A Sermon by Rev Alexander McPherson
Psalms 22:17,18. I may tell all My bones, they look and stare upon Me, they part My garments among them and cast lots upon My vesture.
This is a Messianic psalm in the most complete sense – a psalm concerning the great Deliverer from sin and misery that was to come. David was employed by the Lord as a prophet to set forth a good deal about the person and work of the Messiah who was expected, and he describes in detail here the experience of the Saviour on the cross – from the cry at the ninth hour, with which the Psalm begins, until the darkness in the Saviour’s soul gave way to the light of accomplishment and the glorious prospects that we read of from verse 21 to the end of the Psalm.
The Psalm formed the basis of the Saviour’s thoughts during a brief period at the end of His ordeal and most of the first part described how men treated Him when He was made a curse for sin. He was reproached; He was despised; He was mocked; He was nailed to a cross; and while His enemies surrounded Him like strong bulls, roaring lions and fierce dogs, He became weaker and more agonised. One of the results of the treatment meted out to Him was the dehydration of His bodily frame, which led Him to think of the dust of death that He speaks of in the Psalm. Thus, with death in prospect, Christ tells of His emaciated appearance and how those watching Him reacted to it, and that is what we principally have in our text today.
So there are three matters that I would like to say a little about as enabled: (1.) Christ’s emaciated condition; He says, “I may tell all My bones”. (2.) How this affected sinners viewing Him at this time. He says, “They look and stare upon Me. They part My garments among them, and cast lots upon My vesture.” (3.) Some observations on these matters.
1. Christ’s emaciated condition. He could see and count the bones of the upper part of his body and, of course, the stretched posture that was created by crucifixion would bring the bones of the trunk more into view than is normal. But the words convey much more than that and more also than the drying up of the flesh and skin would have produced. The thing to remember is that His was a body wasted by labour, by want of rest and by fasting. That is something we may tend to overlook, but it is a fact – a fact overlooked by the artists in medieval times who thought it a great duty and privilege to make a pictorial representation of the crucifixion. Of course, they were sinning in attempting to make a picture of the dying Saviour, but most of them had not noticed that, looking at it Himself, He could say, “I may tell all My
1Preached on the Sabbath morning of the Dingwall communion season in February 1996.
bones”. It agrees with Isaiah’s prophecy: “As many were astonied at Thee; His visage was so marred more than any man, and His form more than the sons of men. . . . He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him.”
When the Saviour and some of the Apostles came down from the Mount of transfiguration they found a man greatly troubled over his demon-possessed son. The other disciples had been trying to cure him and had failed; the Saviour’s explanation was: “This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting”. I think we can gather from this that the many miracles Christ performed were preceded by prayer and fasting. And if we think of the past week, foretold in this Psalm, when he had gone up to Jerusalem – and especially the past 24 hours, when His expending of energy exceeded all that preceded – our Lord could say, “The zeal of Thine house hath eaten Me up”. And now He could tell His bones as He looked down upon Himself.
There have been others, of course, who could count their bones: some who have been so affected by illness that practically none of their flesh was left, some through starvation, some through ill-treatment (such as prisoners of war), some through fanatical fasting – but these were all sinful, mortal men. The One who speaks here is totally different; He is truly man but, as to His person, He is the Son of God. His body is a supernaturally-prepared and voluntarily-assumed body uncontaminated by sin and ordinarily exempt from death, for death is the wages of sin. As far as He personally was concerned, “in Him is no sin”; there was no deviation from the perfect law of righteousness and love: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself”. This the Saviour did from the time He knew His right hand from His left; He was keeping the law of God to perfection. Therefore in that respect He was not due the penalty of death – the penalty for sin.
We should remember that the body He was at this moment looking at was His own, that the Son of God possessed His human nature – body and soul – as surely as our bodies belong to us, and the souls which animate them. The human body and soul that the Son of God was united to were entirely His; He is God and man in two distinct natures and one person for ever. Therefore the one who says, “I may tell all my bones”, is God in our nature, holy harmless, undefiled and separate from sinners. And is it not extraordinary that such a being should be brought to the dust of death, that one who had never sinned – one in whom there was no inclination to sin but rather a divine aversion to it – should be crucified and be in such a state of body that He is able to count His bones? It ought to be amazing to us.
