Chapter 11
1 Peter, the Cry of Dereliction, and the Petrine Witness to the Atonement

Introduction: Peter's Witness to the Cross

Of all the apostles, Peter occupied a unique vantage point on the meaning of the cross. He had walked with Jesus for three years. He had heard Jesus predict His own death on multiple occasions. He had been at the Last Supper when Jesus took bread and wine and invested them with stunning new significance. He had been in the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus collapsed under the weight of what was coming. And—perhaps most painfully of all—he had denied knowing Jesus three times on the night of the crucifixion, only to be restored by the risen Christ on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. When Peter writes about the cross, he does so not as a detached theologian but as a man who had personally witnessed both the agony and the aftermath, who had tasted the bitterness of his own failure and the sweetness of Christ's forgiving grace.

What Peter writes about the atonement in his first letter is therefore of enormous importance. And what we find there is striking: some of the most explicitly substitutionary language anywhere in the New Testament. In 1 Peter 2:24, he tells us that Christ "bore our sins in his body on the tree." In 1 Peter 3:18, he declares that Christ "suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous." In 1 Peter 1:18–19, he describes believers as having been "ransomed ... with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot." These are not vague, poetic generalities about God's love. They are precise theological claims about what happened at Calvary—claims saturated with substitutionary meaning.

But this chapter does not deal with Peter alone. We must also grapple with one of the most haunting moments in all of Scripture: Jesus' cry from the cross in Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46—"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" This cry of dereliction, as it has historically been called, opens a window into the deepest mystery of the atonement: what it meant for the sinless Son of God to enter into the full consequences of human sin on our behalf. The cry raises difficult questions. Was Jesus truly abandoned by the Father? Did the Trinity fracture at Calvary? Or is there a way to take Jesus' words with full seriousness while also affirming the unbroken unity of the Triune God?

I believe there is. And I believe the Petrine witness, combined with a careful reading of the cry of dereliction, points us toward a rich and deeply moving understanding of what Christ accomplished on the cross: a genuine substitution, rooted not in the Father's rage against the Son but in the unified, self-giving love of the entire Godhead.

The thesis of this chapter is straightforward: the Petrine epistles, especially 1 Peter 2:24 and 3:18, provide some of the most explicitly substitutionary language in the New Testament, while Jesus' cry of dereliction from the cross opens a window into the deepest mystery of the atonement—the Son's voluntary experience of bearing the consequences of human sin. Together, these texts powerfully confirm that substitution stands at the heart of what God accomplished at Calvary.

1 Peter 2:24 — "He Himself Bore Our Sins in His Body on the Tree"

We begin with what is arguably the most important Petrine atonement text. Here is the passage in its fuller context:

For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls. (1 Peter 2:21–25, ESV)

The context here is significant. Peter is writing to Christians who are suffering unjustly—slaves mistreated by harsh masters, believers persecuted for their faith. He holds up Christ as the supreme example of innocent suffering. But notice something remarkable. Peter cannot talk about the cross merely as a moral example. Even in a passage whose primary purpose is to encourage patient endurance, Peter is drawn irresistibly to the substitutionary significance of Christ's death. The cross is more than a model for us to follow. It is the means by which our sins are dealt with, our guilt is removed, and our healing is accomplished.

Let us examine the key phrases in verse 24 with care.

"He Himself Bore Our Sins"

The verb translated "bore" is the Greek word anēnegken (ἀνήνεγκεν), from the root anapherō (ἀναφέρω). This is a word with deep roots in the Old Testament sacrificial system. In the Septuagint—the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that the early Christians used extensively—anapherō is the standard term for offering a sacrifice upon the altar. It appears repeatedly in Leviticus and other sacrificial texts to describe the priest carrying the offering up onto the altar and presenting it before God.¹

