This Psalm was the language of the soul of the Lord while He hung on the cross (Matt. 27:46). He uttered, perhaps, only the first words of it, but His spirit went through the whole. He begins as though His cries for deliverance from death (Heb. 5:7) had not been heard, since He was now under the darkness of the withdrawn countenance of God. This was the death of a victim, not of a martyr. It was death under the judgment of sin. Nothing ever could be of like kind. See how the death of the martyr Stephen is different from that of the Lamb of God (Acts 7). But still the perfect sufferer entirely vindicates God—the faithful God of the fathers, and His God from the womb hitherto.
He therefore still cries, presenting all the features of His present distress from the hand of men before the eye of God. (Psa. 22:7-8,12,16-18.) And it is strange, how the enemy, in that hour, were fulfilling the word of God against themselves to the very letter of it. (Psa. 22:8; Matt. 27:43.) But at last the blessed sufferer seems conscious of having been heard (Psa. 22:21)—heard from the horns of the unicorns—heard, doubtless, by Him who was able to save Him from death (Heb. 5:7). For we may observe that the cry of Jesus on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken Me?” was after an interval followed by another, “Father, into thy hands I commend My spirit.” That second cry would naturally arise from a consciousness of the first having been heard. And it may therefore be thought that the Lord here in Psalm 22:21 expresses His sense of having been heard by His deliverer from death.
Under this He makes His vows—1St, to declare God’s name to His brethren; 2nd, to praise Him in the congregation (of Israel), and in the great congregation (of all the nations). The first He began to pay immediately on His being delivered from death (John 20:17), and is still fulfilling in all the saints (Rom. 8:15); the second He will pay in the kingdom when Israel and the nations are gathered, the seed of Jacob glorifying God, and the kindreds of the nations worshipping before Him. For then, as Jesus here pledges, the kingdom and all its offerings shall be the Lord’s.
But upon this Psalm 1 must further observe, that while the Lord Jesus, in the days of His life and ministry on earth was saving and not judging, stooping down and writing on the ground as though He heard not, rather than casting a stone at a guilty one, yet He did refer the world in its wickedness to the judicial eye and observance of God. In John 17 He does this, when He says, “O righteous Father, the world hath not known Thee.” This same thing He seems to me to do in this very peculiar and affecting Psalm.