lion’s whelp: he shall leap from Bashan.” Satan, as Peter also tells us, goes about “as a roaring lion,” and his M.O. is to counterfeit the Lord Jesus Christ.

“Now when a lion’s trying to get you into his mouth, what’s he trying to do to you? He’s trying to devour you,” explains Jordan. “A lion kills his prey by getting it in his mouth, and he thrashes it and he throws it. He doesn’t really kill it by squishing it, he gets a big grip on it with those big old teeth and then he just begins to jerk it and throw it around and tear it and rip it.

“I watched once on the Discovery Channel some lions chasing some antelope and a lion literally has this gazelle with its entrails all hanging out, and the poor gazelle is still fighting to get away. . .

“Satan has pounced on Christ and is seeking to tear and destroy him. And Christ says to the Father, ‘Deliver me. Save me from the lion’s mouth.’ ”

In Psalm 22:14, Christ says, “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.”

He’s exhausted, and this is why He says on the Cross, “I thirst.” Notice He doesn’t say His bones are broken; they’re all just dislocated. His cry, “My heart is like wax; it is melted of my bowels,” reveals the depths of the physical suffering.

In verse 16, He reports, “For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.”

Dogs, in the Bible, are a reference to Gentiles and He’s talking about the Romans. This is the verse confirming the feet of Christ were pierced, just as Isaiah 50 reveals how they “plucked off the hair” of Christ’s beard and He hid not his “face from shame and spitting.”

Verses 17-18 in Psalm 22 reveals, “I may tell all my bones: they look and stare upon me

They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.”

“You can look at Him and see all his bones; He’s dehydrated,” explains Jordan. “There He hangs naked on the Cross. They’ve taken His clothes and are over there shooting high dice for them, and He hangs exposed in shame and rejection under the weight and load of your sin, my sin, the sins of all mankind. There wasn’t even any relief from the psychological torment aimed at Him.”

In verses 19-21, Christ finishes His cries with, “But be not thou far from me, O LORD: O my strength, haste thee to help me.

“Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog.

“Save me from the lion’s mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns.”

“Christ’s literally looking Satan right in the eyeball and saying, ‘C’mon, give me your best shot!’ ” says Jordan. “There’s been a war going on between Satan and the Lord Jesus Christ since Genesis 3 and the prophesy is that Satan’s going to bruise Christ’s heel and Christ’s going to bruise his head. Before you can stomp on somebody’s head with your heel, where’s their head got to be? It’s got to be pretty much down.

“He’s literally going to let Satan exhaust himself—bring the blood hatred he has for God Himself to a spent condition where he literally just pours out all of his anger, rage, hatred, ire, vehemence, murderous rage against Christ and is spent in it. And when he’s spent, as it were prostrate, ‘Whack!’ In Col. 2:15, Paul says that Jesus Christ made an open show o him and triumphed over Satan right here. He literally won the victory and while He’s doing it, He’s trusting the father, saying, ‘Save me from the lion’s mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns.”

As Jordan points out, skeptics of the Bible have long humored themselves with this reference to unicorns, arguing it shows the Bible’s figurative and can’t be taken literally.

“The same nuts who say they believe in Brontosaurus and Sagisaurus and Utisaurus, and all kinds of extinct dinosaurus stuff they never saw—you go downtown to the Field Museum and most the skeletons they’ve got are made of Paper Mache with little bones here and there—say, ‘Well a unicorn couldn’t exist; it’s mythology,’ ” says Jordan. “Well, No. 1, you don’t know what might have existed and be extinct today, do you? But the other thing is, where is that unicorn (from the verse)? Where is God listening to Christ’s cries from? The third heaven. It’s not talking about a creature in the physical world; it’s a creature in the spirit world and there are all kinds of funny creatures in the spirit world. In II Kings, it talks about horses that have flesh that looks like fire. There are all kinds of strange animals, so this is nothing to throw the Bible out on just because it’s got something you don’t know about yet.”

>From the same verse, we know God hears Christ, and we know He answers His cry for deliverance from the next verse, which reads, “I will declare thy name unto my brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee.”

“If the lion wants to get him, it’s by death that Christ destroys him that has the power of death, so He goes into death,” says Jordan. “Because He’s the eternal Son of God and the spotless Lamb of God, He can do something no one else can do—He can completely and totally and fully pay for sin, because it wasn’t His sin. He can pay the debt and then be free to come forth from death. And because He does that, verse 21 begins to talk about the glory that’s going to come from the successful execution of the Crosswork. And that’s where we see the spheres of blessing and resurrection. . .

“When He was on the Cross, one of the last things He says is, ‘It’s finished; it’s done.’ It’s vanquished.”