Psalm 22

Psalm 22 is what we call a “Messianic” psalm, which is just a fancy way of saying this psalm is prophetic, and speaks about Jesus. This particular Messianic Psalm speaks about the CRUCIFIXION of Jesus. In fact, you might have noticed that Jesus quoted the first verse of this psalm when he was crucified… “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

There are a lot of things we could look at in this psalm, but I want to look at one little phrase… it is the part of verse 6 where Jesus says, “I am a WORM and not a man”. The word translated as WORM is the Hebrew word TOLA. The Tola is not just a common worm; it is the SCARLET WORM from which scarlet dye was derived. When we read in Isaiah the famous passage where God says, “though your skins be as SCARLET, they shall be made as white as SNOW”, Tola is the word used for scarlet. This is an interesting fact. Here we have Jesus saying I am the TOLA, the one who provides dye… It was his blood that would bring us forgiveness. He became TOLA when He took our sins upon Himself, making forgiveness and new life a possibility for all of us.

Read this psalm again and think about how much Jesus went through for “the joy set before Him”. All this so you and I could be called His daughters and sons.