First Series – Sermon Eight
Original by George MacDonald
Paraphrase by Dale R. Howie
The Eloi is probably the most misunderstood and misinterpreted passage in the Gospels. Theologians have done more to hide the gospel of Christ than any of its adversaries. They have introduced one of the greatest heresies in Christianity, the dividing of the Father and Son! There is no such division within the Trinity! “For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation.” 2 Corinthians 5:19 NLT
There is no sweet Jesus and angry, punishing Father! Our Abba bears the scars of His Son’s crucifixion! Jesus did not die to change His Father’s mind about us, but to change our minds about Them! They had always intended to give Themselves for us! The cross was no plan “B” after Adam’s fall, but plan “A” to release Their Life in Us. “But when the fullness of the time came, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons and daughters.” Galatians 4:4-5 NASB
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And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabaktanei?” that is, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
The Eloi
The words of The Eloi, of all the words ever spoken, are of enormous importance. These words contain both the seed and the fruit of the Divine devotion to its creation. They include the most profound and practical lesson the human heart must learn. The Logos, the Revealer, hides nothing from us. He covers nothing up but reveals the terrible conflict between Himself and evil with transparent humility.
Jesus gives us His final thoughts before His death for our consideration. His thoughts when He could take no more and fled into the loving arms of His Father. His Father, who was well pleased with Him! It was Satan who, at this critical moment, came to try to dissuade Him with his last temptation. The temptation was that although Jesus had done His part, the Father had forgotten His!
Jesus did not hide His suffering from us, for Truth is Light, light in the minds of men! The Holy One, the Father’s Son, had nothing to hide but all the heart of the Trinity to reveal! Let us then take off our shoes and draw near to this holy ground. Bow our heads and kiss the feet that forever bear the scars of our victory!
It is with holy reverence that we approach the suffering of our Lord. Let no one think that His suffering was less because He was more. The more perfect the nature is, the more alive to all that is lovely and true, lawful and right, and the more painfully felt is the antagonism of death that is transforming into Life. The pain more dreadfully felt in the torture that breached this harmony of love. Jesus felt more than we could imagine because He was the source of Life! He was tortured beyond what others could have endured! These sufferings were more difficult as His human will began to weaken, and His struggle with the awareness of His Father’s faithfulness began to fade. When the effort of will became a struggle to hold onto the vanishing vision of His Father, it was here He let loose His cry! “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The Son had never known these feelings before. Never before had He been unaware of His Father beside Him. Yet, never was His Father nearer than now! Never before had Jesus expressed more of the Divine! He could not see, could not feel Him near, yet it is “My God” that He cries! Psalm 22 NASB
In this very moment, the will of Jesus, in triumphful faith, is victorious! He has no feelings that support His faithfulness, no beautiful vision to absorb it. His soul is as naked as His body was as He was scourged before Pilate. His faith is pure, simple, and surrounded by fire as He stands for God! His sacrifice ascends in the cry, “My God.” The cry comes not from happiness, peace, or hope, nor even from suffering and desolation, but from Faith! It was the last words of truth, speaking when it could but cry! The divine horror of that moment is unimaginable to the human soul. It was the blackest of darkness, yet He would believe and hold fast. The Father was His Father still! Therefore, in the cry came the victory, and all was soon over, followed by peace. The peace of the perfect soul, larger than the universe, purer than light, more passionate than ever, and victorious for God and His brethren! Jesus alone knows the breadth, length, depth, and height of this victory!
This last trial, the last temptation of our Master, had not yet filled what the human cup would hold. There would have been one place where we would have to go — a moment where we would need to call upon the Lord. If He did not do so, assume all, there would be no voice or hearing of our call in that fatal moment! The temptations in the wilderness were of a different time and kind. Now after three years of divine actions, His time had come to finish His work. After He was tortured, His life’s blood drained to the point of death, and His disciples had fled and forsaken Him. The enemy came saying, “Despair and die; God is not with you. All is empty, and death is your only refuge. Move quickly to Hades, where your torture will end. God deceived you. He was never with you. He was the God of Abraham, but Abraham is dead. Who made you?” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is the Master’s reply. His Father was His God still! Even if He seemed to have forsaken Him, it was so that His faith might shine out triumphantly! His Father had come nearer than ever, closer and beyond measure in His pregnancy of Life! Even as He withdrew from their sight, this birth was happening that He would dwell in their beings forever!
I do not believe it was Jesus’ most challenging trial when He was in the garden in prayer. For there, His will was still strong, but now the time had finally come. He felt He was drinking the cup alone. In the final moments, His faith rose and declared in the face of His pain, darkness, and death the faithfulness of the invisible God!
