There are times in the life of God’s people that we feel a deep chasm between us and the Lord, a distance from him. When God’s people endure heavy persecution, are victims of abuse, are plagued with sickness and bombarded with grief and the loss of loved ones, are hounded by enemies, or are gossiped and slandered against, there can be a feeling of utter forsakenness that God has left them all alone. This kind of deep forsakenness and sense of abandonment by God usually does not come as the result of one instance of suffering or hardship. That seems to be the case with David. The affliction that he speaks about in Psalm 22 exceeds any known situation in his life. This has led John Calvin and others to suggest that David has bottled up, crammed, and compressed all the suffering he experienced during his entire life in this one psalm.¹ In this psalm, all the hurt, all the sorrow, all the pain and suffering he endured join together and leave him with a deep sense of abandonment by God.