But the phrase "bore our sins" adds another critical dimension. Peter is clearly echoing Isaiah 53, the great Suffering Servant prophecy that we examined in depth in Chapter 6. In Isaiah 53:4, we read that the Servant "has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows." In Isaiah 53:11, the Servant "shall bear their iniquities." And in Isaiah 53:12, the Servant "bore the sin of many."² The Hebrew verb in Isaiah 53:12 is nasa' (נָשָׂא), which carries the twin ideas of "bearing" a burden and "carrying away" sin—the very language of substitutionary sacrifice.³

So when Peter says that Christ "bore our sins," he is doing two things at once. He is using the sacrificial language of the Levitical system—Christ carried our sins as a priest carries an offering to the altar—and he is identifying Jesus as the fulfillment of the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53, the one who bears the sins of the many. This is not accidental overlap. Peter is making a deliberate theological claim: Jesus is both the priest who offers the sacrifice and the sacrifice itself, the one who carries our sin to the cross and deals with it there on our behalf.

Now, an important interpretive question arises here. What exactly does it mean for Christ to "bear" our sins? William Hess, writing from a perspective critical of penal substitutionary atonement, offers an alternative reading. Hess argues that "bearing" our sins does not necessarily imply a transfer of guilt or punishment. He suggests that to "bear someone's burden" can simply mean to come alongside them, support them, and carry them through a difficulty—without any legal or forensic transfer taking place. On this reading, Jesus "bore our sins" by suffering the effects of human sin inflicted upon Him by wicked hands, not by receiving an imputation of our guilt from the Father.⁴

I appreciate Hess's concern to protect against crude portrayals of the atonement that make the Father into a vindictive deity punishing an innocent victim. As I have argued throughout this book, any such portrayal must be firmly rejected. But I believe Hess's reading, while capturing a partial truth, fails to do justice to the full range of meaning that anapherō carries in this context.

Here is why. The specific combination of anapherō with "our sins" as the object unmistakably echoes the Septuagint rendering of Isaiah 53:11–12, where the Servant bears sins substitutionarily—that is, he bears the consequences that properly belonged to others. The whole point of the Servant's bearing is that the punishment falls on him instead of on the sinners: "He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5). The consistent pattern is this: what belonged to us was placed upon him, and what belonged to him—righteousness, healing, peace—was given to us. That is substitution, not merely sympathetic suffering alongside.⁵

Moreover, the sacrificial use of anapherō in the Septuagint strengthens the substitutionary reading. When a priest "carried up" a sacrifice to the altar, the whole point was that the animal was dying in place of the worshiper. The sins had been symbolically transferred to the animal through the laying on of hands (as we explored in Chapters 4 and 5), and the animal then bore the consequences of those sins. Peter, who was steeped in the Old Testament, almost certainly had this sacrificial framework in mind.⁶

Hess also appeals to Polycarp, the early second-century bishop and disciple of John, who quotes 1 Peter 2:24 and connects "bearing" with "enduring." But even Polycarp's language supports the substitutionary reading, because Polycarp says Christ "bore our sins in His own body on the tree" and then immediately says he "did no sin"—the juxtaposition of the sinless one bearing our sins is precisely the logic of substitution. Polycarp's point is not that Jesus merely endured suffering generically, but that the sinless Christ endured what was ours to endure.⁷

David Allen summarizes this well. He notes that some atonement passages "simply cannot be limited to a 'representation' category and are more accurately described as substitutionary," and he specifically identifies 1 Peter 2:24 as one such passage. Christ did not merely do something "representatively" for us; He did something for us as our substitute.⁸

"In His Body on the Tree"

Peter adds that Christ bore our sins "in his body on the tree." The word "tree" (xylon, ξύλον) is a striking choice. While stauros (σταυρός) is the standard Greek word for "cross," Peter here uses xylon, which literally means "wood" or "tree." This is almost certainly a deliberate echo of Deuteronomy 21:22–23: "If a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree.... A hanged man is cursed by God."

