“O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” So wrote David in the 63rd Psalm while he was dwelling in the wilderness of Judah. Driven out as he was by his own son, Absalom, King David was not only an outcast among his own people, but he was also ostracized from God’s temple and the worship that went on there. It was at the temple in Jerusalem where one heard the Word of God proclaimed and received the forgiveness of sins. But now David was not only in a geographical desert where water was scare, but also in a spiritual desert, where the Word of God was scare. Where God’s Word is not, neither is God. Conversely, where God’s Word is, there He is also. To be separated from God’s Word is to be separated from God Himself. The Apostle Paul writes that the Gentiles were at one time “separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the testaments of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” Having been separated from God’s temple and God’s Word, David felt like a Gentile - separated from God Himself. Such a separation created a thirst in David, a longing for both God and His Word. Just as we would become physically thirsty if we were deprived of water for very long, so David became spiritually thirsty. And just as it would mean physical death for us if we were to go without natural water for more than a few days, so it would mean spiritual death for us if we stopped drinking from the wells of God’s Word.
But David not only speaks of himself in this Psalm, but ultimately of Christ, the Son of David, as well. And tonight we hear Him speak from the cross that He suffers thirst, thirst not only for the natural water His body so desperately needed, but also for the spiritual water of God and His Word that His soul needed. Having cried earlier, “My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me!” Jesus was suffering a separation from God that was greater than either David or you and I will ever have to suffer ourselves. Yet it is the suffering that you and I deserved on account of our sins. We deserved to suffer not only the lack of earthly water, but also the lack of the living water of God’s Word. We deserved to be deprived not only of the temporal life that regular water sustains, but also the eternal life that the water of God’s Word sustains. But with His words, “I thirst,” Jesus shows that He suffers all this for us, so that we might not have to.
Jesus’ suffering is vicarious, which means that He suffered what He did in our place. Jesus was our scapegoat. In the O.T. the scapegoat was a goat which was brought to the temple, where the high priest placed his hands on this goat and confessed the sins of the people of Israel over it, then let it loose in the wilderness. The imagery here was given to teach God’s people what He would do with their sins for Christ’s sake. He would take them from the people and place them on Christ, who would carry them away with Him to a remote place where they would never again be found. That place is as far away from us as the east is from the west. So far have our sins been removed from us in Christ.
This removal is pictured for us at the cross by the manner in which Jesus was offered sour wine for His thirst. In the O.T. a hyssop branch was used to sprinkle the blood of an animal upon both people and things to sanctify them and cleanse them of sin. On the night when God was going to strike all the firstborn of the Egyptians, He told the Israelites to take a bunch of hyssop and dip it in the blood of a lamb, in order to apply it to the lintel and doorposts of their homes. The people who were in such homes where this had been done would be spared this final plague of death. Later on, God told the Israelites to use hyssop in the cleansing of lepers, dipping the branch into the blood of a bird, in order to sprinkle it upon the person who was to be so cleansed. Still later, when David confessed his sin of adultery and murder, he prayed, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” And now, here at the cross, hyssop is used again, this time to lift the sour wine to Jesus’ mouth. The imagery here is that Jesus is the Lamb whose blood cleanses us from all sin. Just as the hyssop branch was used to apply the blood of animals in order to sanctify things in the O.T., so it’s use at the cross shows us that it’s this Man’s blood, sprinkled upon us at our Baptism, that sanctifies us and cleanses us from all unrighteousness.
In Psalm 69 David, speaking prophetically about Christ, writes, “They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me sour wine to drink.” God has prepared for His people “a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, and of aged wine well refined,” according to Isaiah. But in order that we might eat and drink of this banquet, our Lord had to eat of the poisonous food and drink of the sour wine that we should have eaten and drunk of. It was not only the poisonous food and sour wine of the world’s hatred of Him that He had to taste for us, but also the bitter cup of God’s wrath. God had threatened His rebellious people with this cup, and not only them, but all the nations of the earth. Jeremiah writes, “Thus the LORD, the God of Israel, said to me: ‘Take from my hand this cup of the wine of wrath, and make all the nations to whom I send you drink it. They shall drink and stagger and be crazed because of the sword that I am sending among them.’” It was this cup, however, that was given to Jesus to drink on the cross. In the garden He had prayed to His Father that, if it were possible, this cup be taken from Him. But He also prayed, “Yet not my will be done, but yours.”