April 16

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.— Matthew 27:46.

Do not imagine that when Jesus uttered these mysterious words, that the Divinity was separated from his humanity, or that Christ had ceased to be an object of complacency and delight with the Father. We cannot imagine at any period when God took greater interest in his Son, than when he was accomplishing the very act of atonement, by which all his perfections would be rendered eternally illustrious, and the redemption of a guilty world effected. God ever delighted in his Son, and never more so than at this solemn moment. But it behoved Christ to suffer the withdrawing of the joys and consolations of his Father's countenance. It was now that it pleased the Father to bruise him. He put him to grief. He presented the cup to his lips, and the bitterest portion of that cup he was now drinking when he exclaimed, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me." Now indeed was Divine justice, magnified in exacting the vast atoning sum for human redemption. Now the sufferer felt the unutterable weight of a world's guilt pressing upon his agonized soul. Now he was enduring the holy infliction of sins demerit, which required for a season, the hidings of his Father's face. Yet be it observed, the complaint of Jesus did not imply regret that he had undertaken the redemption of the world, — neither did it imply despair as to its glorious consummation. He knew the momentous work was nearly accomplished, — he was certain as to its glorious result, — he did not doubt the Father's approval, or the bestowment of the joy that had been set before him. But he felt the billows rolling over his afflicted spirit. The tempest of wrath, was now raging with relentless fury. Darkness had not only surrounded the earth, but Christ's soul was filled with horrific and sable blackness, and in the depths of his agony, he exclaimed, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me." That partial eclipse of the Father's countenance obtained for the guilty family of man, the reconciled smiles of the blessed Deity. Now the clouds of indignation against an iniquitous race are removed, and through Jesus, the light of immortal blessedness, beams upon our perishing world.