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Why have you forsaken me?
By Stephen Seamands

About fifteen ministers sat in a circle in the class I was teaching. We were discussing why we spend so little time in prayer when suddenly, one man began to sob. I was puzzled. Nothing had been said to prompt such an emotional response, so I wondered if he was struggling with a personal problem.

“Is there something you’d like us to pray with you about?” I asked.

“Oh no,” he replied. “It’s nothing like that. During this discussion God has been showing me why it’s been so difficult for me to pray the last few years. About five years ago,” he went on to explain, “I came home and found a note on the kitchen table from my wife. She said she didn’t want to be my wife anymore. So she had taken her things and left.

“I was devastated—I didn’t think this could ever happen to me. And what was going to happen to my ministry?

“In the months that followed, I pleaded with God about our marriage. ‘Lord, you can’t let this separation end in a divorce. I know that’s not your will. You’ve got to save my marriage.’ I prayed like that constantly. And I was convinced—I just knew God was going to come through.”

Then he shook his head. “God didn’t save our marriage. It ended in divorce. And today I realized for the first time how my deep hurt, and especially my disappointment with God over my divorce, has affected my desire to pray.

“I have no problem praying for others,” he continued. “I can encourage them to trust God. But when it comes to myself and my needs, it’s so hard to pray. I’m flooded with doubts. Does God really listen to my prayers? Does God care about my needs? I can’t say I’m sure anymore.”

Both rejection and shame had stabbed this man’s heart. His wife had walked out on him; his marriage had failed. He would forever bear the stigma of divorce. But what he said that day centered around another issue that often arises in relation to our hurts: disappointment with God. British theologian John Stott maintains that “the real sting of suffering is not misfortune itself, nor even the pain or the injustice of it, but the apparent God-forsakenness of it. Pain is endurable, but the seeming indifference of God is not.”

According to Scripture, God loves us “with an everlasting love” (Jeremiah 31:3); God is “faithful in all his words, and gracious in all his deeds” (Psalm 145:13). We should therefore “trust in him at all times” (Psalm 62:8). Because the Lord is our shepherd, we have everything we need. He provides green pastures and still waters for us; he protects so no evil or enemy can harm us (Psalm 23). Yet does God always provide and protect the way the familiar Twenty-third Psalm might lead us to expect? No. And that’s when we feel the sting of disappointment with God.

Virginia knew the sting. And as a result, she dropped out of church. In fact, she hadn’t attended worship in fifteen years. But a few months after I was appointed pastor at the church, she unexpectedly showed up one Sunday morning and kept coming back.

One afternoon I stopped by her home to visit. After we had talked awhile, I said, “I’m curious, why did you stop coming to church?”

She replied, “I was very active. I taught Sunday school. My husband and I, our two young children—we were there whenever the doors were open. Then one day, right here in this room, my husband, who was only forty, had a massive heart attack. He keeled over in front of me and was dead before the ambulance could get him to the hospital.

“I was devastated,” she went on. “At the time I wasn’t working. My husband was the sole breadwinner. Now it was up to me to provide for the family. I felt so frightened and alone, so abandoned by God.

“So I turned away from God and quit coming to church. That was fifteen years ago, and now I regret what I did. But it’s taken me all these years to get past my hurt and anger. I’m finally ready to open my heart to God again.” Before I left her home, we prayed for the healing of her wounded heart and restoration of her relationship with God.

The effects of disappointment
What effects do such experiences have on our relationship with God? Let’s consider three of the most common.

1. Disappointments with God damage our trust receptors. The minister who felt let down because God didn’t save his marriage said it well: “When you’ve been burned once, you sure don’t want to get burned twice…. I’m afraid of getting hurt again.”

Imagine you are alone in a small chapel, praying about a problem you’ve been wrestling with. As you are praying, God speaks to you: “Turn your problem over to me. Trust me to work it out. And as an expression of your faith, get up from your pew, go to the Communion table, and grasp hold of the metal crucifix on it. Lift it up off the table. Hold it tightly.” So as an act of trust and obedience, you walk forward to the table and take hold of the cross.

