Forsaken of God(Matthew 27:46)
While Jesus Christ was suffering in our stead upon a cross at Golgotha, He uttered something that was most profound. He said “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). Now, why was it that He said such a thing? He was, is and forever will be God. Yet, why did He utter those words? First off, He was fulfilling the words of David in Psalm 22:1 as he was in distress. Yet, even in saying that, if we leave it there, we never really find the answer based on that nugget of biblical fact alone. The words Jesus uttered go way deeper than that. Jesus, always being the God the Son, the God-man that came in the flesh, was always in accord with His Father, and He always referred to His and our God as Father. Yet, while on the cross He said ‘My God, My God’, not ‘My Father, My Father’. I believe it was Spurgeon, in a sermon of his concerning this very verse, that pointed this out to me. So, I am not trying to take credit for this.
This picture painted a dark picture of how God truly handles sins and sinners. I am not saying that Christ was a sinner, because He was and is forever sinless, being God. Yet, when He was in Gethsamane praying to His Father, He asked Him three times to let that cup pass from Him.(Matthew 26) Yet, He submitted Himself to His Father’s will, and died to obtain eternal redemption for those He came to die and propitiate for. When Christ ingested that cup, He ingested our sins, and God’s wrath. As David wrote in Psalm 75:8 ‘In the hand of the Lord is a cup full of foaming wine mixed with spices; he pours it out, and all the wicked of the earth drink it down to its very dregs.’ So this cup that Jesus drank every drop of was, indeed, the cup of God’s wrath meted out to sinners. He ingested our sins, and God treated Him as if He was you or I. It was at this moment God had to withdraw Himself from Him and treat Him as if it was you or I. God, in His holiness and justice, can not let any sin go unpunished. We can read in Habakkuk ‘Your eyes are too pure to look upon evil; you can not tolerate wrongdoing.'(1:13a)
This verse goes along with the doctrine that is called penal substitutionary death. This helps to show that Christ, in our stead, acting as our substitute, bore our sins for us, taking the wrath of God Himself(our punishment for us), for what should have been ours. In Isaiah 53 we can read sayings such as ‘yet we considered him punished by God’,(vs 4)…’he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities’,(vs 5), ‘he was oppressed and afflicted’,(vs 7) ‘for the transgressions of my people he was punished’,(vs 8) ‘Yet it was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer’,(vs 10) ‘because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors, for he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors’.(vs 12) I believe verse 12 shows a very important fact in that He was ‘numbered with the transgressors’. When Christ was in anguish upon that cross, He was suffering a physical death and also what seems to some form of a spiritual death(spiritual death is separation from God, and He was separated from His Father during that time) in that God had to withdraw Himself from His Son. Yet, at the same time, He also killed His Son, the ‘One in whom I am well pleased’.
To further support this doctrine, let us go to 2 Corinthians 5:21 where Apostle Paul wrote ‘God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’ The Apostle wrote, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that God made him(Christ) to be sin for us. How profound a statement has been made by the Apostle under the inspiration of the Almighty. This helps to not only support Christ dying fully as man and God, but also the doctrine of imputation, where our unrighteousness(sins and iniquities) was imputed unto Christ and His righteousness was imputed unto us. Apostle Paul touches upon this with Abraham in Romans 4 where after he believed God, God’s righteousness was imputed/credited unto him. If our sins were not imputed/credited unto Christ, His righteousness could not be imputed/credited unto us.
Then in 1 Corinthians 15 the Apostle wrote ‘that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures.'(vss 4,5) Right here is the pristine truth contained in the gospel of Jesus Christ; His death, His burial, and His resurrection. You take any one of them away and your have destroyed the gospel. If Christ had not died in our stead, and was resurrected, we are still in our sins.(vs 17)
I will close with 1 John 2:2 where the Apostle wrote ‘he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.’ The KJV uses the word ‘propitiation’ where the NIV uses ‘atoning sacrifice’. Both refer to the act of reconciliation of man to God and God to man. The first Adam, when he sinned and fell, he placed a breach betwixt man and God that no one could repair but Christ. We had nothing to reconcile us back to Him. This is why it is oh so important to truly grasp what Matthew 27:46 entails. The fall of man was so severe, the breach betwixt man and God was so deep and wide, that it took more than a physical death to satisfy God’s demand for sin to be punished! Christ, by taking everything God poured out upon Him, fully satisfied God’s justice, appeased His wrath, placated and pacified Him, that He can now pardon wicked sinners.
So in closing, I believe I have shown sufficient biblical evidence to prove that God had to separate Himself, withdraw His hand from upon His Son, when Christ was treated as a sinner. He willfully laid His life down a ransom for many(Matt. 20:28 & Mark 10:45) and poured out His life unto death(Isa. 53:12) so that we could have a right back to the Tree of Life, which is Christ.
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