Paul famously drew on this same text in Galatians 3:13, declaring that "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree'" (as we discussed in Chapter 9). Peter's use of xylon points in the same direction. By choosing this word, Peter frames the cross not merely as an instrument of execution but as the place where Christ took upon Himself the curse that rightfully belonged to sinners. The "tree" language connects Jesus' death to the Old Testament framework of divine judgment and curse-bearing.⁹

The phrase "in his body" emphasizes the physical, embodied reality of what Christ endured. The atonement was not an abstraction. It was not a transaction happening in some invisible spiritual realm disconnected from flesh and blood. The eternal Son of God bore our sins in His actual, physical body. The nails pierced real hands. The thorns pressed into a real brow. The agony was tangible, bodily, and intensely personal. Peter, who had seen the risen Christ's scars and eaten fish with Him on the beach, would have understood this with a vividness that no amount of theological abstraction can capture.

"That We Might Die to Sin and Live to Righteousness"

Peter does not stop at describing what Christ did; he also explains what Christ's substitutionary death was for. The purpose clause is introduced by hina (ἵνα)—"in order that"—marking a clear statement of divine intention. Christ bore our sins so that we might "die to sin and live to righteousness."

This is enormously important because it shows that substitutionary atonement is not merely a forensic transaction disconnected from actual transformation. Christ's substitutionary death accomplishes both: it deals with the legal problem of our guilt before God, and it empowers a genuine transformation of life. We are freed from sin's penalty and from sin's power. Allen highlights this same purpose clause and notes that it points to Christ's death as the basis for "spiritual renewal to empower believers to live godly lives."¹⁰

This integration of the forensic and the transformative dimensions of the atonement is characteristic of the New Testament's view of the cross. The critics who charge that penal substitutionary atonement is a "legal fiction" that leaves the sinner unchanged have simply misunderstood it. The New Testament never presents Christ's substitutionary death as a mere courtroom technicality. It is the very thing that breaks the power of sin over us and makes a new kind of life possible.

"By His Wounds You Have Been Healed"

Peter concludes verse 24 with a direct quotation from Isaiah 53:5: "By his wounds you have been healed." The Greek word for "wounds" is mōlōps (μώλωψ), which refers specifically to a bruise or welt—the kind of mark left by a severe blow or a whip lash. It is a painfully concrete word. Peter is not speaking in vague spiritual metaphors. He is pointing to the actual, physical wounds that Christ received at the hands of the Roman soldiers—the scourging, the beating, the nails—and declaring that through those very wounds, our healing has been accomplished.¹¹

The healing language of Isaiah 53:5 has sometimes been pressed into service for a "health and wealth" theology that promises physical healing to every believer who has sufficient faith. That is not what Peter means. The "healing" in view here is primarily spiritual—healing from the disease of sin, restoration of the broken relationship between sinful humanity and a holy God. Peter makes this clear in the very next verse: "For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls" (1 Peter 2:25). The "healing" is the return of lost sheep to their Shepherd. It is reconciliation. It is the mending of what sin had broken.

And this healing came at a cost: the wounds of the Shepherd Himself. What a staggering reversal. In the normal course of things, a shepherd suffers wounds from the predators that attack the sheep, not instead of the sheep. But here, the Good Shepherd takes upon Himself the wounds that were due to the straying sheep themselves. He bears what they deserved. That is substitution at its most beautiful and most costly.

1 Peter 3:18 — "The Righteous for the Unrighteous"

If 1 Peter 2:24 is Peter's most detailed atonement text, then 1 Peter 3:18 is his most concise—and in some ways his most powerful:

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit. (1 Peter 3:18, ESV)

This single verse is a compressed summary of the entire theology of the atonement. Virtually every key element is here: the sufficiency of Christ's sacrifice, its substitutionary nature, its purpose, and its result. Let us unpack it phrase by phrase.

