Forsaken

My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?
Why are You so far from my deliverance?
– Psalm 22:1

I can hardly think of a word that instills more hopelessness. Being forsaken is worse than not having any help; it is having lost the help you once had. It implies unfaithfulness, disloyalty, abandonment, intentional rejection. It leaves us feeling resentful, wondering why we allowed ourselves to trust in the first place. The pain would be no worse if we literally had our gut ripped out by someone we hold dear.

It is bad enough when people leave us feeling forsaken. How much worse, then, when we feel forsaken by God? Anyone who has made the journey through Holy Week is familiar with Psalm 22:1. The familiarity is probably not because of the address. Rather, the words are familiar because the gospel writers tell us these words were on the lips of Jesus soon before he died (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34). If it is possible to feel alone in the midst of a crowd, Jesus must have. His best friends had fled. Only a few friendly faces remained in proximity. And as he bore the sinfulness of humanity, Jesus experienced something completely foreign to him: the absence of the Father.

The plea of Psalm 22 is desperate and intense. The writer expresses anguish from the deepest place of human need. Yet if we follow the course of the entire psalm, we notice a powerful contrast. From the forsaken heart also comes words of confidence and praise to God. The writer begins by remembering God’s faithfulness to previous generations (v. 4-5) and acknowledges how God created trust within him from birth (v. 9-10). From this remembrance the writer makes his plea for God’s help (v. 19-21), and commits to declare God’s goodness (v. 22-31). It is a response we might least expect from one feeling forsaken.

Without a doubt, one day of feeling forsaken must feel like a lifetime. None of us would desire to experience it, and hopefully we will not. Still, if such a day does come, I pray that we may learn from Psalm 22 how to hold human desperation along side faith in God. I pray that we would look to Jesus as our model, who even in his last moment was willing to offer himself into the hands of the Heavenly Father (Luke 23:46; Psalm 31:5). There is an adage sometimes used in preaching: “It may be Friday, but Sunday’s coming.” If you are in a “Friday” season, resonating with the despair of Psalm 22, take heart. God can get you to Sunday, and your mouth will again sing His praise.