My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?
Mark 15:33-39
Rev. Stephen E. Farish


Mark 15:33-39 reports the supreme moment of all redemptive history, when Jesus Christ the Son of God on the cross bore the sins of sinners and thereby satisfied the righteous wrath of God the Father against those sins. However, we naturally ask what in the world was happening in the spiritual realms when Jesus uttered the last words we would expect to hear from the mouth of the Son of God: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The answer to this question is that God in that moment, out of his immense and steadfast love, was delivering his people from his eternal judgment through the sin-bearing and wrath-bearing sacrifice of Jesus the Son of God on the cross. And the equally glorious reality is that God, through the cross, was not only delivering sinners from his wrath, but he was delivering us to nothing less than to himself!

A. Three words of caution concerning our understanding of Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross
1. A caution from the doctrine of the Trinity
2. A caution from the doctrine of the union of a fully human and a fully divine nature in Jesus
3. A caution from the infinite love for and delight of the Father in the Son

B. Three hints at the meaning of the cry of forsakenness in v. 34
1. A hint from the Garden of Gethsemane prayer (Mark 14:36; cf. Jeremiah 25:15-16)
2. a hint from the descent of darkness from noon to 3:00 p.m. (v. 33; cf. Amos 5:18; 8:9-10)
3. a hint from the cry itself (v. 34; cf. Psalm 22:1)

C. Two applications of Jesus’ suffering of forsakenness
1. to the lives of unbelievers, from v. 39 (cf. Mark 1:1)
2. to the lives of believers, from v. 38 (cf. 1 Peter 3:18)