Scriptures to the Witness of God being the Father of ALL, and Jesus being the Savior of ALL. Part 2

 















Part 2

Let’s look at the words of Jesus, “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me”.

From these words that Jesus uttered on the cross people are told that God forsook Jesus at the hour in His greatest time of loneliness and utter despair. What was happening between our loving Father and the Son at that precise moment?

Many have taken Jesus' cry that His Father had forsaken Him to mean that the Father turned His back on the Son and left Him high and dry. God cannot bare to look upon sin, is their explanation, so that when our sins were laid on Him He had to turn away from His beloved Son. This premise is used to justify God forsaken the vast majority of His beloved created people at death id they did not get "saved", and sends them to suffer in hell fire forever! 

Was the faithful One unfaithful to His Son in His darkest moment? Jesus said to His disciples that they would all leave Him alone...then, did He not say that He would not be alone for the Father was with Him. If Jesus were speaking the truth, which He was, how could His loving Father forsake Him? I don’t believe for a moment that Father God forsook His Son. Could it be that there is a difference here in what God the Father did and what Jesus perceived Him as doing? Did Jesus feel forsaken? Yes...but though feeling forsaken doesn’t mean that He actually was forsaken.

When Jesus became sin for us, He entered into the full shame, darkness and bondage of that sin. It is possible that at the moment on the cross when God’s wrath was consuming the sin He had become, He couldn’t even see the Father with whom He had shared fellowship with during eternity. Sin blinded Him and He felt as if God had forsaken Him. But that is difference between our perception that sin reveals and the reality of God.

I am sure that most of us have felt abandoned by God while going through some of our darkest moments. But that doesn’t mean that He left us...it only means that we can’t see Him thorough the pain. The fact is though, God was right there with us going through the tough times, never turning His face from us His beloved children. To believe He did forsake His Son Jesus is unthinkable.

That Jesus felt abandoned and alone shows the depth that He felt our sin. He entered into it fully and for a brief time in eternity the Son knew what it was like to experience fatherlessness...not because His Father forsook Him, but because He was in such agony He could not feel His Father's presence.

Unseen though He was, His Father was there in the same measure He always had been. But having become sin itself Jesus could no longer sense His Father’s presence. Perception became its own reality to Jesus as He shared in the emptiness and loneliness beyond what we could even fathom. In allowing sin to touch the Godhead, a rift was created in the divine community. The price of our sin was borne in their wounding. Oh...oh, how Jesus’ cry must have torn the Father’s heart by Jesus thinking He Himself the object of separation rather than love.

Shortly after the cry of abandonment He cried the greatest cry of trust that ever could be demonstrated to His Father Whom He could not see or feel. “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit”.

The cross stands as the undeniable proof that we ALL are loved children of God. God demonstrated His love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.

On RESURRECTION morning, He broke the bars of the grave, of death and of hell's hold on humanity. Death could not hold Him, He arose triumph and gave us freedom to be His temple and be in a relational journey with Him as His Community of the Redeemed to bring the Good News Gospel to His loved Community of Humanity.

God has shown us from the beginning that He does not hide from sinful humanity. Did He hide from Adam and Eve when they sinned...NO, they hid from Him and He sought them out. It is not that God cannot bare to look upon sin, He is continually looking upon the sin of humanity, it is that we in our sin cannot look upon God. He is not the one who hides, we are. God is secure enough to look upon sin and not be tainted by it. He has always done so and He did so at the cross.

By allowing sin to touch His person through the Son, God would be able to prevail in Himself over that which we were powerless to overcome. Through the physical body of Jesus, sin came face-to-face with the power of God. And God prevailed over sin utterly and completely.

This underscores the fallacy of any law-based or performance-based approach to God. Jesus became sin for us because we were powerless to deal with it on our own. We cannot do anything that will allow us to get to God...”He did it all! He condemned sin in sinful man” (Rom. 8:3). Notice it is not sinful people that were condemned, but the sin in their (flesh). Thus we are free from condemnation in Jesus because He already bore that condemnation. He opened the gate for all who wanted to be free and to live in the life of the Father...and ALL mankind will want to at their appointed time!

God’s focus was on sin and on the power of sin itself, by taking care of the power of sin He provided for us not to be a slave to sin thus breaking sin’s hold on us. The cross was not primarily about exacting punishment; it was about prevailing over sin itself.

God is not about destroying His loved sinning people but about destroying the sin that destroys His loved people. In that sense God’s wrath is curative not punitive. His primary purpose is not to hurt us as sinning sinners, but to heal and redeem sinning people from sin.

Now we can live has a loved people never to be abandoned by God for He will never leave us or forsake us. We are free to live in His love and set free from the need to appease Him. We are set free to love Him and love ALL people as He loves ALL people.