April 16, 2017 PM Service The Son Forsaken by Pastor Josh Sheldon

Matthew, chapter 27. This is the first couple of verses there in that.

Verses 45 and 46, actually, just those two verses for this afternoon.

Of course, we join with the gospel account of Jesus' crucifixion.

So Matthew 27, at verse 45. Now from the sixth hour, there was darkness.

All over all the land, until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour,

Jesus cried out with a loud voice saying, Eli, Eli, lema sochthani?

That is, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? This particular scripture actually holds a very special place in my heart.

It was while I was reading Matthew, chapter 27, in verse 46, having just a few weeks, recently, before that,

I read Psalm 22. And it was as I was reading this, my

God, my God, why have you forsaken me, that God slammed the door on what was left of my resistance to him.

And in a moment, I realized, in a flash that I, honestly, I can still remember, I can almost feel it still.

I realized that Jesus Christ actually uttered these words from an actual cross upon which he actually hung, and that these words had actually been penned centuries before and held in custody, so to speak, until he for whom they were ultimately intended would appear and utter them from that cross upon which he actually hung.

It was these words that, really, I think I had come to believe prior to that moment.

But when I read these and I connected them to Psalm 22, I gave up. I couldn't deny the

Lord anymore. So this particular passage, these verses, especially the second of these two verses, really holds a very special place in my and my wife's hearts.

The cry Jesus, the cry he gave was a loud one, as though he, at the height of his physical suffering, it sounds like he's overwhelmed, finally, because of just the pain and the anguish and his muscles being tied up in knots, being unable to breathe, his shoulders ripped apart.

Great as that was, I don't think that that was quite what elicited this cry from him.

The prophet had said, I speak of Isaiah, centuries before this, he spoke of Jesus and said he was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth.

Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter and like a sheep that is before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.

Now it's interesting that this prophecy from chapter 53 of Isaiah speaks of Jesus not speaking and yet this whole series, this being the fourth of seven words, things that Jesus spoke from the cross.

But what we have is an analogy, an analogy from Isaiah 53 looking ahead to the

Lord Jesus Christ. It's an analogy that likens the lamb of God to a common sacrificial lamb in the

Old Testament days. Now what they have in common, of course, is that lambs were used as sacrifices.

Where the two differ, where the analogy falls apart is that lambs died without any awareness of what was happening.

They had no idea why they were dying. They did not know that they had become sin for the worshiper as the worshiper laid his hands on us.

We spoke a bit this morning about lambs might not have even known that they were slated for death.

Jesus knew all this full well. It is well said that the Lord was in control.

He was in full control of all the events from start to finish. I mean, it was the Lord whose voice had forced the arresting party to fall to the earth as dead man, and they stood up again when?

When his voice allowed it, as it were. So Eli, Eli is the fourth time he spoke from the cross.

This is a loud voice. This, to me, is a cry of a warrior that we're hearing here. It's the roar of a lion whose last gasp is not being wasted.

What the prophet meant about him being silent was that he would not complain.

He would not question God. He would not say, why me? Or protest against the injustices being done against him.

He opened not his mouth. He was silent at his slaughter insofar as he spoke when he, and not the wicked men who were executing him, chose.

He refused to lower himself to the ground and to speak to Herod. Wouldn't say a word to that man. But he had a few words for Pilate.

He was silent like a lamb before his shearers insofar as he spoke when he chose to speak, and not when they tried to force him to say something.

But in all this ordeal, we come now to what I think is the worst of it.

God forsaking his son. And if you read about this in the theological studies and the commentaries, men have constructed a lot of analogies to describe what is actually happening here.

And they ask questions like this. How could God forsake his only begotten son? Understanding as we do that Jesus was as much man as he was

God, we could even wonder, how could God forsake God? And the word forsake here, it's only used in this one place.

Now Mark uses the same word, but it's the same word. So it's used twice in all the

Gospels, but it's really just once, because they both use it in exactly the same way, at exactly the same place.

The point there is just studying the word doesn't help us very much. We have to take it at face value. Forsake means forsake, to be done with something.

Did God turn for himself? If Jesus was God as much as he was man, did God turn for himself?

Or was it only Jesus in his humanity as he was being made sin for, 2 Corinthians 5 .21?

Or was it only because of that, and in Jesus' humanity, and God still regarding Jesus' divinity?

There's a lot of speculation on this. And I think it's safer for us, rather than to speculate, though it's a wonderful topic to sit down and have good and long and lively discussions that are based upon the

Bible and good sense and reasoning. What was really happening here, I think it could be an edifying sort of discussion.

