Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2562
“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? Why are You so far from helping me, and from the words of My roaring?” Psalm 22:1.
(This was the first evening Sermon preached by Mr. Spurgeon after the fatal calamity at the Surrey Gardens Music Hall two weeks previously. [Someone yelled “Fire!” and ensuing rush to leave building by some resulted in someone being trampled to death.—Editor.] On commenting on his discourse, Mr. Spurgeon said, “The observations I have to make will be very brief, seeing that afterwards we are to partake of the Lord’s Supper. I shall make no allusion to the recent catastrophe—that theme of my daily thoughts and nightly dreams, ever since it h as occurred. I hope, however, to speak about that event at some future period.” This Mr. Spurgeon did, in many memorable utterances which will be included in Vol. II of his Autobiography, now in course of compilation).
WE here behold the Savior in the depths of His agonies and sorrows. No other place so well shows the griefs of Christ as Calvary and no other moment at Calvary is so full of agony as that in which this cry rends the air, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” At this moment, physical weakness brought upon Him by fasting and scourging, was united with the acute mental torture which He endured from the shame and ignominy through which He had to pass— and, as the culmination of His grief, He suffered spiritual agony which surpasses all expression on account of the departure of His Father from Him. This was the blackness and darkness of His horror. Then it was that He penetrated the depths of the caverns of suffering.
“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” There is something in these words of our Savior always calculated to benefit us. When we behold the sufferings of men, they afflict and appall us, but the sufferings of our Savior, while they move us to grief, have about them something sweet and full of consolation. Here, even here, in this black spot of grief, we find our Heaven while gazing upon the Cross. This, which might be thought a frightful sight, makes the Christian glad and joyous. If he laments the cause, yet he rejoices in the consequences.
I. First, in our text, there are THREE QUESTIONS to which I shall call your attention.
The first is, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” By these words we are to understand that our blessed Lord and Savior was, at that moment, forsaken by God in such a manner as He had never been before. He had battled with the enemy in the desert, but thrice He overcame him and cast him to the earth. He had striven with that foe all His life long and even in the garden He had wrestled with him till His soul was “exceedingly sorrowful.” It is not till now that He experiences a depth of sorrow which He never felt before. It was necessary that He should suffer, in the place of sinners, what sinners ought to have suffered. It would be difficult to conceive of punishment for sin apart from the frown of Deity. With crime we always associate anger, so that when Christ died, “the Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God”—when our blessed Savior became our Substitute—He became, for the time, the victim of His Father’s righteous wrath, seeing that our sins had been imputed to Him in order that His righteousness might be imputed to us. It was necessary that He should feel the loss of His Father’s smile—for the condemned in Hell must have tasted of that bitterness—and therefore the Father closed the eyes of His love, put the hand ofjustice before the smile of His face and left His Son to cry, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
There is no man living who can tell the full meaning of these words—not one in Heaven or on earth. I had almost said, in Hell there is not a man who can spell these words out with all their depth of misery. Some of us think, at times, that we could cry, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” There are seasons when the brightness of our Father’s smile is eclipsed by clouds and darkness. But let us remember that God never really forsakes us. It is only a seeming forsaking with us, but in Christ’s case it was a realforsaking. God only knows how much we grieve, sometimes, at a little withdrawal of our Father’s love, but the real turning away of God’s face from His Son—who shall calculate how deep the agony which it caused Him when He cried, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
In our case, this is the cry of unbelief. In His case it was the utterance of a fact, for God had really turned away from Him for a time. O you poor, distressed Soul who once lived in the sunshine of God’s face, but are now in darkness—you who are walking in the Valley of the Shadow of Death—you hear noises and you are afraid! Your soul is startled within you, you are stricken with terror if you think that God has forsaken you! Remember that He has not really forsaken you, for—