"Christ Also Suffered Once for Sins"

The word "once" translates hapax (ἅπαξ), which carries the sense of "once for all"—a single, unrepeatable event that accomplishes its purpose fully and finally. This is the same emphasis we find throughout the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the author stresses that Christ's sacrifice, unlike the repeated Levitical sacrifices, was offered once for all and never needs to be repeated (as we discussed in Chapter 10). Peter shares Hebrews' conviction: what Christ did at Calvary was complete. It was sufficient. Nothing needs to be added to it.¹²

The phrase "for sins" uses the Greek peri hamartiōn (περὶ ἁμαρτιῶν), which has important resonances with Old Testament sacrificial language. In the Septuagint, peri hamartias can function as a technical expression for "sin offering"—the sacrifice specifically designed to deal with the problem of sin and its defilement of the sanctuary (see Chapter 4). While we should not press this too far—the phrase can also simply mean "concerning sins" or "on account of sins"—the sacrificial overtones are unmistakable in this context.¹³

"The Righteous for the Unrighteous"

Here is the heart of it. The Greek reads dikaios hyper adikōn (δίκαιος ὑπὲρ ἀδίκων)—"the righteous one on behalf of the unrighteous ones." This is unmistakably substitutionary language. The innocent dies in the place of the guilty. The one who has no sin bears the consequences of sin for those who are saturated with it.

The preposition hyper (ὑπέρ), as we discussed in Chapter 2, carries the fundamental meaning of "on behalf of" or "for the sake of." While some scholars have debated whether hyper can bear the full weight of "in the place of" (as opposed to the more explicitly substitutionary anti), the context here makes the substitutionary force unmistakable. It is not merely that the righteous one suffers alongside the unrighteous or for the benefit of the unrighteous in some vague sense. The contrast is stark and precise: one party suffers instead of the other. The righteous one takes the place of the unrighteous ones. That is the whole point.¹⁴

Fleming Rutledge captures the radical nature of this claim beautifully. She observes that in ordinary human experience, we might conceivably imagine someone dying for a "good" person—a friend, a loved one, someone we consider worthy. But the idea of the righteous dying for the unrighteous overturns all our normal categories of fairness and moral calculus. This is not a tale of mutual love between equals. It is the story of the perfectly innocent one voluntarily accepting the consequences belonging to the guilty. As Rutledge puts it, "humanly speaking, this makes no sense." We would not do it. We would not die for the people who have wronged us, for the unjust and the ungodly. But Jesus did. And that is precisely the scandal and the glory of the gospel.¹⁵

Hess reads this passage differently. He argues that "the righteous for the unrighteous" should be understood as "an exchange between groups" in the sense of a ransom: something of value is given to free another, an exchange of ownership. On this reading, the emphasis falls on the ransom metaphor rather than on penal substitution—Christ gave Himself to liberate us from captivity, not to satisfy a legal penalty.¹⁶

I think Hess is right that the ransom motif is present here—Peter has already used explicit ransom language in 1 Peter 1:18–19, as we will see shortly. But I do not think we need to choose between ransom and substitution as though they were mutually exclusive alternatives. In fact, the text holds them together. The ransom is accomplished through substitution. The righteous one liberates the unrighteous precisely by taking their place and bearing their consequences. As David Allen argues, passages like 1 Peter 3:18 "simply cannot be limited to a 'representation' category and are more accurately described as substitutionary." Christ's death was both a ransom that purchased our freedom and a substitution in which He stood where we should have stood.¹⁷

"That He Might Bring Us to God"

The purpose of Christ's substitutionary death, Peter tells us, was "that he might bring us to God." The verb "bring" is prosagagē (προσαγάγῃ), a word with rich Old Testament associations. In the Septuagint, prosagō is used for the bringing of sacrificial animals to the altar and, more broadly, for bringing someone into the presence of a superior or a king. It carries the idea of access—of being granted entry into a presence that was previously closed off.¹⁸

This is a stunning purpose statement. The goal of the atonement is not merely legal acquittal—though it includes that. It is not merely the cancellation of a debt—though it includes that too. The ultimate purpose is relational: to bring us to God. To restore the access that sin had destroyed. To open the door into the Father's presence and invite us in. The substitution is the means; reconciliation is the end.

