Wednesday
Wednesday
His Cry of Dereliction
From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land. About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, … “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Matthew 27:45–46
If the first three words from the cross portray Jesus as our example, the fourth (and later the fifth) portray him as our sin bearer. The crucifixion took place at about 9 a.m. (“the third hour”), and the first three words from the cross seem to have been spoken near the beginning of this period. Then there was silence. At about noon (“the sixth hour”), when the sun was at the meridian, an inexplicable darkness stole over the countryside. It cannot have been a natural eclipse of the sun, because the Feast of the Passover took place at full moon. No, it was a supernatural phenomenon, perhaps intended by God to symbolize the horror of great darkness into which the soul of Jesus now plunged. It lasted three hours, during which no word escaped the lips of the suffering Savior. He bore our sins in silence.
Then suddenly, at about 3 p.m. (“the ninth hour”), Jesus broke the silence and spoke the remaining four words from the cross in rapid succession, beginning with, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This terrible cry is recorded by Matthew and Mark alone, and in the original Aramaic—“Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” The onlookers who said, “He’s calling Elijah” (v. 47) were almost certainly jesting; no Jews could have been so ignorant of Aramaic as to make that foolish blunder.
Everybody agrees that Jesus was quoting from Psalm 22:1. But why did he quote it and declare himself forsaken? Logically there can be only two explanations. Either Jesus was mistaken and not forsaken or he was telling the truth and was forsaken. For myself I reject the first explanation. To me it is inconceivable that Jesus, in the moment of his greatest surrender, could have been mistaken and that his sense of godforsakenness was imaginary. The alternative explanation is simple and straightforward. Jesus was not mistaken. The situation on the cross was of God forsaken by God—and the estrangement was due to our sins and their just reward. And Jesus expressed this terrible experience of godforsakenness by quoting the only Scripture that foretold it and that he had perfectly fulfilled.
For further reading: Galatians 3:6–14