Now imagine someone else—for example, a woman in her thirties—praying in that same chapel about some issue in her life. She hears God saying the same thing to her: “As an expression of your trust in me, go to the Communion table and take hold of the cross.” But unlike you, imagine the woman has a deep cut in the palm of her hand. Even slightly bending her fingers causes her to grimace with pain. If she takes hold of the cross, it will be almost unbearable. The cut in her hand makes her act of faith extremely difficult.

Those who have encountered disappointment with God often have deep cuts in their hands. Damaged trust receptors make it painful to reach out to God. Memories of past disappointments convince them God will always be indifferent. They also stir up shame. Feeling that God abandoned them confirms they are worthless.

2. Disappointments with God fuel anger at God. Like the woman whose husband died of a sudden heart attack, we want to cry out against God when we feel abandoned, “How could you allow that? It was so unfair. Why didn’t you stop it from happening? Why weren’t you there to help us?”

As a result of anger fueled by disappointments, many sincere Christians work at cross purposes with themselves. One hand is open, reaching upward toward God. The words of an ancient prayer express the deep longing they have for a closer relationship with God: “To see Thee more clearly, love Thee more dearly, and follow Thee more nearly.” But the other hand is a clenched fist raised upward against God. It’s as if they are driving a car with one foot on the accelerator while the other is on the brake! Their unresolved anger undercuts their desire for spiritual growth.

3. Disappointments with God expose our idols. On the wall in my home office hangs a framed Scripture verse: “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4). This wonderful verse encourages us to make the Lord our focus and our joy. If we do, God promises to fulfill our heart’s desires. But often we reverse the order and live by our own version: “Delight yourself in the desires of your heart—and ask the Lord to give them to you.” In other words, we serve God in order to get what we want. We assume that in exchange for our service God is obligated to grant our desires.

What happens when God doesn’t fulfill them? We feel let down, sometimes even betrayed. We were counting on God but God didn’t come through. Yet the truth is, no matter what we assumed when we signed on as disciples, God never promised to pander to our selfish desires. So our disappointments with God are often the children of our false expectations. And behind our false expectations lurk the idols, the false gods we worship.

After graduation, a seminarian returned to pastor a church in his home state and denomination. He assumed that a promising ministerial career lay ahead of him. But what he thought would be a great start to his career turned into a jolting, dream-shattering experience. Consequently, he was forced out of both his church and the denomination. Broken and disillusioned, he moved to another state.

The healing of his deep wounds took place slowly. Coming to terms with his disappointment with God played a significant part in his healing. Gradually, his deep seated anger at God was diffused and his shattered trust was restored.

One day as he was praying, he realized how much he had lived for the acceptance and approval of his ministerial colleagues. His status and reputation in the denomination had meant everything to him. He had fashioned an idol out of it. Now at last he realized why he was so disappointed and angry with God: instead of supporting his idol, God had allowed it to be smashed.

Tears of repentance welled up in his eyes. “Oh, God,” he cried, “forgive me for wanting their affirmation and favor even more than yours.” Soon his tears of grief were mixed with tears of gratitude. By allowing his idol to be destroyed, God had refined his motives and purified his love.

Bringing our disappointment to the cross
As he hung on the cross, Jesus himself felt disappointed, even abandoned by God. After being suspended for six hours, he finally voiced his disappointment. According to Mark’s account, he cried out “with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’” (15:34). In Aramaic—the language he actually spoke—Jesus was reciting a familiar verse, Psalm 22:1: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In his bitter cry of dereliction he made those words his own.

But not only did Jesus cry out for himself, he cried out for us too. He gave expression to all of humanity’s—all of creation’s (Romans 8:22)—groaning cries of disappointment with God. On the cross, our cries are both anticipated and caught up in his.

Of course, Jesus wasn’t the first righteous person to voice disappointment with God. But if Jesus openly and loudly cried, “My God, my God, why?” shouldn’t that give us permission to cry out? Author Pierre Wolff says, “If Jesus in all his perfection had the audacity to ask his Father, ‘Why?’ we can express to God all our whys, since the why of the Son of Man embraced ours. None of our whys can be excluded from his, because all of our whys are healed through his.”

