Abandoned

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?”

Matthew 27:46 (NIV)

An English professor wrote these words “A woman without her man is nothing" on the chalkboard and asked his students to punctuate it correctly. All of the males in the class wrote: "A woman, without her man, is nothing." All the females in the class wrote: "A woman: without her, man is nothing." Punctuation is powerful!

Without the correct punctuation, each person is open to interpret the sentence in the way that they choose. The same thing is often done with Scripture. When we open the Bible and pick and choose what we want to read, we can interpret the Scripture in many different ways.

A man once was trying to decide what God wanted him to do. He prayed and asked God for direction and decided to flip open his Bible to a verse to see if God would answer his prayer. He flipped open his Bible and read, “Judas went and hanged himself.” He didn’t like the selection and decided to try again, so he flipped open to another scripture and read, “Go ye therefore and do likewise.”

God does speak through scripture; however, we are to use all of God’s Word not just the portions we like. One example of why this is important can be found in Matthew 27:46. Many people believe, including theologians, that this verse shows how God, at the toughest point in the life of His Son, abandoned Jesus. What a sad picture that would be, if it were true.

In 1994, my wife and I started a new journey in our lives together. We had only been married for a little over two years when we received our “Macedonian call” to the mission field. We were talking with a friend in the Music Library at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary about our plans after graduation. I shared that I wanted to teach music and our friend Amal looked straight at us and said, “You should teach music in Jordan. They need someone to come and teach music to their churches.” Amal was the daughter of a Syrian couple who had moved to Jordan when she was just a little child so that they could pastor a small church in the village of Jerash. After many months of prayer, investigation, preparation, testing, and training, we got aboard a Royal Jordanian flight bound for Amman, Jordan.

We were the only Americans living in Jerash; a village of about 20,000 people. We arrived in Jerash after dark, so on our first morning we were somewhat shocked to see buildings that looked like they had been part of a warzone. In fact, they had. Many of the buildings still had visible signs from the 1967 Jordan-Israel war, including deep bedded scars from bullets and many patched walls with basketball-sized or larger holes that had ripped them apart. I had ventured out that first money only long enough to buy some carrots from a truck that had stopped on our street. Since I could not even speak one word of Arabic, I simply pointed to the carrots and held out some Dinars in my hand. The man took a half Dinar, less than a dollar in U.S. currency, and handed me six kilo or carrots. I went back in the apartment holding thirteen pounds of carrots…for two people.

We had been expecting a visit from our supervisor on our second day in the country, but they did not arrive. We tried to call, but our telephone was not working. We found out from some nationals that it had snowed in Amman and Ajloun, so all roads of the roads were closed. Then our electricity went off, so we had no heat. We did not have any transportation of our own and we could not read Arabic, so we had no idea how to use the buses. After two days with no word from any of the other Baptist representatives, no phone, no newspapers we could read, no television, and no radio, we felt abandoned.

But God had not abandoned us. He provided a great friend and mentor for us. Remember our friend Amal? Her father, Abu Zohair, was the pastor of the Jerash Baptist Church. He spoke some English and invited us to come to his home when we lost electricity. He and his wife sat us beside their gas-powered heater, served us hot drinks of chia (tea) and qahoua (Arabic coffee). What we thought was abandonment was actually God’s way of helping us become a part of the culture of Jerash by becoming less dependent on our American friends. We learned much about Arabic hospitality from Abu and Um Zohair. He later explained that they had adopted us as their son and daughter, and when our son was born, they told us that they were Jiddo and Tetta (Grandpa and Grandma).

This brings me back to our story from Matthew. Does this passage actually mean that God abandoned Jesus? For that to be true, Jesus could not be God, for how else could you separate the two? Colossians 2:9 tells us that, “in [Jesus] dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.” (KJV) He was fully God and fully man. The two could not be separated.

So what could Christ have meant? If the Father did not abandon His Son, why did Jesus seemingly accuse Him of doing so? Why would three of the four Gospels record His words as, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”?

To understand this, we need to better understand the Hebrew culture of that time. The Jews were very religious people. All of their laws came from their religion. They knew the Bible very well. The children received their formal education in the Synagogues taught by Rabbis. Still, very few people actually owned or could even read the scrolls on which the scriptures had been written. They had to learn things by rote (memory). They knew what the scriptures said; it was the foundation of their lives.

