"And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46).
"And Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit"(Luke 23:46).
"God hath fulfilled the same unto our children, in that he raised up Jesus; as also it is written in the second psalm, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee" (Acts 13:33).
"Who was declared (to be) the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead; even Jesus Christ our Lord " (Rom. 1:4).
"For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee?" (Heb. 1:5).
The matter which is brought before us by these passages is more for meditation than for speaking about: it is something to dwell upon quietly and thoughtfully. I shall do little more than bring it before you with a few observations for further meditation on your part.
Going back to those passages in the Gospels, we have first of all the cry of desertion and forsakenness and the term used by our Lord at that moment was "My God, my God..." In the next passage, we come to the last cry, the final cry of the Lord on the Cross, and the term used was "Father..." When the Lord Jesus rose from the dead, among the first words that He spoke, as far as we can tell, were these: "Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended unto the Father: but go unto my brethren, and say to them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and my God and your God (John 20:17), bringing both of these cries from the Cross together. "My Father... my God"; "your Father... your God." Therein lies a whole wealth of wonderful spiritual truth.
b
b
In the first of those two cries - "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" sonship has been suspended, it is not there; the cry is "My God." At the last cry, the battle is won; all that the former cry meant of sonship being obscured has been set aside. In perfect tranquility, peace, rest, it is now "Father"; sonship is back. Now it is "My Father and your Father, My God and your God." Both "God" and "Father" were eclipsed; but later it is "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ."
Sonship in Resurrection in a Representative Man
There must, I think, have occurred to your minds at some time a difficulty over these passages - the passage from the second psalm, quoted in the New Testament: "Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee and declared to be the Son of God by the resurrection from the dead." Probably the intellectual difficulty is this - was He not always the Son of God? What about the eternal Sonship? Was He not God's Son before the resurrection? If so, in what way is He Son in resurrection? What does it mean, "This day have I begotten thee"? These words quite evidently refer to His resurrection, and that is borne out without any question, I think, by the first and second chapters of the letter to the Hebrews. If you look at the context, there is no room for any doubt about it, that "this day" is the day of His resurrection, and on that day He was begotten and on that day He was called "Son." Where then is the difference? Was He not Son? If so, in what way is He Son in resurrection?
Let us say at once that the matter is altogether related to the first and the last Adam. The first Adam was called God's son in the genealogy - "Adam, the son of God" (Luke 3:38). There is a sense in which the first Adam was the son of God, but there is a sense in which that sonship was never fully realised - all its meaning, all its potentiality, all the Divine intention, was never known. It was sonship on probation before determination. (You notice the marginal word in Rom. 1:4 - "determined the Son of God with power"). Well, the first Adam failed, and in him the whole race lost its sonship. As we so well know, in the Cross the Lord Jesus came into that position as representative of the whole race in Adam, to meet the final consequences of that lost sonship. Those consequences were known in that eternal period of unspeakable agony when there was the awful consciousness of what it means to be abandoned by God. By nature we are out of Christ, without God and without hope in this world, but we are not aware of it fully nor of the full extent of what it involves. In that phase of the Cross, the Lord Jesus was, so to speak, projected into the full realisation of that complete consciousness of what God-forsakenness really means, that which is the terrible, terrible destiny of all deliberate and conscious rejectors - to be rejected. There He stood in a relationship to lost sonship in its full and final meaning, and suffered the consciousness of being abandoned by God.
Well, having suffered that judgment, that consequence, and having carried all the agony of it to the extent that He died not by crucifixion but by the very disrupting of His soul and the breaking of His heart (for when the soldiers came to inspect they found He was dead already, while those crucified with Him were still alive) - bwhen that was accomplished He came to the moment, shall we say the eternal moment, of consciousness that judgment was past, it was all borne, and He could return and use again the word "Father," but now with a meaning which it never bore for man before that time; and the last word of the Cross is not "forsaken" but "Father." Sonship has come now on to a new ground of resurrection, restoration; the alienation of the race has been overcome in Christ, restoration is made for the race in Him, and so it is "Father" with which everything begins; it is "God" and "Father." "The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Eph. 1:3) - what a wealth that phrase holds when you look at it in the light of the Cross! It is the ground of our approach, our appeal. It is the full meaning of the triumph of His Cross over all the alienation that had come to the race with the loss of God's meaning of sonship.
