Psalm 22:9-11. “Yet you are he who took me from the womb; you made me trust you at my mother’s breasts. On you I was cast from my birth, and from my mother’s womb, you have been my God. Be not far from me, for trouble is near, and there is none to help.”
Here is a beautiful expression of the covenant love of God. God’s love from generation to generation of those who seek him. God is working in David from birth so that David recognizes that he has trusted in God from his birth. How did David know that? We don’t need to guess at any extraordinary reason David may have believed in God from birth. Some almost magical working of God that we no longer experience in the regular life of covenantal generations today. David knew from the practice of circumcision that God had incorporated him into his people from birth. His mother had taught him the words of God from an early age.
Here is a mother who faithfully fulfills her calling before God in training up her child in the fear of the Lord. So even though he likely does not remember a particular moment in which he put his trust in God at this time, he sees the trajectory of his faith in God forming as he learns about God in the first years of his life. “You made me trust at my mother’s breasts.”
This early faith doesn’t mean there was no wandering or time to make the word of God his own. We shouldn’t imagine that David’s spiritual journey was radically different than that of the average Christian who is born into the faith. Follow David in the book of 1st and 2nd Samuel, and we see the ups and downs. Throughout his life, David had to continue to say “Yes” and “Amen” to the promises of God so that more and more they might become his beliefs, not just his parents’ beliefs.
Behind all this is the doctrine of the Perseverance of the Saints. God is forming that initial faith as David receives the word of God from an early age. God is watching over David from the very beginning of his life because he will ensure that the elect David remains in him to the end. For David, that relationship began right from the time when he drank from his mother’s breasts. Ultimately, because God brought him into the world through a covenant family. God used that covenant bond to create faith in David from a very early age.
We pluck these words of Psalm 22 out of the midst of a lament and a plea to God. The Psalm begins with the words, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me?” Throughout the Psalm, he speaks of the trouble that he is in, “they make mouths at me; they wag their heads; He trusts in the Lord; let him deliver him; let him rescue him, for he delights in him!” “Many Bulls encompass me,” “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint,” and “For dogs encompass me; a company of evildoers encircles me.”
Even in his lament, his recognition that God has rejected him, he knows that God has caused him to trust him from his mother’s breasts. That gives him a profound certainty during his trouble. When we look back at our lives and we see those little moments of faith, it strengthens our confidence that God is working in our lives. Further, we see how God has ordained the shape of our lives and we rightly rejoice in the work he is doing.
David’s lament foretells Christ’s lament on the cross. Christ takes up the words of David on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” And it tells us that even as he experienced the wrath of God on the cross, he knew that the fact that he was cast on God from the day of his birth, encouraged him as he suffered for our sake. His entire life of obedience pointed toward this moment on the cross.
The Heidelberg Catechism is striking in the way it draws out the benefits we receive from the fact that Christ was born. “He is our Mediator, and with his innocence and perfect holiness covers, in the sight of God, my sin, in which I was conceived and born.” The first faith of David as a child on his mother’s breast is counted to him as righteousness on the basis of Christ’s work. It is Christ’s work that creates even the possibility of David’s relationship with God. Christ’s entire life of righteousness belongs to me.
How much more for us who are baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ. Those who grew up in covenant households can look back at a life of ups and downs, and they may despair. But if they remember that they were cast on God from birth, they will marvel at his grace. When they approach the bulls of Bashan in their life, the dogs that surround the children of God, they may look back at the words that God pronounced over them in their baptism. They may remember: my God is a God who keeps his word. He has given me his word and sealed it with water so that the suffering and death of Jesus belongs to me. That gives me strength in my distress.
Where then is the comfort for those whom God brings into Christ at a later age? That is not what Psalm 22 emphasizes, but these words are a comfort to all Christians. We understand that when God baptizes us into Christ, his death covers the sins of my whole life. That covering includes my failure to trust God in the first part of my life. More than that, even though at birth we were cast upon God, God in his infinite mercy has chosen me before my birth so that he might cast me upon himself in the appointed time. My whole life now belongs to God even though in the first part of my life, the Lord was not my God. The whole work of Christ, including his birth, belongs to me.
In all this, whatever advantages to those in the covenant, we must remember the sovereignty of God. “Will the molded say to it’s molder, “Why have you made me like this? (Romans 9:20)” Not all those who call me Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. What God ultimately wants is a true child-like faith, which will depend on him even in the hard times. David’s child-like faith, while at his mother’s breast, is prototypical for all faith that begins in complete dependence upon God.
Whenever God brings me into his kingdom, I may look at the way he has manifested himself in my life and my faith. I may continue to find comfort that, yes, God is near, even when there is no-one else to help. So that “I will tell of God’s name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation, I will praise you;” (Ps. 22:22).
Peter and Trudy
We really appreciated this devotional. Thanks for sharing it, James.