Did God Forsake God...?

I'm no authority on anything, but I do think and read and ponder a lot ... and I do really-really trust Jesus when He said that the Spirit would lead us into all truth.

Speaking of Jesus ... all my life, or at least during the 30-odd years that I was an Evangelical Christian (& they really were some *odd* years, LOL!), I heard some truly interesting explanations as to why Jesus cried out "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me" on the cross ... yes, we've all been told, ad nauseam, that since God cannot have anything to do with sin, and since Jesus was then filled with our sin, that God had to "turn away." That God had to forsake God, when God became filled with the sin that God had chosen to take away from humanity... in order to appease God.

May I say - POPPYCOCK! :)

How can any of us, at any time, not be in the Presence of the Omnipresent God..? David affirms, in his psalm, "where can I go from Your presence ... if I go to Sheol [the place of the dead, not "hell" ... there's no hell in the OT, or the NT for that matter, but I digress] there You are."

Plus, the NT affirms that "God was IN CHRIST, reconciling the world to Himself [at the very moment in which Christ took on sin, in order to *take away* sin]."

Another possibility of what Jesus was doing at that time, could be a very intentional act. I believe that He fully knew what He was doing, in dying for everyone (my personal view is that He didn't come to accomplish anything, but to demonstrate what had always been accomplished -- the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world -- we just needed a live-action demonstration to *believe* it - a cosmic flannel-graph if you will).

I've come to believe that He was very intentionally letting the witnesses know what He was doing ... He called out the first line of Psalm 22. Psalms didn't have numbers then ... they were known by their first lines, much like we know songs by their titles. Psalm 22 is all about the Savior of the World ... read it for yourself. The Jews would know that psalm inside-out (Jewish men memorized all 151 of the psalms ... there are 151 psalms in the Septuagint, the scriptures that Jesus read and quoted from... even though our versions only have 150 - makes me go "hmmm").

When Jesus called out the first line of that psalm, He was letting them know that He was the Lamb who was slain ... that He had come to save the world (btw, we're not saved from "hell"... scripture says that we're saved from sin ... that He took it *away* - so why are we so danged sin-focused?).

Anyway, that's what I've come to believe ... and I'm smack-dab thick in the middle of studying the various Atonement theories. I no longer buy into the theory of Penal Substitutionary Atonement (that God was pissed, that somebody had to die, and God had to have blood, and so Jesus paid the price). I'm more in favor of the Christus Victor theory, but am looking into the other 5-6 theories, and letting the Spirit lead me...

I suspect that we've gotten the Atonement "all wrong" ... that we've put our own human thinking onto God (as we're wont to do... He made us in His own image, and we've been returning the favor ever since!).

While I'm en route here, I see that there's only one thing to really do ... to trust Him to lead. He promised He would. He'll keep leading us into all truth - as we can bear it...

Shalom, Dena