“My, God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” There may be no sentence in all Scripture that is more difficult to explain than this one. It’s said that Martin Luther fasted and meditated for hours on this verse, and when he finally spoke, it was to declare, “God forsaken of God! Who can understand that?”

Indeed, to fully grasp our Lord’s meaning and experience in Matthew 27:46, we would have to fully grasp the mysteries of the Trinity—one God eternally existing in three equal but distinct persons—and fully grasp the mysteries of the incarnation—the union of human and divine natures in the one person of Jesus Christ. And since our earthly minds cannot comprehend such heavenly realities, God’s people are backed into the corner of our finitude. There are things in this horrid scene that we just can’t fully understand. But, by God’s grace, there are also some things we get to understand more fully because of this horrid scene.