454_Hallelujah! What a Savior Psalm 22:1-8 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? 2 O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest. 3 Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel. 4 In you our fathers trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them. 5 To you they cried and were rescued; in you they trusted and were not put to shame. 6 But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by mankind and despised by the people. 7 All who see me mock me; they make mouths at me; they wag their heads; 8 “He trusts in the Lord; let him deliver him; let him rescue him, for he delights in him!” 27-31 All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you. 28 For kingship belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations. 29 All the prosperous of the earth eat and worship; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, even the one who could not keep himself alive. 30 Posterity shall serve him; it shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation; 31 they shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn, that he has done it. A few years ago, a young missionary couple living in a remote African village in Africa lost their first child. Their grief was deep and raw. But those who knew them saw not just their sorrow—but their worship. A few days later, they knelt beside that tiny grave and sang, “Man of Sorrows, what a name, for the Son of God who came, ruined sinners to reclaim—Hallelujah, what a Savior.” That hymn, sung through tears, testified their knowledge that the Lord was still their faithful, present, and victorious Savior. Likewise, Psalm 22 opens in the pit of despair but ends with the shout of victory. It begins with “Why have You forsaken me?” and ends with “He has done it!” As the Lord cried out on the cross, “It is finished!” The psalm has two distinct movements. The first part, from verse 1 to 21, is a lament of abandonment and suffering. The second part, from verse 22 onward, is a song of triumph, a proclamation of praise and of resurrection hope. David may have written these words in the anguish of betrayal, perhaps fleeing from Saul or Absalom. Yet his words, intense and poetic as they are, stretch far beyond his own experience. 1 Peter 1:10-11 explains how the prophets “searched and inquired carefully” about the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow. The Spirit of Christ in David pointed forward—across a thousand years—to the day Jesus Christ would hang on a Roman cross. Quotations from Psalm 22 abound in the New Testament. The Gospel writers saw in it the crucifixion, described in graphic detail in verses 12 to 18- though