Bible Story · Psalm 22
My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me
The Story
The psalm opens with a cry that has reverberated through history: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?" What is extraordinary about this opening is its honesty. The psalmist does not say "I feel forsaken." He does not add a disclaimer: "I know you haven't really forsaken me, but..." He speaks with raw directness. The feeling is stated as a question hurled at God: why? Yet even in the cry of dereliction there is faith. He says "My God" — twice, with double emphasis. He is not abandoning God in the cry of abandonment. He is speaking to the very God who seems absent. This is itself a form of trust: addressing as "my God" the one who seems to have hidden his face. The psalmist remembers the past. The ancestors trusted and were delivered. They cried and were rescued. They were not disappointed. Yet here is this person — a worm and not a man, scorned and despised — mocked by everyone who sees him. They say: he trusted in the Lord; let the Lord rescue him. They divide his garments; they cast lots for his clothing. And then the tone shifts. Despite the mockery, despite the isolation, the psalmist returns to the character of God. "Yet you are he who took me from the womb; you made me trust you at my mother's breasts." The psalm alternates — darkness and trust, lament and memory, cry and praise. It is not a smooth resolution; it is a wrestling. And in the wrestling, there is honesty about the full range of human experience before God. By its latter half, the psalm has shifted entirely into praise: "For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help." What happened? We are not told. But somehow, in the darkness, the psalmist found that God had not after all turned away. The feeling of forsakenness was real and valid. But the forsakenness itself was not the final truth. A thousand years after David wrote this psalm, Jesus of Nazareth — hanging on a cross, in the darkness of midday, with his clothing divided among soldiers who cast lots — cried out its first words. And the question that was David's cry became the most costly question in history: why have you forsaken me? The answer, worked out in three days, was resurrection.
Background
Psalm 22 is attributed to David and was likely written during a period of intense personal suffering, possibly related to persecution by enemies. It is one of the most extensively cited psalms in the New Testament passion narratives: the mockery (v. 7–8), the dividing of garments (v. 18), the cry of dereliction (v. 1), and the declaration that God has not hidden his face (v. 24) all appear in the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion. Jesus' quotation of verse 1 from the cross (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34) was not a cry of despair but a messianic identification — by citing the first verse, he invited his hearers to see the entire psalm as being fulfilled in that moment. The psalm moves from lament (vv. 1–21) to praise (vv. 22–31), tracing a journey that many interpreters have called the defining shape of the Psalter.
Truth
Psalm 22 teaches that the experience of God's felt absence is not the same as God's actual absence. The psalm validates the cry of forsakenness as a genuine human experience before God — one that is so human, so universal, that the Son of God himself prayed it. At the same time, the psalm does not allow the feeling to become the final word. It holds both realities: the darkness is real, and God has not turned away. The movement from lament to praise is not denial; it is the long, honest journey of a soul that takes both its pain and its God seriously — and finds, in the end, that the one who cried out was heard.
Application
Have you ever felt spiritually forsaken — as if God had turned away, gone silent, or hidden his face? Notice that Jesus himself prayed these words on the cross. Your experience of divine absence does not disqualify you from faith; it may be the most honest prayer you have. What would it mean to take that feeling directly to God in the form of a question — "my God, why?" — rather than either suppressing it or concluding that God is truly absent?