Crucifixion displayed the faith of the Son of God! God withdrew, as it were, that the perfect will of the Son would rise and go forth to do the will of His Father!
Possibly even then, He thought of the lost sheep who could not believe that His Father was their God? Identifying with them in all their blindness and loss, Jesus crying, saying the words they needed to say. Believing for them that God is Father and more. Thinking now, as He had never known before, what a fearful thing it is to be without hope and God in this world!
What can this Alpine apex of faith have to do with the people who call themselves Christians? Christians who creep in the valleys, who hardly recognize the mountains above. Those who only notice and stumble over the pebbles that have washed across their paths by the glacier streams. I will tell you. We are and will continue to be these creeping Christians as long as we look to ourselves and not to Christ. Christians who are looking down at their own dirty laundry and the trail left by their own footprints instead of looking up, where Christ climbed to the snowy peaks of purity. Each thinking they put their feet in the prints of the Master and so spoil them. Those who turn to examine their neighbor’s footprints, comparing them to their own, thinking they belong to the feet of the Master’s still.
Or, we commit a petty wrong and make a big deal out of it, expressing our shame before family and friends. This religious show, instead of quickly confessing and making it right with the wronged. Then we could move on, forgetting our small selves with their well-earned disgrace, dying to the creeping creature we so wrongfully call ourselves. Move on by lifting our eyes to the glory of the Lord, which alone can give Life to the true man within. The true self can look at Jesus face-to-face and say, My Lord!
Life is easy when our souls are all brightness and light; when the gentle breezes of our thoughts move in the flower garden of our imaginations. Here it is easy to look up and say,” My God.” Even in a bit of pain, so long as it is manageable, we hope in God for deliverance and strength to endure. But what are we to do when all hope is gone? When we are not sure, we believe anymore or love any longer. When we no longer see the beauty around us in art, music, and poetry because of our pain or depression? The pain of hurt, disappointment, or temptation? Here it seems that God does not care for us or us for God. If he is humble and broken, he will think himself unworthy of God’s care. We believe for a moment that God loves only those who love Him, instead of realizing that God loves us always as our Father! We will come to understand that we only live by His Love!
If we only relate to God when we are in the sunshine or feel Him near us, we are poor creatures indeed, willed upon, not willing! Beautiful reeds that are blown about in the wind, not wicked, but poor children.
So how, in this condition of pain, do we act? Do we mourn the loss of our pleasant feelings? Or worse, do we panic and work to get them back? Still worse, relapse into a state of unbelief and yield to the pressing temptation? Sometimes we are just careless, heartless, and too lazy to respond to evil thoughts and temptations. We know they are not good for us, but they are not that bad. We are asleep, and we know it. If nothing comes from outside of us to awaken us, we remain as we are.
Does God, by some instant gift of His Spirit, fix all this and inspire the fruit of the Spirit? Inspire desire, purity, and love after Him and His will. Therefore, either He will not or cannot. If He will not, is it because it would not be good for us? If He cannot, then would He if He could? If either is true, then there must be a better divinity than is conceivable to Him or a divine condition in which He can save His creatures, those He has made, better than He does.
The truth is, God wants to make us into His image, choosing the good and refusing the evil. How would He affect this if He constantly moved from within, as He does from time to time, moving us towards beauty and wholeness? Instead, the Father gives us room to be ourselves. He does not oppress us with His power. God “stands away from us” so that we can act on our own, exercising our will for good. Do not misunderstand me to mean that we can do anything alone without God. If we choose what is good in the end, it is all through God’s assistance. The more He assists, the more it is our response, but in a far more amazing way, His. God’s more than if He had given us His power and removed our need for choice. Up to this point, He has been educating us for this very purpose. He has been pushing, driving, leading, and attracting us that we would choose Him and His way. We would then be many times more His mature children, those of His best making.
God made our individuality as a more sweeping miracle than our dependence. He made us distinct from Himself that our freedom would bind us in union with Himself. He is unifying us with a mysterious love, with the Trinity being its root and creator. The freer the man is, the stronger the union with Him who has made our freedom! God made our wills and is working to make them freer. We can only be sons and daughters in the perfection of our individuality and freedom of our choices! This freedom is full of mystery, but we can see enough to make us glad and peaceful!
Not in any other actions but ones that flow despite our impulses and weaknesses. Those actions that decide for the Truth, for God, that we arrive into absolute freedom, into real life!
