Psalm 22:19-21. 19O Lord, do not stay far away! You are my strength; come quickly to my aid! 20Save me from the sword; spare my precious life from these dogs. 21Snatch me from the lion’s jaws and from the horns of these wild oxen.
Psalm 22 was written by King David. It is a cry for help from God – come quickly to my aid. Why does David need help? Because he is being attacked by dogs, lions, and wild oxen. David does not mean literal dogs, lions, and wild oxen, he means people who are acting like these animals.
Dogs –David’s enemies are like filthy dogs that just want to cause trouble.
Lions – But David’s enemies are not weak, they have the strength of lions.
Then David describes his enemies like a third animal, the wild oxen. Wild oxen?
The Old Testament, including Psalm 22, was written in a different language, Hebrew. There are many Hebrew words that we aren’t exactly sure what they mean. This is especially true when it comes to animals in the Bible. For example, the word for “wild oxen” is the Hebrew word reem (pronounced reh-ame). But nobody really knows for sure what a reem is. One of the most confusing guesses came 400 years ago. If you look up this verse in a King James Bible you can see that it says “save me from the horn of the unicorn.” People made fun of the Bible for claiming that there are actual unicorns (there’s not). Others have assumed the animal is a rhinoceros (one horn).
It’s much more likely that David is talking about an extinct (do you know what extinct means?) animal known as the auroch. The auroch was a giant, wild cow-like animal. Some fossils of auroch show them to be six feet tall at the shoulders, with three-foot long horns. Auroch could weigh over 3000 pounds. They lived all over Asia, Africa, and Europe. Oh yeah, and auroch were fearless and aggressive. They would fight each other and any other animal that got in its way. Needless to say, the auroch was NOT at baby Jesus’ manger.
But they were at Jesus’ cross. Not literally, but like David, at his crucifixion, Jesus was surrounded by people that acted like auroch. Mean, aggressive, violent people that wanted Jesus to die. These people are described in Psalm 22 as wanting to kill David. But look at how David describes it:
Psalm 22:16. My enemies surround me like a pack of dogs; an evil gang closes in on me. They have pierced my hands and feet.
Psalm 22, with its dogs, lions, and wild oxen, is pointing us to the cross one thousand years before Jesus. King David’s hands and feet were never pierced, but Jesus’ hands and feet were pierced on the cross. Jesus didn’t just come to Earth as a baby to be cute and cuddly and teach us how to love each other. He came to die for sinners, the same sinners that surrounded him like wild aurochs.
We are all like that auroch aren’t we? Mean, fighting with each other, doing whatever we want, all of which only leads to our extinction. But Jesus came to free us from that selfishness and tame us. Jesus turns us from wild oxen to domesticated oxen, yoked to Jesus’s love and serving him forever.
Questions: How is Jesus changing your life? Can you see how trusting Jesus is changing you from a wild ox to a tamed ox?
TLICfamily 