Matthew 27: 45-46 "From the sixth
hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land. 46About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).[
Powerful words
... a powerful image. Jesus Christ ... the Son of God ... His body broken,
bleeding, crying out in pain and agony. Let us just take a moment to meditate on one verse in
this passage, verse 46. Let's see what we can learn from it. Let us pause and reflect on the cry itself. Let's examine the word “why”, the word “my”, and then let us look at the question "why have you
forsaken Me?" as the whole. Let's do this because when we are done I think you'll find that the cry points to the fact that Jesus actually died this death, the “why” points to the reason for his death, the word “my”
actually points to the accomplishments of His death and the question taken as a
whole shows us something about why He did what He did, His motive.
First, just notice, “about the ninth
hour” which is three p.m.., “Jesus cried out a loud voice”. It’s a word that
could be translated “scream” or even “shriek”. Any first time
reader reading this would immediately feel that Jesus had cracked. Here He is
saying to God, “you’ve abandoned me, you failed me”. Jesus seems to be
cracking, He’s giving up, He’s saying “God, you failed me.” It’s interesting
that historians and scholars who are actually suspicious of the
bible, that is to say that they feel that the gospel accounts might contain
legendary material and that you can’t trust everything in the bible. Even the most
skeptical scholars say this must’ve happened. Why do they say that? Because if
you were adding things or making something up for promotional purposes, you
would never put Jesus in this position; you would never put your religion's
founder in this place, with these last words in his mouth, looking so
despondent, so unheroic, and so hopeless. If you were to read the accounts of
the end of Buddha’s life or Muhammad's life or any other figure or founder, they
are always dying in peace with wise and heroic last words. If you were making up a
piece of literature trying to promote a faith, you never write this down; therefore
even the skeptic says, “this must’ve happened or we wouldn’t be reading it.” Also,
it’s in Aramaic even though the both Matthew and Mark who record this cry from
the cross, were writing to Greek speakers, so there’s no need to write what He
said in Aramaic. The reason they write it in Aramaic is because this is
eyewitness memory. People remembered it. In fact they couldn't forget that cry.
I don’t want you to ever forget that cry, it happened. He died on the cross. So first of all the cry points to the fact
of Jesus’ death.
Secondly, the word “why?” starts moving
us toward the reason, “why did God forsake Jesus?” So let's explore that
question ... “why did God forsake Jesus on the cross.” The beginning of the
answer is to realize that what Jesus is saying here is, is a bible verse, He is
quoting Psalms 22 verse 1. We constantly forget that. He cried it, He screamed
it but He was quoting a bible verse which actually shows right off the bat that
He did know what was going on. He did know what was happening. Psalm 22 is one
of the most puzzling, even shocking Psalms of the whole Psalter. Why? Well, King
David wrote a lot of the Psalms and the Psalms very often reflected various
times of his life ... and there were terrible times of his life. For example, David
wrote Psalm 51 after his son died. But when did Psalm 22 ever happened to David?
Listen to some of Psalm 22 which Jesus is crying out. “My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me, all who see me mock me, they hurl insults, shaking their heads,
“he trusts in the Lord, let the Lord rescue him”, strong bulls encircle me,
roaring lions open their mouths wide against me. A pack of villains encircle
me. They pierced my hands and my feet. I am poured out like water and all my
bones are out joint. You lay me in the dust of death. People stare and gloat
over me. They divided my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing.”
When did that ever happened to David? When did anybody ever pierce his hands
and his feet? When were there people surrounding him? Psalm 22 is not describing an illness. Psalm 22 is not
describing some kind of general persecution. Psalm 22 is describing an
execution. It’s an execution. Did that ever happened to David? No of course
not. By crying this Jesus is telling us all that, through the power of the Holy
Spirit, David was pointing to me. I am being executed. Judgment is coming down
on me.
An execution is not just a tragic
death, it’s a punishment. Who is doing the punishing? To answer that look at
the darkness. From the sixth hour, until the ninth hour, darkness came over all the
land. Anybody who reads the Old Testament knows what it means when God
sends darkness. Listen Amos chapter 8, “in that day declares the Lord, I will make
the sun go down at noon
and darken the earth to broad in broad daylight. At noon I will make the sun go down. It will be a
time like the morning for an only son.” Or from Exodus 10 So Moses
stretched out his hand toward the sky, and total darkness covered all Egypt for
three days. You know the hymn that goes, “well might the sun in darkness hide shut
his glory in. When Christ the mighty maker died for man the creature sin.”
