Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Popery.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

The haunting words that echo from the cross as our Lord suffers on Good Friday, they're a powerful meditation for Holy Week, and as I mentioned in an earlier episode, Jesus is quoting Psalm 22, which is an incredible Old Testament prophecy of the crucifixion.

But what do his words mean?

Many evangelical Protestants, particularly those from a reformed or Calvinist tradition, have been taught that this passage proves that God the Father has turned away from God the Son, abandoning him or even damning him.

Those are extraordinary claims with some serious theological implications, and today, I want to test those claims by scripture.

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All right.

Let's start with John Piper, one of the most popular preachers in the last several decades.

He says of Christ recounting of Psalm 22

I don't think we could begin to fathom all that this would mean between the Father and the Son.

To be forsaken by God is the cry of the damned, and he was damned for us.

So he used these words because there was a real forsakenness.

Now, Piper is right about one thing.

It is unfathomable that anyone with a proper understanding of the Trinity could believe that the Father damns the Son.

It's unfathomable that somebody could believe that Jesus is both true God and damned by God.

Those things are unfathomable because they're logically incoherent, but there's a good reason that the early Christians didn't believe these things, and it's not just that this view of the cross contradicts Trinitarian theology and sound Christology by pitting the Trinity against itself or even pitting Jesus' two natures against themselves.

It's that this interpretation of Psalm 22 and the cross disagrees with both Psalm 22 itself and the Biblical depiction of the cross.

If you want to understand what Jesus meant by crying out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

you have to read these words in the context of the whole of Psalm 22.

After all

These words are the exact first words of Psalm 22, and that's important because Jesus seems to have known that the whole psalm, in some way or other, was about him, because at least three other parts of this psalm are quoted in the story of his death.

On this point, John Piper is right, and it's worth pointing out that the earliest Christians made this point as well.

So if you want to make sense of Jesus' words, don't run to a reformed manual on what John Calvin thinks forsaking requires.

Turn instead to the Old Testament and read the full passage that Jesus is quoting from.

In fact, better yet, both the prayer of Psalm 22 and Jesus' prayer from the cross should also be read in the broader context of Jesus' teachings about prayer, particularly in Luke 18.

And will not God vindicate his elect, who cry to him day and night?

Will he delay long over them?

I tell you, he will vindicate them speedily.

What are the connections we see here?

Well, first of all, Christ is the electos, the chosen one.

In fact, that's what he's being taunted about here on the cross.

He saved others.

Let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, his chosen one.

The same Greek word, electos, is used in both places.

Jesus is showing us what it looks like to be the elect of God.

And second, Jesus talks about the elect crying out night and day, and that's exactly what Psalm 22 says that the psalmist is doing.

This is where it's important to remember that My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

isn't the end of Psalm 22.

It's the beginning.

And just as Jesus promises in Luke 18, God hears the cry of his elect and vindicates him speedily.

That's the whole point of Good Friday and of Easter, and it's also what happens in Psalm 22.

In verse 24, the psalmist tells us to praise God, for he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hid his face from him, but has heard when he cried to him.

So the man of Psalm 22 says that God has not hidden his face from him.

That's important because central to the evangelical reformed reading of Psalm 22 is that

There's a very real sense, dear friends, that on the cross, if Jesus was to be forsaken, truly forsaken by God, God had to turn his back.

Okay, so Psalm 22 says God has not hidden his face from Christ, and reformed theologians cite Jesus quoting Psalm 22 to claim that God has hidden his face from Christ.

One of these two is wrong.

Now, you might ask, why?

Why would God the Father turn his back on his beloved son in the first place?

It's a great question.

According to Sproul, quote, God is too holy to look at sin.

He could not bear to look at that concentrated monumental condensation of evil, so he averted his eyes from his son .

the light of his countenance was turned off.

All blessedness was removed from his.

This idea doesn't really work if Jesus is God.

You can't simultaneously believe that Jesus is fully God, and is on Calvary, and God can't even look at Calvary.

But let's not miss the forest for the trees.

Jesus is praying to the Father from the cross, and moreover, he's addressing him in terms of intimacy, calling him My God.

And his last words on the cross are going to be, Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.

And none of that makes sense if the Father refuses to hear and listen to his son.

In the Gospel of John in particular, Jesus refers to the crucifixion as a kind of ascension or enthronement, describing it as a moment in which he is lifted up.

And every other time that this word appears, the one that's translated as lifted up, it means exalted.

It's the same word used to describe Christ's exaltation to the right hand of the Father in Acts 2 and in Acts 5. And that makes sense.

Not only is Jesus physically being lifted up, this is also the first time that we find him publicly declared the king of the Jews.

It's emblazoned above the cross.

This, then, is the throne of Christ.

