Adoration
Adoration
Contemplating the depth of our Lord’s humiliation ought to move us to adoration and worship. At His incarnation He became human and was born a human and a servant; and at His crucifixion He became “a worm and not a man” (Ps. 22:6 NASB). New Testament scholars call the first year of our Lord’s public ministry “the year of popularity,” because great crowds of people sought Him and opposition had not yet begun. But by the third year of our Lord’s ministry, the religious leaders were envious and angry and were plotting to kill Him. No employee in the American penal system today would dare to treat the worst criminal in the cell block the way Jesus was treated.
Our Lord became “a worm and not a man” socially. He was called a glutton and a drunkard (Luke 7:34) and even a demoniac (John 8:48); and another messianic psalm says, “Those who sit at the gate mock me, and I am the song of the drunkards” (Ps. 69:12). When they should have been obeying Him, the people were making fun of Him. As opposition increased and His death drew nearer, Jesus sometimes left Jerusalem and Judea and went to secluded places to pray and teach His disciples. But the officials of the nation had already classified Him with the lowest of the low, “a friend of tax collectors and sinners” (Luke 7:34).
Jesus was treated like “a worm and not a man” as far as the law was concerned. His arrest was illegal and so was His trial. The Jewish leaders paid false witnesses to testify against Him, and even though they contradicted one another, the judges accepted their testimony. They considered Jesus guilty even before the trial began.
He was treated like “a worm and not a man” as far His physical body was concerned, because they whipped and beat Him as if He were an animal. What do you do to a worm? You step on it and crush it. The brutal treatment by the soldiers was unnecessary and inhuman. But Psalm 22 uses animals to depict the soldiers and officials, not the Savior. “Many bulls surround me; strong bulls of Bashan encircle me. Roaring lions that tear their prey open their mouths wide against me” (vv. 12–13). “Dogs surround me, a pack of villains encircles me; they pierce my hands and my feet” (v. 16). “Deliver me from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dogs. Rescue me from the mouth of the lions; save me from the horns of the wild oxen” (vv. 20–21).
But the first verse of Psalm 22 gives us the most painful reason why Jesus said He was “a worm and not a man”: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (See also Matt. 27:46.) Many people have forsaken God, but God has never forsaken anyone, for if He did, they would instantly die. “God … is not far from any one of us,” Paul told the Greek philosophers. “For in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27–28). Cain forsook God, but God didn’t forsake Cain (Gen. 4). The nation of Israel repeatedly rebelled against the Lord, but He continued to love them, discipline them, and call them to repentance. “I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them” (Isa. 41:17).
Why did the Father forsake His beloved Son? Because He was the “lamb of God” on whom the Father laid “the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:6; see also John 1:29). “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). When Christ became sin and the sin offering, the Father turned away from His own Son, because God’s “eyes are too pure to look on evil” (Hab. 1:13). Every time we meet at the Lord’s table, we are reminded that the punishment we should bear because of our sins, He bore for us. “This is my body given for you … This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you” (Luke 22:19–20). For you! Paul wrote that “the Son of God … loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). For you! For me!