Christ's Cry of Dereliction

It's so good to see you all here this morning and I do want to thank Brian for his very kind words on behalf of you all. Muriel and I have really felt a wonderful spirit of love flowing out from all of you to us and in receiving us and welcoming not only us in persons but also the word of God that we have tried to bring to you. So thanks again for that warm welcome. Jefferson Park Baptist Church will always have a very special place in our heart after the, I think it's going to be 20 weeks that we will have preached the word from this pulpit. That will be 20 as at the 24th of October, God willing. And then of course you will have the grand privilege of Keith Goad coming and Lisa and the prospects under God of a wonderful new chapter in the life of your church. Our meditation this morning is taken from Matthew chapter 27 verses 31 to 54, and I'd ask you to please stand with me in honor of the reading of the word, that is, if you are able to. Please do not feel under any obligation if you are not physically able to do so. Matthew 27 verse 31. And when they had mocked him, they took the robe off him, put his clothes on him, and led him away to be crucified. Now as they came out, they found a man of Cyrene, Simon by name, him they compelled to bear his cross. And when they had come to a place called Golgotha, that is to say, place of a skull, they gave him sour wine mingled with gall to drink. But when he tasted it, he would not drink. Then they crucified him and divided his garments, casting lots, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, that is, in Psalm 22, verse 18. They divided my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots. Sitting down, they kept watch over him there. And they put over his head the accusation written against him. This is Jesus, the King of the Jews. Then two robbers were crucified with him, one on the right and another on the left. And those who passed by blasphemed him, wagging their heads and saying, You who destroy the temple, build it in three days, and build it in three days. Save yourself. If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross. Likewise, the chief priests also, mocking with the scribes and elders, said, He saved others. Himself He cannot save. If He is the King of Israel, let Him now come down from the cross, and we will believe Him. He trusted in God. Let Him deliver Him now, if He will have Him. For He said, I am the Son of God. Even the robbers who were crucified with him reviled him with the same thing. Now, from the sixth hour until the ninth hour, there was darkness over all the land. And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, that is, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Some of those who stood there when they heard that said, this man is calling for Elijah. Immediately one of them ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine and put it on a reed and offered it to him to drink. The rest said, let him alone. Let us see if Elijah will come to save him. And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. Then behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom, and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split, and the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. And coming out of the graves after his resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many. So when the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and the things that had happened, they feared greatly, saying, Truly, this was the Son of God. So far, God's word reads, May he bless her to our understanding by the power of the Holy Spirit. Please be seated. Let us pray. Our Father, we thank you for all of those who have taken part in the preparation of this service so that from its very beginning right through to the end, when we will break bread together, the focus is on the Lord Jesus Christ and his great atoning work upon the cross. And now our prayer is that by the Holy Spirit, whom you send to glorify Christ, he will continue with that ministry, magnifying him now through the preached word, revealing him in the great glory of his sufferings and death on that cross. for those who will believe on Him for the remission of sins. And we pray, Heavenly Father, that the Holy Spirit will draw us nearer and nearer to Christ until, as a climax, we break the bread and we drink the wine in remembrance of Him. In our Saviour's name we ask it. Amen. Our meditation for the ordinance of the Lord's Supper this morning is Matthew 27 and verse 46. Our Lord's cry of dereliction from the cross. And the word dereliction means abandonment. It was the third hour, that is 9am, that Mark says they crucified him. Three hours later, Matthew says, verse 45 of our text, Now from the sixth hour, twelve noon, until the ninth hour, three p.m., there was darkness over all the land. And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama, sabachthani, that is, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's one of the few times in the Gospels, you know, which were written in Greek, in which the writers have preserved the original words in which Jesus and the people of that day spoke. The first two words, Eli, Eli, are in Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, and they mean, my God, my God. The next two words in Matthew's Gospel are in Aramaic, the language of the day in which the Jews spoke. Lama sabachthanah, why have you forsaken me? And this statement of Jesus, this cry of dereliction, is only found in the first two Gospels. And there is a slight difference between the recording of Matthew and Mark. Matthew saw fit to retain the Hebrew word for God, which Jesus used, Eli. And he did so because this would explain why some in the crowd thought that Jesus was calling out to Elijah to help him. The two words sound very similar in Hebrew. Mark, on the other hand, chose to simplify matters by putting all the words in Aramaic. And so he has Eloi, Elohi, Lama, Sabachthani. Having explained the difference between the two statements in those two Gospels, let's turn to Matthew 27, verse 46, as we try in preparation for the Lord's Supper to prayerfully