Both the life that wasted His holy body and the death that brought it to lie
in the grave were uniquely remarkable, and I just wish to enlarge slightly upon these two matters. If we single out the recorded part of His life – that is, His ministry – which began, as you remember, when He came to John the Baptist, who was baptizing at the Jordan, and presented Himself as a candidate for baptism. John, who had previously been alerted to the coming of this Person, refused to baptize Him, thinking it was more proper that this Person should baptise him. But the Saviour demanded to be baptized and said that it was a fulfilling of all righteousness.
Here, at the very beginning of His work as mediator of the covenant of grace, He was bent on fulfilling all righteousness, which means that He, as the lawful representative of God’s elect people, would perform all the righteousness required of Him. Here is the One who has come to save His people from their sins, and the only way to do so was by associating Himself with them and being associated with them in the eye of the Father. He was their representative, and God looked upon this Person, His Son in our nature, as a representative of those many sinners that He came to redeem. God saw His Son as their representative and saw therefore that He as their representative must act as these people ought to have acted. While they in their multitudes had sinned grievously, in all sorts of ways, breaking both the first table of the law and the second, yet it was His duty as their Redeemer and Saviour to keep that law to perfection, to do Himself what His people had failed to do in order to work out a righteousness for them.
Of course in the 30 years that elapsed before He began His ministry, He had been fulfilling that law perfectly, as I mentioned already; in Him was no sin. There was not a particle of sin in thought or word or deed, in imagination or desire or aim or purpose – not a particle of sin anywhere in the life of this Person. And now, when He entered on His ministry, He was subjected to temptations that had been absent previously, although there must have been many temptations then. He, the holy One living among unholy creatures like you and me, was to be subjected to temptations of a different sort once He entered on His ministry and therefore the trial of His obedience would be all the greater.
But you find Him here declaring that it was His business to fulfil all righteousness; so He continued in His duty of keeping the law of God to perfection. He obeyed every command of God from a spirit of love and in that way magnified the law – that law which Satan would have sinners like us, and even believers among us, to regard as grievous. And sinners do regard it as grievous; the law is an annoyance to sinners; the law is something that we do not like, something we are habitually keeping in part. And we suppose – this is the trouble with many of us – that we are good at keeping the law
because we are keeping the law in part and are not going the full distance in breaking its commands openly. We suppose therefore that our little keeping of the law will be regarded in heaven as sufficient.
In this Person you see that there was no such disposition; in Him there was a perfect love to the divine law. In Psalm 40 He says,
To do Thy will I take delight, O Thou My God that art,
Yea, that most holy law of Thine I have within My heart”.
When part of Psalm 40 is quoted in Hebrews 10 you see that it was when He came into the world that He said this: “I come to do Thy will”. And you can ask yourself how it was that these words were spoken when He came into the world – that is, when the holy Child of Mary was born in Bethlehem.
It was the Saviour’s duty as the Mediator of the covenant of grace to obey the law of God to perfection, to do what man is obliged to do. Adam was not given a tablet of stone on which the Ten Commandments were written. He was not told to love the Lord with heart and soul and strength and mind. This was written into his very nature, his very disposition; this was something that he intuitively knew to be his duty: to love God perfectly and to love his fellow men perfectly. This was the duty from which Adam departed when he sinned by eating the forbidden fruit, and those who are descended from him come into this world sinners, ill-disposed towards that law in its fullness: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with heart and soul and strength and mind, and thy neighbour as thyself. Perfect love, continual love – nothing else but love to God and love to man – that is the law. That is a law we do not keep, a law we cannot keep, a law we have no will to keep.
But when this Person came to begin His official ministry, He declared it was His duty to keep that law, to fulfil all righteousness; He must obey that law, in thought and speech and behaviour, on behalf of the people He loved and had come to save. That was the first part of the Saviour’s duty in connection with salvation; the other part of His duty was to suffer what justice demanded from the sinful people He came into the world to save. “Thou shalt call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their sins.” They were a people under condemnation, under sentence of eternal death, and that is the way that we are by nature. You who are here in a state of nature, you are under the sentence of eternal death; wisdom would suggest to you that there is no time to be lost in seeking salvation. It ill becomes the soul under sentence of eternal death to procrastinate.
