Demons gathered in the darkness. The grieving sun hid its
face. Lightning rent the clouds, thunder threatened the distant hills,
and the earth heaved and groaned. Shattered nature waited, all its
forces poised on the fulcrum of a single, fading life. “My God!”
A tortured voice demanded, more terrible than the thunder, more
unnerving than the quaking earth. “My God?” the same voice
again, inquiring, then imploring, “Why have You forsaken Me?”
The Man of the ages, asking the question of the ages.
When Nazis gas innocent men, women, and children at Dachau;
when angry tribesmen hack to death their unarmed neighbors in Rwanda;
when terrorists blow up a school bus and incinerate children, we want
to cry out, “Where are You, God? Why have You forsaken us?” Where is
God in such circumstances? God is exactly where He was when Jesus died.
The Bible teaches that God is omnipresent—present
everywhere. “You know when I leave and when I get back; I’m never out
of your sight. . . . I look behind me and you’re there, then up ahead and
you’re there, too—your reassuring presence, coming and going. . . . If I
flew on morning’s wings to the far western horizon, You’d find me
in a minute—you’re already there waiting!”1
We may not sense God’s presence, but He always sees us. That was true
when Christ hung on Calvary, as well. Perhaps Jesus lost sight of His
Father, but the Father never lost sight of the Son.
God hides His face from sin
In mercy, God hides His face from sin, not because He cannot
abide sin, but because sin cannot abide in His presence. Though our sin
is repulsive beyond our imagining, Christ accepted our sins as His own.
And, sinful though we are, “ ‘in him we live and move and have our
being.’ ”2 God can abide sin,
but sin cannot remain in the presence of God.
Revelation pictures the lost, those who have clung to sin,
crying for the rocks and the mountains to conceal them from the Lamb,
because, in their sin, they cannot abide His presence. Paul tells us
that Jesus became sin for us. The psalmist, seeking mercy, asked
God to “hide your face from my sins.”3
So God answered the psalmist’s prayer—and also our prayers for
forgiveness—by hiding His face from the One who became sin for us.
Jesus experienced the consequences of carrying our sin—separation from
the Father.
This separation devastated Jesus because never before had His
connection with His Father been broken. Until then, Jesus and His
Father had maintained constant communication. Christ referred to this
connection repeatedly. Just the evening before the Crucifixion, Jesus
had declared that He and His Father were One.4
Jesus only did what He saw His Father doing; so deep and constant was
their communion that Christ could repeatedly say, “the Father is in me,
and I in the Father.”5 So it came to
be that upon the cross, bearing the guilt of all humanity, abandoned by
His human disciples, Jesus experienced separation from the Father for
the first time. Our sins He could bear without a murmur of complaint,
but separation from the Father caused Him to cry out in agony. Imagine
how the Father suffered, watching the scene.
Doctors diagnosed the son of one of my dearest friends with
cancer when the boy was less than two years old. Sitting with my friend
while his son endured many hours of surgery and treatment, I could
hardly tell who suffered more, father or son. How much more the perfect
Father loved and suffered as He watched His beloved Son in agony.
And the Father knew that hiding His face caused His Son the greatest
pain. From the foundation of the world, Father and Son had agreed to
this drastic remedy for sin. In sparing us from the penalty of sin,
neither the Father nor the Son spared themselves in the least.
Psalm 22, which begins, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken
me?” later reassures the sufferer: “He has not despised or disdained
the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from
him but has listened to his cry for help.” In quoting from this
psalm on the cross, Jesus expressed His anguish while at the same time
affirming His faith that His Father “[had] not despised or disdained”
the Son’s suffering.6
God desires reconciliation
When Adam repudiated God’s authority, he breached the loving
relationship between himself and God. No longer could they meet and
commune in the cool of the day, as they had since creation. God always
wanted to heal the breach in order to return us to loving fellowship,
but we did not want that healing, because, as Paul reminded us, “[We]
were alienated from God and were enemies in [our] minds.”7
David W. Augsburger, professor of pastoral care and counseling
at Fuller Theological Seminary reminds us that “authentic
reconciliation requires movement by both sides, the offender and the
offended. Both contribute, both grow, both reopen the future.”8
God, the spurned party, desired to reconcile, but we humans,
having become “enemies in our minds,” refused to cooperate. The
psalmist confirms the problem: “The Lord looks down from heaven on the
sons of men to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God.
All have turned aside, they have together become corrupt; there is no
one who does good, not even one.”9
Rather than let us go, Jesus volunteered to become a human
forever, to take our part, to reconcile for us. Imagine! Even when we
refused to be reconciled, God did not give up on us. God reconciled us
while we were still His enemies!10
Jesus became a human; and on the cross, He accepted our guilt. Taking on
the role of the offender, He could then reconcile us to God. And that’s
the final piece of the puzzle as to where God was when Jesus died.
The Father hid His face, fully aware of the pain it caused, so
that Jesus could experience the separation that sin entails and fulfill
the wrongdoer’s role. Though unseen by Christ, the Father actively
engaged with the suffering Son. For God was reconciling the world to
Himself in Christ.11 Both the wrongdoer,
represented by Jesus, and the wronged Father, willingly endured
Their hour of greatest suffering in order to reconcile lost humanity in
Themselves.
How can we verify this? Both Matthew and Mark record Jesus’
cry, “Why have You forsaken Me?” Both accounts next relate that
someone gave Jesus some sour wine. Christ then cried out once more in a
loud voice, and breathed His last.12
John’s account also mentions the sour wine and the loud cry, but John,
the only disciple actually on Calvary that day, tells us that when
Jesus received the sour wine, He said, “It is finished.”13
But this was no cry of resignation. As our Representative,
Jesus experienced the agony of separation from the Father. In that
anguish, He cried out the words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have
you forsaken me?”14 Yet He realized
that this separation was part of the process of reconciliation. How can
we know? Because the same psalm declares of God, “He has not despised
or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden
his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.”15 And with that realization came the
certainty that His task—the one for which He was born, and for which He
came to this world16—had been
completed.
So as Jesus finished His task in triumph and breathed
His last, He heard in His mind the words of the last verse of
Psalm 22: “They will proclaim his righteousness to a people yet
unborn—for he has done it,” and realizing He had done it,
He proclaimed in victory, “It is finished!“
Where was God when Jesus died? Where He always is.
As one poet aptly put it, “Behind the dim unknown, / Standeth
God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.”17
Behind the darkness, beyond the thunder, unmoved by the quaking earth,
answering unseen the anguished cry, God was in Christ, reconciling the
world—and you and me—to Himself.
Ed Dickerson writes from Garrison, Iowa.