understand the meaning of what is undoubtedly the most awesome and profound utterance of Jesus on the cross. And I'd like us to begin with verse 45. Now from the sixth hour until the ninth hour there was darkness over all the land. And I ask the question, how is this darkness to be explained? Why should there have been such darkness? After all, it was midday, not midnight, and the sun was at the zenith of its light and of its heat. Our Lord, we know, hung on that cross for a total of six hours, and for the first three hours the sun burned down upon Him. drying up all of his strength, and the pain of hanging from the nails increased intensely. But suddenly, at midday, there was a remarkable change. Something occurred in the world of nature so strange that it can only be ascribed to the hand of God. The sun hid its face, and darkness covered the whole land of Palestine. Some rationalistic critics have tried to explain it away in terms of an eclipse of the sun. But an eclipse of the sun was not possible at that particular time of the month, because Passover always occurred in the middle of a lunar month. when the moon was full and situated on the opposite side of the earth to the sun. There was therefore no apparent natural reason for this darkness. At one moment the sun's light blazed down upon the land. The next moment there was not a ray of light to relieve the gloom. So this was not a natural darkness. It was God who had stretched out his unseen hand to obscure the rays of the sun and plunge the land in total darkness. And you can imagine the fear and trembling of those who still remained around the cross of Calvary. the jeering and the laughter would have died down immediately as people huddled together in the uncanny and frightening darkness. This was something supernatural. And we all believe totally in keeping with the death of God incarnate, God manifest in human flesh. For as at his birth the Son of God had brightness at midnight, so at his death there was darkness at midday. Which brings us to the second question. What was the purpose of the darkness? Why did God bring darkness over all the land for three hours? What was its significance? What did the frightening omen portend? Well, I think it was first the mute protest of the world of nature against a horrific injustice against its own creator. Our Lord had previously told his critics who tried to discourage the disciples the previous Sunday from praising him, that if the disciples ceased from praising him, the very stones would cry out. Well, here, when there was no human intervention possible, the Son under the direction of its Creator, refused to shine upon a gross deed of shame and injustice that sinful men were brazenly staring at. Matthew also says in verse 51 that the earth shook and the rocks split. And they did so again as nature's protest over Christ's undeserved and indescribable sufferings. To quote Isaac Watts' beautiful hymn, well might the sun in darkness hide and shut its glories in, when Christ the mighty maker dies, for man the creature's sin. But the darkness was obviously more than a protest by nature. It was a symbol of the judgment of God upon sin. The Apostle John says, God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. In Scripture, sin is constantly typified with darkness and holiness with light. God lives in the light because He is sinless. Man commits his deeds of sin in darkness. because he is ashamed of them. Thus John says, everyone who does evil hates the light and does not come to the light lest his deeds should be exposed. Or if you like, the reward of pleasing God is to spend eternity in the light of his presence. while the punishment of rejecting God is to be cast out of his presence into outer darkness of hell. So it was the judgment of God upon our sin that Christ had taken upon himself as our substitute that was symbolized in this darkness that covered the land. It was an outward sign of the spiritual darkness which enveloped his soul when he bore the curse of your law-breaking and mine. Our sins, I say, blotted out the sunshine of the Father's face. And therefore, at the end of the three hours of darkness, as it began to lift, Mark says, at the ninth hour, at 3 p.m., Jesus cried with a loud voice, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And as Jesus looks back upon that dreadful experience from which he has now emerged, notice how he describes it. He describes it as three hours of God-forsakenness. And that brings us to a third matter, as I ask the question, was Jesus really forsaken by God? Was this experience of abandonment on the cross a subjective feeling on the part of Jesus, or was it an objective reality? Did God the Father really turn his back upon his son? Now there are many who try to explain away the obvious meaning of this cry of dereliction. They say Jesus was plainly mistaken. He imagined he was forsaken by God when in fact he wasn't. And you know, in a commentary on the Sunday school lesson for Easter in 1988, a contributor for the Religious Herald, our Baptist state paper, wrote, there are several possible interpretations of his cry. One, God actually had forsaken Jesus and he knew it. Or two, Jesus, in his physical and spiritual agony, felt cut off from God, even though God had not forsaken him. The first alternative, he goes on to say, seems theologically impossible. That God abandoned his son cannot be the case, but that Jesus could have felt abandoned seems quite believable, of course, to his human thinking. In other words, he is saying that our Lord mistook his feelings for reality, as we sometimes do. But you know, there are two insuperable difficulties in adopting the interpretation that has just been given. First of all, it fails to do justice to the sense of the words in Psalm 22, verse 1, where David is expressing a very real feeling of being forsaken by God, not feeling God forsaken. And secondly, those who explain the cry of dereliction or desertion as a mistake can scarcely realize what they are saying. They are denying, you see, the moral perfection of the Son of God. They are saying that he was guilty of unbelief on the cross, just as some think he