The Bulls of Bashan

In one paragraph

Brian walked Psalm 22 through the lens of Holy Week, showing how words David wrote a thousand years before the crucifixion map onto it with almost uncomfortable precision. The title, "The Bulls of Bashan," comes from verse 12, and by the end it carries a lot more weight than a strange phrase about livestock. The congregation read through all of Psalm 22 together, passing a microphone around the...

Read together

1. Psalm 22 read aloud in full as the primary text of the sermon
2. Genesis 3 God's promise that the coming one would bruise the enemy's heel but crush his skull
3. Genesis 6 sons of God taking human wives, producing the Nephilim and later giants
4. Deuteronomy 3 account of King Og, the giant king who ruled in Bashan
5. Isaiah Jesus was beaten so badly he was unrecognizable as a man
6. 1 Corinthians 1:8 the rulers of this world did not understand, or they would not have crucified the glorious Lord
7. Psalm 23 you prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies

Talk about it

1. Brian pointed out that roughly a thousand years passed between David writing Psalm 22 and Jesus fulfilling it. Why does that gap matter, and how does sitting with that gap change the way you read the psalm?
2. Several people in the room noted how the mockers at the cross were echoing the same tactic Satan used against Jesus in the wilderness, taking his own words and turning them against him. When have you felt something similar in your own life, where doubt or accusation used your own beliefs against you?
3. Brian described Jesus going to Caesarea Philippi and then to Jerusalem as deliberately picking a fight with the forces of darkness, waving the bullfighter's cape. Does that picture of Jesus change or challenge how you normally think about him? In what way?
4. The sermon made the point that the cross looked like the enemy's greatest victory, but was actually the moment of his undoing. Where in your own life right now does something feel like defeat that might actually be heading somewhere else?
5. Brian closed by saying that whatever fierce bulls are surrounding someone today, their authority is, in his words, not real, because of what Jesus accomplished on the cross. What does it actually look like in daily life to believe that and act on it?