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Today is Good Friday. It is the day where we Christians remember Christ's death on the cross and what it represents to us as both a political execution and an atoning sacrifice. It is a day where we express great thankfulness in solemn remembrance of the price Jesus was willing to pay for each and every one of us.

It is a day that - by remembering all that he endured on the cross on our behalf - we share in his suffering.

There is a certain aspect of Christ's suffering that I have most identified with as I have been meditating on the Scriptures and seeking the Lord in my heart this Good Friday. His feeling of abandonment.

In the final moments of Jesus' torturous death on the cross he found himself in such despair, feeling such isolation from his heavenly Father, that he could only cry out, "My God, why have you forsaken me?"

Here was the Son of God, having been faithful every step of the way to the mission God had set before him, at his absolute lowest point. And in the midst of tremendous physical and emotional pain, he cries out to the Almighty and says "WHERE ARE YOU?"

And there was still no answer from God.

There is so much comfort in knowing that I can identify with Christ in his suffering because he has identified with me in mine. He too has felt the pain of isolation, and the agony of feeling rejected by God. He too knew how it felt to weep and to cry out to God only to have the agonizing sound of silence ring hallow in his ears. He too knew what it meant to question whether or not God really cared at all.

In asking "why" Jesus was questioning a great number of questions of God. He was questioning his sovereignty. He was questioning God's justice. He was questioning his love. He was questioning his faithfulness. And somewhere in all of that he may have even been questioning himself.

Historically, Christ's questioning God while on the cross has been problematic for me. We teach that Jesus wasn't just the Son of God, but that he was God incarnate. Or God himself. So what are we to make of it when God questions himself? Has he ceased to be all-knowing? Maybe he's not as sovereign as we've made him out to be? Was Jesus showing a lack of faith? Isn't a lack of faith sinful?

So we invent a number of scenarios to explain all of this away. We say that because Jesus was paying for our sins, and in effect became sin on our behalf, that God couldn't look at him on the cross and that's why Jesus felt so abandoned. Or we speculate that maybe for a brief moment in time there

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