Why Have You Forsaken Me?

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ME: Intro - God Killed Jesus (New Paltz)

When my wife, Stephanie and I were in college,
We were involved in the Navigators for Christ.
But there was another Christian group called “The Truth Study.”
It began as an on campus Bible Study through the Gospel of Mark.
And they made these flyers and posted them around campus:
“God Killed Jesus.”
The groups purpose was clearly defined by their name,
It was a study in search of truth.
And this statement, God Killed Jesus, is a true statement.
They intentionally chose this statement because in isolation,
It is a shocking statement that at first glance doesn’t seem true,
Or doesn’t feel true.
But we who are Christians do believe that God the Father did this to God the Son.
This seems like an apparent contradiction that a loving God would do such a violent act.
In fact, some try to outright reject this truth about God.
But God’s willingness to punish what is evil is consistent with His loving character.
We live in a culture that promotes tolerance,
But that is merely a cover for indifference.
And indifference is not an act of love.
So, because God is not indifferent,
Motivated by His infinite love for us,
Jesus came into the world as the embodiment of goodness and kindness.
Then, He went to the cross not as a victim.
But as a willing sufferer,
Who took the death, the punishment, the wrath of God,
Which we deserve for our sin.
So, yes, this means God loves us so much that the Father did kill the willing Son, Jesus,
As a perfectly satisfactory substitute for His wrath.
This does not make God love His Son any less,
Nor does it create any sort of dissension between the Father and the Son.
They were in perfect love and perfect agreement in this will.
Despite these human or emotion-based criticisms,
We must consider what the Bible says on this subject.
So, the best place to look in the Bible is the cross itself.
This event is recorded in all four Gospels.
But we are not going to focus as much on Christ’s suffering at the hand of the Roman soldiers,
Rather, our focus is on the suffering Jesus experienced from the Father.
Last week, we were in Mark 10, where Jesus taught His disciples,
That even the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and give His life a ransom for many.
This morning we are in Mark 15:33-34.
And Lord willing, next week we will jump to John 3:14-18.
Our outline for this morning will look to answer three fundamental questions;
Who Forsook Jesus?
What Does it Mean For Jesus to be Forsaken?
Why Was Jesus Forsaken?
God will remember you because He has forsaken Christ.
Last week’s lesson from Mark 10 came while Jesus and His disciples were on their way to Jerusalem,
Where Jesus said, He would be given over to the Gentiles to be killed.
After that teaching, Jesus entered into Jerusalem on a colt,
To the shouts of Hosanna in the highest.
Once in Jerusalem Jesus entered the temple and began flipping tables and driving out the money changers,
Who, Jesus said, turned the Father’s house into a den of robbers.
This event did not sit will with the chief priests and pharisees,
So, they began seeking a way to destroy Him.
First, they tried questioning Jesus in the temple,
But Jesus turned it around on them and left them without an answer.
So, Jesus continued to teach in parables,
Until the Pharisees interrupted His teaching with another question.
This time, they tried to trap Him with a question related to paying taxes to Ceasar.
Jesus knew they were hypocritically trying to test Him,
So, He said, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto God what is God’s.”
They failed again.
Next, they came up with a crazy hypothetical about a woman marrying and remarrying seven brothers because they keep dying,
To try and stump Jesus.
And Jesus does not entertain the hypothetical and tells them they are flat out wrong,
And they do not know God or the Bible.
While that argument is going on,
One scribe steps forward with a seemingly sincere question;
“Which commandment is the most important of them all?”
Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength,
And love your neighbor as yourself.”
After that, no one dared question Jesus anymore.
So, Jesus continued teaching in the temple.
Days later, Judas is paid off by the chief priests to betray Jesus.
The night Jesus was betrayed by Judas,
Jesus celebrated the Passover with His disciples,
Where, at this Last Supper, He instituted the Lord’s Table,
Teaching that His body is broken and His blood is shed for us.
Included in this supper was Jesus’ prediction of Peter’s denial.
After the Last Supper, Jesus and the 11 disciples went to the Garden of Gethsemane,
Where Jesus prayed for this cup to pass from Him,
But ultimately says, “Father, not my will, but yours be done.”
