18 Minutes
God knows what it is like to lose a Son. But God forsaking God...no man can fathom this. What was meant by Jesus when he asked his Father to take away this cup from me? Because Jesus’ love for humanity was so great he was not praying for a way out of the pain and suffering. He was praying for strength to face the pain and suffering he knew he was about to bear. The cup he was relating to was the adversity of the human will. Consider the eternal relationship that has existed between God the Father and God the Son. Understand this relationship. They had never been separated by anything for any length of time in any way, shape, or form. Nothing had ever come between them in the way of will, desires, intentions, thoughts, or purposes. This was a sovereign transaction completed in the counsel of determination. God and Christ knew there would come a day that he would bear the sins of the world and the righteous judgment of God in his body. We have a difficult time grasping this, since we don’t know what it is like to live in such a relationship at all, let alone for all eternity. All our relationships, even those that are thought to be the most loving, have areas of discord and misunderstanding. But God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit always are in a perfect relationship and perfect unity. Jesus had not gone to Calvary without purpose. God would never have allowed this had it not been in His plan. Christ would never have submitted to this awful death had he not been willing to purchase our redemption.
It was when Jesus took on my sin, became a curse for me...that was a time of separation from his Father. Not an abandoning, a brokenness. Jesus’ faith was that he would rebuild this temple. If we could but understand the despair, the agony we bring to God when we sin. Jesus is God and he is not a God-forsaken God. God is not forsaking Jesus. He is handing His Son over to humanity to show the dearth of our love for he who dies to save us. Trace God’s speech and God’s silence, God’s presence and God’s hiddenness. Jesus had to understand what the full impact of separation from God was because of sin. Jesus never sinned. He had to experience the pain and turmoil of what it is like to be a sinful human being separated from God. Jesus came as a human being yet being fully divine to rescue us from our sinful plight and in so doing, experienced almost everything he could as a human. He never really experienced the fearful and agonizing predicament of what sorrying to repentance and receiving forgiveness. It should dawn upon us that losing our life because of sin denounces God’s sovereignty. God was in the flesh of humanity. This is the prayer of Jesus that he be glorified with God Himself and that we be made clear in the matter.
II Corinthians 7:9-11
But when Jesus took my sin upon himself on that cross...the crushing despair of how we should feel when we sin was sounded from the Son of God as if he had been sin altogether for eternity. The total sum of the miseries brought by sin upon all the past, present, and future generations of the human race and the holy horror of Jesus bearing physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually in thought and deed all the woes of mankind caused by sin in this life, and in that which is to come all being completely placed upon this one man. We are so numbed in our souls that when we sin we except the next breath as though it is owed us. The cry that Jesus made should be the heart cry of every single human being on earth. It is the cry we should voice since the beginning. It was Jesus giving voice to our pain, our fear, our hurt, our despair, when we are one with him. God Himself came to earth, to us, to feel this anguish of suffering for Himself.
Because of the wonder of Christ when we feel despised and rejected, abused and slandered, misunderstood and forgotten, our God will not forsake us. It is sin that makes us feel separated from God, and this is the feeling Jesus expressed on the cross, and is one reason Jesus went to the cross, to take our sin and bear it away into death so that we can see that God has not left us, has not abandoned us, and has not forsaken us, but has fully entered into our pain, our suffering, and even into our sin, so that He might show us how much He loves and cares for us. This truth is explained in reasoning with God that we may know the atoning done for us. We must learn to truly hear what the word of God is saying in every particular. For He Himself spoke it.
Hebrews 13:5, 6
The deepest part of sadness must be when we forsake God. God is holy. He kept us in the womb. He is present in our trials. We look for God in our circumstances yet ignore Him in the consequences. I think of the intimacies of praise, thoughts, words that Jesus offered the Father. We’d best know Him for who He is, what He has done, and what He will do. We are to persevere to the end with absolute trust. God gave His Son to bear our sin that we might be prepared for the judgment. The judgment due us, God’s wrath, instead of being poured upon us was poured upon Christ. For God so loved the world...He gave him up to suffer the weight of all the sins of all of His people and the judgment for those sins. We cannot begin to fathom all that this would mean between the Father and the Son. And I pray we never have to.
