Cries No.3 My God, my God

In times of glory died, My richest gain I count but loss, And pour content on all my pride. Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast, Save in the death of Christ my God. All the vain things that charm me most I sacrifice them to His blood.

See from His head, His hands, His feet, Sorrow and love flamingo down, Did such love and sorrow meet? Orphans compose so rich a chord, The whole realm of nature mine, That what I'm offering far too small. Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my soul, my life, my everything. So today we go to the heart of the offering of our Lord Jesus on the cross, and we must therefore move to the 27th chapter of Matthew's Gospel, where he gives us more information than Dr. Luke does in his Gospel.

For he takes us to the cry of dereliction, when our Lord acknowledges His own isolation. Matthew 27 and verse 45. 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, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, which means, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? When some of those standing there heard this, they said, He's calling Elijah. The Old Testament gives more commentary on that tremendous hour. Psalm 22 and verse 9. You brought me out of the womb.

You made me trust in you, even my mother's breast. From birth I was cast upon you. From my mother's womb you have been my God.

Do not be far from me. Trouble is near. There is no one to help.

Many bulls surround me. Strong bulls of Bashan encircle me. Roaring lions tearing their prey.

Open their mouths wide against me. I am poured out like water. All my bones are out of joint.

My heart has turned to wax. It has melted away within me. My strength is dried up like a pot's herd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.

You lay me in the dust of death. Dogs have surrounded me. A band of evil men encircle me.

They pierce my hands and my feet. I count all my bones. People stare and gloat over me.

They divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing. And again in Isaiah chapter 53, verse 2 and the second half. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him.

Nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men. A man of sorrows, familiar with suffering.

As one from whom men hide their faces. He was despised and we did not esteem him. Father, with those somber scriptures in mind, we come to you.

Who can unravel the mystery? Who dares to approach the bush with sharp feet? We come with humility of mind and heart and extend ourselves before your word and ask that at least something of what it contains might be made clear as we contemplate not only Calvary but the heart of Calvary, the apex, the pinnacle, the moment when God the mighty maker died for man the creature's sin and send us away informed, moved and in some way reformed with a greater determination to live for you and for your glory. Amen. Now we sing again the second time this week 520.

We need to sing this because well it puts the framework from the hymn writer's point of view as to what Jesus has done and how mortal man can respond. O sacred head once wounded with grief and pain weighed down it asks the question what language shall I borrow to praise thee heavenly friend. 520.

Let's stand. O sacred head once wounded with grief and pain weighed down and all truly surrounded how pale thou art with anguish with sore abuse and scorn how does that visage languish which once was bright as morn O Lord of life and glory what bliss till now was thine I read the wondrous story I joy to call thee mine thy grief and thy compassion were all's gain mine, mine was the transgression but thine the debt what language shall I borrow to praise thee heavenly friend for this thy dying sorrow for such dying sorrow Do be seated. Thank you again for coming.

As I've explained to those of you who've been here for the last couple of sessions I'm really indulging myself this Easter in just a personal reflection on the death of Christ our Lord and I would have preached these if there'd only been one person present to share something of my inadequate musings with. The death of Christ is the apex of the Christian faith. I've often done what Isaac Watts tells us we ought to do.

I've stood in front of that cross and tried to survey it. I've pondered the love of our Lord Jesus. I've sung on so many occasions like a child asking that I might see the cross and that its beams might be directed over me in all my reading, in all my time studying philosophy, psychology and goodness knows what over the years.

I have come across nothing that's like this. There is here, I believe, the manifestation of God's love for me. There is here a framework by which we can understand life and understand ourselves.

I was engaged in a conversation with a beautiful lady last Monday who I met by accident. She happened to have been given a book of mine and she had a very trained mind. Confessedly not a Christian but she wanted to talk to me about the Lord.

Gave me the accolade of saying that she thought I could help her intellectually. And I left her by saying, I'll talk to you again but I cannot reason you into faith for faith demands, as the word indicates, a commitment. We believe in order that we may understand.

