1. INTRODUCTION

Once Martin Luther sat for hours in deep contemplation as if in a trance. Finally he arose and exclaimed, God forsaken by God! Who can understand that? Among other great mysteries of the Christian faith like the Trinity and the Incarnation, the tortured cry from our dying Savior as He hung on the cross staggers our minds and shocks our sensibilities. Leon Morris called it one of the most horrifying passages in Scripture. F. F. Bruce called it the hardest of Jesus sayings yet the most credible because no one would have invented it. We can not plumb the depths of this profound mystery for there is no parallel in this life to give us light on it.

Nevertheless there are some things we can know from Scripture about what was taking place there on the cross at that time and why it was happening. In this regard John Stott in The Cross of Christ offers a most helpful and encouraging exposition of this passage in the overall context of the atonement, which I will refer to later. Christ s cry of forsakenness I believe can be best understood in the light of His agony in the Garden of Gethsemene. As I will develop, these two passages provide us what has been called a window on hell and at the same time the most exquisite revelation of God s love. God s holiness and the consequence of our sin come together in this cosmic drama. After peering directly into the fiery furnace of God s holy wrath in the Garden, Jesus willingly chose to actually experience its full force on the cross for no other reason than His love for His people whom the Father has given Him.

2. IN THE GARDEN AS PRELUDE

After Peter s confession of His identity and the Transfiguration, Jesus set his face like a flint to Jerusalem to fulfill His destiny, to complete His rescue mission - dying alone and being accursed for the sins of the world. In other words, He was headed to hell. After inaugurating the new covenant with His disciples, He and his disciples retire to the Garden of Gethsemane where he begins to enter His great passion, the passeo magnum. The Garden is really His preparation for Calvary. While He had contemplated the full meaning of His mission before, the Father now gives the Son an utterly remarkable foretaste of what is before Him - the cup of wrath which He to drink to save His people. The cup in the Old Testament was used as a metaphor God s punishment which brings suffering and death. No man will ever comprehend the death of Jesus Christ until he realizes that the Lord was put to death by God the Father.

Jonathan Edwards is just remarkably insightful in helping to work through what is happening here. He says that the Father gives Jesus His clearest apprehension of what it means to make an atonement i. e. His suffering would transcend physical and human death. Edwards says God gave him an extraordinary view of it. A sense of that wrath that was to be poured out upon him, and those amazing sufferings that he was to undergo.. . Before He could push ahead to Calvary willingly, Jesus had to have a full understanding of the cost to Him of our salvation. And so the Father shows Him the cup that He will have to drink alone in the absence of any comfort from the Father. As Jesus looks at it in His authentic humanity, He is horrified and He shrinks back from it. The awfulness of the prospect is so great He sweats blood. Interestingly, Edwards exegetes the Greek text as clots of blood he surmises probably congealed in the cool night air. Christ s agony is not the anticipation of the physical pain of the scourging and the nails common to all those were crucified, but for His ability and courage to do drink every drop of the cup of imputation.

For what Jesus sees is that He is to be made the curse for sin and that the Father s wrath which had been stored up against sin already committed or to be committed would be poured out upon Him. What He staggers under is that He will actually bear the separation from God that is the inevitable consequence of sin. Above all else, however, Jesus desires to be obedient to the will of the Father.

He knew the cup could not pass yet in His authentic humanity He prayed that it might. In other words He prayed that there might be another way of fulfilling His mission without the Cross. At this point, we re really trying to imagine the unimaginable. While He prayed that the Father might spare Him from the cup nevertheless He desires His Father s will more. His prayer was answered I believe in that although His body died, He was saved out of death. He did not remain in death. In tasting death however He became complete in His human experience as indicated in Hebrews. He closed the loop so to speak in His solidarity with mankind. Here in the Garden then Christ conquered His dread, yielded His will and was ready for death death . Only Christ s great eternal love for us made Him go forward having looked into hell knowing the reality will be even worse than the anticipation.

3. ON THE CROSS AS DRAMA

When He uttered that cry on the Cross He knew why He was there. He was not merely reciting Psalm 22, as some have suggested, as if to identify with David s experience of despair. Others say the words mean He felt as if God had forgotten about Him. Others speculate He simply delirious. But everything we hear from the cross reveals a remarkably clear mind. The only weakness that we read from the account is His thirst. His cry of abandonment was not internal and subjective. He didn t just feel forsaken; he was actually forsaken by God and because it was too much for him to bear He cried out. By identifying with the words of the Psalms, He was giving expression to the reality of the forsakenness He was experiencing.# Its utterance marks the lowest depths of Christ s agony; it is both the climax and end of the suffering. It is death death - the outer darkness. It is a awesome testimony to the whole world, for all time, as to what was happening there to Him. He who knew no sin was made to be sin (2 Cor 5:21); in other words, Jesus became the curse (Gal 3:13) as He bore the full weight of sin and experienced the actual, full force of His Father s righteous fury against sin.

