Throughout the Easter story in the Gospels we find references to the book of Psalms. If we follow those references and spend time with the Psalms, we can get a deeper sense of what the Lord was going through in the week leading up to His resurrection, and so a deeper sense of what the Lord carries us through when we go through our own temptations.
This week, consider adding these Psalms to your daily reading. I recommend reading through them in their entirety. One important thing to keep in mind is that many of them reflect times when the Lord, in the lower levels of His mind, felt separate from the Divinity at His soul, which He called the Father; and so we see the speaker talking to God as someone separate, even though after His resurrection the Lord’s humanity and divinity were completely united.
Psalm 22. According to Prophets and Psalms (a posthumously-published book of the Heavenly Doctrine), in the internal sense this Psalm is about the state of the Lord’s passion on the cross. The Lord quoted this Psalm on the cross when He cried out, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” But the psalm ends on a hopeful note, that His suffering would not have been in vain: “The seed that shall serve Him shall be numbered to the Lord for a generation. They shall come and shall tell His justice unto a people that shall be born, that He has done it.” (Psalm 22:30-31)
Psalm 16. Prophets and Psalms gives the internal sense of this psalm as “The Lord’s trust in Himself for delivering the good, whom the evil infest (verses 1-5), that His is the Divine and Divine power (verses 6-8), and that His human glorified will rise again (verses 9-11).” The final verse might be familiar: “You will show me the path of life; in Your presence is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” We often think of this verse in the context of our own relationship to the Lord; but here we see it in its highest sense, of the Lord’s own hope for unity between His human and His Divine.
Psalm 118. Prophets and Psalms calls the beginning of this psalm “a song of praise to the Father by the Lord, for the church.” The whole psalm is a celebration of the Lord overcoming the power of hell, and a celebration of His ability to save humanity because of the power in His Human made Divine. Verses 22-24 capture this joy: “The stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner. From the LORD this has been done; it is wonderful in our eyes. This is the day that the LORD has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.”