A Hideous Weight

In 2003, I went with a group of GCC high school students out to St. George, Utah, where we spent a few nights at a local church. Just crashed on the floor on sleeping bags and air mattresses. And I remember distinctly on the second night of that trip, I had just turned off the lights in this big room where we were all sleeping. And as I crawled into my sleeping bag out of the darkness from all sides, about 10 or 15 of our high school guys just mobbed me. They dogpiled me, and so I picked up the whole pile and I threw them.

Actually, it didn't go like that at all. I mean, I was. It was a perfect ambush, and I was pinned to the floor. I was immobilized. So there was a lot of laughter.

And after a minute or two, the guys finally climbed off and they went back to bed. And the most amazing part of the story is my air mattress survived. I. I was able to use it for the rest of the trip. Now, that was all in fun, but getting buried under the weight of humanity often ends very badly. In September of 2015, during the annual Muslim Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, two enormous crowds of pedestrians converged and they overloaded an intersection that was leading to the Jumarat bridge, and over 2,400 people were crushed to death.

Now, incidents like these happen all the time. We don't always hear about them because we live in a country that is very safety conscious, we're very wary of lawsuits, and so we devise really elaborate systems for moving people safely in and out of large sports and concert venues. But incidents like these are called crowd crushes. And this one that took place in Saudi Arabia in 2015 was the deadliest on record. The.

But in the last 300 years, over half a million people all over the world have been trampled and suffocated in hundreds of panicked human stampedes, some of them at festivals, some at sports events, some of them at relief aid distribution sites where a whole bunch of people are trying to get their hands on limited resources. But most notably, these happen with regularity during religious pilgrimages. Now, today, our journey through Jesus last words from the cross is going to bring us to this moment of crushing and unbearable weight that's recorded in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Mark. I'm going to focus our thoughts on Mark because they're virtually identical accounts. But this is how Mark sets the scene for us.

Mark 15:33 says, at noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. So as Jesus Hung on the cross, the land grew unnaturally, actually supernaturally dark. Now, anytime scripture talks about a miraculous, a bizarre event like this, there are some who begin to look quickly for any sort of naturalistic explanation. In this case, it's been suggested that what's happening here is a solar eclipse. But that explanation really falls short for a couple of reasons.

Number one, we know from history that Jesus died just before the Jewish Passover celebration. The Passover always coincides with a full moon, while solar eclipses happen only during a new moon. We also know from some fairly recent experience right here that solar eclipses only last a few minutes. Whereas this darkness lasted for three hours. Like the plague of darkness on Egypt that we read about in the book of Exodus, chapter 10.

This three hour darkness while Jesus hung on the cross was an act of God. And it was at the end of this darkness that Jesus spoke his next famous last words. Mark goes on to tell us this. At three in the afternoon, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, eloi, Eloi lama sabachthani. Which means, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Now, those words are shocking because they suggest a distance between Jesus and the Father that we've never before seen and probably wouldn't even think possible. After all, we read in scripture that in the beginning was the Word. That's how John introduces Jesus to us. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God.

He. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made. Without him, nothing was made that has been made. Jesus himself said, I and the Father are one.

He went on to say, I am in the Father and the Father is in me. If Jesus the Son exists as one with God the Father, how could Jesus speak of God forsaking him? What's happening here? Well, I think there are at least four factors that we need to consider, and the first of those is this. In this moment at the cross, Jesus was enduring unimaginable suffering.

In November of 1975, a storm on Lake Superior sank an iron ore ship that's now very famous. It was called the Edmund Fitzgerald, and all 29 of the crew members died. And after reading about the tragedy in Newsweek magazine, a Canadian singer named Gordon Lightfoot wrote a tribute that imagined the final moments before that shipwreck. You've probably heard that song, Fun Fact about Me, my dad actually used to sing that song to my brothers and me at bedtime as a lullaby. Dad was also a big fan of gunfighter ballads.

