John Calvin Commentary Psalms 22:4

"Our fathers trusted in thee: They trusted, and thou didst deliver them." — Psalms 22:4 (ASV)

Our fathers trusted in you. Here the Psalmist assigns the reason why God sits among the praises of the tribes of Israel. The reason is that his hand had always been stretched out to preserve his faithful people.

David, as I have just observed, gathers the examples of all past ages, in order to encourage, strengthen, and effectively persuade himself that, as God had never cast off any of his chosen people, he also would be one of those for whom deliverance is securely laid up in the hand of God.

He therefore expressly declares that he belongs to the offspring of those who had been heard, thereby intimating that he is an heir of the same grace which they had experienced. He has in view the covenant by which God had adopted the posterity of Abraham to be his peculiar people.

It would be of little consequence to know the varied instances in which God has exercised his mercy towards his own people, unless each of us could count himself among their number, as David includes himself in the Church of God. In repeating three times that the fathers had obtained deliverance by trusting, there is no doubt that with all modesty he intends tacitly to intimate that he had the same hope with which they were inspired—a hope which results in the fulfillment of the promises on our behalf.

For a person to derive encouragement from the blessings which God has bestowed on his servants in former times, he should turn his attention to the free promises of God’s word, and to the faith which leans on them. In short, to show that this confidence was neither cold nor dead, David tells us, at the same time, that they cried to God. He who pretends that he trusts in God, and yet is so listless and indifferent under his calamities that he does not implore His aid, lies shamefully.

By prayer, then, true faith is known, as the goodness of a tree is known by its fruit. It should also be observed that God regards no other prayers as right but those which proceed from faith and are accompanied with it. It is therefore not without good reason that David has put the word cried in the middle between these words, They trusted in you, they trusted, in Psalm 22:4, and these words, They trusted in you, in Psalm 22:5.