About Jesus' Last Words
The last words Jesus spoke before He died were a cry so agonizing that the people standing at the foot of the cross could not even understand what He was saying. Most Christians know that. Here is what most Christians have never been told. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me" is not a cry of despair. It is a direct quotation. The opening line of Psalm 22. A psalm written by King David roughly a thousand years before Jesus was born. Jesus was not losing His faith on the cross. He was quoting Scripture. And in ancient Jewish tradition, when a rabbi quoted the first line of a psalm, He was invoking the entire psalm. Every person standing at Golgotha who knew the Torah would have recognized exactly what He was doing. He was not crying out in defeat. He was pointing them to a prophecy. Now here is what makes that staggering. Psalm 22 was written approximately one thousand years before the Roman Empire invented crucifixion. Yet look at what David wrote. "They pierced m...