See what lies within our reach every time we are clothed in darkness. The highest awareness of the human will is within sight. I am not saying the highest condition of the human being, for that lies in the beautiful vision of Christ. But the highest awareness of the Human Will, as distinct. This distinction is not separation from God; when not seeing God and not seeming to hold Him, we are yet held close by Him. We cannot continue in this sense of separation, not seeing or finding Him, for we would die. But when we exercise our wills, we pass from darkness to light. Then, in experiencing freedom and asserting it, the individual is one with His Father. His child is restored to fellowship, where childhood and fatherhood meet as one! The brotherhood of humanity rises from the dust, and Jesus’ prayer is answered, “I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.” Let us rise in our God-given strength when we feel the darkness closing in and say, “I am of the light and not of the darkness.”
We, as troubled souls, are not bound to feel, but we are bound to rise. The Father loves us whether we feel it or not. Never forced to love, but we are bound to fight hatred in us to the last. Do not feel good about yourself when you are not good, but call to Him who is good. God does not change because we do. No, but He is especially tender to those in darkness who have no light. His heart is glad when we rise and say, “I will go to my Father.” Our Father sees us even when we do not see Him or choose His will as ours. Tell Him, “My God, I am dull and hard, but You are wise and tender as my Father. I am your child. Forsake me not!” Rest in your faith, but not from your work. Think of what you can do and go and do it. Whether it be to sweep a room, prepare a meal, or visit a friend. Do not let your feelings control you. Go and do your work!
As God lives by His will and we live by Him, so has He given us the power to choose in ourselves. How much better off we would be when finding we have turned from the good and have no leanings to seek the source of our lives. We would choose to look up to God, stirring the essence in us of life that He has given us. Call upon Him, who is our life, who can fill our empty hearts, awaken our dull awareness, quicken our deadest feelings, and strengthen our weakest wills!
Then, when the time comes, as perhaps it must come to each of us — a time when all awareness of well-being has vanished. The time comes when men and women delight us no more. No, when the Father Himself is but a name, and Jesus is just a story. Then, even then, when death has gripped our hearts, slain our love, hope, and faith leaving only the agony of existence. That is the point at which we will be able to cry out with our Lord, “My God!” Neither will we be ready to die until we speak with Jesus those final words, “Father into your hands, I commend my spirit.”
It is here that we all stumble and fall. We do not begin believing that God is GOOD, that He is For Us! We see the wind and waves in the darkness and storm and sink, like Peter, into the waters. Satan needs no new tricks; the old ones work perfectly well!
Jesus’ cry is from Psalm 22. The opening verse of Psalm 22 says, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It moves from agony to God’s victorious intervention and to a prophecy that the coming generations will look back upon this moment as the salvation of the Lord of Hosts.
Why did Jesus quote the opening verse of this Psalm? In his day, to hear the first of a verse of a Psalm was like hearing the beginning of the tune of a favorite song. The tune jump-starts the tape in our heads and sends us singing the rest of the song. I suspect that when Jesus quoted the first line of Psalm 22, he was jump-starting the memory of the whole Psalm in the minds of the people around him. For they all knew it by heart. In doing so, he was interpreting the event of his suffering and death for them. He was telling them what was happening.” C. Baxter Kruger – Jesus and the Undoing of Adam
The Vicarious Life of Jesus is that we were in him and He, in His assumption of humanity, through His incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension, did all of this in our place and our name! This is how Paul can say in Galatians 2:20 KJV, “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live . . .”
Gregory of Nazianzus (329-389), Archbishop of Constantinople and patristic theologian, stated “What has not been assumed has not been healed.” He is here speaking of the humanity of Christ — that to heal us, he had to assume our essential human identity.” This assumption goes to the depth of human sin, darkness, and death!
Do we compare ourselves among ourselves? Are we fair-weather Christians and question the faithfulness of God when troubles come? When we feel that God has failed us, it is not God that has failed, but our concepts of Him!
God made our individuality as a more sweeping miracle than our dependence. He made us distinct from Himself that our freedom would bind us in union with Himself.
There can be no separation from God! If anyone or anything were to be disconnected or removed from the mutuality of creation, they would cease to exist! As God lives by His will and we live by Him, so has He given us the power to choose in ourselves.
The question is: Will God find us faithful? When all hell breaks loose in our lives, will we cry out like our Master and say, “My God!”? When we do, we will find He is our Father still!
Trinity as One – Introductory Blog
Watch “Icons of Beauty” on YouTube
LAST TEMPTATION
He will give us even to meditate the one thought that slew him at last, when he could bear no more, and fled to the Father to know that he loved him, and was well-pleased with him. For Satan had come at length yet again, to urge him with his last temptation; to tell him that although he had done his part, God had forgotten his.
The Lord hides not his sacred sufferings, for truth is light, and would be light in the minds of men. The Holy Child, the Son of the Father, has nothing to conceal, but all the Godhead to reveal. Let us then put off our shoes, and draw near, and bow the head, and kiss those feet that bear for ever the scars of our victory.
