Is Psalm 22 too vague?

One of the popular objections to Christian arguments for prophecy fulfillment is that the prophetic passages are too vague. Can Psalm 22 be dismissed that way?

Is Psalm 22 Messianic?

A common objection to Christian arguments for prophecy fulfillment is that the Old Testament passages don't identify themselves as Messianic. But they wouldn't have to in order to have evidential significance.

Prophecy fulfillment can have evidential value without the prophecy being Messianic, explicitly identifying itself as Messianic, or anything like that. The Messianic nature of a passage can be implicit rather than explicit. And a passage doesn't have to be Messianic to provide evidence for Christianity. Christians consider Jesus the Messiah, but there are many subcategories to the category of Messiah. A prophecy could refer to one of those subcategories without addressing the larger category. And, from a Christian perspective, Jesus is more than the Messiah. So, Messianic prophecy isn't all that's relevant.

With Psalm 22, what we have is a psalm that's attributed to David, but we don't know of anything in David's life that even comes close to fulfilling the passage, and the contents of the psalm are of such a nature that they're highly unlikely to have happened in David's life in some context that's not part of any of our extant records of his life. Then we have the fact that David is often assigned a lot of Messianic significance elsewhere in the Old Testament, such as being an ancestor of the Messiah. And the geographical and chronological influence of the figure in the psalm (verses 27-31) suggests a highly significant and influential individual. That doesn't require a Messianic understanding of the psalm, but a Messianic fulfillment helps make sense of those closing verses. It adds coherence to the psalm. Furthermore, we know that a later figure widely considered the Messiah, Jesus, died in a manner that aligns well with the psalm and was thought to have experienced a deliverance from that death (his resurrection). The themes of death and deliverance from it are prominent elsewhere in material Christians (and others) have argued is Messianic elsewhere in the Old Testament, and the psalm fits well with those passages (as discussed here, for example). For reasons like these, it makes sense to consider the passage Messianic, though implicitly rather than explicitly.

That's a secondary issue, though. The psalm doesn't have to be considered Messianic in order for Jesus' fulfillment of it to be evidentially valuable. Even if you identify the figure in the passage as a highly influential Jewish individual or whatever else other than calling him the Messiah, Jesus' alignment with the passage makes more sense as something supernatural than something natural. That's the primary issue, not whether the psalm should be categorized as Messianic.

The Closing Verses Of Psalm 22 Favor A Christian Interpretation Of The Psalm

One of the aspects of Psalm 22 that doesn't get enough attention is how the psalm ends. The individual in the passage is approaching death (verses 15 and 20-21), apparently at the hands of the enemies mentioned in the psalm, who are likened to animals. He asks for deliverance from those enemies, but says nothing of deliverance from some other manner of death, like an illness. And he is delivered. We're not told how he's delivered, but we're told that he is (verses 22-24). Verses 27-31 refer to the major significance of what's happened, how people across the world will hear about it and turn to God as a result of what's been accomplished. Those verses refer to widespread influence both geographically and chronologically.

That's happened on a large scale with Jesus. There have been widespread discussions of his execution in Christian and non-Christian sources from the first century onward.

By contrast, none of the many records we have of David's life describe anything even close to what Psalm 22 depicts. It seems unlikely, given what we know of David's life, that events such as those described in Psalm 22 happened to him. So, a fulfillment in David's life seems unlikely upfront, and it isn't referred to elsewhere in the oldest records we have of his life. An advocate of David's fulfillment of the passage could appeal to the psalm itself as evidence, but the widespread influence described in the closing verses of the psalm make more sense if they refer to something that would be discussed elsewhere as well.

The Christian understanding of the passage not only has the psalm itself recording the events, but also has the events being widely discussed from early on after the events, both geographically and chronologically, in contexts independent of Psalm 22. The closing verses of the psalm make more sense under the traditional Christian understanding.