FORSAKEN[i]
We probably know very well what it feels like to be
forsaken. It is a feeling of abandonment, of being disowned, or forgotten
utterly by those you love. To be forsaken is to know loneliness and emotional
turmoil. We can understand that feeling and know what it means for us.
What
does it mean when Christ says he was forsaken? That is not so easy to
understand and it is not so easy to explain.
Martin
Luther sat down in his study to consider the text we are studying today. He
spent hours meditating on those words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken
me?” Those who served Luther entered the room and found him so absorbed in
those words that they almost thought he was dead. He did not move; he did not
eat or drink, but sat with his eyes locked onto this phrase. Then, after many
hours of this, having been so utterly focused so that everything around him had
been as if weren’t even there, he rose from his chair. He was heard to say,
“God forsaking God! No man can understand that!”
There is
the mystery. How can Jesus who is God Himself feel abandoned by God the Father?
Jesus said, “I and the Father are one?” Is it even possible for Christ to be
abandoned by the Father?
It has
been said that Luther looked like a man who had been down a deep mine and who
had come up again into the light. Charles Spurgeon said that he felt like one
who has not been down in the mine, but who has looked into it and shuddered at
the darkness of it. Have you ever peered into a dark room straining to see but
only finding darkness?
How can
you explain something like that? I won’t pretend to know the mystery of this
saying from the cross, but will lead you in some observations and draw a few
lessons from it. We are going to consider the question Jesus asked; then talk
about his experience; then apply it if we can.
1. Why did Jesus cry out, “My God, my God…”?
Many have attempted to explain what Jesus meant to say.
Some have excused his words with one explanation or another since it is very
difficult to fathom how God can forsake God. In any case, we cannot ignore that
Jesus quoted in a mash-up of Hebrew and Aramaic, “My God, My God, why have you
forsaken me?” What was his forsakenness?
Consider
a few questions as an attempt to understand this:
a) Was it the
horror of the human condition? We often say that all the sins of the past,
present and future have been laid upon Christ and that this caused great
suffering for Jesus. Somehow he perceived the total sum of the miseries brought
about by all this sin. And this was a holy horror as he felt all the sin of
this world as one man. He spoke on behalf of humankind when he cried, “My God,
my God…”
We can
only imagine. There is truth in this summation but it is not adequate to
explain his cry. You see, Jesus did not say, “My God, my God, why have you
forsaken MAN?” but “Why have you forsaken ME?” This forsaking was personal.
b) Was it his
revulsion to sin? The Father who lives in holy light and is holiness
himself cannot bear that which is unholy. Jesus, like his Father, recoils as the
sins of all the ages are placed upon him because he too is holy. Yes this is
true too. But it is too easy to explain his cry away with this attempt. You
see, Christ did not say, “My God, my God, why has man forsaken You, and why
have You so completely left men in their sin?” Again, his cry was, “Why have
you forsaken Me?” Jesus shouted, “My God,
my God…” not “Father,” for in this
moment, the Father he trusted in seemed to have left him.
c) Was it from
physical weakness? When we become ill and battle some virus that we just
can’t shake, we feel lower than is proper, and we find too that our soul sinks.
Our poor battered bodies lead us to an unhappy state, even depression and
sorrow. Sometimes we don’t even have a reason for our poor spirits, but we know
that our bodies have conquered our souls. Was Christ so depleted of energy and
will that he succumbed to the feeling of his abused body and cried out in such
despair? You would think so.
Except
that moments later he shouted. The narrative says, “And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his
spirit,” (27:50). Matthew does not record the words but we suspect this is
the triumphant, “It is finished.” In that moment he courageously overcame his
physical weakness displaying mental strength. Jesus did not allow his physical
condition to wreck his awareness of the moment.
d) Was this a cry
of unbelief? We all know of times when our personal pain causes us to feel
like our faith has been pointless. Suffering can make us doubt God’s love and
even his existence. All the while God is in our pain with us, so near that he
has to whisper. The nation of Israel accused God of abandoning them, of
forgetting them in their trials. But God replied, “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on
the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!”
(Is. 49:15). No, Jesus did not entertain any thoughts about the faithfulness
and love of his Father. His cry was not on that account.
On the
other hand, some have said that his was a cry of faith. Jesus quotes David’s
Psalm 22, a psalm that begins with intense suffering but ends on a note of
praise and confident trust in God. But think about it, who quotes poetry when
they are hanging on a cross? Monty Python’s depiction of several men on crosses
singing “Look on the bright side of life,” expresses the absurdity of such a
notion.
e) Was it a
mistake? We say things in our pain that we don’t mean. Did Jesus mean what
he said? Did Jesus only think that
God had forsaken him? But then let me ask you this; does the perfect Lamb of
God make mistakes? Jesus was not under a cloud of disillusion or delirium that
he misspoke. He knew what he was saying and he knew what he experienced. We can
only take Jesus at his word and conclude that God had indeed forsaken him for
that moment of time.
f) Did it mean
that God did not love him? Forget about it! This is far from being the
case. God may have forsaken His Son but He loved His Son as much in this
forsaken state as at any other time. If it were possible for God to love His
Son more for enduring the cross and suffering on behalf of humankind, He would
have. But it is not possible for God to love His Son more than he already does.
God was not personally angry with Jesus – yet God forsook Him, allowed Jesus to
die, leaving him alone on that cross.
Some
well-meaning Christians will deny that God forsook Jesus on the cross because,
as I said before, God cannot possibly forsake God. That would be impossible.