Meanwhile, the disciples who were supposed to be praying,
Kept falling asleep because, even though their spirit was willing,
Their flesh was weak.
While in the garden, Jesus is betrayed by Judas and arrested.
He is brought before the high priest, chief priests, elders, and scribes.
This council orchestrated a mock trial where Jesus declared Himself as the Son of Man.
So, the council declares Jesus guilty of blasphemy,
And condemns Him to death.
After this declaration,
Peter fulfills Jesus’ prediction by denying Christ three times.
While that is going on, Jesus is bound up and delivered over to Pontious Pilate.
Pilate can find nothing wrong with Jesus,
So, he offers to have someone set free,
And the mob-like crowd that has now gathered shouts to release Barabbas,
A known murderer, instead of Jesus.
So, Pilate asks what the crowd wants him to do with this Jesus, the King of the Jews.
And they shout, crucify Him!
When trying to ask what Jesus has done,
The crowd continues to interrupt Pilate, shouting crucify Him!
So, Pilate gives Him over to be crucified.
As Jesus is led away,
He is mocked and spit on and stripped and beaten,
And a crown of thorns was formed and pressed onto His head.
After all that, Jesus was led out to be crucified,
Carrying His own cross to Golgotha,
Where He was crucified with two robbers on each side of Him.
While on the cross, Jesus was mocked by the chief priests and scribes.
This leads to Mark 15:33-34, which says;
Mark 15:33–34 ESV
And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
What are we to make of Jesus’ Words from the cross?
This sounds like a desperate plea for help from His Father to rescue Him from the circumstances of this world.
Or the sound of a confused child cowering away from the wrath of His Father.
In actuality, Jesus is speaking in anguish,
But He is not crying out for rescue or crying out in terror.
Jesus is revealing that He knew on the cross that He was forsaken.
This declaration is the climax of what we call the passion narrative.
And the time that it occurs, vs. 33 says is the sixth hour.
The sixth hour is noon, and the ninth hour is 3PM.
So, there was darkness over the whole land from noon to 3PM.
This was not just a cloudy sky kind of darkness,
This was a supernatural darkness that represented God’s judgment.
It was a 3 hour darkness that recalls the three day darkness Egypt experienced.
The ninth plague striking Egypt is recorded in Exodus 10:22, which says;
Exodus 10:22 ESV
So Moses stretched out his hand toward heaven, and there was pitch darkness in all the land of Egypt three days.
The verse prior described this darkness as darkness that could be felt.
And as vs. 22 says, it covered all the land of Egypt.
It was pitch black, to the point that people could not even see one another.
This plague led up to the tenth and final plague,
The death of the firstborn.
The only way for the people of God to spare their firstborn was by means of a substitute,
A passover lamb.
This was the same plague we looked at in Exodus 12 on Easter Sunday at the start of our It Is Well series.
But the ninth plague was not the only place where darkness was prophesied.
In Amos 8:9-10, God promises to “darken the earth in broad daylight.”
The brightest time of day is between noon and 3PM,
The exact time Mark 15:33 says that the land was darkened.
Amos 8:9-10 compares this time a darkness to a time “like the mourning for an only son.”
For God the Father, that is exactly what it was.

WE: Who Forsook Jesus?

Because, as we see in vs. 34, at the ninth hour,
Jesus calls out in the darkness,
“Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?”
Which vs. 34 translates to mean, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Or why have you rejected or abandoned or deserted me?
The literal definition of the word is to refuse to accept or acknowledge something,
Or in this case, someone.
The definition goes on to say, conceived of as leaving behind or forsaking.
So, our first question is who forsook Jesus?
And the simple answer is, well, everyone.
Jesus was forsaken by the government of His time,
As an innocent man, He was not protected.
The Pharisees did not have the authority to crucify anyone,
So, the fact that Jesus was crucified falls on the Roman government.
As Mark 15 shows, Roman soldiers obeying their Roman governor flogged and crucified Jesus.
This was not something invented for Jesus’ punishment.
The Romans had been crucifying people for hundreds of years.
It was the most cruel form of punishment.
