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Jehovah's Witnesses - 04_08 - Answers - To Whom Did Jesus Pray?

 

1. You asked: 

Matt 27:46 "And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

(Was Jesus not talking to his God?) Please answer.

 

a. Yes, Jesus was talking to God (or it is fine to say, Jesus was praying to "his God"; yes)

 

b. As I explained already in great detail, God consists of three persons in one Godhead.  The person of the Son regularly conversed with the person of the Father.  In this passage, the person of the Son, as a man, is conversing with (praying to) God; not just to the Father and asking why he is now separated from them.

 

c. So, what is happening?  During animal sacrifices, the priest would lay his hands on the lamb and would thereby vicariously impart the sin of the person to the lamb. As the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world, Jesus bore the sins of the whole world. At this point in the crucifixion a separation took place, because God hides his face from sin, and because iniquity separates people from him.  Isaiah chapter 59, verses 1-2 clearly explains this:

 

Behold, the LORD's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear: But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear.

 

d. So, at this point of the crucifixion, when the sins of the world were placed on the man, Christ Jesus (I Tim 2:5), the Lamb of God, a separation occurred.  The man, Christ Jesus, as the Lamb of God and representative of men was separated from his own nature – God – which included separation from the Father and from the Holy Spirit.  II Cor 5:21 says, For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.  God had to hide his face from the man, Christ Jesus, because of the sin, which prompted Jesus to speak those words in Matt 27:46.

 

e. This separation is a type of death.  It would be similar to what happened to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden in the sense that sin caused a separation between man and God and that separation included a penalty of death.

 

f. This is also the great triumph of the cross.  Like the pure and perfect lamb, Jesus had not sinned.  So when Satan inspired the people to crucify Jesus he broke the law of sin and death that said the soul that sinneth; it shall die.  Satan killed an innocent man.  That innocent man carried the sins of the world on him (like the sacrificial lamb did) and therefore – by law – the penalty was fully paid.

2. So, on the cross, the man Christ Jesus, the second person of the Godhead, was praying to the corporate "Godhead" called "God"

 

3. Using the analogy from our article on the Godhead, this would be like the secretary or the treasurer, a member of the board, speaking to the "board", even though he was a member of board himself.