Wolff goes on to make an intriguing suggestion: Jesus cried out not only as the Son of Man but also as the Son of God. His why was also God’s why over the sin and suffering of creation. Furthermore, since we who are in Christ are also sons and daughters of God, there may be times, through the groaning of the Spirit in us (Romans 8:26-28), when our whys are actually God’s too. In such cases “our revolt expresses the Father’s own revolt rather than human rebellion against him. We think we are accusing him, while in reality he is sorrowfully questioning the world through us!”

Overcoming the effects of disappointment with God
I said earlier that disappointments with God can damage our trust receptors, fuel our anger and expose our idols. Interestingly, all three of these issues are present in the drama of Christ’s crucifixion. At Calvary, Jesus’ faith is tested as never before (trust). He is the object of the people’s rage (anger), which is fueled by their self-serving expectations of a political messiah (idolatry). Let’s examine these one at a time.

Damaged trust. On the cross Jesus struggled to maintain his trust in God. As he hung there, the religious leaders taunted, “He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to; for he said, ‘I am God’s Son’” (Matthew 27:43). But God didn’t deliver him. God seemed indifferent. That Friday there was darkness at noon, thick darkness that hid the sun and also hid God’s face. No voice from heaven this time—only silence, until Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why...?”

This cry is the only place in the Gospels where Jesus doesn’t address God with the personal, intimate “My Father,” but instead uses the more formal, distant “My God.” What he had struggled with in Gethsemane, what he had implored his Father to save him from, had at last come upon him. In Golgatha’s deep darkness, he felt forsaken by the One he had always called Father, the One who had called him his Beloved Son. Centuries earlier, the prophet Amos poignantly described the scene:

“On that day, says the Lord God, I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight.…I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day” (Amos 8:9-10).

On the cross, the bonds of trust between the Father and the Son seem to disintegrate. As theologian Jurgen Moltmann says, “The love that binds the one to the other is transformed into a dividing curse.” In that awful experience, as the Son bears the sins of the world, and the Father, whose eyes are too pure to look on evil (Habakkuk 1:13), turns his face away, God seems mysteriously divided from God.

Yet at the cross, the Father and the Son are never more united, never more bound together. They are one in their surrender, one in their self-giving. The Father surrenders the Son. As Paul says, God “did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us” (Romans 8:32). The Son, in turn, surrenders himself to the will of the Father. He “became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8).

“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). In his final utterance from the cross, Jesus reaffirms his connection to God. These words, also from the Psalms (31:5), were commonly recited by Jewish children as a “now I lay me down to sleep” bedtime prayer. Jesus probably learned them at Mary’s knee. His last words, then, are an affirmation of faith. He addresses God as Father once again, thus implying he is the Son. He places himself in God’s hands. As the Scripture says, “He entrusted himself to the one who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:23).

So the religious leaders were right in saying, “He trusts in God.” He did. When he felt utterly God-forsaken, his faith may have faltered, but it did not fail. He died with a prayer of childlike faith on his lips.

As we bring our damaged trust receptors to the cross, consider what his faith can mean for us. In Galatians 2:19-20, Paul declares that we “have been crucified with Christ.” Consequently, we no longer live, but Christ now lives in us; and the life we now live, we live “by faith in the Son of God.” That last phrase can also be translated “by the faith of the Son of God.”

In the light of damaged trust receptors that make our faith in the Son of God difficult, the faith of the Son of God takes on special significance. At the foot of the cross, his faith—which endured to the end—can be imparted to us. A wonderful exchange takes place: our damaged trust for his determined faith. The exchange may happen suddenly, but usually it comes gradually. We may stand beneath the cross with our damaged trust receptors for a long time. No matter how long it takes, we can rest assured: the faith of the Son of God will be made over to us, enabling us to trust again.

Anger against God. Suspended on the cross, Jesus was the focus of anger on the part of the religious leaders, the soldiers and the common people. Even one of the thieves being crucified with him turned against him. From Jesus’ arrest through his crucifixion, their hostility toward him poured out as they mocked him, spit in his face, flogged him, shook their fists at him, and drove in the nails. At the cross it was not “sinners in the hands of an angry God” but “God in the hands of angry sinners.” Christ became the willing, innocent victim of their rage.

