My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?
Last Words of Jesus on the Cross • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Handout
1st Word - Mercy / Forgiveness
2nd Word - Grace / Heaven
3rd Word - Love / Spiritual Family
4th Word - Forsaken / Holy
The fear of David in Psalm 51.11 reflects a fear that we have as well and one that Jesus had on the cross.
Do not cast me away from Your presence...
There was another time that David felt like God had forsaken Him.
My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Far from my deliverance are the words of my groaning.
And yet this is the Psalm that Jesus quoted as His 4th word from the cross.
And the question that people wonder is: Was Jesus really forsaken?
Forsaken: (NT) to leave behind, abandon, (OT) to let go of, separate from
Or like David, did He just feel forsaken?
Doesn’t God say He will never leave us nor forsake us?
“Be strong and courageous, do not be afraid or tremble at them, for the Lord your God is the one who goes with you. He will not fail you or forsake you.”
Because the follow up question is, if Jesus was forsaken, didn’t God break His promise?
This is the question we will answer today.
Let’s start by reading all of Psalm 22
Now when a teacher would quote a part of the text, automatically, the rest of it would come to the students mind and the student would “fill in” the rest.
They would know that the teacher was not just referencing that one verse, but rather the whole context.
As a simplified example...
Jesus only quotes the first half of Psalm 22:1, but look at verse 3.
Yet You are holy, O You who are enthroned upon the praises of Israel.
Included in the 4th Word of Christ on the cross is the implicit trust in God the Father and that God is doing what is righteous and holy.
And part of the final conclusion of the Psalm:
You who fear the Lord, praise Him; All you descendants of Jacob, glorify Him, And stand in awe of Him, all you descendants of Israel. For He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; Nor has He hidden His face from him; But when he cried to Him for help, He heard.
So David starts his Psalm with a question of why God had forsaken him, only to conclude that God did not, in fact, hide His face from David.
Although the Psalm describes David’s struggles and fears of God turning His face from him and casting him out of His presence, one of the thrusts of this Psalm is focusing on God’s holiness, His awesomeness, and His righteousness in all that He does.
God’s Holiness
God’s Awesomeness
God’s Righteousness
And these are key themes to rightly understand Jesus’ use of this Psalm.
God Will Not Hide His Face From The Righteous.
God Will Not Hide His Face From The Righteous.
The truth of this Psalm is that God will help the righteous.
This Psalm highlights that in spite of what one is experiencing, God will hear the cry of the righteous one and will not forsake him.
It also highlights the truth that although we feel forsaken, we are not.
So the initial conclusion would be, God did not forsake Jesus. He just felt forsaken.
But, the opposite is also true. God will not help the unrighteous.
God Will Hide His Face From The Unrighteous
God Will Hide His Face From The Unrighteous
In other words, the unrighteous will be forsaken.
Going back to David’s fear of being cast out of God’s presence in Psalm 51 was in connection with his sin with Bathsheba, but also was in connection with sin as a whole, echoing what happened in the Garden of Eden.
therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken. So He drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.
Adam and Eve were cast out from the presence of God.
We see the same happening even further with Cain after he murders Abel.
Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is too great to bear! “Behold, You have driven me this day from the face of the ground; and from Your face I will be hidden, and I will be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”
Cain said that from God’s face he would be hidden because of his sin.
God will hide His face from the unrighteous.
“Then My anger will be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them and hide My face from them, and they will be consumed, and many evils and troubles will come upon them; so that they will say in that day, ‘Is it not because our God is not among us that these evils have come upon us?’
In fact even Job acknowledges that the one who God hides His face from is considered God’s enemy.
“Why do You hide Your face And consider me Your enemy?
So, God does hide His face will forsake the unrighteous.
Now let’s go to Matthew 27 and examine Jesus’ experience to expand on this issue and answer the question on whether Jesus was actually forsaken or not.
The Darkness (vs 45)
The Darkness (vs 45)
More than just silence from Heaven, it became dark on earth.
The Darkness Was A Sign Of The Covenant Curse.
Darkness was one of the plagues on Egypt and was a covenant curse, if God’s commands were not kept.
and you will grope at noon, as the blind man gropes in darkness, and you will not prosper in your ways; but you shall only be oppressed and robbed continually, with none to save you.
The fulfillment at the cross.
“It will come about in that day,” declares the Lord God, “That I will make the sun go down at noon And make the earth dark in broad daylight.
The Darkness Reflected The Darkness Of Sin
Three truths about sin:
Sin will always look good on the outside, at the beginning, but its true self will expose itself shortly after.
Sin will always take you further than you intended to go and keep you longer than you intended to stay.
Sin will always separate and lead to death.
For the wages of sin is death...
What we see portrayed in the crucifixion is the full display of the ugliness and vileness of sin.
We observe the hard hearted and jealous Pharisees egg on the crowd to call for Jesus’ death.
