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You missed my point, though. It isn't about whether we are sinners or not, we are. It is a question of God turning His back and forsaking sinners as some suggest He did to Christ when He took our sins on Himself. If God is one to turn His back on Christ due to the sins He personified, then, if God is consistent, Christ should never have come to begin with. If God forsakes sinners, we were forsaken, not forgiven.

However, God does not forsake sinners and we were saved from our sins by a loving God. Christ wasn't forsaken on the Cross, He was teaching His followers to look to Psalm 22 for the answers on what they were witnessing.

With that, I will go home. Good night and God bless.

Our Lord was on the Cross for six hours, from approximately nine o'clock in the morning until about three o'clock in the afternoon. He was physically alive during the entire period, but the three hours from 12 noon until 3:00 P.M. was the period of His spiritual death. He had no sin of His own. He came to the Cross without spiritual death. But as the impeccable God-Man hung upon the Cross, the sins of the world were poured out on Him, and the Father judged our sins in Him.

This was His spiritual death. While being judged in our place, His humanity was separated from God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. It was His substitutionary spiritual death that was efficacious for our salvation.

We know that he was physically alive while being judged because He kept screaming, "My God (the Father), my God (the Holy Spirit), why hast thou forsaken me?" He was quoting Psalm 22:1 where the verb in the imperfect tense indicates that He shouted this over and over again. Christ was forsaken because " ...he(the Father)hath made him(Christ)to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him"

When His spiritual death was complete, Jesus Christ shouted, "Tetelestai!" - the perfect tense meaning, "it is finished in the pasty with results that go on forever!"

Note that our Lord was still speaking after salvation was completed. Obviously He could not have spoken if He were physically dead! And certainly if He was still physically alive on the Cross after salvation was complete, His physical death could have nothing whatever to do with the payment for sin!

He died physically by His own volition- no one took His life! His work on the earth was finished, the Father's Plan called for Him to depart and He dismissed His own spirit.

source: The Blood of Christ by R.B.Thieme Pastor of Barachah church in Texas. Dallas Theological Seminary Summa Cum Laude. Nine years of Greek and five years of Hebrew. Now teaching isagogical,categorical and exegetical teaching of the Word of God.