And Roman citizens were granted immunity from experiencing this punishment.
So, Jesus was falsely charged with betraying Caesar,
And despite the governor declaring that there was no basis for a charge against Jesus,
Jesus was still forsaken, abandoned by the governor, to appease the angry crowd.
The governor had a man He knew to be innocent executed on the cross.
Jesus’ death was unjust.
But it wasn’t just the government that forsook Jesus.
The government catered to the people who forsook Jesus.
These people weren’t just anyone, they were the Jews, Jesus’ own people.
One week earlier, they welcomed Him as their king,
When He was not the conquering King they hoped for,
They turned on Him,
Shouting for His blood to be spilled.
Mocking and insulting Him while He hung on the cross.
Rejected by the very ones He came to save.
Perhaps the worst abandonment Jesus endured, humanly speaking,
Was the abandonment of His own followers.
For three years, Jesus lived with and loved these disciples.
He deeply invested in their lives and in their souls.
But after being betrayed by one of them,
The rest deserted Jesus.
He was forsaken by His dearest friends.
This is shocking,
The greatest human being of all time was forsaken by all.
But this shines a light on the reality of our fallen world.
Sin characterizes the largest human institutions like governments,
And it characterizes the deepest core of every human heart,
Even those who are closest to Jesus.
Even more shocking,
Jesus was forsaken by His own Father!
He cries out, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
This exact statement is also the opening line of Psalm 22.
And Jesus did not speak this in Greek,
The Gospel tells us He speaks it in Aramaic, Jesus’ heart language.
From the depth of His soul, Jesus speaks the opening words of a messianic Psalm that describes an execution.
But it is interesting,
David, the sufferer from Psalm 22 is delivered,
His deliverance results in the deliverance of Israel.
By the end, the deliverance of Israel brings the nations to worship the Lord.
So, what does all this mean?
It means, even in His death,
Jesus is foremost demonstrating that He is the Word incarnate.
And as the Word, He affirms His relationship with the Father by crying out to God.
But by quoting Psalm 22,
It is possible that Jesus is drawing us to Psalm 22,
Which begins with a king suffering and being forsaken,
But ends with the deliverance of God’s people and all nations worshipping the Lord!
This possibility at the very least makes Jesus’ question easier to stomach.
But I do not believe we can fully embrace this as the only purpose behind Jesus’ Words.
This cry from the cross is difficult for us to hear,
And it should be.
Pastor Michael Lawrence explains well;
“Rather than explain away the offense and difficulty of these words, we must grapple with the force and pain of what has been described as Jesus’ cry of dereliction, if we are to understand the cross.”
In Psalm 22, these words were a genuine plea for help from David.
On the cross, Jesus uses these same words as a rhetorical question to make a two-part statement.
First, Jesus was forsaken by God.
The OT says that anyone who hung on a tree was accursed, forsaken by God.
As we saw in Isaiah 53:10;
Isaiah 53:10 ESV
Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
Zech. 13:7 also says;
Zechariah 13:7 ESV
“Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, against the man who stands next to me,” declares the Lord of hosts. “Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered; I will turn my hand against the little ones.
Earlier in Mark, Jesus said He would fulfill these prophesies.
It is why He prayed in Mark 14:36 that the Father would take this cup from Him.
But He submitted to the Father’s will,
Acknowledging that the cross had not been forced upon God,
It was not God’s backup plan after we ruined His initial plan,
Rather this was God’s plan from before the foundation of the world.
The cross was God’s decision,
It was according to His will.
In Acts 2:23, Peter understood when he said,
“[Jesus] was handed over to [Israel] by God’s purpose and foreknowledge.”
As 2 Cor. 5:21 also teaches;
2 Corinthians 5:21 ESV
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Yet many try to “defend” God as if this was not God’s will.
As if God, in His love, was reluctantly forced to do this.
The Bible makes it clear that this was God’s plan,
That Jesus Christ would be forsaken by God.
So, what does this reveal to you about God?
Hopefully you understand how truly loving He is.
Because while God was forsaking Christ on the cross,
He never stopped loving Him.
Rather, the cross demonstrates His love for us!
