Featured Jesus Paid For Our Sins In Hell?

Just a guess (not to answer for BaptistBeleiver), but perhaps because that was the passage he was fulfilling, that God would not abandon his Righteous One?

 

In Psalm 22 the Father had not left his Righteous One. He was forsaken to die, not abandoned. I am saying that Jesus was not taking out one verse and making it deny passages where God says over and over and over again that he will not forsake or abandon his Righteous One. I am saying that if Jesus was truly separated from God, that if Jesus experienced that spiritual "deadness" that is a spiritual separation, that we have absolutely no hope in Christ because His hope in the faithfulness of the Father was misplaced. And I am saying that this is impossible and it is for the simple fact that the Father did not abandon his Son that we can have faith in a faithful, immutable, and holy God.

So yes, I deny that this one quote was taken in isolation in order to deny a substantial theme of the Old Testament, that God will not forsake his Righteous One. I believe that Jesus was pointing to the entire Psalm by quoting that first verse (akin to what other biblical writers have done...Paul comes to mind quite often). Why, do you think God just said that he would not abandon the Messiah but when push came to shove, when it became an issue of the Cross, God simply went back on his word and did exactly what he promised he would never do? Or perhaps that quote needs to be understood within the context of Psalm 22, and perhaps "forsake" needs to be understood within the context of the Old Testament and what Scripture says about God, about redemption, and about the faithfulness of the Father.

 

Sorry. I misunderstood you. I was watching Mr. Deeds (Gary Cooper, not Adam Sandler) and may have jumped the gun. My bad.

When it comes to the fulfillment of Scripture, perhaps it is not exactly right to say that Jesus was quoting Psalm 22 as much as it is to say that Psalm 22 was looking to that fulfilment. It is obvious, I believe, that Psalm 22 is foretelling of the Cross. And although the Psalm begins “My God My God, why have you forsaken me?”, it is revealed throughout the Psalm that this “forsakenness” was in the context of allowing or permitting this suffering. The assurance of God’s faithfulness for deliverance also comes through the psalm (vs. 3-5), and the suffering of the Cross is described. Yet the faithful cry to God is that he be “not far off”, for God has not hidden his face from the afflicted but “when he cried to Him for help, He heard (v. 24).

It is interesting that some believe Jesus to be quoting Psalm 22 but out of context to say that Jesus was separated from God. They never get through the suffering and to the last third of that Psalm to see the wonderful praise and glory with which the Psalmist prophetically concludes.

 

Sproul is agreeing with Calvin here.

It's worse than that. For the Son to be separated from the Father challenges the doctrine of the Trinity. God cannot be separated from himself; if so, the essential nature of the Godhead would be mutable.

 

I think that what has happened is that men have created a framework to understand aspects of the Cross, but then they have started using that framework as if it were Scripture itself. Substitution no longer existed as an aspect of the Cross understood within a allegorical context (i.e., as if God were a human judge going through an accounting process for debts owed him), but that context became the Cross itself. Jesus therefore had to be separated from God because that is the spiritual death that the lost will ultimately face. The work of the Cross is therefore bound within the context, or allegory, that was used to describe one aspect of the Cross. And what some see instead of the whole work of God is the allegory upon which their understanding rests.

It was the same with some of the teachings of the ECF's (the Cross was Jesus battling with Satan over humanity with the Father standing in support of his Son but only to announce the Victor; the Father paying a price to Satan to purchase mankind from his grasp, etc.).