Does God keep His Promises?

You BET He does!

In our darkest hours, through trials and struggles, God’s light will yet shine.

Some people wonder, “If that’s so, then why did Jesus say on the cross, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

At that moment, Jesus was quoting a passage from the Old Testament,

(Ps. 22:1) in which David laments the suffering of the just. In his pain Jesus did not quote the entire Psalm. But those who are familiar with the entire passage know that it goes on (in verse 22:16) to reveal the foreshadowing of Jesus’ crucifixion: 

“For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.”

Our Lord was crying out as He saw the fulfillment of that Old Testament scripture revealed at that very instant.

The NEW is in the OLD, concealed.

The OLD is in the New revealed.

Why did He have to suffer?

Jesus felt the punishment of the world’s sins falling upon him. It was not deserved. But He took it in the certainty of victory over injustice, and in the hope given at the end of that Psalm, (in 24 – 31) where God gives the assurance that:

“…He has not despised or detested

the torment of the afflicted.

He has not hidden His face from him,

but has attended to his cry for help….

All the ends of the earth

will remember and turn to the LORD….

all who go down to the dust will kneel before Him—

even those unable to preserve their lives.

Posterity will serve Him;

they will declare the Lord to a new generation.

They will come and proclaim His righteousness

to a people yet unborn—

all that He has done.”

And indeed, all who look to Jesus as an example of God’s power can take courage in the fact that death is not the end, but a door to the neverending light that no injustice can extinguish.