We do not understand in order that we may believe. And my framework, my grasp of life and its challenge, its mystery, comes through making that initial commitment to Jesus Christ and an acknowledgement that his death and his resurrection are crucial to my personal pilgrimage through life and for my eternal well-being. So we come again to the heart of the gospel, Jesus Christ and him crucified.

And in this holy week we take up the theme of the cries that our Lord uttered from the cross. And the word I emphasize deliberately is cry. They were not whimpers.

Our Lord is perfectly in control of the situation. He's pinned to that cross the most diabolical method that a man has ever devised to rob his fellow of life. And he looks down from the cross and there is a gradual retreat into isolation that the cries, if you follow them through logically, demonstrate.

He speaks out, if you please, to the world, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. He has in mind the soldiers and the priests and the curious people that we still have with us today who, when they hear of some terrible tragedy, get in their cars and go and gawp and gaze. And then he retreats back and speaks to one who is typical of those he came to save, one who will enter, if you please, the church, and he says to the criminal, today you will be with me in paradise.

Then he retreats further and he speaks to his mother, the woman whose breasts gave him milk when he was a child and on whom he depended. Incredible that. A baby depending on a woman.

The baby being God incarnate. And now the woman needs him. And so he commits her to the care of his beloved disciple, John.

And then he retreats further. And the darkness comes across the scene. For the crucifixion, though quick in comparison with other crucifixions, was nonetheless still a drawn-out business.

And there is a reference here to the time, the chronology of the events, as our Lord moves into a more private passion from the sixth hour, verse 45 makes it clear, until the ninth, darkness comes over all the land. And I want to look at the blackness of the scene and then move on to the latter part of the verse and speak about the darkness of the cry. Darkness came over all the land and after three hours of mysterious, frightening darkness, a cry that was blacker than the physical darkness left the lips of our Lord.

Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, why have you forsaken me? Jesus is the light of the world, which makes what happens now extremely poignant. He finds himself enveloped in a pallor of darkness that comes in the middle of the day. I've already intimated that as far as Scripture is concerned, the day of the Lord is just one day.

I'm not speaking from a human chronological viewpoint, I'm speaking from the divine viewpoint. There is one day, one day of creation. God creates in the beginning and man messes it up very early on.

But at high noon, Jesus comes on the scene. You find him by the cross and darkness occurs at high noon, which is very strange. And at the end of the day, the eternal day, that same Jesus who died on the cross will come again in great power and glory and he will come to take vengeance on those who have sinned and their sins have no respite, no absolution whatsoever, for you cannot play with this God.

He is a God of grace. He is a God of holiness. He is a God of pardon.

He is a God of law. In the Old Testament, the psalmist cries out for God to vindicate his name. In the New Testament, the same cry is heard from those under the throne.

How long, O Lord, how long before you sort things out on this earth where your name has been blasphemed and your law has been ignored? So Jesus comes at high noon in this one day, this day of the Lord, and we find him who is the light of the world bathed in darkness. It is true, I think, to say with the apostles' creed, not only that I believe in God and I believe in Jesus Christ and I believe that Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary and that I believe that Jesus Christ suffered under Pontius Pilate. I believe that Jesus Christ was crucified.

I believe that Jesus Christ was buried. But it is also true, I believe, to say that Jesus Christ descended into hell, and that's how you are to understand what happened from the sixth hour to the ninth hour at noon till three o'clock. Our Lord Jesus drops into hell.

This is a staggering thought. But you see, picking up on what I taught you yesterday from Scripture, if Jesus is identified with transgressors as you are a transgressor, then with the caveat just for a moment that there is no salvation for you, your ultimate destination is where you belong as a transgressor, away from God, alienated from the God whose law you did not want, whose world you have polluted. It is natural for fallen man to spend an eternity away from God.

That is hell, being separate from the Lord God, the Creator Almighty forever. So Jesus, the Son of God, representative man, at high noon offers himself and goes into the jaws of heaven, into the jaws of hell on our behalf. Christ as mediator confronts the humanly impossible task of suffering an infinite burden, the penalty for sin in a finite period of time.