But for purposes this morning, we're gonna constrain ourselves just to what scripture says, that God forsook his son.

He forsook him, but I don't think he ignored him. Jesus had, again, as we said earlier this morning, he had emptied the cup of Gethsemane, and he drank full there of our sins.

We are the ones who filled the cup. So like the high priests of Israel, who had on them the names of all the 12 tribes when they went into the holy place, and there made atonement for those 12 tribes, so Jesus, by having drank the cup, he is bearing our sins before God on the cross and was, as the

Lamb of God, slain for them. Darkness came over the land.

That was in verse 45. There was darkness at this moment. What is darkness? Inexplicable darkness.

On a day, it's not so bright today, but if all of a sudden it turned black out there, if it was just suddenly completely dark, it's a sign of God's displeasure.

It is, in that sense, that's his frown. There's a couple of Old Testament verses,

Amos 5, 18 to 20. Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord. Why would you have the day of the

Lord? It is darkness and not light, as if a man fled from a lion and a bear met him, and went into the house and leaned his hand against the wall and a serpent bit him.

Is not the day of the Lord darkness and not light and gloom with no brightness in it? Zephaniah 1, 14 and 15.

The great day of the Lord is near, near and hastening fast. The sound of the day of the Lord is bitter, and the mighty man cries aloud there.

A day of wrath is that day, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness.

There are many others, if you just did a concordance search on darkness, you'd find the point being pretty much the same.

Darkness over the land is a sign of God's displeasure. In each of these cases, in each of those cases, there's no explanation for the darkness suddenly coming other than God.

And if you look those up, you'll always find, you'll find that they're almost all coincident also with the day of the

Lord. The day of the Lord and darkness are always married together. Second Corinthians 5, 21 again,

Christ becoming a sin for us, sort of a partner with Galatians 3, 13 where it says

Christ became a curse for us. These are more than symbolism.

I mean, these are foundational truths. So these don't put it to us and say as if he were sin or as if he were a curse.

He literally was these things in the suffering on the cross. As the hymn says, the one we love to sing, the father turned his face away.

The scripture says God is of two pure eyes than to behold evil. God holds no communion with sin. And if we take this literally as I'm prone to doing,

Christ is at that moment just that. He is sin as he's being punished for ours.

Christ doesn't merely symbolize the transfer of sin from a guilty sinner to an innocent animal like the lambs and the bulls and the goats of past ages.

He was that, he was sin. He became your and my every wicked thought. He became as it were the adulterer, not that he ever did anything wrong, but having drank that cup as given from this morning.

This is what he is as he's on the cross. Your extortion did not merely become his as he paid for it, he became in that sense the extortioner.

Not as though he had coveted that advantage which caused you and me to hate our neighbor. He was that one.

Matthew Henry puts this very well. He says he withdrew his approval of Christ. When his soul was first troubled, a voice from heaven spoke comfort to him.

When he was in agony in the garden, an angel was sent to strengthen him, but now he had neither one nor the other.

God hid his face from him. You think how different Christ was treated there on the cross than were or are

God's people. I think of the Aaronic blessing with which we close our afternoon service every

Sunday. The Lord make his face shine upon you, be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

And here he who is that blessing to us, he who is the fulfillment of everything the high priesthood stand for, including this

Aaronic blessing. The Lord make his face shine upon you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you.

He being treated exactly the opposite. He got nothing of the kind.

God turns his face away, he utterly and completely had to reject what his son had become.

There's darkness. There's darkness over the land. Just before this cry of abandonment, there's darkness, the light of the world being smothered by darkness.

You know, we read in the scripture that in Egypt, the plague of darkness was so thick that men could feel it.

In Revelation, there's described the darkness that is so dark that it causes men to gnaw their tongues.

I mean, imagine that. That is so pitch black out in the world that your only response is to chew off your tongue.

What a reward this is, darkness over the whole land. His entire life had been spent doing that which pleased and honored

God the Father. His every action is motivated by the goal of bringing glory to his Father, the one who sent him.

Not as much as a breath was ever drawn, but God's holiness and righteousness were given perfect reflection and fulfillment.

As John puts it, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. He says that in Jesus, he beheld his glory.

That is the very glory of the Father. How different Christ was treated.

Psalm 71 10 speaks of my enemies speaking against me and those who lie in wait for my life take counsel together saying

God has forsaken him. Pursue and take him for there is none to deliver him. The psalmist's enemies were wrong.

God had not forsaken him, but was bringing chastisement the way a loving father does. Jesus though,

Jesus was utterly forsaken. Again, falling back on Matthew, Henry, he delivered him up into the hands of his enemies and did not appear to deliver him out of their hands.

