"My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?"

This cry of David, penned a millennium earlier, only begins to reflect the horror being experienced by his greater Son.  Is it possible to imagine a statement more laden with despair?  Such words eclipse Dante’s forlorn inscription, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

Everything about Passion Week has moved towards this prophecy in Psalm 22:1 which our Lord fulfilled on Good Friday, a day unbroken from Thursday.  We left with Jesus and the disciples finishing the Last Supper and following that they sang a hymn and went to the Mount of Olives (Matthew 26:30).

Once they arrive Jesus prophesies that all will abandon Him.  If that isn’t enough, Jesus also tells Peter a second time that he will deny Him (Matthew 26:33-35; Mark 14:29-31).  But bravado will have none of that—Peter will stand by Jesus to the end!  Yet in just a few short moments, he and the others are lulled into slumber while they abandon their Lord to a solitary torment.  Agony of this kind forbids all sleep.  Yet selfishness justifies it.  The disciples would not have the vigilance of a sentry let alone the courage of a warrior.  Thus as the torches descend from Jerusalem, through Kidron and up to Olivet, Jesus alone is able to see them.

Satan’s moment is here.  The hour of darkness has come.  How tragic that our Savior would face it with no human support.  Yet His Father knew what He needed and therefore sent an angel to strengthen Him (Luke 22:43).  How did that happen?  We don’t know.  Perhaps the angel quoted a passage like Isaiah 49:5-6:

5And now says the Lord, who formed Me from the womb to be His Servant, to bring Jacob back to Him, so that Israel might be gathered to Him (for I am honored in the sight of the Lord, and My God is My strength), 6He says, "It is too small a thing that You should be My Servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved ones of Israel; I will also make You a light of the nations so that My salvation may reach to the end of the earth."

Having been strengthened, Jesus continues in prayer.  And as He anticipates what looms before Him, He experiences travail of soul unlike anything ever known.  His agony is not so much focused on the cruelty of crucifixion—perhaps the most barbaric form of torture ever devised—but rather on the horrific prospect of becoming sin for us.  What a strange paradox that the supreme focus of the Father’s love will now become the equal focus of His wrath.  Christ alone will know the fullness of each spectrum like no other.  And how ironic that in the place called Gethsemane, meaning “oil press,” the weight of this eternal moment would press blood and sweat from His pores.

There is no escape.  “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me” (Matthew 26:39).  If it were possible for God’s righteousness to redeem man any other way, He would have dispatched twelve legions of angels with lightening speed to deliver His beloved Son.  Never did a cry emerge from the human breast that the Father so desired to answer but could not.  A cross-less redemption was forever impossible and the Son submits, “yet not as I will, but as You will.”

That submission will include subjecting Himself to ridicule and scorn as He is dragged away to the Sanhedrin, the ruling body of Israel.  His trial is a farce unlike any other yet it is one whose verdict is insufficient; in order for the Messiah to die as the prophets predicted, further assistance was needed.  Though the plot to execute Jesus was Jewish in origin, it could not have happened without the willing assistance of their Gentile rulers.  One had the motivation, the other the means.  Guilt falls to all races, not just one.

Enter Pontius Pilate, a governor with no love lost for his subjects.  He began his rule in AD 26 by provoking the Jews with graven images of Caesar in Jerusalem.  And although he would eventually remove the images, an ominous precedent was set.  Several years later, for example, he brutally suppressed a protest against the use of temple funds to build an aqueduct, an event possibly highlighted in Luke 13:1.  Such cruelty would be his undoing and lead to his deportation in AD 36.

Thus his encounter with Jesus serves as another flashpoint between the Jews and him.  Yet this would neither be a day nor a Prisoner he would ever forget.  Pilate stands before no mere mortal; the claims of Jesus’ deity send a chill down his spine.  The haunt of his wife’s dream will become his own.  Forever.  He is used to seeing men tremble before him as he decides their fate.  Yet in a divine twist of irony, he trembles before the Prisoner as if his fate is being decided.  Listen to John 19.