Now when we come to the matter of His suffering, He is to be thought of as the substitute of His people, their representative, the Person who must die instead of them, the Person who must take their law-place and give satisfaction to divine justice as it demanded of Him what was proper. Here you have one
Person; on the other hand you have the ones He represented, the ones He substituted for – a multitude that no man can number. Many of them had a hideous record, Manasseh among them. Adam too was among them; his was a fearful transgression; it brought his whole posterity into this dreadful plight of spiritual death.
This multitude that no man can number, guilty of all the sins, almost, that you can imagine, these are the people for whom He is the substitute, and it was proper that His substitution should be accepted on their behalf. It is proper that this one Man’s endurance of the penalty of His people’s sins should be effective. He laid down His life for His sheep, as He said, giving His life a ransom for many. It was proper that the life He laid down, the death that He died, which was a death under the curse, should be accepted as a sufficient atonement. It effectively brought about redemption for the whole number of those for whom He substituted. And the reason why the sufferings unto death of this one Man, on Calvary’s accursed tree, was a proper substitution for those He loved is just due to the Person who suffered. It was no ordinary man who was suffering; it was the Son of God in our nature who suffered unto death.
That is the reason why there is such merit in His death. And divine wisdom and divine justice appointed that these sufferings on that accursed tree should be a perfect substitute for the sufferings that the people He loved would otherwise have had to endure. These things are, of course, mysterious; we are dealing with divine matters. “Great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh.” And we come up again and again against matters that are beyond our power to understand. Yet we can satisfy ourselves with the truth that this one Man, the God-man, died on Calvary’s accursed tree following the nine hours on the cross, and God accounted this a perfect atonement. Thus there is every reason why the multitude of His people should be redeemed and should come at last to glory. This was the completion of the fulfilment of righteousness, the doing of all that was required to vindicate and glorify the righteousness which marks God’s nature.
This is what is overlooked or even rejected by many who speak of their ideas about the gospel. What they leave out of account altogether, what they do not want to consider, is that in this there was a fulfilling of God’s righteousness, that this was all due to the fact that God is righteous. “Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” said Abraham. And he was only saying what is absolute truth and what is said elsewhere in a multitude of places regarding the high and the lofty One who inhabiteth eternity, whose name is holy – that He is righteous, that in Him there is no iniquity, that He does not tolerate sin, that He does not set aside what is right in favour of something incomplete.
This is the God who is absolutely right and who will not be moved from his divine rectitude on any account.
You see preachers of the Word with false gospels who are now coming out into the open and declaring that they do not believe that there is a hell; they cannot accept that there is a lost eternity. And what lies behind that but their ignorance of the fact that God is righteous and of what will therefore happen if sinners will not receive the one Saviour that is set before them, if sinners will despise and reject the Son of God in our nature, if sinners will pay no due attention to the fact that “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life”? If sinners will have none of these things, they will perish in a lost eternity, because God is righteous.
And the righteousness of God is such that, when His eternal purpose of saving some of this sinful race must be fulfilled, it fell to His Son to bear His wrath and curse. No escape for Him although He is the Son of God, although He is God in our nature, although – in addition to His perfection as the Son of God – His behaviour as the Son of man was infinitely perfect. No exception was made for Him. If it was proper for sinners to be saved through a divine substitute, that substitute must suffer the wrath and curse of God. Righteousness demanded it, and that is what happened when the Saviour came to the state we read of in this portion of the Word of God. This was required to vindicate and glorify the righteousness which marks God’s nature and government, and this was what produced the descent to death in Christ’s sufferings.
These sufferings and shame had no parallel; so it is divine, redeeming love that we see in the words before us: “I may tell all My bones”. We read of Christ coming to the upper chamber on the night before He died; we read that, “having loved His own that were in the world, He loved them unto the end” – although He knew what lay before Him, although something of the shadow of Calvary was passing over His heart and mind. Yet He loved His own unto the end, notwithstanding the fearful physical sufferings, notwithstanding this reduction of His holy frame to something that was now wasted, whose bones He could count. It was due to the fearful wrath that fell upon Him as the Father visited upon Him the iniquities of all His people. We see divine redeeming love in these words before us: “I may tell all My bones” – love that many waters could not quench nor floods drown.
So the Apostle says, “Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might be rich”; “Christ also hath loved us, and hath given Himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour”. And so He said, “I may tell all My bones”.