SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/27/2024 9:39 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-2
“Sovereign Departure”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
27:46-49
Message of the verses: “46 About the ninth
hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, "ELI, ELI, LAMA
SABACHTHANI?" that is, "MY GOD, MY GOD, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN
ME?" 47 And some of those who were standing there, when they heard it, began
saying, "This man is calling for Elijah." 48 Immediately one of them
ran, and taking a sponge, he filled it with sour wine and put it on a reed, and
gave Him a drink. 49 But the rest of them said, "Let us see whether
Elijah will come to save Him.’”
I want to begin by looking at what Habakkuk declared
of God in Hab. 1:13 “Thine eyes are too pure to approve evil, and Thou canst
not look on wickedness with favor.” Now
I want you to think about how difficult it was for God to forgive our sins, and
part of that problem can be seen in this verse from Habakkuk. It was hard for the Father to send His Son to
earth for those 33 years, it was hard for the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ to
leave His home in heaven and be away from His Father for 33 years. It was hard for the Son to get Himself ready
to become the Sacrifice for sin as we saw that He sweat great drops of blood
before the angels came to help Him with this issue. However once He got His mind ready for what
He was called to do, that is be crucified for our sins then He went through
with it all the way to the end. I
mentioned it was hard for both the Father and the Son to be separated from each
other, and even harder for the Son to have His Father take out all the sins of
the world that were ever sinned as He became sin for us that we may have His
righteousness. This took place the last
three hours that Christ was on the cross, and you have to look at all of the
gospels to understand this as some of them do not speak of this. Jesus went through great agony, the greatest
agony while the Father took out the punishment on the Son for what you and I
deserve. He could not even call God His
Father at that time as He said what David wrote in Psalm 22:1 “My God, my God,
why have You forsaken me? Far from my deliverance are the words of my groaning.” That term “My God” is seen four times in
Psalm 22, twice in the first verse.
John
MacArthur writes that “Jesus did not die as a martyr to a righteous cause or
simply as an innocent man wrongly accused and condemned. Nor, as some suggest, did He die as a heroic
gesture against man’s inhumanity to man.
The Father could have looked favorably on such selfless deaths and
those. But because Jesus died as a
substitute sacrifice for the sins of the world, the righteous heavenly Father
had to judge Him fully according to that sin.
“The
Father forsook the Son because the Son too upon Himself ‘our transgressions,…our
iniquities’ (Isa. 53:5). Jesus ‘was
delivered up because of our transgressions’ (Rom. 4:25) and ‘died for our sins accordingly
to the Scriptures’ (1 Cor. 15:3). He ‘who
knew no sin [became] sin on our behalf’ (2 Cor. 5:21) and became ‘a curse for
us’ (Gal. 3:13). ‘He himself bore our
sins in His body on the cross’ (1 Peter 2:24), ‘died for sins once for all, the
just for the unjust’ (1 Pet. 3:18), and became ‘the propitiation for our sins’
(1 John 4:10).”
Now Jesus Christ not only bore man’s sin but
actually became sin on man’s behalf,
in order that those who believe in Him might be saved from the penalty of their
sin. Now as He bore our sin and became
sin for us we can understand that Jesus never did sin, and the reason that He
never did sin was because it was impossible for Him to sin because of who He
was and is.
Jesus
came to teach men perfectly about God and who God is as He Himself was the
perfect example of God’s holiness and righteousness. MacArthur adds “But as He Himself declared
the supreme reason for His coming to earth was not to teach or to be an example
but ‘to give His life a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:28).
“When Christ was forsaken by the Father, their
separation was not one of nature, essence, or substance. Christ did not in any sense of degree cease
to exist as God or as a member of the Trinity.
He did not cease to be the Son, any more that a child who sins severely
against his human father ceases to be his child. But Jesus did for a while cease to know the
intimacy of fellowship with His heavenly Father, just as a disobedient child
ceases for a while to have intimate, normal, loving fellowship with his human
father.”
These
are very interesting truths that we as believers need to understand, as this
shows part of the complexity of How our sins were taken care of by Christ and
the Father.
8/27/2024 10:17 AM
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