The crucifixion itself was the most heinous of torture devices known to man reserved for the vilest of sinners against the Roman state.
In Jesus we see sin’s hatred of God - mocking, jealousy, pride, beatings, betrayal
And yet, we have to see the ugliness of sin in order to understand the damage, depravity, and deceit embedded within it.
We need to understand this is why God hates it. Sin is an abomination to Him.
The Darkness Reveals The Affront To His Character And Essence
Why does God have to turn His face? God is Holy! God is Awesome! God is Righteous!
Your eyes are too pure to approve evil, And You can not look on wickedness with favor...
Sin goes against every fiber of God’s essence.
God is life, sin is death
God is light, sin is darkness
God is truth, sin is a lie
God is holy, sin is perverse
God is righteous, sin is wickedness
God says, sin you just can’t be here. You have no place in my space.
And yet, we have sinned, are sinners, and stand before Him full of sin.
as it is written, “There is none righteous, not even one;
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
Which means we are all unrighteous and in our unrighteousness we are an affront to God’s character and essence.
The Darkness Was A Signal Of The Father Turning His Face Away
The holiness, awesomeness, and righteousness of God demands, requires, sin and those who are unrighteous to be put away from Him.
The darkness was a symbol of the loss of the light of the Father’s presence.
The darkness was a sign of God hiding His face from all that is an affront to His essence.
What choice does God have, but to cast us out of His presence forever?
These will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power,
But, wait...back to our original question.
Wasn’t Jesus perfectly righteous?
And if so, God wouldn’t have abandoned Him, would He?
Yes, Jesus was perfectly righteous, and in His righteousness He would not be abandoned.
But, there was a moment when Jesus was filled up to the fullness of the sins of mankind.
In other words, Jesus became unrighteous and as a result, the Father had to turn His face away.
Jesus did, in fact, experience separation from God, which would have been the last great experience of sinful man.
The Darkness Was God Turning His Face Away From Our Sins Now In His Son, Jesus.
and He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross...
Why Have You Forsaken Me? (vs 46)
Why Have You Forsaken Me? (vs 46)
Yet You are holy, O You who are enthroned upon the praises of Israel.
It Was A Cry Of Distress, But Not Of Distrust.
Jesus knows God is holy and has to turn His face away.
My God - first time He did not reference God the Father as Father.
My - still intimate and relational.
It Was Not A Cry Of Injustice, But An Acknowledgment Of God’s Righteousness
and while being reviled, He did not revile in return; while suffering, He uttered no threats, but kept entrusting Himself to Him who judges righteously;
Jesus does not complain of injustice, but rather acknowledges God’s righteousness
By His cry, Jesus is declaring God is right in forsaking Him.
He is declaring that God is justified in turning His face from Him.
He is declaring that God is perfect in His judgment on Him.
And in His humanity mixed with His divinity He is accepting the condemnation declared against Him.
Jesus knew that He had just become unrighteous and that God’s holiness demanded that He be forsaken.
David could say in his time, “I have never seen the righteous forsaken.” (Psalm 37.25)
But not anymore.
THE RIGHTEOUS ONE was forsaken.
THE RIGHTEOUS ONE was forsaken.
So was Jesus forsaken on the cross? YES!
For 3 painful hours Jesus received the wages for our sin.
3 hours of enduring the wrath of God against sin.
3 hours into which was condensed the equivalent of an eternal hell. Left alone in the outer darkness.
3 hours of bearing our sin must have felt like an eternity.
But...Here’s the beauty of Jesus using Psalm 22 in His 4th word from the cross and it ties back into something King David said in Psalm 51:
Do not cast me away from Your presence...
Hide Your face from my sins And blot out all my iniquities.
The reason the righteous will not be cast out of the presence of God is because God hides His face from their sins.
And God hid His face from my sin when He turned His back on Jesus who was filled with my sin.
God hid His face from Jesus so He wouldn’t have to hide it from me.
Jesus took on our unrighteousness and was forsaken so that we could receive His righteousness and not be forsaken.
He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
The Righteous One Was Forsaken So That I Wouldn’t Be
The Righteous One Was Forsaken So That I Wouldn’t Be
In other words, Jesus WAS forsaken, so that King David wouldn’t be.
Jesus was forsaken so that Jon Hayashi wouldn’t be.
Jesus was forsaken so that you wouldn’t have to be.
All you have to do is put your faith in Jesus Christ and you will be justified because of Jesus’ Righteousness.
being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness...so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
The Fourth Word: He Was Forsaken So That We Could Become Holy As He Is Holy
Closing Song: How Deep The Father’s Love For Us
Jesus, thank you for taking the wrath of God for us, so that God could shine His favor upon us and turn His face towards us.
Now may the Lord bless you and keep and make His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord turn His face toward you and give you peace.