Again Pastor Lawrence comments here;
“Sometimes people think of Jesus as the really loving one and the Father as the grudging, miserly one whose love must somehow be won for us in Jesus, but nothing could be further from the truth. It was the Father’s love that planned the cross from the beginning.”
The second part of Jesus’s statement is that Christ was forsaken by God.
From the earliest times of Christianity,
People tried to “defend” God as if Christ was not actually forsaken on the cross.
In some of the earliest churches,
Some tried to claim that Jesus did not really suffer,
He only appeared as if He were suffering.
Others tried to argue that it was not really Jesus on the cross.
At the last second, God loved Jesus too much to forsake Him,
So, He rescued Jesus and snuck someone else on the cross in His place.
A substitute for the substitute.
This early form of heresy eventually influenced Islam.
Then in the middle ages, the Roman Catholic Church taught that it was only Christ’s human nature that suffered,
But His divine nature was never harmed.
This led to a focus on Jesus’ physical sufferings as a human,
Reflected in the belief that the body of Christ is still on the cross,
And the bread becomes Jesus’ physical body during communion.
You see, our human attempts to “defend” God inevitably lead down a path that is forged by the enemy himself.
Satan wanted to “defend” God and not allow Jesus to be forsaken by offering Jesus a shortcut past the cross.
Jesus warns His disciples that Satan seeks to use us to distract from Him laying down His life.
Friends, you must understand,
Christ was forsaken by God on the cross.
It was not a substitute,
Jesus’ followers in the NT preached Christ crucified,
Christ made sin, Christ offered as a sacrifice.
Think of how absurd it is for these followers to preach that their Savior was crucified if it was not true.
Christ, fully God and fully man, was crucified on the cross,
And forsaken by God.
As Hebrews 9:14 says, Christ, through the eternal Spirit, offered Himself unblemished to God.
Yes, it was in His human nature that He suffered and died,
But it is only by His divine nature that His death is of infinite worth.
As we talked about last week, making Him the ransom for many.
He willingly and obediently suffered being forsaken by God.
As Jesus says in John 10:18,
“No one takes [my life] from Me, but I lay it down of my own accord.”
Friends, this is why we understand that Christ is the only One able to save us when we repent of our sins and trust in Him.
Peter preaches this in Acts 4:12;
Acts 4:12 ESV
And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”
You see, we will not fully understand the cross,
Until we understand what it means for Jesus to be forsaken.
Which brings us to the next question in our outline,

GOD: What Does it Mean For Jesus to be Forsaken?

What does it mean for Jesus to be forsaken?
In the most literal sense, to be forsaken is to be abandoned.
And that is what Jesus experienced, abandonment for our sins.
And outside of Jesus’ crying out that He had been forsaken in the Gospels,
There are only two other places this word is found in the entire NT,
In 2 Tim. 4:10, where Paul describes being abandoned by Demas.
And Hebrews 10:25, which says,
“Let us not neglect, abandon, forsake to meet together.”
It is telling Christians not to make it a habit to refuse to meet together,
Do not abandon meeting together,
Do not forsake meeting together.
And if I can address you who are joining online.
I praise God that we have been able to stay connected by using these resources during a pandemic.
But joining online is not a worthy substitute of meeting together in person.
If you are joining online out of convenience primarily,
Or out of intentionally not wanting to meet together,
Then you are currently contradicting Hebrews 10:25.
It is time to get back into the habit of regularly meeting together.
I am not implying that we are preparing to take attendance or anything like that.
But I am saying it is much harder to do Hebrews 10:24, which says,
Let us stir one another toward love and good works,
Without doing Hebrews 10:25,
Without meeting together regularly.
If attending a large group in person concerns you,
We have connect groups available,
And if our current connect groups do not work for some reason,
I would be glad to work with you to start another connect group.
Consider this my attempt at doing the latter part of Heb. 10:25,
Encouraging one another to stir up love and good works,
And to habitually meet together.
We cannot forsake these things in the way Jesus was forsaken on our behalf.
At the same time, I confess that we cannot fully understand the extent of forsakeness Christ endured on the cross.
We can appreciate elements of the physical pain He felt because we have all felt pain.
