How Can God Abandon God

How Can God Abandon God

Matthew 27:45-46

Intro. My introduction to the sermon is different this morning than how I usually start a sermon. I usually try to start with some humor that leads into the sermon or with a great story that tries to illustrate the main theme of the message.

. I am not going to do that this morning because the scripture that we are going to look at this morning is so hard to understand. How could God abandon God.

. I can’t understand this in my feeble human mind.

. God is love isn’t He?

. How can love abandon someone?

. The 16th century theologian and father of Protestantism Martin Luther took leave of everyone and went off by himself to study and pray and try to understand this very concept. He sat for days pondering this question. Finally, someone heard him say “God forsaking God . . . no one can understand that” and he gave up his quest and went back to his other duties.

. C.H. Spurgeon is considered one of the great preachers of the 19th century preached a sermon on this passage and said, “I think I can understand the words, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" as they are written by David in the 22nd Psalm; but the same words, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" when uttered by Jesus on the cross, I cannot comprehend, so I shall not pretend to be able to explain them.”

. We read in the Bible about the prodigal son in Luke 15:11-31 in how that no matter what we do, God will always welcome us back.

. He will never forsake us.

. I think about my family. My wife and my sons. I can’t imagine them ever doing anything that would cause me to abandon them or forsake them.

. That’s exactly what is going on in our scripture this morning.

. I believe and we believe that Jesus was and is God.

. As Baptists we believe in the Trinity of God. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

. So again ask you how can God abandon God?

. While I certainly don’t consider myself a great theologian or a great preacher.

. If I ever even remotely consider myself a good preacher, my wife humbles me by reminding me that I am competent at best.

. I think that is one of the main jobs of the preachers wife. When we talk to people after the sermon and they tell us how great the sermon was and how our message had spoken directly to their heart . When we get in our vehicle and are on the way home and we tell our wives how the congregation had responded to our message and our head is almost too big to stay in the car with us, she will look at me and say it would have been a better sermon if you had done this and that if anyone that was touched by the sermon it had to be God, not me.

. Pastors wives have a way of keeping us humble.

. I believe though that if we look closely we can answer the question of why God abandoned God. I don’t know how God did this but we can understand why.

. Last week we looked at the three crosses on Calvary and the interaction of Jesus with the other two men that were crucified with Him.

. We looked at the first two sayings from the cross. “Father forgive them because they don’t know what they are doing” and “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”

. Today we look at the third saying.

. Jesus had been beaten, nails driven through His hands and feet He had been crucified at 9am and He had hung on that cross for three hours listening to all the mocking and cursing and scoffing and then at 12:00 something happened. This is where our scripture starts.

. Matthew 27:45-46:

. At noon, darkness fell across the whole land until three o’clock.46At about three o’clock, Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” which means “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

. Why did God abandon God?

. There are at least three reasons why.

. The first is because of us. Because of man. We caused God to abandon Jesus.

. We talked last week about choices and how the three people on the crosses were there because of choices that they made.

. Well God had to abandon himself because of the choice that man made at the beginning of time.

. When we chose to rebel, we set a course that brought Jesus to this exact moment in time.