Not only did they know their scriptures, but they also knew the songs of their hymnal. We have many of those same songs recorded in the book of Psalms. But they did not have a nice printed hymnal. The Levites could not say, “Turn to Psalm 123 this morning as we stand together and sing,” The Psalms were not even numbered as they are today. So how did they know what song to sing? They may have had them all memorized, but there still had to be a method to announce which Psalm they wanted to sing. That is how the practice of using the first sentence of each Psalm as the title of the song. Sometimes the entire first verse was the title; otherwise the Psalm “Praise the Lord” could have referred to any Psalm from 146-150.

Knowing this helps us to better understand what Christ meant as He cried out from the cross. It was not a cry of abandonment. God did not “turn His back” on Jesus as so many pastors have preached. Jesus was actually crying out the title to a Psalm. Jesus had to struggle for every breath and every word He spoke, so it is unlikely that He would have had the strength to quote the entire Psalm. 

If you turn to Psalm 22:1, you can find the song that Jesus was directing them to as He hung dying on the cross. Psalm 22 is a prophetic prayer written by David and it shows how important it is that we use the entire Bible to determine God’s meanings rather than just a single verse.

Two things are revealed in this prayer: human agony and divine greatness. The first eighteen verses describe in great detail the suffering that Christ would endure on the cross. In verses 6-8 we can see the people standing around Him as they mock Him, calling out, “If you are God’s Son, let God save you. Call on God for help.” In the Matthew passage we see that the soldiers, chief priests, rabbis, elders, and even the thieves hanging alongside of Him mocked and insulted Him.

Verse 14 points to a very important fact in the death of Christ. Most people when crucified did not die as quickly as Jesus. Sometimes they even suffered for days before finally dying. They did not die because they were nailed to a cross, but because their lungs would collapse when the cross was dropped into the hole. In order to continue breathing, they would need to lift themselves up by pushing against the nails in their feet and pulling on the nails in their hands. They would usually remain alive as long as they continued this agonizing struggle for each breath. But Jesus was crucified the day before the Sabbath, so the soldiers were ordered to break their legs so that they would no longer be able to lift themselves up to breathe, and in effect they would suffocate and die before the Sabbath started at sundown. But when they went to break Jesus’ legs, they discovered that He was already dead.

Some claim that Jesus died of fatigue. After all he had been beaten, punched, forced to carry a heavy cross through the streets and Jerusalem, and then crucified. Some theologians claim that His body died after His Spirit left the body, but that would mean that Jesus escaped death. God’s Word clearly shows that Christ died on the cross. But medical specialists have pointed to a recently discovered phenomenon to explain His death: they believe that Jesus actually died from a broken heart (My heart has turned to wax; it has melted away within me.)

The experts point to several facts to back up their belief. First, Jesus was so grieved in the Garden of Gethsemane that He sweat drops of blood, as Luke, the doctor, explains in Luke 22:44. Matthew 26:38 records that Jesus told His disciples, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” There are have been recorded medical cases where people have become so emotionally worked up that the blood in their body seeps through the pores of their skin and appears as sweat. Second, based on the eye-witness account by John, when the guard struck the spear into Jesus’ side, blood and water flowed out (John 19:34). This shows that he was dead at the time. Third, the medical experts point to recent cases in which people have worried or grieved so much that they caused their blood pressure to rise extremely high. If these people were in good health, the heart would not stop pumping, but would instead burst.

Other verses in Psalm 22 are direct portrayals of Christ’s crucifixion. Verse15 speaks of Christ’s thirst. Verse 16 shows that evil men will pierce His hands and feet. This was long before crucifixion existed. Verses 14 and 17 refer to His bones, many of which would have been jarred out of joint when the cross fell into the ground. Verse 18 speaks of the men that would cast lots for His clothing.

If you stop reading at verse 18 you might believe that Christ had truly been abandoned, but the Psalm suddenly shifts from a focus on human agony to the divine greatness of God. Verse 24 should be enough evidence to prove that God did not abandon His Son on the cross, “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.” All of the storied I heard as a child of the moment when Christ took on our sins that caused God turned His face away from His Son, which in turn caused the darkness to come over all of the world for three hours; all of those stories can be debunked with this one verse. God was in control at all times. He would not forsake His own Son. He could not forsake Himself.

It is directly because of His greatness, His willingness to suffer and die on the cross, and His resurrection from the grave that we have reason to praise Him. The final verse of Psalm 22 shows is that everyone will worship Him one day. Even those who refuse to accept Him as their Savior will one day kneel before Him and declare Him Lord or lords and King of kings before they are cast into an eternity apart from God.

Did God forsake His Son? No. Will God ever forsake us? Not if you have placed your faith and trust in His Son, Jesus. In Matthew 28:20, Jesus told us that He would be with us always, even to the end. We are the sons and daughters of God. God has never and will never forsake one of His children.