My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?– Matthew 27:46

I find this verse to be the most heart wrenching verse in the Bible. Here we see the full anguish and despair of Jesus. As he is nearing his death He cries out in exasperation and pain.

This verse is also probably one of the hardest verses to explain to people who do not believe that Jesus was God, and honestly it is easy to see why. Jesus is crying out to God and questioning why He has been abandoned by God. The atheist would argue that if Jesus was God how can this be? God cannot abandon Himself, therefore Jesus was not God.

Back in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus prayed to the Father to remove the cup from his lips, but then agreed to obey the Father’s will.¹ Now Jesus almost seems to be asking God why he didn’t answer that prayer in the garden. With the excruciating pain he was enduring this is actually a reasonable question considering he was fully human, how many of us have asked the same question even while in a situation not nearly as dire as this? But, Jesus was also God and that’s where the difficulty lies for atheists.

I have read several explanations of what this verse could mean, here are the four explanations we are going to look at today:

• Jesus was quoting scripture to show He was fulfilling scripture
• At that moment divinity left Jesus and he was fully human alone
• God turned His face from Jesus
• Jesus was banished from Heaven/the glory of God

We’ll start with the first one because He was indeed quoting scripture. When Jesus quoted the first line of Psalm 22 many of the Jewish people who heard Jesus would have known the scripture, some of them probably knew the whole Psalm. It is a Psalm that ends with hope in God for deliverance. But before it gets to hope it is a Psalm of despair which predicts much of the suffering and mockery Jesus was enduring at the time he quoted it.

In this time of great pain it is certainly understandable how Jesus could feel this desperation and this feeling of abandonment, after all those closest to Him scattered like sheep when the Shepard was struck.² But yet, citing this particular scripture at this time seems to show that Jesus was sending a message about his fulfillment of scripture in real time.

Now let’s look at the possibility that at that moment divinity left Jesus. It has been suggested that at this point the Holy Spirit left Jesus because God is eternal and God cannot die. At this precise moment Jesus became fully human alone. It seems like a plausible theory that something like this could have happened, but to me this could only be the case if Jesus had only become God at His baptism when the Holy Spirit descended upon Him.

There are those who believe that Jesus only became God when he was commissioned at His baptism, but John tells us that Jesus was with God and was God from the beginning.³ So I cannot subscribe to this theory. This would also seem to imply that sin can divide God, and if sin can divide God it would be possible for sin to defeat God, and we know this is not true.

The next explanation states that at this moment all the sin of the world was transferred onto Jesus, and because God cannot sin he turned His face from Jesus. God would not have been divided under this scenario as well as the fourth scenario, but rather separated. A subtle distinction, but a distinction nonetheless.

I think of the distinction this way: God divided would sort of be like a father who disowns his son and cuts him of from his rightful inheritance, where God separated would be like a father and son separated by distance but still one family. I’m not sure that is a perfect analogy.

Now we reach an interesting point in the discussion and we need to go back to Psalm 22 again, this time verse 24. This is what it says:

For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him. (ESV)

When I started writing this I had originally had the third and fourth explanations together, but after rereading Psalm 22 I’ve decided they should be separated and I had to go back and do some editing. It is so interesting that no matter how many times you read scripture something new pops out at you that you didn’t connect before!

Jesus, through the Psalm, has gone from asking God why he was abandoned to acknowledging that He has not been abandoned. Much like in the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus asked to have the cup taken from His lips before agreeing to do the Father’s will, He seems to have come full circle.

We now come to the fourth explanation, Jesus was banished from the presence of God, Heaven. Billy Graham subscribed to the scenario that Jesus was cut off from heaven in this article where he answers this very question, here is what he said:

But as He died all our sins were placed on Him, and He became the final and complete sacrifice for our sins. And in that moment He was banished from the presence of God, for sin cannot exist in God’s presence. His cry speaks of this truth; He endured the separation from God that you and I deserve.

Exactly what Jesus saw or didn’t see, felt or didn’t feel as He took His last breaths is something we will never fully be able to understand. We cannot understand the inner workings of God and we’ll never understand what exactly happened at that moment on the cross. But what we do know is that he did it for us.

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1. Luje 22:42 ↩︎
2. Matthew 26:31 ↩︎
3. John 1:1-5 ↩︎