Heard a lot of those too, which probably explains a lot about me. But Gordon Lightfoot's song the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald poses this question in one of the lyrics. That's really a theological question. He asked, does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours? See, fear and pain often prompt us to ask questions about God's goodness.

And we see this in Scripture too. After Satan took his children and his wealth and his health, Job initially blamed God. This is what Job said. The arrows of the Almighty are in me. My spirit drinks in their poison.

God's terrors are marshaled against me. David wrote in Psalm 6. My soul is in deep anguish. How long, Lord, how long? After her husband and her sons all died, Naomi said, the Lord's hand has turned against me.

And remember, by the time that Jesus spoke these words, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me from the cross? He'd been rejected by the very people he came to save. He'd been sold out by one of his disciples for a few bucks and then abandoned by the rest. He'd been falsely accused and unjustly sentenced to death. He'd been mocked and beaten and spit on.

His body had been shredded by a Roman scourging. He'd been forced to carry a heavy splintered cross on his raw and bleeding shoulders. He'd been stretched out and nailed to that cross through his wrists and ankles. He was exhausted, he was dehydrated and he was struggling to breathe. And as God the Son, Jesus knew God the Father more closely than any of us.

And yet in this moment, he experienced suffering unknown to any of us. And in the midst of that pain, he asked a very human question. God, where are you now? There's a second reason, I think that Jesus spoke of being forsaken by God. And it's this.

It's that in this moment at the cross, Jesus was bearing the crushing weight of sin and judgment. A lot of times we think of God in a one dimensional way. We look at texts like 1 John 4:8 which says God is love. And we envision this feel good God, who is much too loving to ever punish anyone. And while God is loving, Scripture is emphatic that it was God's love for all of us that prompted Jesus to come to earth to save us.

God is also holy, and that means he intensely hates sin. David wrote in Psalm 5, you are not a God who is pleased with wickedness. With you, evil people are not welcome. The arrogant cannot stand in your presence. You hate all who do wrong.

You destroy those who tell lies. The bloodthirsty and deceitful you lord detest. Psalm 66 says, if I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. Scripture contains multiple lists of sinful attitudes and behaviors that if not confessed, if not repented of, if not forgiven by God, exclude us from his kingdom. I read several of those lists this week and just for convenience sake I collated and I alphabetized them.

Are you ready? Arrogance, betrayal, cheating in business, cowardice, cruelty, disobedience to parents, drunkenness, faithlessness, foolishness, greed, hatred, idol worship, impurity, ingratitude, jealousy, lying, murder, out of control, anger, selfishness, sex outside of a husband, wife, marriage, relationship, slander, stirring up conflict, theft, unforgiveness and witchcraft. Did I miss anybody? It's a comprehensive list. The Apostle Paul wrote in Romans that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and that the wages of sin is death.

Scripture stresses two truths about sin, the first of which is that we are all guilty of it. We're all guilty of sin. No exceptions. We have all, in a variety of different ways, chosen our way, God's. And Scripture stresses on that basis that the ultimate penalty for sin is being cut off from God.

Without God's intervention, our sin destines us for separation from him, which beyond the scope of this life is called Hell, a place that is horrible exactly because God and His life giving presence are completely absent there. God has hated sin ever since Adam and Eve rejected his instructions in the garden. And we can point to numerous examples in Scripture of God judging sin fiercely. But it wasn't until the cross that God punished sin in a way that had lasting impact. The Apostle Paul wrote these words in Romans chapter 3.

Paul said God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement through the shedding of his blood to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness because in his forbearance, meaning in God's patience, He had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished.

What Paul is saying is that Jesus died on that cross not just for the sins of people who were alive at that moment, but not just for the sins of people who had come along after him, but for the sins of people who had lived and died before Jesus walked the earth. And here's why. Verse 26 he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus at the cross. God punished sin justly. God's holiness demands punishment for every sin.