was guilty of cowardice in the garden of Gethsemane. They are saying Jesus didn't understand why he had to be and die on the cross. But I ask How dare we accuse Jesus of unbelief and of ignorance on the cross at the very moment that he had accomplished his great work of atonement, and in a few seconds or a minute would cry, it is finished. Others again have suggested that Jesus was uttering a cry of victory rather than a cry of despair, and their argument goes like this. Although Psalm 22 begins and continues with an amazing account of Christ's sufferings at the cross, it ends, if you study it, on a note of triumph and success. Psalm 22 is an incredible prediction of the mockery of the priests, the dividing of his clothes by lots, his disjointed bones, his thirst, and his pierced hands and feet. But from verses 22 to 31, the tone of the psalm changes suddenly and dramatically from prayer to praise, from suffering to success, from desertion to deliverance. Verse 23, You who fear the Lord, praise Him, for 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. Moreover, this deliverance is of such significance that David says it affects everybody, not just the Jews, but all the nations. And not just the present generation of David, but the coming generations. Verse 27, All the ends of the earth shall turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before Him. Men shall tell of the Lord to the coming generation and proclaim His deliverance to a people yet unborn. And so, there are those who say that when our Lord quoted Psalm 22 from the cross, He was not expressing feelings of despair, but proclaiming His faith in God's deliverance. Well, it's ingenious, but a bit far-fetched. For why, if Jesus wanted to emphasize God's deliverance, would he quote the first verse of the psalm and not the last few verses of the psalm? How would anyone have guessed the meaning he was trying to convey by just reading verse 1 of Psalm 22? We come back then to the only adequate explanation that is left to us. That is to take these words at face value and to understand them as a cry of real dereliction, abandonment. What a terrible experience it must have been. There is no sadder word in human language than the word forsaken. To be forsaken by your parents or by a spouse or by a friend, a very close friend, is a terrible sorrow. And the Lord Jesus knew what it felt like to be forsaken by those whom He dearly loved. His own brothers and sisters, thinking He was deranged, forsook Him. The crowds who once followed Him and adored Him and praised Him forsook Him. And now, as he faced death, his own trusted disciples forsook him and fled. One of them even betrayed him for thirty pieces of silver. But despite this, our Lord says to them, only a few hours before they are going to desert him, He says, you will be scattered, every man to his own home. and will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me." In the darkness, however, Jesus says He was forsaken. He was abandoned. He was entirely alone. Although He had eternally basked in the light of His Father's presence, He is now abandoned in the darkness of God-forsakenness. That, dear friends, is the simplest and most reasonable explanation of this cry from the cross. Our Lord had no need to repent of unbelief or of ignorance. He was truly abandoned by God the Father. But that raises a fourth question. Why was Jesus forsaken by God? You know, it is recorded that when Martin Luther was doing his commentary, he came to this phrase. And he sat down in his study to think it through, to try to get to grips with it. And we are told he did so for quite a while without food or water. When at length he got up from his chair, he was heard to exclaim in amazement, God? Forsaken of God? Who can understand that? Jesus Christ was God enfleshed, God incarnate, and yet forsaken of God. Who indeed can understand that? We can only pedal in the shallows of this cry of dereliction. We can never hope to plumb the depths of its meaning. I say, this saying is as deep as God Himself. Bearing that in mind, let's proceed very cautiously then with the question, why did God the Father turn His back on His Son? After all, His beloved Son was doing His will. He was offering Himself on that cross as a ransom for many. Now, there would be no mystery if we were there and God forsook us, for we would only be receiving the due reward of our deeds. But why should He forsake His only begotten Son, who knew no sin, and did no sin, and could honestly say, I always do those things that are pleasing in His sight? There is only one explanation, and that is sin. Because sin is the only thing that can come between us and God. Sin is the only thing that can separate anyone from God. Isaiah 59 verse 2 says, Your iniquities have separated you from your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He does not hear you. But if it was sin which caused God to forsake Jesus, it had to be our sin, because he had no sins of his own. And thus John says, he appeared to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. And friends, this is the unanimous opinion of all the New Testament writers. Paul says that on the cross God made him, that is Christ, sin, who knew no sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him. Peter says Christ himself bore our sins in his own body on the tree. And again Peter says Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God. Hebrews 9, 28, for which I was grateful that Chris read from that passage this morning, the writer says, Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people. John the Baptist calls him the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. And Isaiah 53 says, He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. All we like sheep have gone astray and the Lord has laid on Him. the iniquity of us all. So, all of these verses, and many others besides, portray Jesus as the bearer of our sin and condemnation, which resulted in a real dreadful separation of Jesus from His Father in those three hours of darkness. He had to be forsaken that we might be forgiven. He had to die in the darkness that we might live in the light. He had to endure hell so that we might enjoy heaven. And Jesus expressed the horror of this great darkness and dereliction by quoting the only verse in scripture that predicted it. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He was not asking a question, the answer to which he didn't know. Of course our Lord knew why God the Father was forsaking Him on the cross. This was not a question. It was a quotation. And Jesus was quoting Psalm 22 verse 1 for the same reason, the very same reason he quoted every other scripture from the Old Testament, to inform us that it had been perfectly fulfilled in him. The fact that his cry was in the form of a question was not because he didn't know the answer, but because in the Old Testament text itself, which he was quoting, it was in the form of a question. And friends, Jesus quoted it because he wanted you and me to know from his own lips what he was suffering on the cross. Otherwise, how could we ever have known that the Father would have to forsake him? That behind his shameful treatment by men, there was this greater enigma of his spiritual suffering at the hand of God. I like the way Calvin puts it. He says, if Christ had died only a bodily death, It would have been ineffectual. Unless his soul shared in the punishment, he would have been a redeemer of bodies alone. Therefore, Calvin goes on, he paid a greater and more excellent price in suffering in his soul the terrible torment of a condemned and forsaken man. It was this experience, totally beyond your understanding and mine, which drew from our Saviour's lips that awful cry of God-forsakenness that should have been our lot and our portion. As the poet says, Eli, Eli, sabachthanai, O bleeding Lamb. Eli, Eli, lama sabachthanai, redeemed I am. Thy wounded soul from light and joy shut in, is bearing there the curse of sin. Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani, my soul is free. Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani, love's victory. Forsaken thou that I might never cry. Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani. Now, I don't have to tell you that this is not a popular doctrine among the intelligentsia, but it is a faithful statement of what happened at the cross. Indeed, it is the only explanation of the death of Jesus which takes into account all the available data. It explains the central importance which Jesus attached to his death. as the only means by which the new covenant offering the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit could be ratified, and why he instituted the night before he died his own supper to commemorate it and be a memorial. It explains the agony of anticipation in the garden of Gethsemane, this cry of dereliction, at three o'clock in the afternoon and is claimed to have decisively finished the work of salvation. All these phenomena only become intelligible if we accept the explanation that Jesus and his apostles give us, that he redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. In conclusion, I want very briefly to draw three important truths from this cry of dereliction. First, it enforces upon us the enormity of our sin. Friends, nothing reveals the gravity of our sin more than the cross. If there was no way by which the righteous God could justly forgive our sin, except that He should bear it in the person of His Son, then it must be serious indeed. If anyone thinks of sin as something that can easily be forgiven, I say, let he or her look again at the cross. This is the end result of all sin, God-forsakenness. And this is the only way in which it can be dealt with. The measure of what Jesus suffered upon the cross is the measure of the enormity of your sin and mine. And it's only when we see this that we begin to feel ashamed of ourselves and come to the Saviour we urgently need, begging for mercy. And then secondly, this cry reveals God's love as wonderful beyond comprehension. Because God could justly have abandoned us to hell, He could have left us alone to perish in our sins. That's what we deserve. But He didn't. In love He came after us in Christ. He pursued us even to the desolate anguish of the cross where He bore our sin and our guilt and our judgment and our death. This, I say, is the greatest display of love the world has ever seen. How greatly God must love us to give up the Son of His delight to the agony of this appalling darkness and God-forsakenness. And friends, I want to say, honestly but bluntly, it takes a hard and a stony heart to remain unmoved by this love. Because it's more than love, it's what the Bible calls grace, which is mercy to the undeserving. And finally, let me say that this cry issues a solemn warning. Jesus suffered the penalty of sin. He purchased salvation for us at the immense cost of his own physical and spiritual death. The writer to the Hebrew says, how shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation? And again he tells us how terrible is the punishment going to be for those who have trampled underfoot the Son of God and insulted the Spirit of Grace. These are the warnings that Scripture itself gives, and they are readily intelligible. There can be no sin more damnable than the sin of rejecting or neglecting the salvation that Christ secured at such enormous cost on the cross. So I beg you this morning, in the name of the Saviour, accept it as the free and undeserved gift that it is. And that means accepting Him, because you cannot accept salvation without accepting Him. He is the Saviour, and He must be received and accepted by you. and live in you, not only to forgive your sins, but to continue to save you from their power, and one day to save you from their very presence. Let us pray. O God, our Heavenly Father, as we come now to go into the ordinance of the Lord's Supper, we pray that we may by the Holy Spirit carry these thoughts with us. And as the bread is broken and the wine is poured out, as we eat and as we drink, we may see no one but Jesus alone. And our hearts will be strangely warmed as we are drawn to him. and He renews our love and our faith and becomes even more precious to us than He has been so far. Hear our prayer for Jesus' sake. Amen.