We can sympathize with some of the emotional heartache he endured because we have all known injustice, betrayal, or loss.
But to be forsaken by God?
As long as we have breath in our lungs,
We cannot pretend to know that level of agonizing abandonment.
Jesus was forsaken by God,
So, that, in Him, you may never have to experience it.
This brings us to some really hard theology,
Where One Person of the triune God is forsaken by another Person of the triune God.
And to be honest, we cannot fully comprehend this.
Pastor Lawrence helps us with a partial understanding;
“The God-forsakeness that Christ experiences on the cross is not merely the absence of God’s favor and blessing, though it is that. It is also the positive infliction of God’s wrath for sin.”
What Pastor Lawrence is getting at when he talks about the positive infliction of God’s wrath for sin,
Is the fact that Jesus, who had no sin, bore the penalty for our sin.
Christ endured the wrath of God that sin deserves.
God’s wrath was not directed at Jesus,
But at sin.
And Jesus took that sin upon Himself.
The Bible is very clear that God hates sin.
And perhaps you are thinking,
“Well gee, I do not like the idea of a hateful God.”
Me neither, this is a terrifying thought.
But it is true.
So, what does this mean?
Well, it means sin makes God angry,
But this anger is different from our anger.
We get angry when our ego is damaged,
Or when our rights are infringed upon.
God’s anger is a righteous anger.
It is where perfect justice and perfect love meet,
And it is rooted in His holy nature.
Our sin, is then an attack on God’s perfect nature,
It is living in denial of this truth.
So, God is right to hate sin,
To be angry at sin,
And to punish sin.
As Romans 1:18 says;
Romans 1:18 ESV
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
We see this wrath so clearly with the cross.
As Paul says in Colossians,
On the cross, in Christ’s body,
We are reconciled to God by nailing the requirements of the law to the cross.
Those requirements are separation from God for our sin.
That is what Christ was declaring with His Words.
He knew, deep down, in His soul,
The torment of being cut-off from God for our sin.
This means that Christ experienced not only physical,
But spiritual death.
As people, we all experience physical death.
But just because we die physically,
It does not mean we cease to exist.
On the contrary, our souls will exist forever.
1 Thess. 4 talks about a day when the physical bodies of all who have died will be raised,
Each one reunited with our soul.
And when that happens we will have to give an account for how we have lived the life God has given us.
Rom. 2:8 says;
Romans 2:8 ESV
but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury.
The wrath and fury is described in Revelation 20 as second death,
Eternal existence separated from God in the Lake of Fire.
So, Jesus being forsaken means Jesus experienced this second death.
This is what the darkness described in these verses communicate.
Darkness is often used throughout Scripture to illustrate something negative.
Sometimes it could be related to chaos,
Other times it implies a sense of ignorance.
But in general it represents something evil or wicked.
Ephesians 5:11 for example described impure actions as “unfruitful works of darkness.”
Darkness only exists in the absence of light.
Likewise, evil pervades when goodness is nowhere to be found.
And from noon to three on the day Jesus died,
There was darkness over all the land.
Does this mean evil conquered Jesus?
Certainly not.
After Jesus’ ascension, John introduces Jesus in His Gospel; John 1:4-5,
John 1:4–5 ESV
In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
So, what was going on with the darkness here in Mark?
Well, Jesus, Who knew no sin,
Became sin.
And on that cross, He was being forsaken by the Father,
That, we might become the righteousness of God.
In Isaiah 13, God is talking about pouring out His judgment on the sins of His people,
Then in Isaiah 13:10, He says;
Isaiah 13:10 ESV
For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light; the sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light.
Interesting.
The prophet speaks about the sun being darkened as a symbol of God’s judgment.
The plague of darkness on Egypt was not using the sun being darkened as a symbol,
But as an example of God’s judgment.
Therefore, this means God’s judgment must have something to do with what it means to be forsaken.
Also, elsewhere in the OT,
Job 10:21; 17:13; 18:6; Ps. 107:10; Isa. 8:22; Ezek. 30:18;
Darkness is a symbol of misery, sometimes even death.
So, to be forsaken is a combination of God’s judgment and misery, resulting in death.
