Question Queen

My son calls me the “Question Queen”.  It usually refers to my need for information about the details concerning what he is doing.  Nevertheless, as I contemplate scripture and what I have been taught, I find I have more questions than ever.  Did you ever have the feeling you were taught something that didn’t make sense?  For instance, I don’t understand how we got the notion that God the Father turned His back on Jesus when He was on the cross.  I have heard over and over that God is so holy He couldn’t bear to look at sin.  Wasn’t the cross His idea to start with?  Scripture says that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself (2 Cor. 5:19).  That word “God” is theos which the Blue Letter Bible defines as, “In the Sept. theos translates (with few exceptions) the Hebrew words Elohim and Jehovah, the former indicating His power and preeminence, the latter His unoriginated, immutable, eternal and self-sustained existence.”  That sounds like what we consider to be the Father.

Didn’t Jesus say He never did anything He didn’t see the Father doing?  What was Jesus seeing?  What part of the Father was laying down His life for mankind?  Certainly, the Father was laying down the life of His Son; the Son He was intertwined with, and could not be separated from in His essence.  He gave His Heart of Hearts; His Son, sacrificing Him as a Lamb for, but also AS mankind, releasing the world from the futile way of living passed on to us by our forefathers (1Peter 1:18-20).  

How can we say that the Father was not with Jesus right through to the end?  I guess I don’t believe the interpretation that when Jesus said, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?”, that He actually believed that God had turned away.  I think Jesus was taking on and voicing the cry of humanity that went all the way back to the Garden.  When Adam sinned, he was the one who turned away from God.  The enemy was only too willing to defile Adam with self-consciousness which resulted in Adam hiding from God.  God never hid from Adam when he sinned; He went after him.  But, when Adam hid, in an exaggerated consciousness of self, he felt forsaken.  It is easy to project our own perceptions on another and reinforce them until they become our reality.  Yes, there was a new reality for Adam, but God had planned for the possibility and eventuality of sin.  In His compassion and love, He offered Jesus as the sacrificial lamb before there was ever a world. So, why do we continue to think that the Father, that same God, would turn away from Jesus at the very moment He was fulfilling the plan that was hidden in the Heart of God all along?  It just doesn’t make sense. 

It’s like I am being asked to believe God pushed the “pause button” and fast forwarded through the climax of the movie; the part where He pulled off the impossible, with all the tension and drama and excitement, and tune back in after it was all over.  He is the Divine Script Writer.  He wrote the Book.  The Book says,” He became sin”.  He did not become a sinner, but the mystery was how He included us in Christ and became sin so that the whole creation could be released from decay.  It only makes God bigger to see with different eyes and question some of the things we have come to believe.  It is the only way for me to really appreciate how big God is; how magnanimous and majestic.  How wondrous is His Love that never fails and is always with us.  

How can I believe God will never leave me or forsake me in my personal hell, if I have in the background of my theology, a notion that God turned away from Jesus on the cross?  Instead, I see many scriptures that say God so LOVED the world.  I see God coming after and delivering again and again, from Genesis to Revelation.  We might get tired of delivering others, but I think it is part of the nature of God.  He is not like us.  He will keep coming after mankind until He Is satisfied with the results.  That is what the Holy Spirit still does today.  He is another way for God to be present in our situations, however painful or bad we have chosen to make them.  The Holy Spirit is the Gift we have been given.  He helps us believe just how present God is with each one of us all of the time.  He enters our hell and helps us believe there is a finished work that we can reconcile ourselves to that has delivered us from evil.  That is our hope.  That is our assurance.  That is our reality.