“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? Why are You so far from helping Me,
and from the words of My groaning? O My God, I cry in the daytime, but You do not hear; and in the night season, and am not silent.” (Psalm 22:1-2 NKJV)
“Save Me from the lion’s mouth and from the horns of the wild oxen! You have answered Me. I will declare Your name to My brethren; in the midst of the assembly I will praise You. You who fear the Lord, praise Him! All you descendants of Jacob, glorify Him, and fear Him, all you offspring of Israel! For He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; nor has He hidden His face from Him; but when He cried to Him, He heard. (Psalm 22:21-24 NKJV)
“For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show Himself strong on behalf of those whose heart is loyal to Him.” (2 Chronicles 2:9a NKJV)
Today, as I woke up I was thinking about my relationship with my heavenly Father. I was thinking about Jesus on the cross as he was quoting Psalm 22 and he began with, “My God, my God, what have you forsaken me?” When you read on in that Psalm you find out that God had never forsaken him. He was right there with him through it all.
So often, I think in religion we get things backwards. We think that God turned his back on Jesus, when no he didn’t turn his back. We go all the way back to Adam and Eve, and we think that when they made that terrible life-changing decision, God somehow abandoned them. We think that he separated from them. Scriptures don’t teach that. The truth is that they separated themselves from him. They ran away and hid themselves due to their guilt and shame. Their Father came to the garden as he always did, ready to walk and talk with them as he did each evening. He sought them out, led them in conversation to confession of their sin, shed blood on their behalf, and covered their nakedness. He then put up a barrier between them and the Tree of Life in order to save them from a second bad decision with eternal consequences.
If you are reading this and you feel like you have been abandoned, you haven’t. If you don’t turn your back on God, he does not turn his back on you. You may be hiding from him, but he never hides from you. He is searching and seeking for those that he can rescue and save from their shame and guilt.
God loves you. He wants to be with you. He will never abandon or forsake you.
Remember that with…
…Eric’s Life Lesson # 388: Backward Thinking