About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Matthew 27:46

Surely greater anguish has never been experienced by man before, or after, the crucifixion!  Jesus’ brutal torture and execution must have caused him more physical pain than we can even comprehend.  What is more, many believe that the mental and spiritual anguish of bearing the sins of the world eclipsed the physical pain with an agony beyond our experience.

It is during this time that Jesus cries out to his Father saying “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The next verse explains how the onlookers didn’t understand what Jesus said.  They thought he was asking for water.  Interestingly enough, many people today may still not know what he meant when he struggled to just get those few words out.  Years after the gospels were written, leaders in the early church tried to explain the crucifixion.  Greek influence drove people to want to intellectually understand the Gospel.  The early church fathers wrote extensively on the subject, trying to explain how the plan of salvation “worked.”

These writers came up with something similar to what many people believe today.  It goes something like this:

God is Holy and separate from sin.  Because we have sinned, we have been separated from God (Isaiah 59:1-2).  There is, in effect, a wall between us and God.  The only way that the wall could be broken is for something to be done about our sin.

But the wages of sin is death (Romans 3:23), so the only way to break down the wall is to pay for our sin by dying, or going to Hell.

And here is the good news:  because Jesus took our sin on himself, Jesus was, in fact, separated from God.  God had to abandon Jesus.  God put all of his wrath on Jesus, in order to free us from the wrath he would have put on us.  Jesus suffered, as some put it, “more than the cumulative sufferings of all mankind,” even including what everyone would have suffered for all eternity in Hell!

So that is supposedly the Gospel, the good news.

The question is, “where does it say this in the Bible?”  Obviously some verses are used to build the explanation, but some very difficult questions are not answered:

1. Where does it say in the Bible that suffering “pays” for sin?  This thought does not come from the Bible, but apparently from ancient heathen religions.

2. If God has to be separate from sin, then what about Jesus?  Is he not God?  So why didn’t he have to be separate from sin?  Or are we trying to say that the Jesus died as a man?  That cannot be.  See Acts 20:28.

That brings us back to the words that Jesus said on the Cross.  “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” If we are saying that God did not forsake Jesus, then why would Jesus say something like that?

Let’s take a closer look at the text.  First of all, notice that he had spoken other things on the cross, but when he said this, he did it in Aramaic.  He was, in fact, quoting from the Old Testament:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
by night, and am not silent.
Psalm 22:1-2

Psalm 22 is a prophetic psalm about Jesus.  In it, the psalmist expresses the anguish of the cross.  However, as you go through the psalm, you notice that there comes a change:

You who fear the LORD, praise him!
All you descendants of Jacob, honor him!
Revere him, all you descendants of Israel!
For he has not despised or disdained
the suffering of the afflicted one;
he has not hidden his face from him
but has listened to his cry for help.
Psalm 22:23-24

Jesus was, in fact, quoting Psalm 22!  But why?  We believe that he was going through his last temptation.  The temptation to believe that God had left him.  He had to go through everything that we go through (Hebrews 4:15), and this, was the hardest trial of all!

Is this not the same trial that all of us face from time to time?  Sometimes it is because we have sinned and do not feel “close to God.”  Sometimes it is when we realize how sinful we are.  And sometimes, as C.S. Lewis says, “it is because He wants to see if we will still follow Him even when we don’t feel his presence.”

At those times, we cannot imagine that God would love us or want to be close to us.  But how are we to deal with our sin if God is far from us?  We can do nothing without Him (John 15:5).  We need Him at those times more than ever!

The good news is, that God is, in fact, right there with us.  He never leaves us!  (Hebrews 13:5)  In our minds, we may be more sinful than we were the previous day, but to God it is all the same.  He knows that we are dust.  (Psalm 103:14)  God was separated from us because of our sin, but once we came to Him, He will never leave us again.

Jesus, our champion, gained the victory over his last temptation.  He believed, even when he didn’t feel God’s closeness.  He believed to the end.  Will we?

“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” Luke 23:46

Originally published in Faith21 Magazine (www.faith21.org)