He let loose the powers of darkness against him and suffered them to do their worst, worse than against Job.

So fully was sin placed on Jesus, so thoroughly had Jesus become sin that there was no remedy that could maintain the bond between God the

Father and God the Son. Now, how hard this was, you and I can never imagine.

Certainly, we'll never know. I think harder still was what none of us would be able to do ourselves, which is to ignore the plea of our son, of our child when they were suffering like this, and yet God the

Father, in order to complete the plan of redemption, did just that.

God held himself apart from helping the only innocent man who ever lived. Now, nothing

Jesus ever did actually justified this. We can't say that because he never sinned.

And yet, in some sense, he did deserve the Father's forsaking him because he was sin. He'd become that for us, and so the

Father's rejection of him was necessary. Had not

God forsaken him, he would not have received himself the full force of sin's penalties. And had the penalty not been fully satisfied, then our time here together at the table, at the

Lord's table, would be meaningless. The elements would represent nothing significant.

But Jesus did become sin, God did forsake him. The punishment for our sin was upon him.

He was wounded for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him, the chastisement that brought us peace.

And with his stripes, we are healed. These elements represent something very real, something very precious to us beyond measure.

Means because of what Jesus Christ suffered, a break in his fellowship with God. God forsaken,

God turning his face away. Whatever metaphor or analogy we want to give it, this breaking of the eternal bond between God the

Father, God the Son, was real and literal. But because of that, because the punishment, because God's response to sin was so complete and so thorough, we can understand what the apostle says.

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have what? Peace with God. So these elements represent to us the peace that we have with God because Jesus was broken, his blood was poured out, his life was poured out on our behalf.

Because of these things, we have peace. Well, Jesus did speak, of course, while he was on the cross.

He spoke to God, prayed for forgiveness of his tormentors. He spoke to his beloved disciple and his mother.

He spoke to the thief who was next to him. He would not answer

Herod during his scourging by the Romans. There's no record that he spoke or cried out. The thorns pressed into his forehead, elicited no sound.

The high priest and Pilate both asked him, do you answer? Nothing. When the disciples fled, he had no complaint.

When Peter denied him, he didn't complain. His own people forsook him.

He came to his own and his own did not receive him. And none of this made

Jesus cry out. But this, God turning himself from him,

God forsaking his son, this was more than silence could restrain. And Jesus finally does cry out with this loud voice, my

God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The one and the only time in eternity where this bond between them is broken.

Jesus had our sin poured onto him. He becomes sin for us. God is of purer eyes than to behold evil, and he won't behold him for that moment.

For us, what should this put into our minds? What should we be thinking of here?

We should be thinking of just how awful sin is. So awful that the bond of love between the first and second persons of the

Godhead is broken by it. And if we can think of how awful sin really is, then ought we not to think all the more of the gratitude that we should have in our spirits for what

Christ has done for us? He bore the curses promised against us by the law, and they are done with.

He bore the fractured intimacy between God and man, and that breach because of him is now closed.

Before Jesus cried out, there was darkness over all the land. I'm gonna close with just a couple of thoughts about darkness and what it means in the biblical narrative.

And for that, I want us to think of the ninth plague against Egypt. The ninth plague against Egypt was one

I spoke of a moment ago when darkness covered the land, a darkness so thick they could feel it. The ninth plague, darkness, and what followed that?

The 10th plague, the death of the firstborn. Keep those two thoughts in mind and go forward a few thousand years to the cross.

And what do we have? Darkness covering the land. And what comes after the darkness?

Darkness, death of the firstborn. Think back to Egypt, because there was the darkness, then death of the firstborn, and then what?

Freedom. Then Israel was released from their bondage to the Egyptians, and they were free, and they left and went to worship

God. Hold those in mind for a second.

And think of the cross. There was darkness.

Then there's death of the firstborn son, God's only son.

But what follows that? Freedom. Freedom from slavery to sin.

These elements before us this morning remind us of all these things. His body battered, his blood spilled, the bread and wine memorializing for us the greatest act of love ever conceived.

So as we partake, let us remember, though, that the torture was not the worst of it. The nails that began the flow of his blood, that was not the worst of it.

The worst thing Jesus endured on our behalf was becoming the sin that we are, and then being forsaken by his

Father. So we need never be. As we remember these dread thoughts, let's also remember that, just as I said, darkness, death, then freedom.

Because of Christ, because he did these things, because he endured these things, we, God's people, the ones that Christ actually redeemed on the cross upon which he actually hung, when he actually said these words, we have freedom, amen?