Q. In worship, we sing the song, How Deep The Father’s Love For Us, and there is a lyric in the song that says, “The Father turns His face away.” Is that true? When Jesus was on the cross, did the Father turn His face away?
A. That is a good question. Let me say first of all that we need to be people of the Word who recognize biblical truth in a lyric and recognize error in a lyric. We should both understand what we sing, and mean what we sing when we sing it.
When we have a song before us that is “true” and understand it and mean what we are singing, it then becomes an offering brought forth in spirit and in truth. The fact that you are dissecting a lyric in the attempt to decide if it is true is a good thing.
Songs are powerful in that they do a number of important things; they unite worshipers in the singing of praises, they teach truth, they enable us to express depths and heights of emotion, they help us remember doctrine, they encourage us to keep going by focusing our eyes upon God in times of difficulty, and more.
The songs we select to sing in corporate worship gatherings are carefully chosen. We sift through many songs in order to find the “gold”. Not all old songs are gold. Not all new songs are gold. We work hard to choose songs that people can sing, like to sing, and need to sing. In our “mining” of songs, we have chosen to introduce one new song each month, (excluding the summer) for a total of 10 new songs a year. Some of these songs will stick, some will not. Some will become anthematic, finding their way deep into the hearts, minds and voices of the worshipers.
We seek to use songs that fit the following criteria:
a. Biblical - Biblical themes are overt. The song has strong biblical substance. It is theologically sound.
b. Lyrical - The song has lyrical depth. The lyrics are strongly vertical and horizontal. It is a song to the Lord, in the presence of one another. The lyrics are well integrated and clearly point to one key theme.
c. Singable - The key is within a normal singing range, appropriate for the average person. The melody is easy to follow.
d. Memorable - People like the songs. They click. There is a ease to the song and they are easy to remember.
e. Impactful - The song conveys a deep meaning and evokes feeling. It touches the listener spiritually, engages them mentally, moves them emotionally, and leads them to love God, open their heart and live out their worship in authenticity.
In our repertoire of 200 songs, we sing songs that are timeless, that is, they have been around a long time and have been the song of the church for hundreds of years. An example of this would be, Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, a hymn based on Joachim Neander's German chorale, published in 1680.
We have songs that are timely, that is they are fresh and new. An example of this would be the song God is Able, written by Ben Fielding and Reuben Morgan in 2010.
We also use songs that are tested, that is, they are modern yet have been around for a while and they are part of our song vocabulary. An example of this would be the Easter anthem, Happy Day, written by Tim Hughes and published in 2006.
With that background, let me address your question. When Jesus’ cry of dereliction on the cross (from Psalm 22:1) (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) was uttered, did the Father “turn His face away”, as the lyric states? “Was the Trinity broken?”
Author of the book, Forsaken, Thomas H. McCall, address this question, and addresses recent commentators who have interpreted Jesus’ cry form the cross as indicating He was literally abandoned by the Father so that the Trinity was in some sense severed for a time.
I quote from a reviewer of McCall’s book. “McCall argues this view (of Jesus being abandoned by the Father), is out of step with the Christian tradition, which has normally interpreted Jesus’ words either as identifying with our sense of abandonment or merely as Jesus’ human feeling of abandonment on the cross. McCall maintains that no matter what general approach one takes with regard to the Trinity…the broken-Trinity view threatens the very idea of the Christian God. The Trinity quite simply cannot be broken, and such a view is not demanded by the gospel narratives.”
To summarize then, yes Jesus did quote Psalm 22:1, and in two gospels Matthew and Mark He is quoted as saying those words from the cross. The Bible however does not say or indicate that “the Father turned His face away.” That is an interpretive lyrical line and not a biblical line. We can affirm biblically that Jesus God’s Son did bear the divine wrath for sin but the Trinity was not broken.
It is a theological impossibility for there to have been a break in the Trinity at any point, therefore the Father did not and could not and would not ever “turn his face away” from the Son.
We then are left to decide what point the song’s author is trying to convey. He could be simply unbiblical or he may be saying that God in that moment when Jesus was on the cross rejected sin turned his face away from sin, or alternatively he may have meant that the Father while ontologically united to the Son was expressing grief and wrath upon sin and indicating disapproval upon sin bourn in that moment by the Son.
The important thing is that we as worshipers know what we mean when we sing those words. We mean that God is ever and only one God in three persons. We need to affirm that there cannot be and never has been a division in the Trinity. And finally, we mean when we sing those words that God is angry at sin, he truly hates it and expresses his hatred for sin and his judgment upon sin through the death and vicarious atonement of Jesus Christ upon the cross.
So deep is the Father’s love for us that He went to such lengths and His Son experienced such depths that we might know the heights of His great love and mercy.