Here is where we see into the determinate counsel of the Godhead. When Jesus was hanging on the cross he did not say “let me quote Psalms 22 here”. He was in his moment of agony. What words we will say in the depth of our trial either is in us as the very essence of our calling or it is not. And if it is in us, then we give vent at the worst moment of our life with the appointment of what our Father scripted for us in the counsel before the foundation of the world. That is what hit the heart of Jesus. That is why he declared in the counsel “send me”. There is no curiosity in faith. Jesus could not see through the portals of the tomb, yet his words were “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Our faith is to be our triumph.
We ought to cease looking for a theological answer to somethings. We should bring a real cry of spiritual desolation with words reasoned with God that are second nature because our whole life is scripted by God...all will go according to His plan. Jesus was not asking the question “my God, my God why has thou forsaken me” for an answer. This “cry of abandonment” is the voice of our salvation. He was enduring a real sense of forsakenness for our sake. He was not dying for his sin. It is our sin that was upon him. He was expressing desolation, not asking for an answer. This cry was not occasioned by unbelief. Unbelief is the denial of truth and that is doing sin. Jesus was pointing his hearers to the prophesy that would teach them that as the Savior Messiah the petition was answered. The language of the prophesy was designed to give us a pattern for praying in times of extreme suffering and need. It movingly expresses the common emotional experience of God’s last day people when they are alone and afflicted. Jesus is demonstrating his oneness with us. Our fully God, fully human Savior identifies with us in every way, even in our weakest moments, even when we feel like God has abandoned us. Through Christ’s total identification with us, He gives us permission by his own example to pour out our hearts to God. Jesus shows us that trusting God means lifting up the very worst of life to God in prayer. He was amazingly fulfilling scripture in the horror of it all and witnessing to the perfection of the plan of salvation. With these words, Jesus beckoned us to make the connection and recognize prophetic implications as given in the Psalms. Who was the fulfillment of the Psalms prophecy? Who is the fulfillment of the prophecies to come in Revelations? What is shown us in these prophecies? It was necessary for God to withdraw that the fullness of God’s love for humanity should be realized. Do we not understand that God so valued us that He abandoned His Son, as sin, that we might be saved. God loves us so much that He could not save His Son from this suffering unto death. Do we not hear Jesus’ dependence upon God and his gratitude for the benevolence of God? My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me is the cry recognizing the desperation of humanity that hung upon Jesus then and will so likewise be upon us and even in that agonizing moment, his voice called out to show that only God could deliver him...for he did no sin and only God will deliver us as we enter into the suffering with Jesus and cease to sin. It is here that God becomes truly vulnerable for the sake of His creation knowing that as God He cannot die, yet He must allow death to arise that salvation is to be secured for all His faithful. And this omniscient offering removed all barriers between us and God. Let us term it “justification”. Never again was a blood sacrifice required. The relationship that we were created to have with God was now possible again. Ultimately, it comes down to an exchange or substitution...God for us. We were given the covenant truth and expression to be able to understand in some way the need for God to demand justice for the offense of human sin. We despised the goodness of God when we first offended Him in the Garden and because of that we have all lived under the curse. We became an imperfection in the good thing that God created us to be. Sacrifices had to be perfect animals. We were not, are not perfect from birth. Only Jesus would be able to satisfy the demand for a perfect sacrifice because he was perfect from before conception. Only Jesus could pay our price, only Jesus could suffer in our place.
The language of sacrifice allows us to begin to comprehend our need and the remedy for that imperfection: a sacrifice of blood. However, the question does present itself, how effective is a sacrifice that has to be renewed continuously? Is there some way to pay the price forever? God had this very thing in mind from the beginning. The early sacrifices were in place to help us to understand what Jesus would do when he came to walk among us. Jesus knew that God could not look upon sin and would withdraw His favor.
Habakkuk 1:13
I repeat this again that it might be heard...the burden is now fully upon His Son and the reality of God’s wrath for sin reveals itself in full. Here is where Jesus cries out “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” In this moment there is the despair of death, but in the words of the Psalm that he rails, there is also hope for deliverance. Jesus still has trust in the God of the Universe. He has submitted to God’s will to that very last moment. There is a terrible beauty in this death in that it shows us that God loves us by taking our place on the cross and dying in our stead. There, we have heard it again. Do we better understand what was said and why?
Jesus’ last words are not a pleasant phrase; they are full of despair. It was misunderstood by those close by when he said it and today it can be difficult to understand without placing it into its appropriate context of Psalm 22. You cannot leave it by itself. Jesus was calling us to the full Psalm just as he knew that his followers would understand when they figured out what he had said. Yes, that was a moment of ultimate pain and loss as only the burden of sin could cause. Jesus was telling us that sin is not just relationally ruinous, but spiritually separative.
