I love Pastor Kevin DeYoung's
ministry and writing, I strongly commend it, and I thank God for him. I was so excited yesterday to receive the 30 copies of his new book,
Daily Doctrine: A One-Year Guide To Systematic Theology that I ordered to give to every family in my congregation. As is my custom, I'm most eager to see what he wrote about the cross in his chapter on Jesus being forsaken by God. But I was very disappointed in his chapter on Christ's cry of dereliction (Day 138, pages 201-202). I will still give the book away to my congregation, but with an added correction I'll write and insert for this particular chapter (Yes! I think it's that important!). Sadly, Pastor Kevin does exactly what he says we should not do: ". . . we never want to lessen the pain and passion of Christ's cry on the cross . . . ." I hope you (and he) will consider why I'm so disappointed and concerned. Here are four reasons:
1. He spent most of the chapter writing about what the cry of dereliction is not rather than telling us what it is and moving us to boast only in the cross.
2. When you read about Jesus' cry of dereliction on the cross, you should come away from such a meditation rejoicing in the fact that Jesus was forsaken so that His people will never be forsaken. It ought to make you sing: "Hallelujah! What a Savior!" This entry falls flat on that note.
3. Pastor Kevin writes that Jesus only felt forsaken on the cross and that He was not actually forsaken. He even writes what I would argue is the exact opposite of what Scripture teaches when he writes: ". . . Christ was not forsaken by the Father . . . ." I agree with him that there was no intra-trinitarian disruption, conflict, or separation - yes, the Trinity was not broken apart in that sense. But in history as the mediator, there is a mysterious sense in which Jesus Christ was truly and objectively forsaken by God His Father on that cross: there's no hope without it! I've written about this point here:
Forsaken Or Felt Forsaken?
Herman Bavinck was right:
In the cry of Jesus we are dealing not with a subjective but with an objective God-forsakenness: He did not feel alone but had in fact been forsaken by God. His feeling was not an illusion, not based on a false view of his situation, but corresponded with reality. (
Reformed Dogmatics: Sin and Salvation in Christ, Vol. 3, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006, 389)
Joel Beeke is right:
Outside an emergency room in a California hospital is a drop-off box for unwanted babies. The thought of abandoning one’s baby like dropping mail in a mailbox makes us shudder. Yet, when believers feel forsaken, it is like that: a feeling that does not correspond with reality. They lose the sense of God’s presence, but not this presence itself. With Christ this loss was both feeling and fact. He felt forsaken because He was forsaken. He endured the essence of abandonment . . . . (Christ Forsaken!)
Robert Letham (who sort of understands the Trinity) is right:
To fathom the depths of what Christ endured we would need to spend eternity in hell. He was rejected by humankind, abandoned by God, subject to the full curse of the law and more besides . . . He endured the holy judgment of God against the unrighteous. He was made sin. He experienced the fearsome fate of falling into the hands of the living God, who is a consuming fire. He took our place as the guilty, the accursed, the covenant breaker. He was abandoned. He cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (The Work Of Christ, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1993, 133 & 142-143)
4. Pastor Kevin appeals to Wilhelmus à Brakel, writing that God was not angry with Jesus on the cross. I've never been able to understand how this is not a denial of penal substitution and the propitiation of God's anger toward sinners. à Brakel is probably following Calvin's unhelpful statement in his Institutes (I've written extensively on
Calvin's inconsistency on this here). Thomas Goodwin is a much more helpful guide. Yes, the Father always loved the Son on the cross, but the Father was also very angry with His Son because of our sins imputed to Him. This is the heart of propitiation and the heart of the Gospel. See Goodwin here:
Thomas Goodwin On The Father's Love And Anger At The Cross
Here is a small sample of Goodwin on this point:
That God should never be more angry with his Son than when he was most pleased with him, for so it was when Christ hung upon the cross, God did find a sweet-smelling savour of rest and satisfaction even when he cried out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Thomas Goodwin, The Works Of Thomas Goodwin, Volume 4, Chapter 2, Glory Of The Gospel (Tanski Publications: Eureka, California: 1996), 275.)
And also this offering up himself was so sweet a smelling sacrifice to God (as Eph. V. 2), that although God expressed never so much anger against Christ as when he hung upon the cross, yet he was never so well pleased by him as then . . . . (Thomas Goodwin, Christ Our Mediator, (Sovereign Grace Publishers, Grand Rapids: 1971), 136.)
