Psalm 22:6: 6. But I am a worm,

and not a man; the scorn of men, and the contempt of the

people.

 

6. But I am a worm, and not a man. David does not murmur against God

as if God had dealt hardly with him; but in bewailing his condition, he

says, in order the more effectually to induce God to show him mercy, that

he is not accounted so much as a man. This, it is true, seems at first sight

to have a tendency to discourage the mind, or rather to destroy faith; but it

will appear more clearly from the sequel, that so far from this being the

case, David declares how miserable his condition is, that by this means he

may encourage himself in the hope of obtaining relief. He therefore argues

that it could not be but that God would at length stretch forth his hand to

save him; to save him, I say, who was so severely afflicted, and on the

brink of despair. If God has had compassion on all who have ever been

afflicted, although afflicted only in a moderate degree, how could he

forsake his servant when plunged in the lowest abyss of all calamities?

Whenever, therefore, we are overwhelmed under a great weight of

afflictions, we ought rather to take from this an argument to encourage us

to hope for deliverance, than suffer ourselves to fall into despair. If God so

severely exercised his most eminent servant David, and abased him so far

that he had not a place even among the most despised of men, let us not

take it ill, if, after his example, we are brought low. We ought, however,

principally to call to our remembrance the Son of God, in whose person

we know this also was fulfilled, as Isaiah had predicted,

“He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and

acquainted with grief and we hid as it were our faces from him; he

was despised, and we esteemed him not.” (<235303>Isaiah 53:3)

By these words of the prophet we are furnished with a sufficient

refutation of the frivolous subtlety of those who have philosophised upon

the word worm, as if David here pointed out some singular mystery in the

generation of Christ; whereas his meaning simply is, that he had been

abased beneath all men, and, as it were, cut off from the number of living

beings. The fact that the Son of God suffered himself to be reduced to such

ignominy, yea, descended even to hell, is so far from obscuring, in any

respect, his celestial glory, that it is rather a bright mirror from which is

reflected his unparalleled grace towards us.

Commentaries on the Psalms