“My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?”

How would it change me to not only believe that God created me but that He CHOSE to create me, that He could’ve chosen NOT TO, that God ENTHUSIASTICALLY decided to make me, knowing in advance all the bad things I would do and all the good things I would fail to do, that God didn’t crank me out in a heavenly factory/assembly line but rather made me by His own hand, hand-made, knitting me together in my mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13)?

I was talking with my 5 year old son recently and I said, “Did you know that if God lined up all the young boys in the world and let me choose which one would be my son, that I would choose you!?”

My son smiled, gave me a hug, and quickly said, “Papa…can I watch something on t.v.?” 🙂

As he scampered off, a thought hit me: that’s how God feels about ME! I backed away from this thought in my mind…no way. He can’t love me that much, can He? In a sea of 7 BILLION humans, does God love ME? Has He really chosen ME? (That’s what He says NINE times in the New Testament; 1 Peter 2:9) Yes! He literally chose ME to be one of His children–He created me to know Him as my Heavenly Daddy! And He chooses you too–He has said YES to you and desires you to say YES to Him. Wow! I love my son SO MUCH…and yet I am a broken sinner. HOW MUCH MORE does God–Who is perfect and Whose character is love itself–love ME, love YOU!?!?!

And yet this is hard to imagine, and that is why the Apostle Paul prays for us to have POWER–not power necessarily to do good deeds for God but power to UNDERSTAND how much God loves us!!! (Ephesians 3:17-19) And the more we understand how much God loves us the more we will DO the good deeds He has prepared for us to do!!! The more a pitcher of juice is filled up, the more it is able to pour out into the empty glasses of the thirsty masses…

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So let’s pray right now, asking God for such power, soaking in the fact that God ENTHUSIASTICALLY CHOSE to create us, that God ENTHUSIASTICALLY CHOOSES those who are His children to be in His family, and that He continues to ENTHUSIASTICALLY CHOOSE us to know Him, to love Him, and to be loved by Him…

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Matthew 27:45–56 (please click HERE to read this passage online)

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Jesus allowed Himself to be convicted of OUR crimes; He allowed Himself to be found GUILTY in our place; when each of us is accused of the crimes/sins that we have committed, Jesus stands up and says, “I did them. I did those terrible things.” He doesn’t just take our punishment, He takes our guilt/shame and becomes guilty Himself. Wow. And so our GUILT was placed on Jesus, the bricks of blame, the cinder blocks of shame…the guilt of EVERY HUMAN who has ever lived and who ever will live was un-piled off our imperfect souls and piled on His perfect soul, every bad thing we have ever done and every good thing we have failed to do (Isaiah 53:6).

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Not only that, but the Bible tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:21 that Jesus literally BECAME sin for us so that we could BECOME goodness for God the Father…I’ve been part of some lopsided food-trades at lunch in elementary school but this is amazing–Jesus took our moldy prunes and gave us His fresh Snickers bar (KING size, by the way!)…He didn’t just wear our guilt like an itchy wool sweater on bare skin but took our guilt into Himself like an invasive poison so that we could not just wear His purity on the outside like a cashmere sweater on a dirty hog but could literally have Him live INSIDE OF US through His Holy Spirit…staggering!

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But it wasn’t just enough for Jesus to have our sins, our filth, our shame placed on Him; He also then had to be punished, to receive the consequences that we and our sins deserve.

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We see this in courts of law: rendering a verdict is part of the process, but it is not the end of the process. When a person is found guilty, they aren’t then set free to go and live their life as they please! (“Now don’t do THAT again!”) They are then sentenced to a particular punishment depending on their crimes. So it wasn’t enough that Jesus was declared guilty in our place; He also had to be punished in our place as well. And punished He was…no slap on the wrist for Jesus, but rather nails IN the wrist…

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BUT WHY!? Why couldn’t God the Father just have been like, “I’m GOD–I can do whatever I want! And I WANT to spare my only Son Jesus from the cross, I DON’T want Him to suffer, so I’m throwing down my God trump card, declaring blackjack, and walking away from this table with my Son AND all the people who will say YES to Him. WHO’s GONNA STOP ME!?”

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Because while God is full of love, mercy and grace, He is also FAIR, JUST and TRUE. Since God’s laws/rules are His character–Who He is–He can no more break one of His rules than you can genetically stop being you, than you can on a chromosomal level stop being a human being, a homo sapien. God CAN do anything, but not really…He cannot sin, and NOT punishing Jesus for our sins would in itself be a sin.

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What would you do if the Supreme Court of the United States decided to be loving, merciful and full of grace and declared that all prisoners in the United States would be released today from their prisons? Even more, what would you think if one or more of those prisoners had killed one of your loved ones? You would cry “Foul!,” it would be unfair/unjust and you would be right to be outraged. Those judges would be put in jail themselves…such an act might appear to be loving but it is not because it is not just…

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But you might say, “What about Presidents or Governors who grant clemency or pardons? Why couldn’t God just do that to our sins and pardon us WITHOUT Jesus having to suffer on the cross the way He did?”

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Great question! Because sin is WAY WORSE than we imagine it to be. No President or Governor has pardoned a serial killer; John Wayne Gacy, Jeffery Dahmer, Ted Bundy, none of those killers was pardoned, and for good reason: their crimes were of a horrific nature.

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And so it is with sin–we often think of our sins as “mistakes,” the spiritual equivalent of accidentally bumping into someone in line at the movie theater. But the Bible teaches us that our sins are attempts at blowing the brains out of the Person in charge of passing out tickets at the movie theater, our sin is no less than cosmic treason against God and a feeble but defiant assassination attempt against Him and His right to be in control of our lives:

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The Mona Lisa. I looked up the dollar value of the Mona Lisa. The French government has declared it “priceless”–they would not sell it for $50 Billion. It simply cannot be purchased–it is THAT valuable. So imagine what would happen if you decided to paint a mustache on Mona’s face–just want to touch it up a bit and improve it! You would be tackled and handcuffed before you had the cap off your Sharpie! And if you actually DID manage to deface the painting? Well the French gov’t just might dust off one of their guillotines…

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But since God’s laws are an extension of His character–God’s rules are literally WHAT GOD DOES and HOW HE ACTS every day–when we sin we are defacing HIM, we are spray-painting graffiti over His character, and God is WAY MORE VALUABLE than the Mona Lisa…

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What We REALLY say to God when we sin: God’s laws–HIS CHARACTER–give us a picture of how God wants life to be. And so all sin–ANY sin–is us saying to God, “I’ve got this. This is how I want life to be! I’m in charge of my life and for this moment, hour, day, week, month, year, decade or lifetime, I’m going to do what I want to do EVEN IF You don’t want me to do it.”

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In other words, each time we sin we are in a temporary/earthly sense overturning God’s laws and re-writing the laws to be what we want them to be (that’s why in an earthly sense we say that some who breaks the law has “taken the law into their own hands”). We are pushing God off the throne of our lives and sitting in the place of control that is for Him alone. We are impeaching Him–worse, assassinating Him–from being God and are electing ourselves to fill that role. What would happen to you if you went into the Oval Office, pushed the President out of his chair, and tried to re-write the laws you disagreed with? Though we can’t kick God out of the “Oval Office of the Universe,” we CAN kick Him out of the “Oval Office of our individual lives.”

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And while we of course can’t kill God, we can’t really de-throne God, we can do the next worse thing: when we sin we pretend He is not there, whether for a moment, hour, day, week, month, year, decade or lifetime, we act AS IF He is dead. We try to go on living without Him. This is why we don’t like it when family, friends, or strangers call us out for our sins–we don’t want to HEAR THAT NOISE because maybe, just maybe, it is God speaking to our souls through them and reminding us that HE ISN’T DEAD, that HE ALONE is God, and that our sinful decisions carry consequences (and by the way, that’s why I think many of us don’t read the Bible much–it reads us back and will lovingly but clearly point out our sins). And if we never talk to a family member or friend again (if we ignore them and pretend they aren’t there), haven’t we kind of killed them as far as our life is concerned? Many of us would rather have someone yell at us than ignore us, would rather have someone raise their voice at us than to walk by us and pretend we don’t exist. Well this is what we do to God when we sin…

…and THAT is why God couldn’t just “wave His wand” and “pardon” our sin without Jesus–or ourselves–being punished for our sins.