Darkness means God’s judgment and when it says it’s over all the land, it’s
sign of the fact that God’s judgment is over the whole human race and
punishment is deserved and it’s going to come down somewhere.
Now let me just say this ... you can’t
come to grips with or understand why God forsakes Jesus, and you can’t
understand the cross unless you understand that all human beings stand guilty
before God and deserving judgment and punishment. Now, that might be a
controversial statement for you. Modern people resist this because all of our
lives, we’re told, don’t let other people make you feel guilty. Guilt is a bad
thing, it shows that you’re letting other people make you feel guilty, you have
to decide what is right or wrong for you. You have to decide that. You
determine what’s right or wrong for you and then you live the way you want to
live and you don’t let anybody else make you feel guilty.
After World War II, there was a period
there that was called “The Age of Anxiety.” This was a time when everybody was
wracked with guilt and everyone was into a psychoanalysis to deal with their
repressed guilt. If you were to look back at that era you will see that it was
the theme of plays, it was a theme of books, it was a theme of everything. We
are not like that today. Nobody talks about our current culture as people
wracked with guilt. It seems like everybody does things out in the open,
everybody is just as shameless ... the president is having affairs with porn
stars, our youth are sending nude pictures of themselves to one another on their cell phones,
we've legalized marijuana ... and every time we hit a new social low everybody
just says, "well ... this is the way it is" or refers to the calendar
(this is 2019). We don’t feel guilty, we have no problem with guilt as a
culture and that lack of guilt IS a
problem. Of course an inordinate amount
of guilt feelings is pathological, no guilty feelings are just as pathological.
Andrew Delbanco, a terrific cultural
analyst wrote a book some years ago on American Culture. In that book he
analyzes a little section out of Walker Percy’s novel, Love in the Ruins.
There’s one point which Delbanco looks at the character named Max. Max is a psychiatrist
who thinks that the essence of being an enlightened person is that you live
without guilt. You do what you want to do and you don’t feel guilty about it. Now
Max has this client named Tom whom has just had an affair and is very worried. Max
is having trouble understanding Tom and Max says, “well Tom, I don’t quite understand what
worries you about the affair if you don’t feel guilty” and Tom says “that is
what’s worrying me, I don’t feel guilty.” Max comes back and says, “well what I
don’t see is, if there’s no guilt after your affair, what’s your problem?” and
Tom says, “it means that you don’t have life in you.” Then Andrew Delbanco dispenses
his cultural analysis “what the psychiatrist don’t understand is that the guilt
Tom no longer feels had been his last reassurance that there existed something
in the world that transcended him.” This is brilliant. Here’s what Delbanco was
trying to say ... if you say nothing should make me feel guilty, that I have to
decide what is right or wrong for me, then there’s nothing more important than me,
my feelings, my conscience, my needs, my intuitions and my consciousness,
that’s all that matters. There’s nothing more important than me, there’s
nothing that I have to sacrifice and serve and feel guilty if I am not doing it.
But if nothing transcends me, in other words, if there’s no guilt, there is
also no hope because we’ve got nothing to live for and nothing to die for. If
there’s no guilt, there’s no hope and Delbanco says that’s who and what we are,
right now.
People don’t feel guilty in our
culture, people are shameless and people are unbelievably hopeless and
pessimistic about the future. You see, the Bible says is there is truth, there
is right, there is wrong and therefore there is guilt ... BUT ... there is also
HOPE. There is something more
important than you. It’s God. We are supposed to love God with all our heart,
soul, strength and mind because He gave us everything. We are supposed to love our
neighbor as ourselves and we’re not living up to that command. There is
something greater than us (God) who gives us something to live for (to love Him
and to love our neighbour), there is guilt when we don't do it ... but there is
also Hope. When the dark clouds of God’s judgement lie over the whole land, there
should be an execution, there should be punishment. That’s why Jesus was forsaken because the punishment was coming down on
Him.
Now thirdly, I want to look at the little word, “my” because Jesus says “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It is here that we really come
into the holy of holies and we get to learn there’s two ways in which Christ
accomplished our salvation. Yes I said "two ways."