This relational goal confirms something I have argued throughout this book: substitutionary atonement is not a cold, impersonal legal transaction. It is the most intensely personal act of love imaginable—the righteous God bearing the consequences of unrighteousness in order to bring the unrighteous into His own presence. The forensic and the relational are not competitors; they are partners. The legal problem of sin must be dealt with precisely because God wants us back. And the substitution is the way He deals with it.

"Being Put to Death in the Flesh but Made Alive in the Spirit"

Peter concludes with the cross-resurrection sequence: Christ was "put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit." This pairing of death and resurrection is essential to the full picture of the atonement. The cross without the resurrection would be a tragedy—a good man killed by wicked hands. The resurrection vindicates the cross. It is God's public declaration that the sacrifice has been accepted, the penalty has been satisfied, and the substitute has triumphed over death itself.

The exact interpretation of "made alive in the spirit" is debated—does it refer to Christ's human spirit, to the Holy Spirit, or to a new mode of existence? These are questions that go beyond the scope of our present discussion. What matters for our purposes is the basic structure: Christ died as a substitute, and God raised Him to life. The substitution was not a defeat. It was a victory accomplished through death and confirmed in resurrection.

1 Peter 1:18–19 — Ransomed by the Precious Blood of Christ

We turn now to a third major Petrine atonement text:

...knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. (1 Peter 1:18–19, ESV)

This passage combines two powerful atonement motifs: ransom and sacrifice. Let us consider each in turn.

The Ransom Motif

The verb "ransomed" translates elytrōthēte (ἐλυτρώθητε), from the root lytroō (λυτρόω), meaning "to redeem" or "to set free by paying a ransom price." This is language drawn from the world of ancient commerce and, more importantly, from the Old Testament exodus tradition. In the Septuagint, lytroō and its cognates describe God's redemption of Israel from slavery in Egypt—a mighty act of liberation accomplished at great cost.¹⁹

Peter specifies both the negative and the positive: believers were ransomed not with perishable things like silver or gold—the currencies of human commerce—but with something infinitely more valuable: the precious blood of Christ. The ransom price is Christ's own life, poured out in death. This echoes Jesus' own self-description in Mark 10:45, where He says He came "to give his life as a ransom (lytron, λύτρον) for many" (as we explored in Chapter 7).²⁰

The ransom motif is not in tension with substitutionary atonement; it is a form of substitutionary atonement. A ransom, by definition, involves one thing given in exchange for another. Christ's life was given in exchange for ours. His blood was the price that set us free. That is substitution at its most basic level: He gave what we could not give, paid what we could not pay, and accomplished our liberation at the cost of His own life.

The Lamb Imagery

Peter then describes Christ as "a lamb without blemish or spot." This language draws on multiple Old Testament streams. The phrase "without blemish or spot" (amōmou kai aspilou, ἀμώμου καὶ ἀσπίλου) echoes the requirement that sacrificial animals be physically perfect—free from any defect that would render them unacceptable for sacrifice (Leviticus 1:3, 10; 22:19–21). But which "lamb" does Peter have in mind?

The most likely answer is that Peter is deliberately evoking multiple backgrounds. First, there is the Passover lamb of Exodus 12, whose blood marked the doorposts of Israelite homes and protected the firstborn from the angel of death. Peter's audience, composed largely of Gentile Christians scattered across Asia Minor, would have known the Passover story. Second, there is the lamb of Isaiah 53:7—"like a lamb that is led to the slaughter"—the Suffering Servant who goes silently to his death. As Stott notes, Peter's reference to 1 Peter 1:18–19 "may combine the idea of the sacrificial lamb at Passover with the statement about 'ransom' in Mark 10:45."²¹ Allen makes a similar point, observing that Peter's language brings together the Passover lamb, the ransom motif of Mark 10:45, and the Suffering Servant tradition into a single, integrated picture of Christ's atoning death.²²