If he punished your sins while Letting my sins slide, that wouldn't be just. So the way God ensured punishment for every sin was by taking our death sentence upon himself. And in that way, God became the justifier of those who have faith in Jesus. That word justify, when it's used in Scripture, it simply means to declare righteous. God took the punishment for sin in our place at the cross, and all of us who trust in that sacrifice are covered by it.

When you and I trust that Jesus died in our place, God removes our sin. He no longer looks at our sin. And what he sees instead is the perfect righteousness of Jesus. That's why Paul wrote in Second Corinthians that if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come, the old has gone, the new is here. All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ.

And just a few verses later, Paul summarized everything that took place at the cross. In this one sentence, he said, God made him who had no sin, Jesus, to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of of God at the cross. The perfect sinless Son of God was stained and he was burdened with our sin. And he bore the full crushing weight of God's absolutely legitimate holy wrath against our disobedience. He became a sacrifice for our sins.

Jesus experienced separation from God so we wouldn't have to. And that brings us to this third factor that's going on here, and that is that in this moment at the cross, Jesus was experiencing a disruption in his connection to the Father. Now this is hard for us to process because you and I live in a world that is thoroughly tainted by corruption. We see it all around us. We're accustomed to it.

We look to a lot of it as entertainment. We are so steeped in this environment of sin and rebellion against God that I don't think we can fully understand the intensity of God's holy hatred of sin. Nor are we able to fully grasp how painful it would have been for Jesus who had no sin, who had never sinned, to personally feel the hideous weight of our sin. I don't even know what to compare that to. Being buried alive under an avalanche, being force fed food that you're deathly allergic to, experiencing severe burns over your entire body.

See, at the cross we see a subtle shift in the way Jesus spoke to God. I don't know if you noticed this or not, but at first Jesus used familiar relational language. Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they're doing. But a few hours later, he said, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me. Why the shift from father to God?

Well, I suspect it was because at this moment, the repulsiveness of the sin that Jesus carried to the cross forced God the Father, in whose holy presence sin is completely unwelcome, to turn away. When Jesus took on the weight and the filth of the world's sins, my sins and your sins, he felt this sad and terrifying because it was so completely unprecedented, separation from the father. You know, 700 years before the cross, the prophet Isaiah predicted what would happen to the Messiah there. He was cut off from the land of the living for the transgression of my people. He was punished.

How could Jesus, who was God in flesh, be cut off and die unless God the source and the giver and the sustainer of life, temporarily turned away and withdrew his life giving presence from him? Jesus experienced separation from God so we wouldn't have to. And it wasn't just Isaiah who predicted that. There's one more reason why Jesus spoke of being forsaken. And that is, in this moment at the cross, Jesus was precisely fulfilling prophecy.

You know, there are certain phrases that are so familiar that if I just say the first few words, you automatically know the rest. I pledge allegiance. Yeah. May the force. Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya.

Yeah, absolutely. And if I refer to the ABCs, you know, automatically what 23 letters come next? Right. See, many of the teachings recorded in Scripture were first circulated by word of mouth and memorized. So a Jewish rabbi could often recite just a few words from a biblical text, and his students could then recite the rest from memory from the cross.

Jesus Christ, who was a rabbi himself, spoke the opening line of Psalm 22, which David had written 1,000 years earlier. Now I'm gonna read some Excerpts from Psalm 22. And what I want you to do is, number one, I want you to notice the specific parallels between these prophetic words and the things that Jesus is experiencing at this moment. But I also want you to imagine the impact of being a Jew, familiar with the Old Testament, standing there at the cross, he hearing Jesus begin Psalm 22 out loud and then continuing in your own heart and mind to recite the rest of this psalm. I want you to notice what it would have been like to see these words unfolding before your eyes.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My, my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer by night, but I find no rest. All who see Me mock me. They hurl insults, shaking their heads.

He trusts in the Lord, they say. Let the Lord rescue him. Let him deliver him, since he delights in him. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax.

It has melted within me. My mouth is dried up like a potsherd and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. You lay me in the dust of death. Dogs surround me. A pack of villains encircles me.

