For you

   Dear friends, let us look into the ocean through which Christ waded for us. He was without any comforts of God on the cross. No feeling that God loved him, no feeling that God pitied him, no feeling that God supported him. 

    God was his sun before, now that sun had become all darkness. Not a smile from His Father, not a kind look, not a kind word. 

   Nobody ever loved God and got this from God and yet loved anyway. Nobody ever loved people and got this from people and yet followed through. He went to hell for people. He was without a God as if he had no God. All that God had been to him was taken from him now. He had the feeling on the cross of being condemned. 

   He must have heard the judge say, ‘Depart from me, Ye cursed. You who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power.’ That’s what he heard. 

   He felt that God said the same to him. Ahh, this is the hell which Christ suffered. Dear friends, I feel like a little child, casting a stone into some deep ravine in the mountainside, listening to hear it fall but listening in vain. It’s too deep. The longest line cannot fathom it. The ocean of Christ’s sufferings is unfathomable. He was forsaken and in the place of sinners. 

   If you grasp Christ as your surety and mediator, you will never be forsaken. From the broken bread and the poured out wine, do you not hear the cry arise, ‘My God, my God why hast Thou forsaken me!’ 

   And do you not hear the answer, ‘For you!’ For you.

—Robert Murray M'Cheyne, Scottish Presbyterian minister (1813-1843)