“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Mark 15:34 NIV
Forsaken
Between 1860 and 1935, about 100,000 impoverished children were emigrated from Britain to Canada to seek a new life in the “land of plenty.” Charities, religious workers, philanthropists, and state-run institutions, such as workhouses and orphanages, all sent children abroad, claiming that this was the only way to prevent their becoming criminals or joining the masses of working-class unemployed. Friendless or Forsaken? follows the story of child emigration agencies operating in North West England tracing the imperial relationships that enabled agents to send children away from their homes and parents, who often lost sight of them forever.
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We will never fully understand what Jesus went through on the Cross. As brutal as Roman crucifixion was, physically and emotionally, Jesus was also bearing the sin of the world on Himself as He hung there. He knew that He had come to not only prepare His followers to take the Gospel to the world, He had come to offer Himself as a sacrifice for our sin, so that God’s perfect balance of love and justice could be met. God couldn’t simply ignore our sin – His justice demanded that an appropriate punishment be meted out. But He loves us, and so He set in place a plan – He would come as the sinless One, fully God and fully human. This same Jesus inspired King David to pen the words of Psalm 22, a profound Messianic psalm that begins the moment Jesus would bear our sins. He would quote the first verse while hanging from the Cross. We read it in Mark 15:34: “‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the cries of anguish? For you.
These have been words from the heart.
Bob Beasley