They pierce my hands and my feet. All my bones are on display. People stare and gloat over me. They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment. It's remarkable, isn't it, how many specific details of Jesus crucifixion the Holy Spirit predicted through David a thousand years beforehand.

And as Jesus spoke the words of Psalm 22, verse 1 from the cross, and Jews in that crowd continued to think through that psalm from where Jesus left off. They would have seen Scripture play out before their eyes. And when they got to the end, they would have found this hopeful promise that hinged on what Jesus was doing at the cross at that very moment. Psalm 22 ends like this. All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord.

And all the families of the nations will bow down before him. For dominion belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations. All the rich of the earth will feast and worship. All who go down to the dust will kneel before him. Those who cannot keep themselves alive, posterity will serve him.

Future generations will be told about the Lord. They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn, he has done it. You and I are a part of those people yet unborn. At the time that David wrote those words, Jesus cried, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Because at the cross, to deal with our sins once and for all, Jesus experienced separation from God.

So we wouldn't have to, you know, if the people who saw Jesus die, if they grasp at all that Psalm 22 was being played out right in front of them, I wonder how many of them might have connected the dots to these words from Isaiah 53, which we've already seen some bits and pieces of this morning. Isaiah 53 says, he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray.

Each of us has turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. The most impactful crowd crush incident in history took place 2,000 years ago just outside Jerusalem. And its single casualty was God himself, who in the person of Jesus was crushed by sin. Mine, yours, all of humanity's. Jesus went to the cross and and endured the punishment that God's justice demanded so that you and I can trust in him and we can be justified, we can be declared righteous by God.

Jesus experienced separation from God so we wouldn't have to. And this idea is expressed again and again throughout Scripture. Maybe the most famous place we encountered is in the Gospel of John which says God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed.

In the name of God's one and only Son, John reminds us that only Jesus can save us from the consequences of our sin. And that means the decision that we make about Jesus is a matter of life and death. The Apostle Paul described it like this in Colossians chapter one. Paul said God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Jesus and through him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross. Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior.

But now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you wholly in his sight without blemish and free from accusation. If you continue in your faith established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the Gospel in light of this central truth of Scripture that Jesus experienced separation from God so we wouldn't have to. There are two responses that the Word of God calls all of us to make. And the first is this. It is to come to Jesus.

We talk about having come to Jesus, meetings with people sometimes. This is the real deal. We have to come to Jesus. God loves us. Jesus has fully paid for our sins.

But until we come to him in faith, until we surrender the throne of our lives to his lordship, we remain guilty and condemned and separated from God. So it is critical that we obey the teaching of Scripture by trusting that Jesus gave His perfect life for our sins and then rose from the dead. Apart from that reality, we have no hope. It's crucial that we recognize the sins in our life that condemned Jesus to death on that cross and that we turn away from them. The biblical word for that is repentance.

It's critical that we tell the truth with our mouths and with our lives, that Jesus is both Lord and Savior and that we call on him to save us because he's the only one who can. And it is critical that we surrender our lives to. To his lordship, which is actually what we declare in baptism. Until we give the weight of our sins to Jesus, we're still carrying it. We're still burdened by it.

We are still separated from him by it. So if you're ready to surrender your life to Jesus, we're always ready to help you take that next step. And we say that all the time, because that's always true. But I want to add this important notation and that is the. This is so important that it shouldn't just be put off.

We don't want to twist people's arms. We don't want to whip you up emotionally. We don't want to prompt you to do something impulsive without thinking it through. But what you do with Jesus is such a crucial decision that I would encourage you not to rush into it. If you have questions or doubts, if you have conversations that need to be had, let's have those conversations to bring you to a place where you understand what this is all about.

But it's such an important decision that it should not just be put off. Don't just think someday, don't just think one of these days I'll get around to that. This is crucial. We're ready anytime to help you take your next step of obedience to Jesus. And if that next step is baptism, we're ready every single time we gather to help you do that.

