“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)
“When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!” (Matthew 27:54)
“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)
Jesus had lived the perfect life. He had denied himself at every moment, juncture, and decision in life. In total and complete obedience and perfection he triumphed over every sin and temptation. Jesus demonstrated that he had deserved both the life he’d been given and the one to come.
And yet, here on the cross, he is given everything he did not deserve.
Robbed of his rightful reward of adoration, worship, riches, power, esteem, and the throne of David, Jesus of Nazareth dies in ignominious, unbearable agony and unspeakable shame. Naked, exposed, beaten, bloodied, and slowly suffocating to death on the splintery cross he has just carried to Golgotha, he is being executed for a capital crime he never committed.
Indeed, he is willfully enduring everything he did not deserve and what we did.
He will likewise freely give away everything he deserved to those who could never earn it.
This gets to the heart of what Jesus is accomplishing in his life and death: he is willingly and fully taking upon himself all curses of the law and is likewise collecting every blessing that the law bestowed upon those who followed it. In this one God-man, the entire law’s blessings and curses are being focused – and in the sundering pain of every past, present, and future sin, the God-man cries out:
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1) Jesus cries out as he receives the punishment he never deserved. And yet, the nearness of his Father’s presence reassures him in the final moments: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46)
It is as if the very Triune God is both nearer than ever (Luke 23:46) and further than it has ever been (Matthew 27:46). Even as the fully mortal, fully divine Jesus suffers a pain threatening to unglue him, so too does the Trinity itself bear the weighty cost of God’s unassailable will to take our place. Both Father and Spirit are fully present and attentive to the Son’s cries – all of history hinges on this moment. The crux of God’s eternal purposes is being staked into the finished work of Jesus of Nazareth, just as he yells out in a final gasp:
“It is finished!” (John 19:30)
