Recently I was told by one well read and informed saint that in the best-selling Christian novel, "The Shack," teaches that Christ wasn't really forsaken by God on the cross, he only mistakenly thought He was. I did not know that "The Shack" taught that about Christ's being forsaken on the cross. I think such reveals the sentimental attitudes we as evangelicals often have towards God. We do whatever we can to soften our views of the cross, and refuse to see it for the horrible event that it really was. And anytime we soften our view of the cross, we become more crippled as Christians. For in the ways of God, death must always precede resurrection, as Passover must always precede Pentecost.
Every time we make the cross an inch shorter, we decrease in our ability to partake in resurrection living and power that Christ wants us to walk in. We substitute goosebumps for power. But I promise, Christ experienced no goosebumps on the cross. It was "for the joy set before Him" Hebrews reminds us, that Christ despised the shame and embraced the cross. In other words, Christ experienced no joy while hanging on that cross, he only hoped for it. There were no goosebumps. There was only death, and death in its ultimate sense: being forsaken by God-- having no consciousness whatsoever of His presence.
Indeed, the saint who truly knows the Lord and what it is to suffer and die to self understands this very thing. He understands that even when he is doing something very spiritual, as our Lord was doing on the cross, that even though he be a son of God, he may have no awareness of God's presence whatsoever. Indeed, trials are a suffering, not because of the physical or emotional stresses it may put on a man, but they are a suffering because in them one has no consciousness of the divine presence. It's a suffering "of the ultimate sort." But this is designed by God, to make us sons in the fullest sense.
