TO SAY, that our Lord and Savior, dying on the cross, in His dreadful suffering and terror, thought of Psalm 22, and then repeated the “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani” from this psalm, at heart destroys the Scripture and lowers the person of the Mediator.
And, on the contrary, to represent, that by His omniscience God had known beforehand, what words Jesus would utter on the cross, and on the ground of this knowledge should have had David write them down, transfers to God what would merely belong to human externality and reduces the work of the Holy Spirit to affected mechanism.
No, to let the Scripture be the divine work of the Holy Spirit, and Christ the eternal and true Witness, and so, likewise, to let God be truly God, everything affected and external must be eliminated from it, and in its higher, Divine naturalness it must all be understood.
Christ knew His suffering beforehand. Not because He had been informed, but from the nature of the case itself. Death is not something arbitrary, but from the reality of life itself the awful dreadfulness of death is determined. Determined also what the suffering of death is in its several stages, according as you sink in it less deeply or more deeply or reach its very bottom. Yea, determined even most minutely, what the tasting of death is, and how it differs with one and the other according to his less or more tender sensitiveness or to his less or more vigorous consciousness of life or holier nature. And all this is determined, not by a certain external appointment, but by the character of Life, by the nature of Corruption, by the hellish depth of the unholiness of Death, and by the perfect sensitiveness and holiness of Jesus’ absolute sinless humanity.
Thus Christ did not surmise, but knew what was to come; knew it most accurately and to the utmost particular; nothing remained uncertain.
And from Paradise on this Christ was the Inspirer of His church. It was this Christ, Who “in all her afflictions had been afflicted” and Who from of old had comforted His believers as the “Angel of His Presence”.
This Christ, says the apostle Peter, also controlled prophecy. In that prophecy, by the Holy Spirit He portrayed Himself; told the story of His own life; fortold His own future; yea, made exhibition of Himself in shadows, so that by the external beauty of the Mediator, the Church of the Old Covenant through faith might be refreshed and justified.
The Scripture of the Old Covenant therefore does not merely speak of Him, but it is He Himself Who gave the Scripture of the Old Covenant its content, inspired it, brought it into being, and as a gift of grace presented it to His church.
And that Scripture He gave to her; not as an external jewel; but as Himself in that Scripture making His approach to her; in that Scripture showing Himself to her; a sending out beforehand of His likeness, if we may so put it, so long as He in His own person had not yet come.
And now Abraham and Moses, David and Solomon, Job and Isaiah, and whoever else you may name, are nothing but instruments, which He creates, to bear the features of His likeness, to prepare the realization of this likeness, and even still to describe to us, who came after, all the excellencies and innumerable tendernesses of all His Mediatorial work.
That “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani” on David’s lips has thus been nothing, but a living through beforehand on the part of Christ of the bitter sorrow of soul, which was to come upon Him on Golgotha, and which by virtue of the fixed data of human nature and according to the fixed relations of the depths of death would have to come to that awful point in the last extremity, at which of necessity the terribly troubled cry of the “Eli, Lama Sabachthani” would be uttered.
And as it is sometimes granted unto us, who live after Golgotha, to bear the marks of the suffering of our Lord, so it was granted to a few elect under the Old Covenant before Golgotha, to bear those same marks in advance.
The Man of sorrows is beforehand imaged forth in the suffering servants of Jehovah.
But while a whole series of believers had obtained in advance those marks of the cross in a measure, in weak reflection, there was one man appointed of God, for whom this honor had been laid up in highest completeness, and that man was David.
David with whom took place these two things: first that he was thrown “in the lowest pit without water”, and again that when he poured out his bitter complaint of personal suffering, the Holy Spirit chose him as organ for the revelation of the suffering of the Messiah, and, deepening infinitely the voice of his complaint, elicited by inspiration from his lips that cry of utter forsakenness, which not by inspiration, but through the reality once must come across the lips of the Messiah.
Thus from the living-through-beforehand of Golgotha the soul’s complaint in Psalm 22 is born, and Christ, on Golgotha, Himself uttering from His soul this cry of hellish pain, repeated nothing after some one else and recited nothing by rote, but tore out of His own succumbing soul, what according to the dreadfulness of His death and the infinite depth of His apperception at that moment with absolute necessity had to come from His lips.
He, the eternal Word, the Son of God, was man, was flesh, was become like unto us, in all things, sin alone excepted.
In the most intimate and tenderest way He had united our human nature with His divine nature. Nothing, how could it be, was taken from His Deity, and yet from tender compassion, He ordains it, in a way incomprehensible to us, that this human nature shall remain inviolately human, so that we should be able truly to testify: Yea, He is our flesh indeed! He is become as one of us.
And being thus, He has entered into what is ours. Into our deep misery; into our sinful and corrupted life; into this heap of rubbish, which we call world; into this ruin, which we call our human life; treading this dreadful, undermined and underexcavated ground, beneath which hides the volcano of hell. And from this hell the vapor of death ascended, full of the wrath of God to rest heavily as lead upon all that human life, and to consume it in curse and death.
And while every one else avoided this, shrank from before it, and by God’s wondrous grace still had shelters in which for a while to withdraw themselves from this awful, killing destruction, He had to enter into it; willingly He must seek it; must concentrate all this upon Himself; must not rest, until the deepest and bitterest of that death was tasted.
Of that Death, i. e., also of the dying, and this not understood of the dying as we see it, but of that dying, with its eternal deep pit underlying it, with its hellish pain, in which it ends, and with all the wrath of God against the unholy, that cleaves to and in that death.
Death, that is what reacts against the Life, and the Life is God; hence death is an enemy of God; death is what puts God aside; death is sin; all sin; and God, because He is the Life can not do other than burn eternally with wrath against sin and death.
And though you will never be able to solve and never can explain it, this is certain: Your Savior has tasted death, or He has not tasted death.
If not, where, O, children of the Kingdom, is then your hope?
But, if so, then tell me, you who call yourself redeemed, what death has your Savior borne for you? Only the death of passing out of the body? and not likewise the death in its depth, in its hellish pain, in its fulness of God’s wrath?
Woe be unto you, for then from this you are not redeemed; then you will still have to bear this yourself!
Impossible, is it not, for then He were to you no Savior!
Thus all this He bore for you.
That real death He has tasted.
That death, in its eternal depth, with its hellish pain, as summary of all God’s wrath!
But can such a death be tasted, really, not in semblance, but tasted, without feeling oneself one awful moment separated from the Life?
Do not quarrel about this. Do not render unholy what is most holy. But believe, worship and give thanks for such inimitable, for such unsearchable compassion.
So it stood: You or He in that unspeakable pain of the depth of death and of Godforsakennesses!
Then spake He: I in your stead, O, my redeemed one!
And then He was forsaken, and God’s angels caught up the Lama Sabachthani from His lips!
To what purpose?
That you should never more be forsaken of God, and should once eternally be with Him.
And this from pure compassion.
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