I AM LIKE AN OWL OF THE DESERT

The death of Christ is presented typically in the law, propheti­cally in the prophets, historically in the gospels and doctrinally in the epistles. The psalms present His death sympathetically and in them we have the inner thoughts and feelings of Christ as He hung on the cross. This psalm tells of the One who was afflicted and overwhelmed at Calvary.

Great care must be taken when applying any picture to the Lord Jesus. The general thought is often the safest. The pelican is known for its large pouch in which it stores food. It has the abil­ity to sit for many hours digesting what it has caught. The observer would see a bird sitting alone in the wilderness marshes. We are able to reverently approach Calvary and see the Saviour in the isolation of His sufferings and hear the lament, ‘Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger’, Lam. 1. 12.

The Lord is also depicted as an owl in the desert and there is added to the thought of His wilderness isolation the idea of a bird that is nocturnal. The Lord was crucified in the day time but, when the sun was at its height, the scene was turned to one of darkness. ‘And it was about the sixth hour, and there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour. And the sun was darkened’, Luke 23. 44, 45. It was in this darkness that He was ‘overwhelmed’ by God’s judgement against sin.

The pelican and the owl are both listed in Leviticus chapter 11 as birds that Israel had to regard as unclean. It is touching to see the Lord in the house of Simon the leper in Matthew chap­ter 26, for Israel would give Him a leper’s death. He was left abandoned outside the city wall of Jerusalem. ‘He is despised and rejected of men’, Isa. 53. 3. ‘He suffered without the gate’, Heb. 13. 12. The world has not changed its view of Christ since that day. ‘But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world’, Gal. 6. 14.