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 my hands and my feet.”

Crucifixion did not exist when those words were written. David had no framework for it. No historical reference. And yet there it is, written into the Jewish Scriptures a millennium before the method of execution that would fulfill it had ever been conceived.

But that is not all.

“They divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing.”

The Roman soldiers standing beneath the cross did exactly that. They gambled for the robe of a dying man, fulfilling a line of poetry written by a Hebrew king who had been dead for a thousand years.

“I can count all my bones. They stare and gloat over me.”

Crucifixion dislocated nearly every major joint in the body. The victim hung suspended while the weight of their own frame pulled their skeleton apart. Every bone became visible beneath the skin.

David described it. A thousand years early. In a song.

And most Christians who have heard “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” their entire lives have absolutely no idea that those words are the opening line of the most detailed prophecy of crucifixion ever written.

But here is the part that changes everything.

Psalm 22 does not end in agony.

Most Christians assume that Jesus died in despair because they only know the first verse. They hear the cry and feel the anguish and believe that the cross ends in darkness.

It does not.

The final verses of Psalm 22 are a declaration of total, absolute, cosmic victory.

“All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will bow down before Him.”

“Future generations will be told about the Lord. They will proclaim His righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it.”

He has done it.

The Hebrew word is a single, thundering declaration that scholars translate as the equivalent of one word.

Finished.

The same word Jesus spoke as His final breath on the cross.

“It is finished.”

Jesus did not die quoting the beginning of Psalm 22. He died fulfilling the end of it. And by quoting the opening line, He was telling every person who knew the Scriptures exactly how the story would end.

Not in defeat. In victory.

~ John Ross (Faith Sprout FaithSprout™ – The 66 Roots Journey} I do not endorse this site nor do I receive anything from them for posting this excerpt. Just want to give credit where credit is due. It is a legitimate site.