“From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land. About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”–which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
(Matthew 27:45-46)

Lent 29

• It didn’t get worse than this.
  • For the very first time in His existence – both as Divine and human – Jesus was separated from God.
  • The darkness that came over the land would have been as nothing compared to that which had appeared within Him.
  • Such was the effect upon Jesus that it tore this cry from the very depths of His spirit.
  • Jesus had taken our sin upon Himself.
    • “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)
• It was our sin that came between God and Jesus
  • It brought about this terrible separation.
  • As ‘the wages of sin is death’ so sin brought death to their intimacy and consequently death to the Jesus who was fully man as well.
  • In terms of His own illustration the branch had been cut off from the Vine – to be thrown into the fire and burned.
  • Jesus experienced the deepest and blackest spiritual hell so that we would not have to.
• Steadily, and seemingly without end, the sin and sin guilt would have poured upon Him.
  • The sin of Adam and Eve, of Cain, of the people of the flood, of the bondage in Egypt and the unfaithful years in the desert,
  • the sin of David and Bathsheba, the repeated idolatries and adulteries of God’s chosen people,
  • the sin of the Great Wars of the 20^th century, the Holocaust, the genocides, the apartheids,
  • the slaughters and merciless killings in Africa and the Middle East
  • the abortions, the abused, trafficked and neglected children and women
  • and all the other sin and sins of the countless individuals from the beginning to the end, and of all the nations and even the churches as well.
  • My sins, your sins of yesterday, today and tomorrow
  • See them as they are poured into Him in an endless stream
  • He would have sunk beneath the weight of sin without number or end, and been spiritually suffocated by the rising tide of thick and impenetrable darkness.
• Alone, lonely and desolate, Jesus hung there.
  • Lacerated within and without,
  • flooded with darkness,
  • pinned to the Cross not by nails but by agonising love,
• He would no longer be aware of the people around Him
  • He had moved into another world
  • An unseen world
  • Where He fought the greatest of all battles –
    • between darkness and light,
    • between love and sin,
    • between law and grace,
    • between holiness and evil,
  • Jesus hung determinedly on – to set us free.

There was no other good enough
To pay the price of sin;
He only could unlock the gate
Of heaven, and let us in.
(C.F.Alexander)

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