This is the case with Jesus.
The darkness was not a natural phenomenon.
Jesus took on the misery of God’s wrath as our sin bearer to the point of death.
Including second death.
Many have taught that after Jesus died on the cross,
He descended to hell.
But nowhere in the Bible does it say that.
The Bible does teach that Jesus publicly atoned for our sin,
Taking God’s judgment on the cross.
And before He cried out at the ninth hour,
For three hours of darkness,
Jesus hung on the cross.
It was during those three hours that Jesus descended into hell.
He experienced the torment of hell reserved for those who are forsaken by God.
That is why after three hours of being forsaken,
In the cover of darkness,
Jesus cried out “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

YOU: Why Was Jesus Forsaken?

Which is the third question we are answering this morning,
Why was Jesus forsaken?
This question just seems to hang there in our passage.
As we have already discussed,
It is really a declaration of Christ being forsaken framed as a question,
But it beckons for an answer.
The answer starts by going back to the OT prophet, Jeremiah.
Chapters 30-33 of Jeremiah is referred to as “The Book of Consolation,”
Because God reveals to His people in these chapters that His final response to sin is not what we deserve.
When expecting wrath and judgment,
He surprises with mercy and comfort.
He has, as Jer. 31:3 says, “loved you with an everlasting love.”
This follows 29 chapters recounting the horrors of Israel’s sin.
And chapter 34-52 recounts God’s judgment against the nations.
The verse that best summarizes this Book of Consolation is Jeremiah 31:20;
Jeremiah 31:20 ESV
Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he my darling child? For as often as I speak against him, I do remember him still. Therefore my heart yearns for him; I will surely have mercy on him, declares the Lord.
Ephraim is a more affectionate term for Israel.
God is calling His people His darling children.
And He has been speaking against them for 29 chapters,
But here He says, as often as I speak against My people,
I do remember them still.
What exactly is God saying here?
Could He possibly fail to recall His people?
Meaning God is promising not to forget that His people exist?
Of course not.
God is all-knowing,
He can recall every person who has existed for all time.
Dane Ortlund explains what this verse is talking about;
Remember here is covenant language. It is relational. This is remembering not as the alternative to forgetting but as the alternative to forsaking.”
So, God, going all the way back to the prophet, Jeremiah,
Is promising not to forsake His people.
How does He fulfill this promise?
By forsaking His Son, Jesus Christ.
This is why God has forsaken Jesus on the cross.
To fulfill His promise not to forsake you.
Jesus was forsaken by God on your behalf.
Why did God do this?
Well, look at how Jer. 31:20 ends,
My heart yearns for him, I will surely have mercy on him, declares the Lord.
God did this because His heart yearns for you.
The word for heart here is translated as bowels in the KJV,
Because it is speaking of God’s innermost wanting,
His deepest desire.
And to yearn is different than to bless, or rescue, or even love.
Again, I turn to Dane Ortlune to help explain;
“The Hebrew word here (hamah) at its root has a denotation of being restless or agitated, or even growling or roaring or being boisterous or turbulent...His capacious affections for his own are not threatened by their fickleness, because pouring out of his heart is the turbulence of divine longing. And what God wants, God gets.”
And because His heart yearns for you,
He declares that He will have mercy on you.
The literal translation of this phrase from Hebrew is “Having mercy, I will have mercy.”
Ortlund comments again, “The yearning heart of God delivers and redelivers sinners who find themselves drowning in the sewage of their life.”
Therefore, God forsakes Christ, so that you are not forsaken.
So, that you can be restored to this covenantal, loving relationship with God.
Who do you perceive God to be?
Better yet, when you are in sin or when you are in suffering,
Who do you perceive God to be?
I am not asking you to answer with a Sunday school answer.
Reflect on who you believe the person on the other end of the line is when you pray,
Assuming you pray in those moments.
How do you think God is feeling toward you?
Do you see Him as a cold authoritarian?
Do you see Him as an indifferent hearer?
Do you see Him as an angry dictator?
Or do you see Him as One who yearns for you from His innermost being?
One who longs for you to stop hiding behind a social media filter,
Who wants you to stop comparing yourself to a fake idealized version of who you wish you were,
Who desires the real, genuine, authentic you.