And how does it happen? By darkness descending on the scene as our Lord retreats so that it is no more himself and fallen humanity, no more himself and his mother, but it is himself and God, and seemingly even himself without the Lord. When darkness fell upon the Egyptians in that final plague, it lasted for three days, and at the end the firstborn of all the Egyptians were dead. Three hours, darkness falls upon this scene, and at the end the firstborn, God's own Son, dies.

He who was the light of the world, he whose birth at Bethlehem at night was interrupted as shepherds see the glory of God heralding the occasion when angels shall sing forth in praise and wonder and worship, the God who has caused Jesus to come into the world, he who was born, basked and bathing in light, dies with a darkness that is so mysterious and so very frightening. It's a moment of reversal. If the prophet holds the hope out for aged saints, at eventide it shall be light.

Here is the opposite. At noontide it shall be darkness. It says, Amos, anticipating the scene, it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day.

So this darkness, this eerie darkness, which is accompanied by an equally eerie silence disturbed only by the dropping of the blood of Christ, God uses it to speak, to speak absolutely, devastatingly, disarmingly. His speech is stripping. It is consuming.

It is more frightful than the legal sentences of Pilate and the Sanhedrin. It is more to be feared than the mockery of the crowds at Golgotha. God, in the silence, is speaking about the horror of human sinfulness, and Jesus Christ is in the very center where the wrath of God is being poured out on the sins of men and women for whom he is the substitute.

The darkness, or the blackness of the scene, gives way to the darkness of the cry. We should not miss this thought, that three hours have elapsed and there has been no voice. Nothing has sounded from the lips of our Lord Jesus Christ.

From the sixth hour until the ninth hour, he bore the punishment in complete silence. But on the ninth hour, at the stroke, Jesus cries out. And he cries with a voice that, by comparison, makes the voice that he used in its intonation at Lazarus' tomb quiet.

He speaks. And even those who cannot see him in the darkness hear what he has to say. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? The apostle Paul will later write of Christian people who speak in groanings that cannot be uttered.

Here is an indication of the Christ groaning under the weight of sin that he has assumed but was never the guilty partner in, never a contributor towards. Here is the Lord groaning under the bondage of sin in the abyss of hell itself. My God, my God, he says, why have you forsaken me? Martin Luther was a great man in history.

There are many stories that still are told about Luther. The day when he felt the presence of the devil so real that he picked up his inkpot and threw it into the corner of the room, hoping to hit the devil. The day when his wife came along dressed in black and Luther said, why are you so dour in your choice of clothing? And she says, I am dour because you are so depressed.

Obviously God is dead and I have dressed for his funeral. But what perhaps is not known of those stories which may be apocryphal about Luther is that on one occasion Luther did what I have done, only with him there was much greater consequence and benefit for the Christian church. And that is he went into his room with his Bible and he locked his study door and for six hours he reflected on what is meant by God forsaking God.

What was meant by the cry, that bleak cry, that derelict cry of our Lord Jesus, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Well, let me suggest that as you come to the cry, having set up the framework of blackness and silence, one of the things it certainly indicates is this, that God forsakenness does not mean soul separation. God forsakenness does not mean soul separation. Now Jesus does not use the term Father.

He starts off, Father forgive them in the first of the cries, for they know not what they do. And in the last cry, Father into your hands I commend my spirit. Here there is no reference to Father at all.

Here is our Lord Jesus who walks deliberately into the caverns of hell itself and from there he speaks. He speaks out, acknowledging his sense of abandonment. But as he does, he indicates that the forsakenness that he feels does not also imply a soul separation.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? What heresy is this that I'm saying, that God is sovereign in hell? Indeed. If I take the wings of the morning, says the psalmist, and I go to the uttermost parts of the earth, if I make my bed in hell, even there you are. This idea that there are two equally powerful gods, the God of goodness and the God of evil, who rival one another may have a lot to do with Greek mythology but has nothing to do with biblical theology.

