What Did David Know about Suffering? More Than We Think

Looking for daily inspiration from devotionals that focus on a common theme for each year? The 13-volume Day by Day Collection may be exactly what you need. Produced by UK-based charity Precious Seed International, the Day by Day Collection delivers 13 devotionals, each centered on individual subjects like prayer or biblical promises.

The content in the Day by Day Collection blends instruction with edification. You’ll come away each day feeling informed, challenged, and uplifted. These volumes are not just invaluable resources for personal devotion; they provide powerful material that you can incorporate into Sunday School lessons, small group discussions, and more.

As an example of Day by Day’s significant content, here is the July 5 entry from Day by Day: Christ Foreshadowed by Ivan Steeds:

The Extremity of Suffering

Psalm 22:14–15; John 19:28

Here was extremity indeed, an extremity in which His life, deprived of its natural support, is in the act of dissolution and strength is decayed. The idea of desperate exhaustion and debility is conveyed in the terms used to describe the Lord’s physical suffering in these verses. The terms are graphic indeed; the reality excruciatingly agonizing in its pain.

The picture shows us a whole frame dissolving, and it retains no firmness, no stability; it utterly yields and flows away in weakness. ‘I am poured out like water’ conveys the idea of exhaustion and of debility. He says, ‘All my bones are out of joint’, literally ‘have separated themselves’, torn from their sockets, as of a man stretched upon a rock.

‘My heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels’ conveys the idea of the inner turmoil; it may also indicate the collapse of strength of spirit. As wax softens and melts and offers no resistance to heat, so the heart lay prostrate beneath subduing misery.

‘My strength is dried up like a potsherd’, He cries, like the broken piece of pottery lying baking in the eastern sun, parched and intolerably dry. He continues ‘My tongue cleaveth to to my jaws’, so there is the resultant, unremitting thirst to which He would give expression in the cry ‘I thirst’, Jn 19:28.

What we have here is a poignant and accurate description of the physical effects of crucifixion. Here is a degree of suffering of which we have no record of anyone enduring in the Old Testament. The words were David’s words, by God inspired, but the thoughts, the extremity, the anguish, were those of another, a greater than David. We await the New Testament to find to whom those these sufferings referred.

Finally the Sufferer says, ‘thou hast brought me into the dust of death’. In all His anguish Jesus realizes His Father’s hand, Is. 53:10; Acts 2:23. So, as in Isaiah 53, verse 10, the death of the Lord Jesus appears not merely as something which befell Him, and not merely as something divinely permitted, but as purposed and determined by God. He died because His people were thus sentenced, and He died the death of the cross to bear their curse; ‘Unto dust thou shalt return’ was Adam’s sentence, Gen. 3:19. ‘Thou hast brought me into the dust of death’. v. 15.

Get the Day by Day Collection today.