Posted on Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - 2:46 pm:

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Did the Father Leave the Son on the Cross?
By Bob Passantino, © 1991

On the cross Jesus said, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Matthew 27:46). Many Christians believe this signifies the one and only time that there was a split between the first two persons of the Trinity, that is, between the Father and the Son. The argument asserts that when Jesus "became sin," the Father was unable to look upon him, hence he "forsook" Jesus. This argument seeks to emphasize the great cost to Christ on our behalf. He was even willing to endure separation from the Father to accomplish our salvation. However, I believe such an interpretation, while well intentioned, has heretical implications.[1] It is a denial of belief in one eternal, indivisible God.

First, if the Father cannot look upon sin, meaning that he had to turn away from the Son on the cross (and I have found no verse which says that), then what does that say about the character and deity of Jesus? Is Jesus somehow less than God, so that he can "look upon" the sin that was laid on him on the cross? Or does he simply have a stronger stomach for sin than the Father? Or perhaps Jesus is more merciful than the Father, able to suffer what the Father cannot even face? It is interesting that in Genesis 6:5, God looked upon the sin of mankind. When scripture says that God cannot "look" upon sin, contextually it means he cannot look with approval upon sin. His consistent reaction to sin is just judgment - against the unrepentant sinner, or through the atonement of Jesus Christ, the one who died in our place and on our behalf.

Second, Jesus quoted the beginning of Psalm 22 when he stated "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" The Psalm is referred to previously in the same passage. The common Jewish way of designating an entire psalm was to refer to the opening lines, since the psalms were not numbered at that time. Jesus did not believe God had forsaken him: this would be lack of faith, which is sin (Romans 14:23), and Jesus never sinned (Hebrews 4:15). He was himself God and always in perfect obedience to the Father. Instead, he referred to the psalm in its entirety as a messianic psalm. That he knew God had not actually forsaken him is clear from the same psalm, which says, "He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; nor has He hidden His face from Him; But when He cried to Him, He heard" (verse 24). In fact, Jesus was declaring to his accusers that they were in the midst of fulfilling this psalm, which was commonly understood in His day to refer to the coming Messiah, the Suffering Servant. The psalmist himself understood that the "forsaking" of God was not abandonment, but a lifting of His Sovereign protection according to His divine plan so that the threats of his enemies could be carried out in fulfillment of prophecy. In fact, there were many times during Jesus' public ministry when His enemies sought to kill him (John 5:16; 8:59, for examples). They were not able to because, as He said, His "hour" was not yet come (John 12:23-28). He declared to Pilate, "You could have no power at all against Me unless it had been given you from above. Therefore the one who delivered Me to you has the greater sin" (John 19:11). On the day of Pentecost Peter declared that no one could have crucified Christ in defiance of God's power: "Him, being delivered by the determined counsel and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by lawless hands, have crucified, and put to death; whom God raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that He should be held by it" (Acts 2:23-24).

Third, when 2 Corinthians 5:21 says that God made Jesus "to be sin," it means that God made the penalty for all sin to fall upon Jesus, not that Jesus himself could become sin, e.g., sinful. As perfect God and perfect man, he could not sin. 1 Peter 1:19 calls Jesus "a lamb without blemish and without spot."

[...]

Answers In Action
P.O. Box 2067
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Answers In Action c/o aia@answers.org

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Posted on Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - 10:15 pm:

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What if one second is enough, the separation would be complete, the man Jesus has suffered, the God Jesus went on being God.

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DID CHRIST REALLY SUFFER AND DIE?

As in much modern New Age teaching, the Gnostics tended to divide Jesus from the Christ. For Valentinus, Christ descended on Jesus at his baptism and left before his death on the cross. Much of the burden of the treatise Against Heresies, written by the early Christian theologian Irenaeus, was to affirm that Jesus was, is, and always will be, the Christ. He says: "The Gospel...knew no other son of man but Him who was of Mary, who also suffered; and no Christ who flew away from Jesus before the passion; but Him who was born it knew as Jesus Christ the Son of God, and that this same suffered and rose again."25

Irenaeus goes on to quote John's affirmation that "Jesus is the Christ" (John 20:31) against the notion that Jesus and Christ were "formed of two different substances," as the Gnostics taught.26

In dealing with the idea that Christ did not suffer on the cross for sin, Irenaeus argues that Christ never would have exhorted His disciples to take up the cross if He in fact was not to suffer on it Himself, but fly away from it.27

For Irenaeus (a disciple of Polycarp, who himself was a disciple of the apostle John), the suffering of Jesus the Christ was paramount. It was indispensable to the apostolic "rule of faith" that Jesus Christ suffered on the cross to bring salvation to His people. In Irenaeus's mind, there was no divine spark in the human heart to rekindle; self-knowledge was not equal to God-knowledge. Rather, humans were stuck in sin and required a radical rescue operation. Because "it was not possible that the man...who had been destroyed through disobedience, could reform himself," the Son brought salvation by "descending from the Father, becoming incarnate, stooping low, even to death, and consummating the arranged plan of our salvation."28

This harmonizes with the words of Polycarp: "Let us then continually persevere in our hope and the earnest of our righteousness, which Jesus Christ, "who bore our sins in His own body on the tree" [1 Pet. 2:24], "who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth" [1 Pet. 2:22], but endured all things for us, that we might live in Him."29

Polycarp's mentor, the apostle John, said: "This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us" (1 John 3:16); and "This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins" (4:10).

The Gnostic Jesus is predominantly a dispenser of cosmic wisdom who discourses on abstruse themes like the spirit's fall into matter. Jesus Christ certainly taught theology, but he dealt with the problem of pain and suffering in a far different way. He suffered for us, rather than escaping the cross or lecturing on the vanity of the body.

http://www.equip.org/articles/gnosticism-and-the-gnostic-jesus

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Yet if that perfect sacrifice of God, never knew separation for ANY length of time, would only be a partial redemption sacrifice, because man became separated from God spiritually in the time of Adam.

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