The little word “my” points to His infinite sufferings and to His perfect obedience. First, His infinite
sufferings. “My God, my God.” Do you notice what He is not saying? He is not
saying, “my head, my head”, “my hands, my hands”, “my feet, my feet”, “my side,
my side”. There’s thorns in His heads, a spear was stuck in His side, and they
pierced His hands and feet with nails. Yet He is not complaining about that.
He’s not screeching about it. Nor is he saying, “my friends, my friends, you’ve
all abandoned me.” He’s not talking about that either. The physical suffering and
the relational suffering aren't the things causing Him the most pain.
Up until the Garden of Gethsemane,
Jesus has been pretty collected and pretty poised; “The spirit is willing but the
flesh is weak, put down your sword, put your sword back. Those who live by the
sword die by the sword.” “What thou doest, do quickly.” You
say I’m a King.,I figure it is safe to say that up until now, even
under incredible pressure, physical suffering, relational rejection, He’s been
pretty poised but now he is shrieking. Why? What’s happening that is worse than
being abandoned by your closest friends? What is worse than being nailed to a
cross? What is He experiencing that makes all that He has endured feel like a
flea bite in by comparison. What is it? The
loss of love.
There is no greater agony than to
lose love. You know that. Psychiatrists and marriage counselors know that.
There is no greater agony than a love that really matters to you. The longer
and deeper that love was, the longer and deeper is the agony you suffer; if
acquaintance says, I never want to see you again, that’s bad but if a good
friend says I never want to see you again that hurts worse. If your child or
your sibling or your parents say I never want to see you again that hurts worse
than a good friend. If your spouse says they never want to see you again, that
hurts the worst of all. If you have been through any of those experiences I am
sure you know how much it hurts .... it destroys your heart, it destroys your
body, it destroys ... period.
That is what is happening here, but
on a scale that you and I just can't comprehend. In John 1:18, it says the Son
was in the bosom of the Father for all eternity. The Father and the Son souls
were wrapped up in one another, not just for forty years or fifty years or
twenty years or sixty years but for all eternity! And that is what Jesus lost. That
is where that cry, that shriek, is coming from. You may know something about
the agony lost love, I know I do, but there is nothing that compares to this.
The love that the Father and the Son had makes the greatest marriage in the
history of the world look like a dewdrop compared to the Atlantic Ocean. He was experiencing eternal suffering.
What is the punishment Jesus was
suffering? 2 Thessalonians tells us that the right and just punishment if we
turn away from God, is exclusion. The absence or exclusion of God, the place
where there is no God, is called Hell. It’s called Hell. You’re just sent away
from the thing you most need.
Just like the flower needs the sun, we
are built for the presence of God. Hell is being sent away forever. Jesus Christ
wasn't just taking that punishment ... He was taking that punishment for us. What He was experiencing on the cross was like
zillions of eternal hells all compressed and laid on Him at once. If you know
the agony of lost love, just take that experience up a trillion times. He’s
saying “I’ve lost you, my God!”
“My” is an intimate word. You may not
know anything about me but if you hear me say “my Ruth” or “my Faith” or
something like that, you’ll say “that must be his children or his wife” because a guy doesn’t say “my something”
unless we're talking about something intimately close to us. “My God, I’ve lost
My God.” When we hear Jesus say that we are looking into the infinity of his
sufferings.
For the first time in all eternity
Jesus was without God, it was as if He had no God. All that God had been to Him
before, was taken from Him. He had the
feeling of the condemned. He heard as when the judge says “depart from me you
accursed who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence
of the Lord and from the glory of His power.” He felt that God had said the
same thing ... this is the hell in which Christ suffered.
But “My God, my God” doesn’t just
mean the loss of love and the infinite sufferings. It also means His perfect
obedience. This is the other side of what was happening on the cross. When Jesus
Christ says “My God” He’s using the covenant. No what do I mean by that ... in the Old Testament God says "if you
enter into a covenant relationship with me, a saving relationship with me, I
will be your God and you will be My people." He gives us the right to call
Him "my God," it’s a covenant name. It means, you’re in a
relationship with God. Every person in the history of the world up to now can
be assured to this: if you give yourself to God, God will be with you. That is
the covenant. That is the promise. However, when Jesus Christ obeyed God, He
was abandoned! To everyone else in the history of the world God says, "Obey
me and I’ll be with you, obey Me and I’ll bless you." But Jesus Christ ...