It does not matter how long you have been following God.
You may have never even read the Bible,
Or you could have memorized entire portions of the Bible,
Each of you have this deep-rooted struggle against revealing who you are deep down.
I feel it in my own heart,
The apostle Paul expresses it in his NT letters.
It is an outflow of mercy coming from God’s heart,
And an outflow of reluctance to receive God’s mercy that comes from our heart.
You see the way you think of God,
Whether it is the cold authoritarian, the indifferent hearer, the angry dictator,
Or some other picture in your mind,
Reveals who you are in your heart.
But Scripture reveals,
That is not God.
He welcomes,
We withdraw.
This is when you hear yourself say, “I could never forgive myself for that.”
When you say that,
You are rejecting God’s yearning heart toward you.
Because God says if you confess and repent of whatever it is you are not forgiving yourself for,
He has already declared you forgiven.
He says, He will remember His loving covenant with you.
He will not forsake you, because Christ was forsaken for that.
This does not diminish how seriously God takes our moral failures,
It does not magically wipe away any earthly consequences that come as a result of that sin.
But it does mean that God still loves you,
That Christ was still forsaken for you,
And that you are forgiven by God and welcomed into a relationship with Him.
So, if Jer. 31:20 is true of God,
Then it is equally true of Christ, Who is God in the flesh.
The Puritan, Thomas Goodwin reflects on this in light of sin in our lives;
“Christ takes part with you, and is far from being provoked against you, as all his anger is turned upon your sin to ruin it; yea, his pity is increased the more towards you, even as the heart of a father is to a child that has a loathsome disease…The greater the misery is, the more is the pity when the party is beloved. Now of all miseries, sin is the greatest…And he, loving your persons, and hating only the sin, his hatred shall all fall, and that only upon the sin, to free you of it by its ruin and destruction, but his affections shall be the more drawn out to you; and this as much when you lie under sin as under any other affliction. Therefore fear not.”
Think about Goodwin’s logic here.
He is not separating God’s love toward us in our sin and God’s love toward us in suffering.
But how can that be?
Sin is bad stuff we do,
And suffering is when bad stuff happens to us, right?
Well, that is somewhat true.
But Goodwin is arguing that this understanding is like using what you learn in history class to try and solve a math problem.
Goodwin is observing from the Bible that God’s level of love is given to match our level of misery.
And our greatest misery according to the Bible is sin.
Therefore, God’s greatest level of love is given to us in our sin.
How can that be?
Goodwin rightly notes that God’s hatred is toward that sin,
But His love is toward us!
It is from this understanding we get the common phrase,
Hate the sin, love the sinner.
I would extend Goodwin’s observation a step further.
I believe our understanding of suffering helps us in our fallen capacity,
To better understand God’s heart toward us in sin.
I’ll give you an example using my mom.
My mom was immune deficient and had extremely weak and damaged lungs from a combination of her immune deficiency and multiple pneumonias.
At the peak of her damaged lungs, she was on oxygen 24/7 and had to use a wheelchair because getting up to take a few steps plummeted her oxygen levels dangerously low.
Her suffering stirred great misery in my heart and the hearts of our entire family who love her dearly.
If I had the ability to see her through that misery and eventually free her from it,
I would have done it in a heartbeat.
Yet, at the same time,
I never took a posture toward her where I was angry at her for having this problem.
I did not condemn her for a lack of willpower to overcome her misery in her own strength.
That is similar to how God sees us in our sin.
But unlike us,
God has the power to see us through our misery and free us from it.
So, He does not forsake us.
He remembers His loving covenant with us.
He forsook His Son to see us through to the misery of our own sinfulness,
And to free us from it!
Our world is desperate for this yearning love that remembers instead of forsakes.
A love that is not dependent upon our willpower to overcome the misery of our own sinfulness.
A love that pierces through the phony filters we present,
And addresses the dark messes of our lives that overwhelm us.
A love that no human love has even come close to accurately representing.
To the world, this love seems like nothing more than an empty hope.
