A Transcription of Tim Keller's "The Crucifixion"

Transcription:

Let’s just meditate on one verse in this passage, verse 46, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “My God, my god why hast thou forsaken me?” Bracket that and let’s just look into that and I want you to see what you can learn from, let’s notice the cry, the word “why”, the word “my”, and the question taken as the whole, because the cry points to the fact of Jesus death and the “why” points to the reason for his death and the word “my” actually points to the accomplishments of His death and the question taken as a whole shows us something about why He did it, it is within Himself, His motive.

First, just notice, “about the ninth hour” which is three P.M., “Jesus cried out a loud voice”. It’s a word that could mean, it could be translated “scream” or even “shriek”. I think actually the translators just couldn’t go quiet all the way. Any first time reader reading this would immediately feel that Jesus had cracked. Here He is saying to God, “you’ve abandoned me, you failed me”. So it, Jesus seems to be cracking, He’s giving up, He’s saying “God, you failed me” and it’s interesting that scholars, historians and scholars who actually are suspicious of the bible, that is to say that they feel like in the gospel accounts there might be legendary material you can’t trust everything in the bible. Even the most skeptical scholars say, this must’ve happened. Do you know why they say that? Because if you think about, did something make this up? What they’ll always say is, “if you were, no account written for promotional purposes, no account for promotional purposes would put your religion's founder in this place with these words in his, these last words, in his mouth, so despondent, so unheroic, so hopeless.” You read the accounts of end of Buddha’s life or Muhammad's life or anybody or any other figure, founder and they are always dying in peace with wise and heroic words, if you were making this up, you’re making up a piece of literature about trying to promote a faith, you never write this down and therefore even the skeptic says, “this must’ve happened, or wouldn’t be reading it.” And of course it’s in Aramaic even though the both Matthew and Mark who record this cry from the cross, writing to Greek speakers, so there’s no need to write what He said in Aramaic and the reason they write it in Aramaic is because this is eyewitness memory. People remembered. They will never forget that cry. I don’t want you to ever forget that cry, it happened. He died on the cross. So first of all the cry points to the fact of Jesus’ death.

Secondly though, the word “why?” starts moving us toward the reason, “why did God forsake Jesus?” Here’s a question, “why did God forsake Jesus on the cross.” The beginning of the answer is to realize that what Jesus is saying here is, is a bible verse, He is quoting Psalms 22 verse 1. We constantly forget that. He cried it, He screamed it but He was quoting a bible verse which actually shows right off the bat that He did know what was going on. He did know what was happening. But this is the beginning of Psalm 22 and this is the Psalm of David and this is one of the most puzzling, even shocking Psalms of the whole Psalter. Why? Well, as you all know that King David wrote a lot of the Psalms and the Psalms very often reflected various times of his life and they were terrible times of his life. So there is a, you know there’s a Psalms, Psalm 51 that says after his son died, this is what he wrote in after this happened, this is what he wrote and after this happened, this is what he wrote. When did Psalm 22 ever happened to David, listen, listen. Let me read you an excerpts from Psalm 22 which Jesus is crying out, which he’s quoting. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me, all who see me mock me, they hurl insults, shaking their heads, “he trusts in the Lord, let the Lord rescue him”, strong bulls encircle me, roaring lions open their mouths wide against me. A pack of villains encircle me. They pierced my hands and my feet. I am poured out like water and all my bones are out joint. You lay me in the dust of death. People stare and gloat over me. They divided my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing.” When did that ever happened to David? When did anybody ever pierce his hands and his feet? When were there people surrounding him but the commentators say, this is not describing an illness. Psalm 20 is not describing, it’s not even describing some kind of general persecution, you know what it’s describing? It’s an execution. It’s an execution. Did that ever happened to David? No of course not. And Jesus therefore, by crying this out, is saying by the Holy Spirit David was pointing to me. I am being executed. Judgment is coming down on me. See, execution is not just a tragic death, it’s a punishment and then the other thing we need to see, is the darkness. From the sixth hour, until the ninth hour, darkness came over all the land. Anybody who reads the Old Testament especially knows what darkness means, when God sends darkness. Listen