But so is the idea that God died. Didn’t God the Son die on that cross at
Golgotha? I don’t know how God can die, and I don’t know how God can forsake
God, but I believe what Scripture teaches us about this incredible event.
2. What does it mean that Jesus was “forsaken”?
So Jesus was forsaken by God. What does this mean? There
are two angles we can look at: one is the experience which we can only observe
in wonder; second is the theological implication for us.
a) Darkness – the
9th Plague – A strange phenomenon occurred while Christ hung
upon the cross. Matthew records that, “From
noon until three in the afternoon (the sixth hour to the ninth hour) darkness
came over all the land,” (27:45). Some have said this was an eclipse. A
three hour eclipse? And how do you explain that at Passover there is a full
moon?
Christ
had enjoyed the light of God’s fellowship like no one else. To have the light
taken away was to feel darkness and know utter loneliness. In Christ there was
no sin, nor anything that even hinted at sin.
Spurgeon
wrote, “Now holiness delights in God. God is the very sea in which holiness
swims – the air which holiness breathes! Only think, then, of the perfectly
Holy One, fully agreed with the Father in everything, finding out that the
Father had, for good and sufficient reasons, turned His face away from him.”
How awful! How horrible! That would be darkness.
Darkness
symbolized this experience.
In
Exodus chapter 10, God told Moses, “Stretch
out your hand toward the sky so that darkness will spread over Egypt – darkness
that can be felt,” (Ex. 10:21). Why would God instruct Moses to do this?
Darkness then, and at Golgotha, symbolized that God’s curse rested on the land.
Except for the homes of the Israelites, Egypt was in darkness for three days.
Darkness that could be felt; just like Golgotha.
This was
the ninth plague. Do you know what the tenth plague was? The tenth plague took
the firstborn son of every family, unless God’s people sacrificed a lamb and
marked the doorposts with its blood. Then the angel of death would “pass over.”[ii]
Centuries
later, while Passover was being observed, and unbeknownst to the Jewish
pilgrims that Friday, God was sacrificing His firstborn Son.
b) Legal
Substitution – This is a term most often heard in football. When a player
comes on the field and gets involved in a play that he should not be part of,
it’s called an illegal substitution.
In this
situation, Jesus was a legal substitution for us. He took our place, we easily
say, and suffered for our sins. Jesus was the only one qualified as a spotless
Lamb to step into our place and endure our cross. We call this the doctrine of
substitution. There are other doctrines about the atonement but I find this one
hard to argue with. Consider the terminology of Scripture:
“We all, like
sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity
of us all,” (Is. 53:6).
“God made him who had no sin to be sin for
us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God,” (2 Co.
5:21).
And “Christ
redeemed us from the curse of the law by
becoming a curse for us, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung
on a tree,’” (Gal. 3:13).
When we
meditate on the truth of these verses, we see where Christ took our place. Our
sin was laid upon him. He became sin for us. He became a curse for us. No
wonder then, that God forsook him, for Habakkuk said of the LORD, “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you
cannot tolerate wrong,” (Hab. 1:13).
If you
want to argue against the doctrine of substitution, remember that many are
touched by the teaching that Christ received what we were due. Many have been
saved from eternal separation from God because of this doctrine. After all, the
only solution to this mystery – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” –
is this: Jesus Christ was forsaken of God because we deserved to be forsaken of
God!
3. What does his forsakenness mean for us?
We close with the answers to this question. There are
three applications we must consider:
a) Behold, how He
loved us – Jesus loves you. What more beautiful sentiment and truth is
there than that Jesus loves you. Jesus stood outside the tomb of Lazarus, his
friend, and wept because death had taken his friend. Witnesses declared, "Behold, how he loved him." But on the cross he did
not weep, he bled and died. Before he died, he felt forsaken of God. Was there
ever a love like this – that the Lord of glory should take on the form and
being of man and receive our shame and death?
Since
Jesus was separated for a time from the Heavenly Father, we may cry out with Paul,
“Who shall separate us from the love of
Christ?” And we can boldly reply with hearts full of praise that nothing,
not one thing in all of creation, “will
be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord,”
(Ro. 8:39).
b) Follow Him
– How can this truth not affect you in the deepest part of your being? How can
we keep from praising His name and following after Him in life? Is there
anything you would not gladly give up if it kept you from serving your Lord and
Savior, Jesus Christ?
Moses
went so far as to plead for the guilty nation of Israel and begged God to blot
his name out of the book of life rather than have God’s name dishonored. How
far would you go? We don’t have to go as far as Moses. But Jesus beckoned to
those who would follow Him, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny
himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”
c) If we should
feel forsaken…If ever your heart and soul should fail you and your faith
feel as weak as a kitten, if you feel that “dark night of the soul,” spiritual
depression – like God is far, far away, where you feel like crying out “My God,
my God, why have you forsaken me?” then you will have gone down no deeper than
Christ Himself went! Jesus has been to that dark place. That thought should encourage
you since Christ was loved by the Father even in that position, and you are
loved too.
A wise older pastor went to the bedside of a
dying man who for 30 years had been a gloomy soul. The pastor thought that now
at last this man, someone who had loved Jesus and served him all his life,
should now find peace. But the man said to his pastor, “What can you say to a
man who is dying and yet who feels that God has forsaken him?” The pastor
replied, “But what became of the man who died, whom God really did forsake?
Where is he now?” The dying man suddenly caught on and said, “He is in glory
and I shall be with him! I shall be with him where he is!”
AMEN
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