You might walk in sometime and think, you know, what I'm sensing I should do that. But wasn't planning on this. I didn't bring anything. I don't have a change of clothes, I don't have a towel. Don't worry, we've got all those spaces covered.

We'd love to help you take whatever next step God is calling you to take as you come to Jesus. But there's a second part of this challenge, and Paul outlines that in Colossians, chapter one. It's not just about coming to Jesus, it's about staying with Jesus. You know, the Christian life. It's not a one time experience.

It's not just an emotional moment. It's not just a photo op. It is a daily, lifelong decision to continue in our faith and to not move from the hope held out in the Gospel. We exist as a church to grow together as disciples of Christ. We want to help all of us who come to Jesus stay with Jesus, continue trusting him.

We want to encourage you to continue following Jesus. We want to equip you as a follower of Jesus. So we'd love to talk with you about whatever questions, whatever doubts, whatever obstacles, whatever struggles you're facing as you seek to follow Jesus. That's why we're here. The message of the Gospel is that Jesus experienced separation from God so we wouldn't have to.

And so that we wouldn't have to. He invites us to come to him and he invites us to stay with him. And if we can help you with any next step, we'd love to do that. Would you pray with me? Heavenly Father, we're thankful this morning for who you are.

We're thankful for your love and your mercy and your grace and your sacrifice. And while we talk about, and we sing about those words on a regular basis, Lord, we're reminded this morning of how little we really understand. We can't possibly imagine what it was like for you to put on flesh and step into the brokenness and corruption of this world that you created, but that rebelled against you. We can't imagine what it was like for Jesus, who had been nothing but submissive and obedient to your every instruction, to suddenly find himself burdened with the guilt, the burden, the heaviness of all the world's sins, to experience, even for a moment, a completely unknown, before that moment, separation from. From you and.

And, Father, while we don't fully understand all that that entails, we have a lot of questions about it. Father, we're thankful. We're thankful that it happened because of the doorway that that opened to allow us to have access to your presence, to allow us to have the guilt of our sins removed from us and to no longer have that barrier between us. Father, we're stunned by the depth of your sacrifice and the immensity of your mercy toward us. And we ask, Lord, that you would show us anything in our lives, anything in our hearts that is an impediment to our fully surrendering to you and becoming the disciples that you call us to be.

God, we're thankful that we get to take this journey together. And we pray that you would help us to consistently be a place, Lord, where we love you through a life of worship and we grow together as disciples of Christ and we inspire others to follow Jesus. Lord, this is our prayer. In Jesus name Amen. Every time we talk about Next steps, we want to make sure you know, in the most practical terms possible what those next steps look like.

I want to invite our Next Step team to come down to the front so that they'll be available here right after the service. There are three things we want to make sure you know about. One of those is our Next Steps classes. We offer those every month at the 11 o' clock hour, so we'll start the next cycle of those in the month of April. We would love for you to come and be a part of those.

Learn more about who we are as a church and what it means to follow Jesus. We. We'd love to tell you more about that at any time. This is true for our friends online as well as for all of us in the room. Just text the word next to 317-707-9997 or you can use the QR code that's on the screen.

Just let us know what you're wrestling with, what you sense God prompting you to do. And if we can be of help with that, we would love to come alongside and begin a conversation. And we have friends down here in front because every single time we're together, we want you to know there are people here who care. We'd love to pray with you, we would love to answer questions. We'd love to help in any way we can as you seek to follow Jesus.

So we want to invite you to respond in any of those ways. And lastly, just want to remind you we have lots of invite cards for Easter. This story of the death and the burial and the resurrection of Jesus is the linchpin of all of history. And we get to live in it and experience hope because of it. And I'll bet you know people in your life who are living right now apart from that hope.

And this Easter season is an incredible opportunity to invite them to come and experience that message with us. So please grab some of those on your way out. We love you, gcc. Be blessed as you go.