When I was a boy I remember being with a group of kids down at the Blackridge Park and there was a homeless man on the bench.

He really was quite wretched. He stunk. He was talking to himself. He seemed alone and abandoned. We left him alone. But one of the older kids use a word I had never heard before. He said, "Look at that derelict."

My friend's comment was derogatory. But the man was pathetic.

For hundreds of years theologians commented on the moment Jesus, nailed to the cross, after three hours of agony, cried out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" They have often referred to it as his "Cry of dereliction."

I never liked that term being applied to Jesus. After all, he is the lover of our souls. He is the good and gentle One who exhibited the fruit of the Holy Spirit in absolute perfection. He is our Joy. So to call him a "derelict" creates static and dissonance in my mind.

And yet, the term is accurate. As his cry goes up late in that dark afternoon, about the time of the evening sacrifice, the One John the Baptist called "The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" is himself abandoned, alone, despised, and forsaken by God. His cry of dereliction and anguish, quoting Psalm 22:1, expresses the agony of unbearable stress. He experiences the pain and ugliness of our sin imputed and pressed upon him. The foul wickedness of sin makes him repugnant to God the Father. And in the small way that derelict old man on the park bench was repugnant to me and my friends, God the Father will now bruise his own son.

Why would he do this? Isaiah 53:10 tells us, "Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt..." He is making an offering for guilt.

That's the explanation! The Apostle Paul unpacks it, writing "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin..." God the Father loved us so much that he was willing to crush his Son and make him an offering for guilt. God the Son loved us so much that he was willing to do the Father's will and become the fulfillment of the John the Baptist's prophecy – to become "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."

The One who never sinned, became worse than derelict. He became sin, receiving the wages of sin because "the wages of sin is death." What a mystery. "For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin..." But he did it with a purpose. Paul finishes the verse, "... that in him we might become the righteousness of God." He did it to restore us back to a relationship with God so that we would not be derelict in his eyes.

So this terrible day ends up being an amazing blessing for us. He did it “for our sake.“ Would you agree?

Musing’s from Pastor John, June 27, Click to Email Pastor John