He obeyed God yet He was abandoned; He
obeyed God and He was cursed! And yet, despite all of this, in the midst of all
His suffering, He is obeying God anyway. Listen to the cry "My God!"
He is loving God anyway. He is holding onto the covenant in spite of what He’s
going through. Nobody on all of time has ever gone through anything like this
but He is and He is loving God anyway.
In the story Moby Dick, Ahab hates
Moby Dick. In one of the very last scenes in that book, Captain Ahab is entangled
in a harpoon line that is attached to Moby Dick. Moby Dick is
injured and is about to plunge down into the depths of the ocean. Ahab knows
he's going to be dragged down to his death by the whale yet he hollers out “From hell’s heart I’ll stabbeth thee.” Jesus really
was in Hell’s heart. But what does
He say? "From hell’s heart I love you still. Though you slay me yet I will
praise your name." That is perfect obedience. That is the most perfect
obedience ever.
Now do you understand what I mean when
I say that the gospel is not one form of substitution but two, not one form of
imputation but two. When the Bible says, “God made Him sin who knew no sin,
that we might become the righteousness of God in Him,” it’s saying not only
that God puts our sins on Him so He dies the death we should’ve died but we are
also told, God puts His righteousness on us so that because He lived the life
that we should’ve lived. He died the death we should’ve died and lived the life
that we should’ve lived. So it’s not just that God pardons you and says “now
you get out of jail free,” He puts the congressional medal of honor on you and
treats you as if you done everything Jesus ever done.
That idea of being clothed in the
righteousness of Christ is a big abstraction for most people including me until
I see this. And now I realize, “you mean God is actually treating me, if I
believe in Jesus Christ, God treats me as if I’ve done everything Jesus ever
done.”
My father used to watch this show NCIS.
NCIS means Naval Criminal Investigative Service and it is about a bunch of
special agents who investigating crimes that have evidence connected to Navy
and Marine Corps. Anyway, there is one episode in which a broken down old
eighty year old man, a vet is being arrested by these great big snarling navy
MPs. But it turns out years before on Hiroshima he had won the congregational
medal of honor and he always wore it underneath all of his suit. So these navy
MPs are standing over him snarling, ready to take him in and somebody reaches
over and pulls his tie aside and there is the congressional medal of honor,
what do you think those guys do? What do those great big guys do, twice his
size? They salute. They snap to attention in front of this little broken man.
What are they saluting? They are saluting the accomplishment, they are saluting
the medal, they are saluting what it represents.
And my friends that is just like us. You
are not just forgiven. Jesus didn’t just die the death you should’ve died. He
didn’t just go through infinite sufferings. He lived the life we should have
lived. He perfectly obeyed in your place so that when you believe His
righteousness is put on you, that is to say all those medals that Jesus Christ
earned in this battle are on your chest and all the angels in heaven salutes
you. “My God” shows us the infinity of his sufferings and the perfection of his
obedience and therefore the amazing accomplishment of the Cross.
Now lastly let’s stand back and look
at the this question, "Why did Jesus do it?" Why did he let God
forsake Him? Why did he put himself in a position where all this could happen?
I think probably the right answer, that is totally inadequate, is Jesus Christ
was doing it for the Glory of God. That’s why He did it. He did it to glorify
His Father! And of course that’s right but as a reason it is totally
inadequate. He was already glorifying His Father in Heaven. He did not have to
come to Earth to glorify His Father. So why did He come? What did He have, what
did He get by coming to Earth that He didn’t have before? Us. Why did he left
all this happen to Him? Why did He go into the agony voluntarily, He quotes a
bible verse here, He knows what's going on, He’s doing it voluntarily. “No man
takes my life from me, I lay it down from my own accord.” Why did He do it?
From the broken bread and the poured out cup, you can almost hear the words,
“my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.” And now you know the answer, why
did He do it? For you. Or you can say for me. But you have to believe. You have
to willing to admit that it was a punishment, it was an execution, the clouds
were over us and yet He took it. This is a Holy Week, you have the whole week
to think about this and then ... on Easter ... we will celebrate.