The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

by Timothy J. Keller

We cannot fathom, however, what it would be like to lose not just spousal love or parental love that has lasted several years, but the infinite love of the Father that Jesus had from all eternity. Jesus’ sufferings would have been eternally unbearable. Christian theology has always recognised that Jesus bore, as the substitute in our place, the endless exclusion from God that the human race has merited. In the Garden of Gethsemane, even the beginning and foretaste of this experience began to put Jesus into a state of shock. New Testament scholar Bill Lane writes: ‘Jesus came to be with the Father for an interlude before his betrayal, but found hell rather than heaven opened before him, and he staggered.’8 On the cross, Jesus’s cry of dereliction – ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ – is a deeply relational statement. Lane writes: ‘The cry has a ruthless authenticity . . . Jesus did not die renouncing God. Even in the inferno of abandonment he did not surrender his faith in God but expressed his anguished prayer in a cry of affirmation, “My God, my God”.’9 Jesus still uses the language of intimacy – ‘my God’ – even as he experiences infinite separation from the Father.