CRY OF FAITH
Let no one think that those were less because he was more.
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Never had it been so with him before. Never before had he been unable to see God beside him. Yet never was God nearer him than now. For never was Jesus more divine. He could not see, could not feel him near; and yet it is “My God” that he cries.
Without this last trial of all, the temptations of our Master had not been so full as the human cup could hold; there would have been one region through which we had to pass wherein we might call aloud upon our Captain-Brother, and there would be no voice or hearing: he had avoided the fatal spot!
ALL ASSUMED
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” the Master cries. For God was his God still, although he had forsaken him—forsaken his vision that his faith might glow out triumphant; forsaken himself? no; come nearer to him than ever; come nearer, even as—but with a yet deeper, more awful pregnancy of import—even as the Lord himself withdrew from the bodily eyes of his friends, that he might dwell in their profoundest being.
This is the Faith of the Son of God. God withdrew, as it were, that the perfect Will of the Son might arise and go forth to find the Will of the Father.
Is it possible that even then he thought of the lost sheep who could not believe that God was their Father; and for them, too, in all their loss and blindness and unlove, cried, saying the word they might say, knowing for them that God means Father and more, and knowing now, as he had never known till now, what a fearful thing it is to be without God and without hope?
SPIRITUAL DRYNESS
I will tell you. We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments, instead of up at the snows of purity, whither the soul of Christ climb. Each, putting his foot in the footprint of the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine how far his neighbour’s footprint corresponds with that which he still calls the Master’s, although it is but his own.
Forgetting our paltry self with its well-earned disgrace, lift up our eyes to the glory which alone will quicken the true man in us, and kill the peddling creature we so wrongly call our self. The true self is that which can look Jesus in the face, and say My Lord.
When a man does not know whether he believes or not, whether he loves or not? when art, poetry, religion are nothing to him, so swallowed up is he in pain, or mental depression, or disappointment, or temptation, or he knows not what? It seems to him then that God does not care for him, and certainly he does not care for God. If he is still humble, he thinks that he is so bad that God cannot care for him. And he then believes for the time that God loves us only because and when and while we love him; instead of believing that God loves us always because he is our God, and that we live only by his love.
The truth is this: He wants to make us in his own image, choosing the good, refusing the evil.
His than if he had kept us filled with all holy impulses precluding the need of choice. For up to this very point, for this very point, he has been educating us, leading us, pushing us, driving us, enticing us, that we may choose him and his will, and so be tenfold more his children, of his own best making.
For God made our individuality as well as, and a greater marvel than, our dependence; made our apartness from himself, that freedom should bind us divinely dearer to himself, with a new and inscrutable marvel of love; for the Godhead is still at the root, is the making root of our individuality, and the freer the man, the stronger the bond that binds him to him who made his freedom. He made our wills, and is striving to make them free; for only in the perfection of our individuality and the freedom of our wills call we be altogether his children. This is full of mystery, but can we not see enough in it to make us very glad and very peaceful?
Not in any other act than one which, in spite of impulse or of weakness, declares for the Truth, for God, does the will spring into absolute freedom, into true life.
ONENESS OF WILL
But the highest condition of the Human Will, as distinct, not as separated from God, is when, not seeing God, not seeming to itself to grasp him at all, it yet holds him fast. It cannot continue in this condition, for, not finding, not seeing God, the man would die; but the will thus asserting itself, the man has passed from death into life, and the vision is nigh at hand. Then first, thus free, in thus asserting its freedom, is the individual will one with the Will of God; the child is finally restored to the father; the childhood and the fatherhood meet in one; the brotherhood of the race arises from the dust; and the prayer of our Lord is answered, “I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.”
“My God, I am very dull and low and hard; but thou art wise and high and tender, and thou art my God. I am thy child. Forsake me not.” Then fold the arms of thy faith, and wait in quietness until light goes up in thy darkness. Fold the arms of thy Faith I say, but not of thy Action: bethink thee of something that thou oughtest to do, and go and do it, if it be but the sweeping of a room, or the preparing of a meal, or a visit to a friend. Heed not thy feelings: Do thy work.
As God lives by his own will, and we live in him, so has he given to us power to will in ourselves.
MY GOD!
Then, if ever the time should come, as perhaps it must come to each of us, when all consciousness of well-being shall have vanished, when the earth shall be but a sterile promontory, and the heavens a dull and pestilent congregation of vapours, when man nor woman shall delight us more, nay, when God himself shall be but a name, and Jesus an old story, then, even then, when a Death far worse than “that phantom of grisly bone” is griping at our hearts, and having slain love, hope, faith, forces existence upon us only in agony, then, even then, we shall be able to cry out with our Lord, “My God.