Psalm 102:10
because of your great wrath,
for you have taken me up and thrown me aside. (NIV)
Today’s Reading: Psalm 102
Psalm 102 is another Messianic psalm. Entirely about Jesus, we can read this psalm as if Jesus wrote it in the first-person. There’s even a cool dialogue in the second half of the psalm that we will discuss another day. The theme of the psalm is Jesus’ sufferings and subsequent glory. The actual author of Psalm 102 is unknown but was clearly written by someone who was suffering from a great affliction.
Like most all of the psalms we have covered where it is written from the perspective of the Messiah, Jesus first calls out to God for rescue. “Hear my prayer, Lord; let my cry for help come to you” (vs. 1). This repetitive theme in each of these psalms should be taken to heart. As Jesus approached the cross, he cried out to God. Likewise, when times get hard for us, we should cry out to God.
God wants a relationship with us. I would even go so far as to say that God so much wants a relationship with us that he will allow us to suffer for it. The silver lining in our hardships is that we should emerge from them with a closer relationship with our Father. Better yet, we should go through them clinging to God. And Jesus is our example of exactly how to do that because he cries out to God even though he knows his fate. His relationship with the Father is of primary importance.
The first eleven verses of this psalm speak of Jesus’ suffering. This psalm doesn’t read as if Jesus is speaking it entirely from the cross although there are parts that do. Much of it reads more like the Garden of Gethsemane or maybe even the days leading up to that moment. It shows Jesus having physical pain but also great loneliness. “My heart is blighted and withered like grass; I forget to eat my food” (vs 4). He is in such deep sorrow that he is forgetting the essential things of life like eating.
There are three bird analogies in this section – pelican, owl and sparrow. “I am like a pelican of the wilderness; I am like an owl of the desert. I lie awake, And am like a sparrow alone on the housetop” (vs 6-7, NKJV). This is an interesting group of analogies. The location of the birds are found in the “wilderness,” “desert” and “housetop” which would all indicate some form of isolation. While owls are generally solitary birds by nature, pelicans and sparrows are very social birds. So in these analogies, we are shown Jesus who is deeply social and relational found in isolation.
We even see that Jesus cannot find relief from his sorrow by food or drink. His enemies taunt his and it’s deeply painful. “For I eat ashes as my food and mingle my drink with tears” (vs. 9). His sadness and mourning is constantly with him.
But at the heart of Jesus’ sorrows is not that his friends have abandoned him or that his enemies taunt him – it is because God has turned away from him. To God he says, “because of your great wrath, for you have taken me up and thrown me aside” (vs. 10). Jesus knows his life is “like the evening shadow” and will soon come to an end. But the abandonment of God is his greatest pain.
God placed the sin of the world on Jesus, abandoning him to the cross so that we could have a relationship with him. The pain was worth the reward to have us experience the love and grace of God. Our response is to praise Jesus for the pain he suffered to bring us into the family of God.
Christ in the Old Testament 
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