The Messiah’s Vicarious Suffering
To the chief musician, for use in the public assembly of the congregation, upon Shoshannim, to be sung to the melody “On the Lilies.” A psalm of David. The psalm is referred to seven times in the New Testament, either by quotation or by unmistakable implication, as prophetical of Christ and the Messianic period. Compare John 15, 25; 2, 17; Matt. 27, 34; John 19, 29.
LAMENT AND PRAYER. — V. 1. Save Me, O God; for the waters are come in unto My soul, the Messiah crying in the agony and distress, in the anguish of His sufferings, their flood threatening His very life.
V. 2. I sink in deep mire, into the abyss of a swamp’s sink-hole, where there is no standing, where He has lost His foothold; I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow Me, overwhelming and submerging Him.
V. 3. I am weary of My crying, with His calling for sympathy and help in His great trouble; My throat is dried, burned or scorched, parched and raw, by the excessive use of His voice; Mine eyes fail while I wait for My God, melting in tears, His eyes have become exhausted, worn out with straining in the unfulfilled hoping and longing for rescue at the hands of God. The Messiah now pictures the nature of His misery, the reason for His bitter complaint.
V. 4. They that hate Me without a cause, while He is innocent of any wrong-doing, are more than the hairs of Mine head, having increased at such a rate that they outnumber the hairs which are commonly considered beyond numbering; they that would destroy Me, desiring to cut Him off from the land of the living, being Mine enemies wrongfully, are mighty, they make use of falsehood and deceit in trying to gain their object.
Then I restored that which I took not away, literally, “What not I robbed, then I restored,” that is, the Messiah not only alleges His personal innocence and sinlessness with great emphasis, but also states that He is being held to pay, to give compensation for, something which He did not rob, of which He did not despoil those seeking redress.
The entire paragraph pictures the climax of Christ’s sufferings. Both in Gethsemane and on Calvary the anguish of soul with which He was battling was of a nature exceeding all human experience and understanding. All His calling at that time availed Him nothing; He was obliged to drink the cup of God’s wrath to the very dregs. His enemies, operating with the meanest falsehoods, set upon Him without reason, to take His life.
But the supreme secret is found in the fact that He was called upon to replace, by means of this suffering, what He had not robbed. He bore the punishment of the sins of mankind; the guilt of transgressions as committed by countless human beings was charged to His account. It was a vicarious suffering which Jesus Christ endured, a vicarious satisfaction which He was called upon to render. God made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him, 2 Cor. 5, 21.
It is as the Substitute of mankind that the Messiah now laments. V. 5. O God, Thou knowest My foolishness, the folly of the trespasses which He here ascribes to Himself; and My sins are not hid from Thee; for so fully did He enter into His role as the Substitute of mankind that He stood before God in the nakedness of the guilt imputed to Him, as though it were really His own.
V. 6. Let not them that wait on Thee, O Lord God of hosts, be ashamed for My sake, His prayer being that those who were depending upon Him for their salvation and thus putting their trust in the true God alone should not be disappointed in their hope; let not those that seek Thee, namely, by looking to the Messiah for their only deliverance, be confounded for My sake, O God of Israel. In the midst of His great offering our great High Priest did not neglect His intercession for the believers; while He was suffering as the greatest sinner who ever lived on earth, His one thought was for those whose transgressions He had taken upon Himself.
V. 7. Because for Thy sake, by God’s predetermined foreknowledge and counsel, I have borne reproach, Is. 53, 4. 10; shame hath covered My face, the full disgrace of the guilt of all mankind.