On suffering and the limits of being human...

One of the few verse fragments I had actually heard before I got my Bible a couple years ago was from Matthew 22:46:
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

I was listening to a sermon from Tim Keller on suffering (I think it was from a long time ago), and he was saying that the suffering now will make whatever is to come all the more sweet and talked about how the reason Jesus endured such suffering was not to get to heaven, but to get us to heaven, that we were his hope in his time of greatest pain.

And aside from the sermon message, it occurred to me that if Jesus is God, how could He feel abandoned by God? And I know I've heard preachers explain it already, that in that particular moment, because of some accumulation of sins, Jesus was actually apart from God. Some even go so far as to say he went to hell for a while.

But if Jesus was fully human, there could be another explanation.

In the depths of greatest suffering, what happens to us? In the midst of some suffering, we shrug it off. Give us a little more and we're likely to turn to God, right? Given the right conditions, even the non-believers might find themselves pleading with a God they don't otherwise believe in. But throw us into extreme suffering, suffering where the body is absolutely overwhelmed and can feel nothing else but suffering and what happens?

I've never been there, I guess, but at the same time, I suppose my own moments of greatest suffering, even if they're insignificant in the realm of possible suffering, might paint a glimpse of what might happen and I think it really is the feeling of being abandoned by God.

If you're a self-aware believer, you've probably noticed that very many of the atheists you meet carry with them this deep unresolved pain (as do most humans...). And I know in my experience before learning about Jesus, I had it too and it did keep me away from God. If my own family, in particular my own mother, did not love me when they are naturally predestined to love me, then how could God love me and not only that, but why would He allow me to experience such a strong, irreparable abandonment? Those questions, along with the fundamental sorrow I carried with me about them, did keep me from knowing God. It all kept me angry at God, even if I didn't believe in Him at all.

So what if that is a layer to Jesus' death on the cross?

And I also realized that the actual physical death on the cross and its complex multidimensional physical nature has the potential to grasp anybody. I've noticed that people who are afraid of death are left in awe by the fact that Jesus knowingly died, but for people like me, who aren't afraid of death, the dying part isn't the most significant. For us (of course I'm speaking generally), it's the earthly suffering that is what creates awe. He didn't just die knowingly; he endured hours of torture first. Knowingly. That is a sacrifice.

Back to my point. What if the human body in a state of suffering overwhelm detaches in such a way that there is no God? What if God, in all His might and power, is intangible at that level of suffering because our broken body creates this impenetrable wall to block out anything but the knowledge of our suffering? And it would be a wall so strong that even Jesus endured it. It would be a distinct human limit to our connection to God.

Then let's take that concept and modify it to accommodate each individual's ability to cope in the face of suffering, however mild or extreme and then you'd have this sort of human predisposition to losing faith under certain pressures.

And so, under these particular circumstances, depending on our own personal vulnerability, we find ourselves utterly alone, completely abandoned. But we know that Jesus wasn't actually abandoned. We know God never stopped loving Him, right? We know that eventually, Jesus was going to be at the right hand of God. (Or maybe we don't and I'm wrong?) But even if we are limited by the mechanisms we've evolved to cope with suffering, even if those mechanisms might have the potential to bring about a state where faith is impossible, it is also impossible that our perception in that moment causes God's love to cease to exist.. While we might not be able to feel God in that particular moment, God is always there.

And I think, as with anything about God, you can look at it as infinitely vast beyond our realm of knowledge, but you can turn it the other way, into the microscopic aspects of our lives. In moments of great suffering where we are rendered incapable of anything but suffering, God is there and conversely, in moments of minor suffering, even if we aren't overwhelmed and isolated, God is also there.

I don't know- I just thought it made sense as a possibility because if God is God and God influenced the Bible, then without a doubt there are layers in there we can't even begin to analyse.