In His purity, in His holiness the Father can not look upon sin and He recoils from it. He can do nothing other than to turn His gaze from the Son and as He does the lights go out. In Old Testament prophecy darkness was a sign not of coming death but of judgment. As if nature itself was also withdrawing from Him, the three hours of strange darkness that fell upon the world was something of a manifestation of what was occurring in the cosmic realm as the judgment was borne by Jesus. It was damnation and He took it willingly and lovingly. When it came upon Him, the intimate fellowship, the expressions of love and the privileges with the Father that had sustained Jesus were now broken off and there was nothing but the most intense silence. He hung between earth and heaven with no home in either. His Father s smile was hidden. His Father s favor was withdrawn. Laden with the sins of others, the sinless One sank into the lowest depths of hell as the waves and billows of God s wrath swept over Him. This then is the horrific experience He foresaw in the Garden which brought upon Him such anguish. The separation as I can understand it was not His divinity or with the substance of the Godhead but in terms of the intimate communion of the God-man become the sin-bearer and the holy Father.

Because Jesus was the public person, as J. I. Packer puts it, He stood in our place bearing the penalty for our sins. All the defilement, filth and hideousness of our sin was imputed to Him. He bore the sinner s sin and He had to be treated, therefore, as though He were a sinner though a sinner He could never be. With his own full consent, He suffered as though He had committed the transgressions which were laid upon Him. Our sin and His taking it upon himself, is the answer to the question - why hast Thou forsaken me? When the first Adam sinned, he ran away and hid from God when he experienced the separation from fellowship with God that his sin caused. By His words My God, My God , we know that the faith of the second Adam did not falter for one moment. These are words of trust from a heart whose desire above all else is to be in God s holy presence. He remained even in His darkest hour, the hour that counted the most, perfectly obedient to the Father s will. He knew this was His mission as the Suffering Servant to save the guilty and He had His eye on His sheep as His comfort. There alone He made a propitiation as God s perfect sacrificial lamb - the sin bearer justly forsaken before a Holy God. The glory of it all is that He turned his moment of greatest vulnerability on the cross into the moment of greatest conquest of evil.

The Old Testament sacrificial system reminded Israel that God could not and would not overlook or tolerate sin but by the sacrifices turned His anger away from His people. Those sacrifices merely pointed to and foreshadowed the reality, the one atonement that would perfectly and completely satisfy God s holiness and quench His wrath. Justice is accomplished; justification is indeed just. The guilty are acquitted, pardoned and forgiven. God is just and the justifier. At one and the same time the moment in time that held the fullest expression of divine wrath and judgment was the moment of the greatest expression of His glorious grace. The justice of the event is seen in that sin was not winked at but truly and fully punished. The grace is seen in that the punishment was borne by a substitute provided by God himself.

The imagery in the Old Testament of the cup of wrath, curses, and sacrifice all are fulfilled in these three hours on Calvary, what R. C. Sproul calls the greatest moment in the history of the world. Its as if the visual aids used to help Israel s limited grasp of profound truths all come to life. For instance, the contrast of Lev. 16:22 with what was happening both visibly and cosmically at Calvary is, for me, utterly overwhelming. The Priest gets the pure, unblemished animal and presses his hands down on it. As people watch, he declares the sins of the people to be now upon their substitute. The innocent animal receives the sins of the people i. e. all their sins are transferred symbolically to the scapegoat, which is then driven into the wilderness and banished. Sin is purged from God s presence, the scapegoat is abandoned and the people are forgiven, covered in the blood of the innocent . Yahweh is appeased and the sinbearer is alone. Jesus redeemed us from the law s curse having become a curse for us. While the Father abandoned the Son to death outside the camp, the Father also raised Him from death. Christianity has its roots in a moment of supreme darkness, as Christ hung dying on the cross. Transformation of that darkness into light, as Good Friday gave way to Easter Day, constitutes the basis of Christian hope.