Rutledge also connects 1 Peter's lamb imagery to the broader Suffering Servant tradition, noting that the image of the lamb in Isaiah 53:7 "almost certainly lies behind 1 Peter 2:23–24," where Peter describes Christ's patient suffering and sin-bearing.²³ The Petrine writings, in other words, see Jesus as the convergence point of all the Old Testament's sacrificial and redemptive imagery. He is the Passover lamb whose blood delivers from death. He is the unblemished sacrifice offered on the altar. He is the Suffering Servant who bears the sins of the many. He is the ransom price that purchases freedom. All of these images point in the same direction: Christ's death is a costly, voluntary, substitutionary act of self-giving love.

Additional Petrine Atonement Themes

Before we turn to the cry of dereliction, it is worth noting several additional atonement-related themes that appear in Peter's writings.

1 Peter 1:2 — "Sprinkling with His Blood"

At the very opening of his letter, Peter describes his readers as those chosen "for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood" (1 Peter 1:2). The language of "sprinkling" (rhantismos, ῥαντισμός) is drawn directly from the Old Testament sacrificial system. On the Day of Atonement, the high priest sprinkled blood on and before the mercy seat in the Most Holy Place (Leviticus 16:14–15). At the ratification of the Sinai covenant, Moses sprinkled sacrificial blood on the people, saying, "Behold the blood of the covenant" (Exodus 24:8). Peter's use of this language frames the entire Christian life within the context of atonement: believers are a covenant people, sprinkled with the blood of Christ, consecrated to God through His sacrifice.²⁴

1 Peter 1:11 — The Spirit of Christ and Predicted Sufferings

Peter notes that the Old Testament prophets searched and inquired carefully about "the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories" (1 Peter 1:11). This confirms that Christ's sufferings were not an accident or a deviation from God's plan. They were predicted, anticipated, and purposed by God from the beginning. The Spirit of Christ was at work in the prophets, pointing forward to the cross centuries before it happened.

1 Peter 1:20 — Foreknown Before the Foundation of the World

Peter declares that Christ "was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you" (1 Peter 1:20). The atonement was not an afterthought or a contingency plan. It was conceived in the heart of God before the creation of the world. The cross was always the plan. This is consistent with the broader New Testament witness (e.g., Acts 2:23; Revelation 13:8) and confirms that the atonement is the centerpiece of God's eternal purpose, not a reactive response to human sin.²⁵

2 Peter 2:1 — "The Lord Who Bought Them"

In 2 Peter 2:1, we find a striking reference to false teachers who are "denying the Lord who bought them." The verb "bought" is agorazō (ἀγοράζω), a commercial term meaning "to purchase in the marketplace." It reinforces the ransom motif and adds an important theological point: even these false teachers, who apparently remain in unbelief and will face destruction, were "bought" by Christ. As Allen observes, "the point of the text is that there will be false teachers in the church and that Christ died for the sins even of these false teachers."²⁶ This has significant implications for the scope of the atonement: Christ's death has universal reach. He purchased even those who would ultimately reject Him (an issue we will explore in depth in Chapters 30–31).

Joel Green's Summary of Atonement Themes in 1 Peter

The New Testament scholar Joel Green, who is himself cautious about certain formulations of penal substitutionary atonement, nevertheless identifies three major atonement themes in 1 Peter: Christ exemplifies innocent suffering; Christ exemplifies effective suffering (His suffering actually accomplishes something—redemption, reconciliation); and Christ exemplifies the vindication of the suffering righteous.²⁷ Even on Green's reading, which is more restrained than what I would argue for, the effectiveness of Christ's suffering—the fact that it actually achieves something for others—is inescapable. And once we ask how it is effective, we are drawn back to the substitutionary categories that Peter himself employs: Christ bore our sins, the righteous died for the unrighteous, we were ransomed by His blood.