But not only their rage—ours too. Theologian Frank Lake is right: “We attended the crucifixion in our crowds, turned on the healer, strengthening the hands of his persecutors, yelling, full of rage and spite, ‘Crucify him.’ Our rage is focused on him as they hammer the nails through the bones and use them to peg him up.”

What then should we do with our anger fueled by disappointment with God? Christians often hesitate to admit they are angry at God, and they are even more hesitant to openly express that anger. However, the cross boldly proclaims that no matter how intense or explosive our anger, it cannot separate us from God’s love. The cross proves there is nothing you can’t express to God. You can shake your fist, spit, rant and rave, spew out your bitterness, vent your rage at God—it really doesn’t matter.

The cross proclaims that our anger does not intimidate God. He is able to handle it. In fact, the cross is the great anger absorber of the universe. The rage, the anger of all humanity against God was born in Christ’s broken body. The cross, then, is a safe place to bring our anger against God. There we can own it; we can admit that we’re angry at God. And then we can disown it and give it to Christ there. Instead of carrying the anger ourselves or venting it on others, we can let him carry it for us.

At one of the healing services being held on the seminary campus where I work, a woman named Carol came forward to receive prayer. I had counseled with her several times prior to that service, and I knew she was beginning to realize how angry she was at God because of past hurts and injustices. “How can I pray for you?” I asked her when she came forward. She shook her index finger in my face and muttered fiercely, “I hate God—I hate your God.”

There was a time when her answer would have unsettled me. But knowing what I knew about her and about the cross, I found her straightforward response refreshing and full of promise. “Let’s bring that to the cross now,” I suggested. “Your confession that you hate God—let that be your offering, your sacrifice of praise tonight.”

What I suggested puzzled her, but she nodded, so we went ahead. We prayed together, and she admitted how angry she was at God for the hurts and injustices in her life. Then she laid her anger at the foot of the cross. We asked Jesus to bear it and take it away, so it would no longer stand as a barrier between her and God. Finally, we prayed that God’s love would flood her heart as never before.

Our time of prayer was neither dramatic nor emotional, but she took an important step forward that evening. By owning her anger at God, she had begun to disown it. Christ could now bear it in his broken body. As her anger receded, it was replaced by God’s love.

Exposed idols. On Palm Sunday the crowds had waved branches and shouted “Hosanna”; on Good Friday they shook their fists and screamed, “Crucify!” What caused the dramatic, one hundred eighty-degree shift in public opinion? Why did they suddenly turn against Jesus?

“We had thought he was the Messiah who had come to rescue Israel” (Luke 24:21 NLT), two disheartened disciples said to each other on the first Easter as they walked along the road to Emmaus. Their words express their expectation of the Messiah, and the expectation of everyone else: that he would be a conquering king, a messiah who would set them free from Rome’s tyranny and restore political glory to Israel.

The Palm Sunday parade elevated their hopes. Jesus seemed on the verge of declaring himself king. But he wouldn’t conform to their expectations. He insisted on being a suffering servant, definitely not what they wanted. What a letdown. By Good Friday their disappointment had turned to contempt and, beyond that, to murderous rage. So their disappointment was the child of their false expectations. And behind it lurked the idol they worshiped: military and political power.

The risen Christ appeared and began walking with the two downcast disciples toward the village of Emmaus. He asked them why they were sad and listened sympathetically as they painfully recounted how the man they thought was the messiah had been crucified. But then he confronted them, exposing their false expectations: “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe.… Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” (Luke 24:25-26).

“Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him” (Luke 24:31). Like the two disciples on the road, our moment of recognition will come. Jesus will reveal himself to us, even in the confrontation; he will make his presence known. Then we will find ourselves saying, as they did, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road?” (Luke 24:32).

“That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem…. Then they told what had happened on the road” (Luke 24:33, 35). They had to tell others what the Lord had done. And we will too. At the cross, hearts burdened with disappointment can again become burning hearts. And burning hearts will inevitably become bold ones.

Stephen Seamands is professor of Christian Doctrine at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. This article is adapted from Wounds that Heal, forthcoming from InterVarsity Press in July 2003. Copyright (c) Stephen A. Seamands. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press (www.ivpress.com).



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