New Salem Baptist Church

Forsaken by God!

March 12, 2023

Read Matthew 27:24-54.

This chapter reveals the intense and great suffering of the Lord Jesus Christ. His suffering and death reveal the most important facts in the universe! They reveal facts about the nature of God and the nature of man.

[1] The first matter that we can see is how serious sin is in the eyes of God. Because we were born with a sinful nature and because we live in a sin-cursed world, we can easily think of sin too lightly. And we do. Frequent exposure to something deadens our awareness of it. Have you ever walked into a kitchen where a person was cooking fish? The smell of fish hits your olfactory sense in a strong way. But all you have to do is stay in that kitchen for ten or fifteen minutes and you do not even notice the odor any longer. Sin is like that. We become less aware of it because it is all around us and even in us!

Along with this loss of awareness is also a feeling of lightness about the severity of sin because of its commonality. The suffering of Jesus reveals the weightiness of sin.

You see, the Father loves Jesus beyond measure.

The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand.^[1]

For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing. And greater works than these will he show him, so that you may marvel. ^[2]

The Father even shared his glory with Jesus before the world began, that’s how great his love is for him!

And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. ^[3]

The Father loves the Son so very much, yet he allowed him to suffer and even ordained him to suffer. If sin were not so serious, he would not allow the One he loves to suffer so greatly. Sin is awful! Sin is cosmic treason.

[2] The second thing that we can see is that sin must be punished. Justice must be administered. Sin cannot be overlooked. If sin could just be forgiven then there would be no need for Christ to suffer and die. Because Christ suffered and died, this proves that sin must be punished.

[3] The third matter that we can know is that the punishment for sin must be great. It must be intense. It must be agonizing. The reason we know these things is because this is the way that the Lord Jesus suffered. His suffering was humiliating, intense, and agonizing. If the suffering for sin didn’t have to be this way, then Jesus would not have suffered in this way.

So, just from the passage we read this morning, we know that:

• Sin is very serious.
• Sin must be punished.
• The punishment for sin must be intense and agonizing.

These truths cannot be denied because to deny them is to question the Father’s love for the Son. But to question the Father’s love for the Son is to question the truth of the words of Jesus. That is the most foolish thing a person could ever do. If any person who ever walked this earth could be trusted, it is the Lord Jesus Christ.

A person has only four options regarding whom to trust:

• You can trust yourself. But “he who trusts in his own mind is a fool.” (Prov. 28:26)
• You can trust another person. But this has the same problem. Haven’t you received advice before and it turned out to be not so good? Other people can be as wrong as you are.
• You can trust no one and nothing. Then you are left with nothing to know. And, even those things that you think you might know leave you in uncertainty and doubt.
• Or, you can trust the Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, we can know these three things about sin. But we can know more by considering a couple of other passages.

[4] The punishment for sin, besides being intense and agonizing, is eternal. It will never end.

since indeed God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, ⁷ and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels ⁸ in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. ⁹ They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might,^[4]

Notice how the apostle describes the consequences of disobedience: there will be the inflicting of “vengeance.” There is punishment. It is “eternal.”

The truth that the Lake of Fire, commonly called hell, is eternal was communicated in the OT as well:

“And they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me. For their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.” ^[5]

When Isaiah says, “their fire shall not be quenched,” he means that the fire they experience – “fire” representing their suffering – never ends. When he says, “their worm shall not die,” he means the infliction never ends.

Because the horror of hell is so great many have tried to deny the endlessness of it. For this, more than anything else, is what gives it its horror. The suffering in hell will dreadful in and of itself. Though the suffering in hell will be intense, if there were some hope of coming out then a person might be able to bear up under it. If one were sent to hell for one year, after the first day of suffering you could say, “I have only 364 days left, then I can leave this place!” There would be hope. If one were sentenced to hell for 10 years, after the first day of suffering you could say, “I have only 3, 649 days left, then I can leave this place!” That hope would keep you from sinking lower. If you were condemned to 100 years in hell, after the first year of suffering you could say, “I have only 99 years left, then I can leave this place.” There would still be hope, though a long way off. If one were decreed to 1000 years in hell, after the first year of suffering you could say, “I have 999 years left, then I can leave this place.” I am not going there but, if I were, and my sentence were 1000 years, I would keep looking to that day when I would one day leave. I think that distant hope would keep me going. Even if one were sentenced to one million years in hell, after the first year of suffering you could say, “I have 999,999 years left, then I can leave this place.” That hope would just be a speck in a vast canopy, but it would still be a hope. What makes hell so horrible and so hard to believe is that it is eternal. It is a place with no hope whatsoever. The absence of all hope make it so utterly forlorn. To enter and to know that one will never be able to leave will be in itself a hell of hells.

Who deserves hell? Adolf Hitler deserves hell doesn’t he? He does! He was a mass murderer.

Joseph Stalin deserves hell. He murdered more of his own citizens that Hitler did.

Mao Tse-tung murdered many more people than even Hitler and Stalin combined. He was responsible for 45 million deaths. He deserves hell.

The correct answer to “Who deserves hell?” is that everyone deserves hell. Everyone deserves hell because everyone has sinned and:

• Sin is ultimately serious. It is rebellion against your Creator.
• Sin must be punished.
• The punishment must be intense and agonizing.
• The punishment must be eternal.

Every person deserves hell. Yet, God has chosen to rescue some because he loves those he rescues.

How does God do this? We have already established that sin must be punished. The way that God saves us from hell is by sending his Son to take the punishment that we deserve. The Lord Jesus died in the place of some people.

Although the physical suffering that our Lord experienced was terrible, the severest suffering was his separation from the Father. He was abandoned by God because he became sin (2 Cor. 5:21)! This is why our Lord cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46) It is because God forsook his Son on our behalf. God left Him! The One whom Jesus had loved from before the foundation of the world, and who loved him in returnr, had forsaken him.

For whom did Christ die?

He died for those who will place their faith in him, turning away from their sin (this is called repentance). He died for those who surrender to him as Lord and who follow him.

Would you have the merits of Christ’s sacrifice applied on your behalf? Would you have your sins forgiven? Then believe in Christ, surrender to him, and find new life!

If you do this then you can be certain that your sins will be forgiven. You can be certain because the Father forsook his Son as he bore your sins. The Father would not forsake the Son unless there were a certainty for the forgiveness of your sins.

This is what the Lord Jesus made available to you: a clear conscience and peace of mind!

If you would like a clear conscience before God I am going to ask you to come forward and make a profession of faith. The reason I am asking you to come forward is because when people placed their faith in Christ in the Bible they did so publicly. It is so safe to follow the examples in the Bible! It is the most important decision you can ever make. Do not put it off for even one more hour!