Chapter Twelve: The King Who Prayed From the Cross

One day, near the end of His ministry, Jesus asked the Pharisees a question they could not answer. He quoted Psalm 110:

Here is the Lord's proclamation to my lord: "Sit down at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool!" — Psalm 110:1, NET

Then He asked: David wrote this psalm. David calls the Messiah "my Lord." How can the Messiah be both David's son and David's Lord? Matthew records that no one could say a word, and from that day on no one dared to ask Him any more questions. (Matthew 22:41–46)

The question was not a rhetorical trick. It was a genuine problem. The son is always less than the father in the ancient world's hierarchy. But David calls the Messiah His superior. Only the Resurrection makes that make sense. The one born of David's line was raised from the dead and seated at the right hand of the Father — declared what He had always been. Both things are simultaneously true, and only the Resurrection holds them together. This is why Psalm 110 is the most quoted psalm in the entire New Testament.

Psalm 22 as the Passion Template

But Psalm 22 is the psalm that describes what Friday cost. We have spent time with it already. Read these three moments in sequence, watching what happens between them.

The beginning:

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? I groan in prayer, but help seems far away. My God, I cry out during the day, but you do not answer, and during the night my prayers do not let up. — Psalm 22:1–2, NET

Then verse 3, with nothing in the circumstances changed:

You are holy; you sit as king receiving the praises of Israel. — Psalm 22:3, NET

And then, after the long middle of physical extremity and encirclement by enemies, before the circumstances have visibly resolved:

For he did not despise or detest the suffering of the oppressed; he did not ignore him; when he cried out to him, he responded. — Psalm 22:24, NET

Three movements in one psalm. The cry from the bottom. The declaration of God's character from inside the darkness. The declaration that God heard the very cry that seemed to go unanswered — made before the answer has visibly arrived.

Jesus prayed this psalm from the cross as the curriculum He had been given for the experience He was in. He did not quote it as a proof text. He prayed it the way you pray the prayer you have been saying for thirty years when you finally reach the moment it was written for — from the bottom, knowing where the psalm ends, praying toward it.

Preserved in Hope

The royal psalms were preserved through centuries when Israel had no functioning king — when the dynasty had failed, the temple had been destroyed, the people were in exile. They kept singing them. Not as nostalgia. As hope. The psalms about the king who would receive the nations as His inheritance, who would sit at the right hand, who would pray Psalm 22 from the bottom and arrive at the doxology — those psalms were being preserved for the one who would actually fulfill them. He fulfilled them from the inside.

When you pray the royal psalms, you are joining a prayer that was already answered. That changes the posture from petition to participation. You are not asking whether the king will come. You are standing in the aftermath of His having come, and His having prayed these words in His own body, and His having been raised.