What does Tribe teach about psalm 22?

At Tribe, the teaching on Psalm 22 begins with a simple but striking observation: David wrote these words a thousand years before Jesus was born, and yet the details map onto the crucifixion with almost uncomfortable precision. Brian has walked the congregation through the psalm carefully, pointing to the opening cry of abandonment, the mocking bystanders, the bones out of joint, the tongue stuck to the roof of the mouth, the piercing of hands and feet, and the soldiers gambling over clothing. He kept returning to that thousand-year gap, saying he did not want people to rush past it as though it were nothing.

The phrase "bulls of Bashan" from verse 12 carries more weight than it first appears. On one level, a bull was simply the largest, most unstoppable force anyone in David's world could picture. On a deeper level, Bashan sits at the foot of Mount Hermon in far northern Israel, a region tied in scripture to King Og, the Nephilim, and by Jesus's day to a pagan temple known as the Gates of Hell. Brian taught that the bulls in the psalm are not only physical enemies closing in but a shorthand for the dark, demonic forces arrayed against the person crying out. The psalm, then, is not just poetry about personal suffering. It is a window into something cosmic happening on the cross.

What Brian kept drawing the congregation back to is where the psalm ends: not in abandonment but in vindication and praise. He pointed out that when Jesus quoted the first line from the cross, anyone who knew the Torah would have heard the whole arc of the psalm. Jesus was not only expressing real desolation. He was pointing forward to what the psalm promised. That arc is what Brian set before the congregation as the ground of Easter hope.

Taught from Psalm 22:1-24 · Deuteronomy 3 · Colossians 2:14 · 1 Corinthians 15:55-57 · Genesis 6