What does Tribe teach about psalm 22?
Drawn from the messages where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At Tribe, the teaching on Psalm 22 starts with a simple but striking observation: David wrote these words a thousand years before Jesus was born, and yet the psalm maps onto the crucifixion with an almost uncomfortable precision. Brian has walked the congregation through the text and let them call out the connections themselves, the cry of abandonment, the mocking bystanders throwing his own words back at him, the bones out of joint, the piercing of hands and feet, the soldiers gambling over his clothing. The point Brian keeps returning to is that the thousand-year gap between David writing these 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 and most unstoppable force anyone in David's world could picture. On another level, Baal, the God at the center of Canaanite religion surrounding Israel, was worshiped in the image of a bull, so the phrase was shorthand for dark, demonic forces arrayed against the person in the psalm. Bashan itself sits at the foot of Mount Hermon in far northern Israel, the same territory that by Jesus's day was called Caesarea Philippi, home to a pagan temple known as the Gates of Hell. Brian has connected this geography to King Og of Deuteronomy, a giant of the Rephaim descended from the Nephilim, showing that the pressure David describes in the psalm is not only circumstantial but has a supernatural layer behind it.
The teaching does not leave the psalm in darkness. Brian points out that when Jesus quoted verse one from the cross, he was doing what rabbis did regularly: citing the first line of a psalm and trusting that anyone who knew the Torah would follow the whole arc. That arc ends not in abandonment but in vindication and praise. The bulls of Bashan are real, Brian teaches, but they are not the final word, and the resurrection is the proof of that.
Taught from Psalm 22 · Deuteronomy 3 · Genesis 6 · Colossians 2:14 · 1 Corinthians 15:55-57
The passage taught · 1 Corinthians 15:55-57
55 “Death, where is your sting? Hades, where is your victory?”
56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.
57 But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- April 5, 2026 The Bulls of Bashan Brian Hunter walks through Psalm 22 on Easter Sunday, tracing David's ancient words about bulls of Bashan to the cross and what Jesus's victory means for your life today.
- March 29, 2026 The Bulls of Bashan Psalm 22 was written a thousand years before the cross, yet it describes it in detail. See what the "bulls of Bashan" reveal about what Jesus walked into.