Amos chapter 8, “in that day declares the Lord, I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth to broad in broad daylight. At noon I will make the sun go down. It will be a time like the morning for an only son.” You know the hymn that goes, “well might the sun in darkness hide shut his glory in. When Christ the mighty maker died for man the creature sin.” Darkness means God’s judgment and when it says it’s over all the land, it’s sign of the fact that God’s judgment is over the whole human race and punishment is deserved and it’s gotta come down somewhere. Now let me say, this is point two, you can’t come to grips with or understand why God forsake Jesus, you can’t understand the cross unless you understand that all human beings stand guilty before God and deserving judgment and punishment. Now, that’s a controversial statement I know and this is just a meditation on this little sentence as importance as it is. I only have time for a couple of sketchy thoughts. Modern people resist this and here’s one of the reasons why modern people resist it. All of our lives, we’re told, don’t let other people make you feel guilty. Guilt is a bad thing, it shows that you’re letting other people make you feel guilty, you have to decide  what is right or wrong for you. You have to decide that. You determine what’s right or wrong for you and then you live the way you want to live and you don’t let anybody else make you feel guilty. You know after World War II, there was a period there that was called WH Auden called it “The Age of Anxiety” and everybody was wracked with guilt and everything was into a psychoanalysis to deal with their repressed guilt and it was a theme of plays, it was a theme of books, it was a theme of everything. Nobody talks about our current culture as people wracked with guilt. Everybody talks about how everybody does out in the open, everybody is just as shameless and there’s no, everybody just says, this is the way it is, we don’t feel guilty, we got no problem with guilt as a culture and that is a problem because I will grant, oh of course I will grant, that inordinate guilt feelings are pathological but I would like you to consider that no guilt feelings are even more pathological and you know why? Andrew Delbanco, public intellectual appear at Columbia University, secular man, terrific cultural analyst wrote a book some years ago on American Culture and in the book, he analyzes a little section out of Walker Percy’s novel, Love in the Ruins. Walker Percy’s, Love in the Ruins. There’s one point which Delbanco, he quotes it in this analysis he’s doing of our culture and in the novel, there is a psychiatrist named Max and Max thinks that the essence of being enlightened person is that you live without guilt. You do what you want to do and you don’t feel guilty about it. But he’s got this client named Tom whose just had an affair and is very worried and Max is having trouble understanding Tom and Max says, he says psychiatrist says, “well Tom, I don’t quite understand what worries you about the affair if you don’t feel guilty” and Tom says “that is what’s worrying me, I don’t feel guilty”, so Max comes back and says, “well what I don’t see is, if there’s no guilt after your affair, what’s your problem?” and Tom says, “it means that you don’t have life in you.” Then Andrew Delbanco comments, he’s doing cultural analysis and Andrew Delbanco says, “what the psychiatrist don’t understand is that the guilt Tom no longer feels had been his last reassurance that there existed something in the world that transcended him.” This is brilliant, here’s what Delbanco was trying to say, if you say nothing should make me feel guilty, I have to decide what is right or wrong for me, what you mean then there’s nothing more important than you and your feelings and your conscience and your needs and your intuitions and your consciousness, that’s all that matters. There’s nothing more important than you, there’s nothing that you have to sacrifice and serve and feel guilty if you’re not doing, no, no, no, nothing’s more important than you. Nothing transcends you, in other words, if there’s no guilt there’s no hope because you’ve got nothing to live for, nothing to die for. If there’s no guilt, there’s no hope and Delbanco says that’s what we are, right now. People don’t feel guilty in our culture, people are shameless and people are unbelievably hopeless and pessimistic about the future. See what the bible says is there is truth, there is right, there is hope and therefore there’s guilt. There is something more important than you. It’s God, you’re supposed to love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind because he gave you everything. You’re supposed to love your neighbor as yourself and we’re not living up and therefore, because we’ve got something to live for, because there’s hope, because there’s truth, because there’s right, there’s guilt. And the dark clouds of God’s judgement lie over the whole land. There should be an execution, there should be punishment. That’s why Jesus was forsaken because the punishment was coming down on Him.

Now thirdly, I want to look at the little word, “my” because if you look at the word “my,” he says “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” We really come into the holy of holies and we get to learn there’s two ways in which Christ accomplished your salvation. Two ways. The little word “my” points to His infinite sufferings and to His perfect obedience. His infinite sufferings and His perfect obedience. First, His infinite sufferings. “My God, my God.” Do you notice what He is not saying? He is not saying, “my head, my head”, “my hands, my hands”, “my feet, my feet”, “my side, my side”. There’s thorns in His heads, there was a spear in His side, there’s nails in his hands and feet, they pierced His hands and feet. He’s not complaining about that. He’s not screeching about it. Nor is he saying, “my friends, my friends, you’ve all abandoned me.” He’s not talking about that either. The physical suffering is not His problem and the relational isn’t His problem. You know up to know even the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus has been rough, how do I say it, roughly speaking, he’s been really pretty, pretty collected and pretty poised, you know. “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, put down your sword, put your sword back. Those who live by the sword die by the sword.” “What thou doest, do quickly.” You say I’m a King, you know, up until now even under incredible pressure, physical suffering, relational rejection, He’s been pretty poised but now he is shrieking. Why? What’s happening? Something beyond all of that, suffering that He is experiencing that makes all the physical and all the other suffering like a flea bite in by comparison. What is it? There is no greater agony than to lose love. You know that. Psychiatrist, counselors know that. There is no greater agony than a love that really matters to you, you lose it, it’s gone, nothing. And of course depending on how long and deep that love was, the more agony it is as you know if acquaintance says, I never want to see you again, that’s bad but if a good friend says I never want to see you again that hurts worse. If your child or your sibling or your parents say I never want to see you again that hurts way worse than if your spouse never want to see you again, that hurts the worst of all. A Lot of you been through those experiences and you know, it destroys your heart, it destroys your body, it destroys your, it destroys! But what about this? The Father and the Son, you know there’s a place, John 1:18, where it says the son was in the bosom of the Father for all eternity. We are not talking here about bodies. You know it’s one thing to have actually been together with someone physically united to them, physically, you know, your spouse. The Father and the Son souls were wrapped up in one another. And not just for forty years or fifty years or twenty years or sixty years but for all eternity! And that’s what Jesus lost. The shriek, the cry. You know something about the agony of loss of love. This is nothing compared to that. The love that the Father and the Son had makes the greatest marriage in the history of the world look like a doo drop compared to the Atlantic Ocean. It has to be! It has to be! He was experiencing eternal suffering. Because He was, what is the punishment? What is the punishment? 2 Thessalonians, the punishment, the right and just punishment if we turn away from God, if we don’t love Him like we should is exclusion. It’s called Hell. You’re just sent away from the thing you most need. We are built for the presence of God just like a flower needs the sun and we are sent away forever. And Jesus Christ was not just taking everything, wasn’t just taking that, but He was taking it for all of us. What He was experiencing on the cross was like zillions of eternal hells all compressed and laid on Him at once. See how could that be if you know what it’s like to lose love? And you know how agonizing it is, just take that up to about twenty trillion and then beyond. The infinity of his sufferings. He’s saying “you, you, I’ve lost you, my God!” “My” is intimate. If you may hear me, you may not know anything about me but if you hear me say “my Kathy” or “my David” or something like that you’ll say “that must be his children or his wife” or something because especially a guy doesn’t say “my something” unless you're talking about intimacy. “My God, I’ve lost My God.” There you look into the infinity of his sufferings. You know Robert Murray M’Cheyne, a Scottish minister preached on this years ago and at one place he says. This is what he says, he says “He was without God, He was as if He had no God. All that God had been to Him before was taken from Him. He had the feeling of the condemned. He heard as when the judge says “depart from me you accursed who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power.” He felt that God had said the same thing, ah, this is the hell in which Christ suffered, I feel, this is suddenly what the minister is saying, “I feel like a little child casting a stone into some deep ravine in the mountainside and listening to hear it fall but listening on and on and on, in vain it’s too deep.” Don’t you? But on the other hand I want you to see that “My God, my God” doesn’t just mean the loss of love and the infinite sufferings. It also means His perfect obedience. This is the other side of what He’s doing on the cross. Listen this is going to be a little fast theology lesson but we all need it. When Jesus Christ says “My God” He’s using the covenant, the covenant language because God says in the Old Testament, if you enter into a covenant relationship with me, a saving relationship with me, I will be my God and you will be my people. He gives us the right to call Him my God, it’s a covenant name. It means, you’re in a relationship with me. Now every person in the history of the world up to now and since can be assured to this: if you give yourself to God, God will be with you. But when Jesus Christ obeyed God, He was abandoned! Everybody else in the history of the world, God says, obey me and I’ll be with you, obey me and I’ll bless you and to Jesus Christ, He obeyed God and He was abandoned, He obeyed God and he was cursed! And yet in the midst of all that, He’s obeying anyway. My God! He’s loving God, He’s holding onto the covenant in spite of what He’s going through nobody's ever gone through anything like this but He is. You know in Moby Dick. Ahab hates Moby Dick and even as he’s going down what he says, you know even when I’m about to die, even if I’m being dragged down into my drowning watery death, from hell’s heart he says “I’ll stabbeth thee.” “From hell’s heart I’ll stabbeth thee.” That’s a great line but it’s rhetoric because you know Ahab wasn’t going to hell, I mean he was going down into the ocean and it was rhetoric but Jesus was in hell. He really was in Hell’s heart. But you know what he says? From hell’s heart I love you still. Though you slay me yet I will praise you. That is perfect obedience. That is the most perfect obedience ever. Now do you understand what we mean that the gospel is not one form of substitution but two, not one form of imputation but two. I told you that this was going to be a theology lesson, it’s only ninety seconds to go. When the bible says, “God made Him sin who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him,” it’s saying not only that God puts our sins on Him so He dies the death we should’ve died but we are also told, God puts his righteousness on us so that because He lived the life that we should’ve lived. He died the death we should’ve died and lived the life that we should’ve lived. So it’s not just that God pardons you and says “now you get out of jail free,” He puts the congretional medal of honor on you and treats you as if you done everything Jesus ever done. That idea of being clothed in the righteousness of Christ is a big abstraction for most people including me until I see this. And now I realize, “you mean God is actually treating me, if I believe in Jesus Christ, God treats me as if I’ve done everything Jesus ever done.” Look at the radiance of this obedience, what does He deserve? There’s this one, one of the few cop shows, an American cop shows that Kathy and I like is NCIS it’s a naval and marine security cops, there’s this one, it’s old now but there’s this one story, one episode, in which a broken down old eighty year old man, a vet is being arrested by these great big snarling you know, navy MPs but it turns out because years before on Hiroshima he had won the congregational medal of honor and he always wore it underneath all of his suite and so he’s standing over him snarling, ready to take him in and somebody reaches over and pulls his tie aside and theres the congretional medal of honor, what do you think those guys do? What do those great big guys do, twice his size? They salute. They snap to attention in front of this little broken man. What are they saluting? They are saluting the accomplishment, they are saluting the medal, they are saluting what it represents. You are not just forgiven. Jesus didn’t just die the death you should’ve died. He didn’t just go through infinite sufferings. He also perfectly obeyed in your place so that when you believe His righteousness is put on you, that is to say all those medals that Jesus Christ earned in this battle are on your chest and all the world salutes you. “My God” shows us the infinity of his sufferings and the perfection of his obedience and therefore the amazing accomplishment of the Cross. Now lastly let’s stand back and just ask this question, let’s look at the whole question. Why did Jesus do it? Why did He do it? Why did he let God forsake Him? Why did he put himself in a position where all this could happen? I think probably the right answer but it’s totally inadequate, what? The right answer which is totally inadquate is Jesus Christ was doing it for the Glory of God that’s why He did it, He did it to glorify His Father! And of course that’s right but the reason it’s inadequate is, in heaven he was already glorifying His Father fine. He did not have to come to Earth to glorify His Father. Why did He come? What did He have, what did He get by coming to Earth that He didn’t have before? Us. Why did he left all this happen to Him? Why did he go into the agony voluntarily, He quotes a bible verse here, He knows what's going on, He’s doing it voluntarily. “No man takes my life from me, I lay it down from my own accord.” Why did He do it? From the broken bread and the poured out cup, you can almost hear the words, “my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.” And now you know the answer, why did He do it? For you. Or you can say it. For me. But you have to believe. You have to willing to admit that it was a punishment, it was an execution, the clouds were over us and yet He took it. This is a Holy Week, you have the whole week to think about this and we’ll continue right now as we participate on the Lord’s supper. Let’s pray.