Click to join the conversation with over 500,000 Pentecostal believers and scholars
| PentecostalTheology.com
The well-known Psalm 22 begins with the following as the first verse (KJV):
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?
It is common to understand this verse as proof God forsook the speaker. However, the Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament appears to understand this as a poetic expression of how the author feels, contrasted with his real relationship with God (emphasis added):
The sufferer feels himself rejected of God; the feeling of divine wrath has completely enshrouded him; and still he knows himself to be joined to God in fear and love; his present condition belies the real nature of his relationship to God; and it is just this contradiction that urges him to the plaintive question, which comes up from the lowest depths: Why hast Thou forsaken me? But in spite of this feeling of desertion by God, the bond of love is not torn asunder; the sufferer calls God אלי (my God), and urged on by the longing desire that God again would grant him to feel this love, he calls Him, אלי אלי. That complaining question: why hast Thou forsaken me? is not without example even elsewhere in Psalm 88:15, cf. Isaiah 49:14.
In fact, after the speaker makes requests to be delivered, he says in verse 21 that God has answered him. Similarly, in verse 24, we read (KJV):
For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard.
Therefore, considering Psalm 22:1 in light of Isaiah 49:14-15 and the rest of the Psalm, should we understand the verse to mean that the speaker feels forsaken but, in reality, is not?