Mark Jones is right:
Let us remember the salient fact that the Father would soon abandon His beloved Son in Whom He found such delight . . . In relation to His death on the cross, God was never more pleased with His Son than when He was most angry with Him. (Knowing Christ, Page 82)
Stephen Wellum and Donald Macleod are right:
In saying that the Son bears the Father's wrath for us, we must never forget that the unity of the triune persons remains unbroken. Macleod rightly notes: "Even while the Father is angry with the Mediator, the Son is still the beloved and still fully involved in all the external acts (the opera ad extra) of the Trinity." (Christ Alone: The Uniqueness of Jesus as Savior: What the Reformers Taught...and Why It Still Matters (Five Solas), Page 209)
When I first became aware of men who (wrongly!) say God was not angry with Jesus on the cross, I asked my Systematic Theology professor, Dr. David VanDrunen, about this error. He wrote me this helpful comment:
. . . it seems difficult to make sense of Jesus saying that he would drink of the cup (since in the OT "the cup" was the cup of wrath against the wicked) or of the terminology of propitiation if God's anger wasn't upon the Son in some important way. I agree with you that there's mystery here, although I think the explanation can be reasonably clear if we distinguish the eternal intratrinitarian relationship of Father and Son (in which it's impossible to think of one being angry with the other) from the historical relationship between the Father and the incarnate Son. Still mysterious, to be sure, but if we locate God's wrath against Christ in the latter we can avoid problems with our Trinitarian theology.
5. Finally, Pastor Kevin argues that the word "damnation" should not be used to describe what Jesus suffered on the cross and calls on Francis Turretin as a witness. But Turretin also wrote:
If Christ is called "a curse," why cannot damnation be ascribed to him? (Francis Turretin, Institutes Of Elenctic Theology, Vol. 2, Trans. George Musgrave Giger, Ed. James T. Dennison, Jr., (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1994), 356.)
Furthermore, à Brakel (and many others!) used "damnation" to describe Jesus' sufferings (Note he also wrote of Jesus enduring "total separation from God"):
Christ did indeed suffer eternal damnation, for eternal damnation, death, & pain consist in total separation from God, in the total manifestation of divine wrath, & all of this for such a duration until the punishment upon sin was perfectly & satisfactorily born." (Wilhelmus à Brakel.
The Christian's Reasonable Service, 591.)
Martin Luther is a good example (Happy Reformation month, by the way!):
So then, gaze at the heavenly picture of Christ, who descended into hell [I Pet. 3:19] for your sake and was forsaken by God as one eternally damned when he spoke the words on the cross, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!" — "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" [Matt. 27:46]. In that picture your hell is defeated and your uncertain election is made sure. (Martin Luther, Luther's Works, Vol. 42, Eds. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), 105.)
Hallelujah! What a Savior!
God doesn't merely send sin to Hell. God doesn't merely punish sin in Hell. God punishes sinners in Hell. And God didn't merely punish sin in His Son on that cross. Our sins were imputed to a man with a true human body - the God-Man Jesus Christ - and He suffered and died on that cross and God punished His own Son Who was made sin on that cross. Disembodied sin didn't die for us on that cross. Jesus, Who was made sin and Who knew no sin, was punished for us and died for us on that cross. And as some old writers have written, what Jesus suffered for us on that cross is even more horrible that what damned sinners suffer in Hell:
As it was all the wrath of God that lay upon Christ, so it was wrath aggravated, in divers respects beyond that which the damned themselves do suffer. (He then gives three reasons why! See
this article at the end for the reasons!) (John Flavel,
The Seven Utterances Of Christ On The Cross)
Yea, and by reason of the incapacity of the damned in hell to take in the full measure of God's wrath due to them for their sins, therefore their punishment, though it be eternal, yet never satisfies, because they can never take in all, as Christ could and did, and so theirs is truly less than what Christ underwent. And therefore Christ's punishment ought not in justice to be eternal, as theirs is, because he could take it all in a small space, and more fully satisfy God's wrath in a few hours, than they could unto all eternity. (Thomas Goodwin,
Christ Our Mediator, (Sovereign Grace Publishers, Grand Rapids: 1971), 285.)
Beloved, if Jesus was not truly and objectively forsaken by God on that cross, then we will be forsaken by God in Hell forever. If God was not angry with His Son on that cross, then He will be angry with us forever in Hell. And if God did not damn His own Son on that cross, then we will be damned in Hell forever. But Jesus was forsaken! Jesus did drink the cup of God's anger! Jesus was damned in our place! And God raised Him up from the dead so that we will never be forsaken! We will never bear God's anger! And we will never be damned! If you repent and trust in Christ alone, by grace alone, through faith alone, according to the Bible alone, for the glory of God alone, you shall be saved!
Pastor Kevin Has Gotten It Right Before
I miss the Kevin DeYoung who preached on Christ's cry of dereliction in Mark 15 and said:
It is a cry of real, objective, God forsakenness . . . Jesus felt forsaken because He was, at that moment, forsaken . . . God was angry, at this moment, with His Son. (A Cry, a Curtain, and a Confession, Mark 15:33-39)
Amen Pastor Kevin! Hallelujah! What a Savior!
I hope and pray you and Pastor Kevin will consider these concerns of mine. May we get the cross right for the glory of King Jesus, for the good of His church, and for the salvation of lost sinners!
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