What does Tribe teach about bulls of bashan?

At Tribe, the teaching on the Bulls of Bashan starts with Psalm 22 and the thousand-year distance between David writing it and Jesus living it. Brian taught through the psalm during Holy Week, walking the congregation through the way its details map onto the crucifixion with a precision that is hard to brush past: the cry of abandonment, the mocking crowd, the bones out of joint, the piercing of hands and feet, the soldiers casting lots for clothing. His central point was that this distance is not incidental. It is the point, and he did not want anyone to move past it quickly.

The bulls of Bashan from verse 12 carry two layers in this teaching. On the surface, a bull was simply the most overwhelming force anyone in David's world could picture. But Brian also connected Baal, the god worshiped across Canaan in the image of a bull, to what the phrase is really pointing at: not just human enemies, but the dark spiritual forces arrayed against the person in the psalm. Bashan itself sits at the foot of Mount Hermon, the same territory that by Jesus's time had become Caesarea Philippi, home to a pagan site known as the Gates of Hell. That geography is not background detail. It ties the psalm to a through-line running from the giant King Og and his Nephilim lineage in Deuteronomy to the confrontation Jesus would later have in that same region.

The opening cry of the psalm, which Jesus spoke from the cross, is also taught here as a deliberate rabbinic act. Anyone in that crowd who knew the Torah would have recognized the first line and known where the whole psalm ends: not in abandonment, but in vindication and praise. Jesus was not only expressing real desolation. He was pointing to the arc of the entire psalm, and Brian's teaching holds those two things together rather than resolving the tension too quickly.

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