But the answer to Jesus’ question from the cross proves that this love is real,
It is present,
It is pervasive,
It yearns from the deepest places of God’s heart for us.
This heart of God from Jeremiah was not some abstract concept,
It was shown in the human flesh of Jesus Christ.
Though God speaks against His children,
He remembers us still.
Once more, Dane Ortlund summarizes this so beautifully;
“At the height of human history, justice was fully satisfied and mercy was fully poured out at the same time, when the Father sent his eternally ‘dear Son’ and ‘darling child’ to a Roman cross, where God truly did ‘speak against him,’ where Jesus Christ poured out his blood, the innocent for the guilty, so that God could say of us, ‘I remember him still.’ Even as he forsook Jesus himself.”
So, why was Jesus forsaken?
The answer is so simple, yet profound,
Christ was forsaken so that we who put our faith in Him will never be forsaken.
This is the message of the cross.
This does not misrepresent God as some hostile father,
Nor does it misrepresent Christ as some poor, helpless victim.
This does not mean division exists between two person’s in the trinity.

WE: Lord’s Table

When Jesus cried out from the cross,
My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?
He was showing how far God went to satisfy His deepest yearning for us.
He went all the way to the cross.
The infinitely relentless merciful love of God was channeled into the crucifixion of Christ.
This fulfilled God’s promise to remember us still.
The Father and the Son were united in this purpose to save all who trust in Him.
Pastor Michael Lawrence summarizes this;
“The sinless Son of God bears our sin, and then God pours out the wrath that our sin deserves, and Jesus the Son endures it so that we, who deserve the wrath, might never encounter it.”
This is the gospel.
It calls us to forsake our sin,
To repent, meaning to turn away from sin,
And to trust Christ,
He who was forsaken so that we may never be forsaken.
After Jesus accomplished this miraculous work on the cross.
We who are His followers continue to worship God through the ordinance we call communion.
We see Paul write to the church in 1 Corinthians 11 teaching them how to celebrate the Lord’s Table.
When Jesus instituted the Lord’s Table,
He told us to do this in remembrance of Him.
Because we are forgetful creatures,
This is a command to do it to remember Jesus’ sacrificial gift on the cross.
But it is also the same type of remembrance from Jeremiah 31:20.
Do this as an act of covenantal love for Jesus.
Do not forsake Jesus, continue in a loving relationship with Him,
By partaking of communion.
At this time, I am going to invite the music team up.
In just a few moments, we will have music playing,
And as we do,
The table is open for all who trust in Christ as Lord and Savior.
As you come forward, please follow the arrows on the ground,
If you come up the middle,
Stay to the right of the center line and return on the opposite side.
If you are unable to come up,
We do have servants who will bring it to you.
When Paul was teaching on the Lord’s Table in 1 Cor. 11,
He includes a command to examine yourself when partaking in this celebration.
So, once you have the bread and the cup,
As you return to your seat,
Take a moment of silent prayer or prayer with your family to examine yourself.
Perhaps you need to repent of what we have talked about today.
Perhaps you have been belittling the heart of God by trying to force it into your limited understanding of God’s love.
Perhaps there are other sins or doubts you have to confess.
Perhaps you are cherishing something you should not be cherishing.
Maybe you are cherishing something more than God.
Whatever it is, remember, Jesus was forsaken for you.
Therefore, there is nothing you can not forsake.
It is a small thing to forsake your sin,
To forsake the whole world,
In exchange for never being forsaken by God.
So, as you forsake your sin,
Get past all the filters,
All the facades,
All the fantasies.
Let God see the deepest and truest reality of who you are.
Then repent of it,
And let Him surprise you with His longing to love you,
His yearning to forgive you,
And His remembering of His covenant with you.
Because God has forsaken Christ,
So, that He can remember you.
After taking that time of examination.
I will return up here and we will partake of the bread and the cup together.
As we prepare for this sweet time with Jesus,
Please bow your heads and join me in prayer.
In 1 Corinthians 11:23-24, Paul writes;
1 Corinthians 11:23–24 ESV
For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
So, together we eat.
Paul goes on in 1 Cor. 11:25-26;
1 Corinthians 11:25–26 ESV
In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
So, together we drink.
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