Psalm 22:1-31

“My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?” (Psalm 22:1) 

Jesus cries on the cross because life at that moment hurts. Was Jesus being faithless when he cried out? We cry also when we experience pain, desolation, and loneliness. When we cry like Jesus are we being faithless? Is it faithless or profane to question God when life is horrible? It is not.

Crying out is an act of faith. It may be the only faithful thing we can do in the moment. But it is an act of faith. When we call on God, it is proof that we believe that He is, that we are His, and that we trust Him in the midst of our most trying times … even when we don’t understand why life is the way it is. Faith is an act that bears out our belief.

In our hardest moments, when we can see Him least, we still call out to Him because we believe He is standing for us even though we don’t know how. These types of cries are an expression of a faithful one seeking understanding, not an expression of a faithless one. This type of “cry” affirms (“proves” if you would) that we believe that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor heights, nor depths, nor any other created thing can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38).

It would be a strange God and a stranger faith that defined faithfulness as only faithful when life was easy and things were good.

Prayer:
God, when I feel faithless, show me who I truly am that I not demean myself whom you have fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139).

Currie Carter