The devil and his hordes, hell itself, is not outside the sovereign control of God. Do you not see that if that were the case, then God would have a rival? And there are no rivals to God. He is the eternally existing one.

He is the one who creates the heavens and the earth. He is the one who in the person, the second person of the Trinity, breathed into existence man, who caused the earth to be prepared for man and for woman. He is the God behind the angelic hosts.

He will always be the infinite, eternal God. What He says goes. You cannot argue with this God.

But He is not an impersonal, dispassionate God. He is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. If I make my bed in hell, even there you are.

And the voice of Jesus calls out from hell itself, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? God-forsakenness does not mean soul separation. What is more, God-forsakenness does not mean mind dullness. I told you the medieval legend the other day, was it yesterday or when I commenced this series, of the way the medieval mind sees the Lord Jesus here as a nightingale singing a song in the May tree.

There are seven stanzas to the song, as there are seven cries from the cross. The medieval church had in mind that Jesus, although He is the victim, He, yes, is in control of His circumstances. And one of the things that you will remember about our Lord before they pinned Him to the cross was, He refused the drug, He wouldn't have the narcotic.

Why not? Because they will not have a stupefied man on the cross. He will have all His mental faculties. He will be able to think, and to think clearly.

He will be able to recall, to recall what? Poetry. To recall what poetry? Poetry that He has inspired, for do you not know that it is His mind that goes through the whole of Scripture, the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Psalms are His Psalms.

He is the poet. He is the romantic. And sometimes He caused words to be written hundreds of years before they would really find their fulfillment.

The singer will sing a song, a song of tragedy. The nightingale will intone a verse written centuries before. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? You see, that's the poetry of the 22nd Psalm.

Our Lord goes back. He has complete recall. The moment for which He truly inspired that psalm to be written has come.

And He observes and registers and evaluates all that is happening. Here He is in the very depths of hell itself. The Word who becomes flesh has recourse to the Word that He wrote.

And He leans on that Word, and in hell gains some comfort and an ability to continue. No one who is bound for hell will suffer hell in the way that Jesus suffered hell. You see, those who go to hell go there with a sin that is unforgiven, with unexpiated guilt, with untreated pollution.

But here is a strange thing. Here is a holy man in hell. Here is the eternal Son of God in hell.

Here is God complex in hell. By God complex, I mean God, Son of God. God, Son of Man.

And it is the humanity of our Lord Jesus which takes upon itself the consequences of our sin. And that's the reason why He is there. Jesus is not familiar with hell.

Jesus is not at home in hell. And the abandonment, paradoxically, seems to be even more absolute for all the graces have been lifted. What do I mean? Well, when David found himself to be in hell on earth, he writes a penitential psalm.

When David has engaged in multiple transgressions and left his harp untouched and not turned to his poetry for many a long week and month, and only those who have gone through a period of backsliding and have not had recourse to the throne and pleaded before God, only they can understand what David was going through. But in the depths of David's remorse, in the depths of David feeling convicted, the grace of God was still being displayed. And the moment came when David picked up his harp and started to play, Have mercy upon me, O God.

But you see, for Jesus, the graces are not there. He is abandoned. The congealed sin of humanity has been rolled upon him and he becomes obnoxious in the sight of God, the Father.

That is the reason why the darkness is total. You see, a man cannot look into the eyes of God, into the face of God. That you know from Moses.

He's hidden in the cleft of the rock. Man cannot look into hell itself. Not man this side of eternity.

But Jesus is in hell. And the darkness that falls is a darkness that has been placed there by a divine hand, curtaining off the mocking crowd so that they cannot see what is happening. The form of Jesus is hideous.

The form of Jesus is, at this point, repulsive. You say my preaching is too strong? He hath no form nor comeliness, and there is no beauty that we should desire him. It is almost the grace of God that prevents those who are onlooking from seeing the sight of God the Son, the Son of Man, the infinite, eternal God, now locked into bodily form, placed in hell with his features contorted and his body so unrecognizable that no one would esteem him and even appreciate his humanity.