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Hebrews 9:22: “Without the shedding of blood there can be no forgiveness.”

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SOMEONE has to pay for our sins…either us, or Jesus. And Jesus would much rather HE pay for our sins…amazing…

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So then why did Jesus TWICE ask the question, “My God, my God, why have You  forsaken me?” Why would God abandon His only Son Jesus? Why was the cross so terrible, so messy, so brutal? Why couldn’t God just give His Son a simple/painless “lethal injection”?

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Because the more terrible the disease the more terrible the cure. A rash might be cured by gently applying ointment for a few days; certain sicknesses might be cured with simple pills or the slight pinch of an injection. But stage 4 cancer cannot be cured so neatly. It requires a ravaging of the human body through surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. This is NOT because the doctors WANT to cause the cancer patient to suffer; it’s because cancer is so terrible that its cure needs to also be terrible to wipe it out. Someone breaking into your house to kill you isn’t going to be driven away with a squirt gun…Sin is NOT just a little cold…it is spiritual stage 4 cancer that will separate us from God for all eternity if we don’t accept Jesus’ cure.

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Because while God has been patient with our sins for thousands of years, eventually God will throw sin out of His presence forever. Heaven will be a perfectly safe place because it will have not even the slightest microbe of sin. God will eventually abandon sin and separate it from Himself and His children forever, just as you would ruthlessly separate yourself and your children from the Ebola virus if you knew it was in your house. And so God the Father abandoned Jesus to the cross and the grave so that we don’t have to be!

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I know this is A LOT to take in! But this message this morning is not meant to discourage or depress but rather to deepen our understanding of how much God loves us and how far He was willing to go and how much He was willing to suffer to SHOW us how much He loves us!

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God the Father would have NEVER put His Son–and really Himself!–through such punishment if it weren’t absolutely necessary for us to be forgiven/cured. Jesus Himself even asked the Father to accomplish His purpose in another way if it were possible. So if it is still confusing, if it still seems unfair, may God help us to trust that His cure was only terrible because our disease is terrible…

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If you have said YES to Jesus‘ free cure/forgiveness for your sins, then hopefully this message will help us to praise Him even more deeply for His amazing love!

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If you haven’t yet said YES to Jesus’ free cure/forgiveness for your sins, then hopefully this message will bring us one step close to doing so. We can do so by simply saying one word to Jesus–YES!

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Closing Challenge

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Academically, it is wrong and illegal to copy someone else’s answers, it is unethical to get someone smarter than you to take your tests/exams for you–if caught it will get you kicked out of school!

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But spiritually, it not only ISN’T wrong, but it is the ONLY way to graduate to heaven!

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The Bible says that the only way we can be forgive (cured!) of our sins is to accept Jesus’ perfection; that is, for us by faith to give Jesus our “Spiritual F” and by faith to accept His “Spiritual A+.” He ACED the tests of life by experiencing EVERY temptation we face but never sinning, and He FREELY offers us HIS perfect GPA so that we can be forgiven, reborn, adopted into God’s family, and guaranteed an eternal life with Him in heaven forever that begins RIGHT NOW on earth! AMAZING!

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Many of us are encouraged by God’s promise that He will NEVER abandon us, will never forsake us, that we will never ever actually be alone…WHAT A PROMISE!

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How remarkable, then, to realize that Jesus Himself is actually the only Person to ever be truly alone…Jesus, Who has existed for all eternity in a perfect/intimate relationship with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, allowed Himself to be abandoned, forsaken, and alone so that we don’t have to be. That’s the answer to Jesus question: “My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?” So that we don’t have to be…:)

“Amazing love, how can it be? That You my King would die for me?
Amazing love, I know it’s true, and it’s my joy to honor You, in all I do, I honor You…”

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May we go out today, this week, and the rest of our earthly lives and pass out Jesus’ amazing love to all we meet…