What does Tribe teach about bulls of bashan?

At Tribe, the teaching on the Bulls of Bashan starts with Psalm 22 and the uncomfortable precision with which David's words, written a thousand years before the crucifixion, map onto what Jesus actually experienced. Brian led the congregation through the whole psalm together, and the connections came quickly: the cry of abandonment, the mocking bystanders, the bones out of joint, the piercing of hands and feet, the soldiers gambling over clothing. His repeated point was that the thousand-year gap between David writing those lines and Jesus living them is not something to rush past.

The phrase 'bulls of Bashan' from verse 12 carries more weight than it first appears to. On one level, a bull was simply the largest, most unstoppable force anyone in David's world could picture. On another level, Baal, the God of the Canaanite religion surrounding Israel, was worshiped in the image of a bull. So the bulls of Bashan were not just a vivid way of describing enemies. They were shorthand for the dark, demonic forces arrayed against the person in the psalm.

Bashan itself matters because of its location. Brian walked through where it sits, at the foot of Mount Hermon in far northern Israel, the same region known by Jesus's day as Caesarea Philippi and home to a pagan temple called the Gates of Hell. He connected this to Deuteronomy's account of the giant King Og, ruler of Bashan and descendant of the Nephilim, building a picture of a place that carried deep spiritual darkness. And yet Psalm 22 does not end in abandonment. Brian pointed out that when Jesus quoted its opening line from the cross, anyone who knew the Torah would have recognized it and known where the psalm ends: not in defeat, but in vindication and praise.

Taught from Psalm 22 · Deuteronomy 3 · Genesis 6 · 1 Corinthians 1:8 · Genesis 3