My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning? – Psalm 22:1

Today’s Scripture Reading (February 15, 2013): Psalm 22

We all go through the “dark nights” of the soul and they are not the fun times of our lives. The problem with our “dark nights” is that our pain is increased to the point where the pain is all we see – and all we feel. During my dark nights I have felt very alone even when that was not really true. But the pain eclipsed the friends and family that had gathered around me to help. I may not have been alone – but I felt that I was.

David writes these words, “My God why have you forsaken me.” And for generations we have read these words and wondered what they meant. Did God really forsake David? And the reality is that we know the story. We know the way that David had sinned and yet God had never left him. In the depths of his sin, God prodded his child – he was with David convicting him of sin and bringing him back to himself. God never left David, but in the midst of the “dark nights” that David had experienced – especially at the death of some of his children – it may be that David pain was so great that he was simply unable to feel God’s presence.

As Christians, David’s words carry an extra meaning because they were quoted by Jesus - and not just quoted, but these words were spoken by Jesus during his ordeal on the cross. The words have become part of the last words corpus of Christ. And ever since Jesus quoted the words from Psalm 22, Christians have discussed the reasons why. For some, Jesus was just quoting a Messianic prophecy. By saying the words, he was reminding everyone who heard his voice of all of the prophecies that had been fulfilled. But a more popular reason was that for a moment, Jesus took physically all of the sin in the world on his shoulders. At that moment, Jesus sin was so great that his Father had no choice but to turn his back on that sin – and on his son. God had actually forsaken Jesus.

It is the more popular response, but I admit that it does not make sense to me. The question that I struggle with is why would a God who had a plan to defeat sin turn his back on his own son at the moment that the plan had become a reality? Why would a God that had worked so hard to convict David and others, including us, of our sin – who loves us in spite of our sin, leave his own son at this crucial moment.

For me, maybe at better explanation is that if Jesus was really fully human, than at this moment he would have been full of pain – he would be experiencing a dark night of the soul. And at that moment, God could have been standing right beside his son – embracing him like he maybe he never had before, but Jesus could not feel the embrace through his pain. And in that, he was no different than any one of us. We are not abandoned in our “dark nights” – our pain just keeps us from feeling the Father’s presence.    

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Psalm 24

Note: The VantagePoint Community Church (Edmonton) Sermon "Be Rich" from the series "Little is Much" is now available on the VantagePoint Website. You can find it here.