John Stott in our textbook makes a powerful connecting case of the substitution motif of the Old Testament and Christ as its fulfillment and reality.He says that substitution is no parallel to the salvation terms, such as propitiation, redemption, justification and reconciliation, but rather the foundation of them all, without which each lacks cogency. Stott argues that God s response to human sin was the atonement and to understand what it achieved you have to understand the idea of substitution. He rejects that Christ went to the cross to appease an angry, wrathful God rather it was both God and Christ taking initiative together to save sinners. Therefore, our substitute is neither Christ alone or God alone but God in Christ, who was truly and fully both God and man, and who on that account, was uniquely qualified to represent both God and man, and to mediate between them. This is a critical point to the objection raised about the immorality of the subsitutionary atonement since the substitute for the lawbreakers is none other than the divine Lawmaker himself.

Nevertheless Stott holds that there was that moment of forsakenness reflected in Christ s cry of anguish from the cross. Stott says this was real separation, but a separation voluntarily accepted by both the Father and the Son. Substitution, therefore, is central to understanding the atonement, but Stott emphasizes God is totally involved in it. The cross, according to Stott, smashes to smithereens any notion of God taking any delight or pleasure in the suffering of the world because on the cross He Himself entered right into the depths of the world s suffering. We are not to envisage Him on a deck-chair , says Stott, but on a cross. The God who allows us to suffer, once suffered himself in Christ, and continues to suffer with us and for us today.

3. DID GOD DIE ON THE CROSS?

Calvin in a classic statement on the atonement states ...neither as God alone could he could he feel death, nor as man alone could he overcome it, he coupled human nature with divine to atone for sin he might submit the weakness of the one to death; and that, wrestling with death by the power of the other nature, he might win victory for us. Therefore, it is the God-man who dies in his human nature.

To this perplexing question, John Gertsner provides keen insight. Gertsner responds to the question with no and yes . According to Gertsner, the man who shed his blood on the cross was a true man, but not a mere man. He was the fullness of the Godhead who was dying on the cross. And because of that, the human blood He shed was the blood of God (Acts 20:28) i. e. the blood of God who had no blood. So the man Jesus Christ shed the blood of God though God did not die, never will die and can not die.

Gertsner goes on to say that the community of attributes of the Godhead means that since the Son of God was one person with two natures, the different attributes of the two natures belonged to the one person. So it was that the divine persons could suffer and die because He, the Son, did it - not in His divine nature but in His human nature (emphasis added).

4. The Descent into Hell

The historic confession contained in the Apostles Creed states that He descended into hell , although the clause was not established until the fourth century which was probably added in order to combat docetic views of the person of Christ . In what sense, did the descent happen, spatially or psychologically, while He hung on the cross or after the crucifixion?

J. I. Packer points out that the Creed uses Peter s statement that Psalm 1:10 ( thou wilt not abandon my soul to Hades ) was a prophecy fulfilled in Christ s resurrection (Acts 2 2:27-31). In other words Hades was the place of the departed or the disembodied souls and this is what was meant in the Creed by Christ s descent after his crucifixion. This is why modern translations of the Creed read he descended to the dead. Therefore, according to Packer, Jesus entered Hades, not Gehenna which signifies the state of final retribution, indicating that he really died,and that it was from a genuine death, not a simulated one, that he rose. Packer s view here as best I can understand is similar to Charles Hodge who considered descent synonymous with Christ s death and burial. On the other hand, however, John Stott in our text The Cross of Christ states We may even dare to say that our sins sent Christ to hell - not to hell (hades, the abode of the dead) to which the Creed says he descended after death, but to hell (gehenna, the place of punishment) to which our sins condemned him before his body died. Stott, therefore, draws a distinction that appears more aligned with Calvin and the Puritans who interpreted descent psychologically in that Christ on the cross suffered in soul the wrath of God or hell. These distinctions made within the Reformed tradition are set within even broader differences in the church s understanding of the descent and even who benefited from. Reformers however do seem generally agreed in rejecting the medieval idea of the limbo of the Fathers in favor of the saints immediately entering God s presence. Luther however spoke of the descent of the whole Christ into hell, where he demolished hell and bound the devil. Calvin and the Reformers taught that Christ s descent into hell occurred on the cross as He received the judgment for sin and vicariously endured its torments. Calvin did however struggle with the order of the Confession. He saw the sequence as suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, descended into hell, dead and buried .

Gertsner addresses this issue again with a yes and no. God never descended into hell because being omnipresent he always is in hell as well as everywhere else. Gertsner says that what makes hell hell is not that devils and sinners are there but that God is there in his full wrath . Psalm 139:8, for instance, says though I make my bed in hell...Thou are there.

The Apostles Creed hell , Gertsner contends, is an imaginary place often called Hades, where Old Testament saints were supposed to have been waiting for Christ to descend and preach liberty to the captives and lead them to heaven. Gertsner contends that Christ never descended there because: