Commissioned: Real Love: Discovering God's Heart for YouSample

"God, why have you forsaken me?"

If God loves us so much, if He has promised to always be with us, then why do sometimes feel that He has forsaken us? Didn’t even Jesus, when He was on the cross, cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Yes, Jesus did cry out these words of anguish and despair. In fact, Jesus was quoting the Psalmist David, and Jesus would have memorized this verse to use, as all good Hebrews did, as a cry of pain at times when God seemed absent. But the Psalm does not say that God had forsaken David, only that David felt as if God had forsaken him. God does not despise our feelings of pain and abandonment—he even gives us in the Psalms words to express our feelings to Him. God welcomes our cries of hurt and he even wants us to tell him when we feel that He has left us. We never need to hide our feelings from God. In fact, God teaches us to express them. Jesus, who was fully human—though without sin—expressed his anguish to God, and so should we.

But our feelings of pain and abandonment are not the end of the story. The Psalmist also acknowledged the faithfulness of God. God raised Jesus from the dead—He did not abandon him. Our trials will also come to an end. Our faithful God will, in His time, bring us comfort and relief.

But why does He allow the pain in the first place? The Bible also answers this question. God is allowing pain to train us. As a Father teaches His dear children, He allows pain to come into our lives to teach us about life, to teach us about ourselves, and to soften and mold us into better, kinder people. In the case of Jesus, who didn’t need to be trained, he allowed this pain so that Jesus could prove himself the perfectly obedient son who triumphed in testing, even where we fail—by offering himself fully to God for the sake of others. But for us, God allows the pain so that we can become more like Jesus. He wants us also to learn to offer ourselves to Him for the sake of others.

There is nothing wrong with feeling like God has abandoned us. Some moments in life make us feel that way. But He has not abandoned us. He never will. He will raise us up again, many times in this life and forever in the life to come.

Stop, think and pray:

We have all felt at certain moments that God has forsaken us? Have we felt the freedom to express ourselves honestly to Him in times of pain? Let’s take time now to express to God any pain that we have held in. When we are ready, let’s confess to Him our trust in his faithfulness and our thanks that He is training us as His own dear children.