But also, there was still hope in the promise of God’s deliverance and that there would be resurrection on the other side of death. Psalm 22 shows us Jesus’ utter dependence upon God, even when he could not feel anything but the weight of the sin of the world. We are invited to do the same in our lives. To depend on God, trust in his love, and believe that eternal life is offered to us through the sacrifice of Jesus his son.
When I begin to think of who God is and His character, one of the most endearing parts of God’s character is His faithfulness. When we understand the truth that is expressed in every word of God and that He is faithful to every truth spoken, every word written, we are to be confident that the work begun in us will be finished.
Philippians 1:6
God is doing the work. I hope we see why this truth is so powerful and should lead us to be thankful. This should lead us to worship...the doing of thankfulness for God. His great love is born out of His character. And His love is the great goodness that He continually pours upon us. It is by knowing His character and who He is which is the only proper response we are to have in worshipping Him. He will never leave us...we should never cease to worship Him. Let our hearts be genuine that pure worship will flow back to the God who truly deserves it. We do not know all the hells we will have to endure. We do not know the particular darkness in which we will have to descend to suffer with Christ. We do not know the rejection we will have to bear this very day, nor the quiet desperation in which, forsaken, we will cry out. We know only Him whose love, unlike our own, does not end in death. Thanks be to God. Our response to God in our suffering is to be with an attitude of gratitude. In the way of Jesus we are called to lament evil, yet speak the truth for God. We must do this in the presence of other people. There is something about speaking out loud when other people can hear that allows us to kindle hope in our lives, and theirs. Even Jesus himself knew this when he was on the cross. He spoke his mind to God.
God is present to us through other believers. Our friends that are believers in Jesus, can make God present to us in the power of the Holy Spirit, just by their presence. What joy in seeking out friends and family who have faith in Jesus. And the deeper their faith, the more they will be able to reason with the mind to God that our conversation not hinder the process of gathering instruction and wisdom from the word of truth. What a blessing always...to hear from God who knows all things. For even from the beginning our God, who is a god that cannot lie and cannot die was familiar with death. For it was in the counsel that God committed to death that we might have life eternal. And it is that that answers my prayers of why hast thou forsaken me...this is my dolorous lament from the lowest pit of misery. In Christ, mine is no more to be measured and weighed in the sanctuary. That which is love endured my every trial and the triumphant shout of, "it is finished” showed there is no forsakening of my God. Faith triumphs. The mere truth that Jesus said “My God, My God”, is the evidence of his faith substanced. If my faith be of Jesus, I am assured to never be without my God. The appropriation is in the word "my"; but the reverence of humility is in the word "God”. This God is ever my God. As was for His Son, I have no question. It is in that probe that we hear reasoning. For Jesus knew most distinctly the sufficient cause of why his Father darkened the scene...that none could see the spiritualnearness that God was for him and with him in a certain unquestionable sense. Yet there was no contact with sin. God was not against him...it was what he was made to be...for us. Only the ear of God could know the purity and truth in the words. We cannot see all that is there. But what we can see is the resolve of submission. In the very words spoken Jesus does not draw back, he does not quit the business of justice. He did not ask this forsaking to end prematurely. My Jesus rather dedicates himself anew to God by the words, "My God, My God," and by seeking to understand the ground and reason of that anguish which he is resolute to bear even to the bitter end. The cry sounds to me like deep submission and strong resolve, pleading with God. This was an amazing experience for such a sacred and pure being. For one to be made a sin-offering who so abhors sin. And found guilty by God. Can we not see that there was here a glance at his eternal purpose, and at his secret source of joy? That "why" is the silver lining of the dark cloud, and our Lord looked hopefully at it. He knew that the desertion was needful in order that he might save the guilty, and he had an eye to that salvation as his comfort. He is not forsaken needlessly, nor without a worthy design. We can make a life-study of that “why”. Was he saying this for himself or to gives us certainty that God would never leave us? That is why it was not a question. Jesus knew the outcome of this suffering, the reason for it. Not only did my Jesus take my sin...he took the separation from His Father, my Father for me. And since he did no sin and sin is what we do, this truth might be heard of us...God loves us more than we could ever love ourselves.
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