My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?

Pause for a moment and think about the verse you have just read. It’s telling us that Jesus, the Son of God, experienced being forsaken shortly before His death on the cross. To forsake another person is to leave them entirely, usually in a moment of desperate need to desert or abandon them. This is what Jesus experienced because all the sins of the world, past, present, and future were placed in their entirety on Him as He hung on the cross.

I think that the worst moment for Jesus was not the ridicule of the people passing by, not the humiliation of the Roman soldiers placing a crown of thorns on His head and mockingly bowing before Him, not the thirty-nine lashes on His back ripping the skin from the bone, not being nailed to a cross or hanging there gasping for breath in absolute agony.  No, it was being forsaken by His Father for the first and only time in all of eternity.

This was the price for our salvation, the cost that Jesus was willing to bear to take the just punishment that was rightfully ours for our sin. It’s an incredibly powerful picture of God’s love for us, but let us not consider this as just something that happened nearly two thousand years ago, because it has a powerful application for us today; maybe even at this moment for you as you are reading this ‘Seed’.

It shows us that Jesus knows pain and abandonment personally, not just intellectually, but physically, emotionally and spiritually. When we are going through an event in our lives that is so excruciatingly painful, such as loss of a loved one, illness, or abuse, and feel as if God has forsaken us, this verse tells us differently.

Remember that Jesus is our Emmanuel – God with us. When we are in our darkest moments, He is there with us. When you are feeling infinitely far away and abandoned by God, He is there with you. When you cry out in deepest pain, “God, where are You?” He is right there next to you. Nothing in this world or in the ages to come can ever separate you from God’s love. He hasn’t abandoned you. He is right next to you in your pain.