So in John 3, he says that just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

And in John 8, he connects his coming lifting up with the fact that the Father never actually abandons him.

He says, When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own authority, but speak thus as the Father taught me.

And he who sent me is with me.

He has not left me alone, for I always do what is pleasing to him.

And just as Jesus's heavenly exaltation to the right hand of the Father is this moment of glory and divine intimacy, so Jesus's earthly exaltation on the cross is also a moment presented in the Bible as one of divine intimacy, not of the Father turning his back on the Son.

Jesus says in John 10, For this reason, the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it again.

No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.

I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.

This charge I have received from my Father.

This is a good reminder that Jesus isn't simply the victim on Good Friday.

He's also the priest, laying down his own life willingly, and he says that the Father loves him for doing this.

In Amos 5, God speaks of the sacrificial offerings made by those who aren't truly contrite, and says that he will not look upon them.

In other words, God is saying he's rejecting those sacrifices.

That's what it means to say God turns his back on a sacrificial offering.

So if the Father really did turn his face away from Jesus's self-offering on Good Friday, that would mean that the perfect sacrifice has been rejected, and we would all still be dead in our sins.

Thanks be to God, scripture says the opposite.

The Father looks upon Christ's perfect sacrifice with love, for Jesus always does what is pleasing to him.

And understanding the cross through the lens of Old Testament sacrifice helps to explain another passage that sometimes trips some Protestants up as well.

In Isaiah 53, the suffering servant prophecy, Isaiah says that, It was the will of the Lord to bruise him.

He has put him to grief.

When he makes himself an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring.

He shall prolong his days.

Now the image there isn't of a passive recipient of the wrath of his father.

It's of someone wholly, willingly serving, doing the will of God, even when that will involves enduring the violence of evil men unto death.

And here, there's an added wrinkle in the Hebrew of Isaiah 53, which says that he becomes asham, a word which means both sin and sin offering or guilt offering.

Think of it like the English word dusting, which can mean adding dust, like dusting for evidence, or removing dust, like dusting the furniture.

Becoming asham, then you could literally translate that either as becoming sin or becoming the sin offering.

But even if you translate it as becoming sin, that doesn't mean that the suffering servant becomes, you know, murder or the embodiment of sin itself, nor does it mean that he's regarded as sinful.

In fact, Leviticus 6 describes the asham as a thing most holy.

And so when St. Paul says that the Father made Christ to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him, we might become the righteousness of God, Paul's not saying that the Father literally made Christ evil or into the personification of evil, or even that he pretended that the good Christ was evil.

He's saying that Christ is the suffering servant, the sinless sin offering, a sacrifice most holy.

And Christ is forsaken in the sense that God allows him to suffer horrendous evils, but he's not forsaken in the sense of being an innocent victim of divine wrath, or of the Father turning his back upon him.

This reformed misinterpretation of Christ's cry from the cross isn't just bad biblical exegesis contradicting Psalm 22, contradicting Jesus's teaching on prayer, and contradicting Jesus's teaching on the cross.

It's not just bad theology contradicting Trinitarian and christological doctrine.

It's ungodly.

In 1 Corinthians 12, St. Paul specifically warns that no one, led by the Spirit, will say that Jesus is, in Greek, anathema, accursed.

But in declaring that God damned Jesus, that's precisely what these reformed teachers are doing.

Wherever this theology is coming from, scripture warns that it's not coming from God.

Now the human father of Calvinism, John Calvin, argued that Jesus' cry from the cross made sense in light of his condemnation on our behalf.

Calvin even argued that Christ's bodily death on the cross was actually inadequate to atone for our sins, and he claimed that it was necessary as well that Christ be spiritually damned to hell.

Now according to St. Paul, God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

According to St. John, By this we know love, that he, Jesus, laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.

The cross, biblically, is the image of divine love par excellence, but according to Calvinists like R.C. Sproul

For that moment in history, at that instant that Jesus was hanging on the cross, he was the most obscene thing in all of creation because there concentrated was the corporate wickedness of us all.

So Christ on the cross is either the perfect image of divine love or the most obscene thing in all of creation, but I would suggest to you that it can't be both, and that one of these claims about the cross is not coming from God.

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.

But this points to the bigger issue.

This isn't just a question about what Jesus means in his prayer to the Father when he cries out from Psalm 22.

It's not just a question of whether or not the Father turns his back upon the Son.

This is a question about the meaning of the cross itself.

The Bible says that he who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the Lord.

The idea that God pours out his wrath upon his righteous son so that the wicked can be declared justified is abominable.

So if this view of the cross is wrong, how should we view it?

That's what we need to figure out, and I do a deep dive on that question right here.

For Shameless Popery, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.