7The Jews answered him, "We have a law, and by that law He ought to die because He made Himself out to be the Son of God."  8Therefore when Pilate heard this statement, he was even more afraid; 9and he entered into the Praetorium again and said to Jesus, "Where are You from?"  But Jesus gave him no answer.  10So Pilate said to Him, "You do not speak to me?  Do You not know that I have authority to release You, and I have authority to crucify You?"  11Jesus answered, "You would have no authority over Me, unless it had been given you from above; for this reason he who delivered Me to you has the greater sin."  12As a result of this Pilate made efforts to release Him…

Like so many throughout history, Pilate simply wants Jesus to go away.  But the One before whom every knee will bow does not go away, not for Pontius Pilate or anyone else.  He is forced to deal with Jesus, as are all men, and thus in condemning the Son of God he ultimately condemns himself.

Pilate has fatefully succumbed.  His Roman soldiers execute his decree by first putting Jesus through a scourging that rips away all but a semblance of humanity.  “So His appearance was marred more than any man and His form more than the sons of men” (Isaiah 52:14).  The torture continues as Jesus inches towards Calvary where He is to die ignominiously between two criminals.

And as He hangs impaled to the cross for six hours, Matthew gives an insightful perspective of what happens.  During the first three hours he focuses on the King under man’s wrath (26:33-44).  But for the last three hours he focuses on the King under God’s wrath as darkness falls upon the land and Jesus utters that horrid scream, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

The Son has been forsaken by the Father, something never known before or since.  Eternity’s line of demarcation has been drawn.  And why has the Father forsaken Him?  Because He has cast an eternal weight of wrath upon the Son as a complete and just payment for our sins.  Listen to this description from Stephen Charnock, a 17th century Puritan preacher:

Not all the vials of judgment that have or shall be poured out upon the wicked world…give such a demonstration of God’s hatred of sin, as the wrath of God let loose upon His Son.  Never did Divine holiness appear more beautiful and lovely than at the time our Saviour’s countenance was most marred in the midst of His dying groans.

God’s justice is on display as never before…or since.  If ever a moment caused the angelic world to stand still, this must have been it.  Not even the birth of Jesus captured their attention like this.  Why?  They have seen countless children born and thus had some idea of what it was for the Son of Man to enter the world.  But nothing could prepare them for His departure from it.  This is the greatest outpouring of God’s wrath they would ever see, now and for all eternity.  Even as dreadful as God’s judgments are in the book of Revelation, when they do occur they will be somewhat anticlimactic for the angels.  They will have "seen worse” and they would never see it again.

But what is explicit to the angels is virtually unknown to us.  Jesus’ cry of abandonment gives only a pinhole through which to peer; afar is a Grand Canyon of judgment lost to our sight.  No wonder we have such a hard time grasping the magnitude of suffering laid upon our Messiah, a magnitude that “pleased [the Father] to crush Him” (Isaiah 53:10).

So how do we comprehend the incomprehensible?  We cannot.  But lest inability despair us of comprehension altogether, let us seek to understand, however feebly, what our Savior endured.

Imagine, if possible, all the stars and planets being poured through a cosmic funnel upon the shoulders of a man.  The mythical Atlas would collapse in an instant.  But even that immeasurable yoke could scarcely compete with the infinitely heavier avalanche of wrath that fell upon Christ at Calvary, a wrath impossible to exaggerate.  If the nations of the earth are as a speck of dust before our God, then is the entire universe any less compared to what Christ bore for us?

Therefore it is no wonder that God rightly condemns all who refuse this gift of mercy.  To those who impugn, “What kind of God would cast men into hell?” truth responds, “The same God that would first cast hell upon His Son for you!”

And it is also no wonder that all will perish who believe the work of Christ alone cannot save, men who think they must bear the pebble which Christ somehow could not.  Such is the folly—and condemnation—of faith plus works.

The substitute has been provided.  The payment has been made.  The work of the cross satisfied the Father as only it could.  “As a result of the anguish of His soul, He will see it and be satisfied” (Isaiah 53:11).  God is never satisfied with the punishment unbelievers endure in the lake of fire, ere the flames would die.  Yet He was satisfied with Christ’s sufferings at Calvary.  “Who understands the power of Your anger and Your fury, according to the fear that is due You?” (Psalm 90:11).  Only the Son.  Christ alone will know the fullness of that fury, more so than all in hell combined.  No wonder Charles Spurgeon called the cross “hell squeezed into a cup.”  And no wonder Jesus would say, “It is finished!” (John 19:30).

Truly this is a “good” day even as it is the most terrible of days.  May the sorrow of the Suffering Servant be our cause for rejoicing.