The Cry of Dereliction — "My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?"

We come now to one of the most profound and challenging texts in all of Scripture—the cry of Jesus from the cross recorded in Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46:

And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34, ESV)

And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" that is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46, ESV)

This is the cry of dereliction—from the Latin derelictio, meaning "abandonment" or "desertion." It is the only "word from the cross" recorded by both Matthew and Mark, which underlines its importance in the early Christian tradition. And it is one of the most debated sayings of Jesus in the history of biblical interpretation.

Jesus is quoting Psalm 22:1. Every scholar agrees on that point. What they disagree about is why He quoted it and what it means that He did so. To answer those questions, we need to consider the major interpretations that have been offered, evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and work toward the reading that I believe best accounts for all the evidence.

Interpretation 1: A Cry of Despair or Unbelief

Some interpreters have suggested that Jesus' cry reflects genuine despair—perhaps even a failure of faith. On this reading, Jesus had clung to the hope that the Father would intervene, perhaps sending angels to rescue Him. When no rescue came, He cried out in disbelief and dismay. He felt abandoned, and His words express raw, unfiltered anguish.

This interpretation must be firmly rejected, as Stott argues forcefully. If we read the cry as an expression of unbelief or despair, we are essentially saying that Jesus' faith collapsed at the supreme moment of His mission. We would be "denying the moral perfection of the character of Jesus" and "accusing him of failure, and failure at the moment of his greatest and most supreme self-sacrifice." That is theologically untenable. Jesus was not overcome by doubt or despair. He went to the cross with full knowledge of what He was doing and full trust in the Father's purpose.²⁸

Interpretation 2: A Cry of Loneliness (Feeling but Not Fact)

A more sympathetic variation suggests that Jesus was not genuinely abandoned by the Father but merely felt abandoned. On this reading, Jesus experienced what the mystics call "the dark night of the soul"—a subjective sense of God's absence that did not correspond to the objective reality. God was still with Him; Jesus simply could not feel His presence.

Stott acknowledges that this interpretation "does not cast a slur on the character of Jesus" in the way that the first interpretation does. But he identifies what he calls "an insuperable difficulty": the words of Psalm 22:1 express an experience of being, not merely feeling, God-forsaken. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" is not "My God, my God, why do I feel forsaken?"²⁹

Hess, by contrast, favors a version of this interpretation. He argues that the Psalms are filled with "hyperbole, parallelisms, picturesque descriptions, and other poetic imagery," and that the theme of many Psalms is that "one may feel abandoned by God in their anguish, might even blame Him, but God is faithful to the end and delivers His people." On Hess's reading, what Jesus expressed on the cross was a feeling of abandonment, not an actual abandonment—and the end of Psalm 22, with its triumphant vindication, confirms this.³⁰

I understand the appeal of this reading. It protects the unity of the Trinity and avoids the theological difficulties associated with any "real" abandonment. But I think it ultimately fails to take Jesus' words with sufficient seriousness. As I will argue below, there is a way to affirm a genuine dimension of separation in Christ's experience without fracturing the Trinity or turning the Father into a vindictive abuser.

Interpretation 3: A Cry of Victory (Quoting the Whole Psalm)

A third popular interpretation notes that Psalm 22, while beginning with anguished lament, ends with triumphant confidence:

For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hidden his face from him, but has listened to his cry for help. (Psalm 22:24)

On this reading, Jesus was not merely quoting the first verse of Psalm 22—He was invoking the entire Psalm, including its resolution. By quoting the opening line, He was pointing His hearers (and all subsequent readers) to the whole arc of the Psalm: from suffering to vindication, from lament to praise, from dereliction to deliverance.

This interpretation has genuine merit. There is no doubt that the early Christians saw Psalm 22 as a prophetic description of Christ's passion—numerous details from the Psalm appear in the crucifixion narratives (the piercing of hands and feet, the casting of lots for clothing, the mocking of bystanders). And the Psalm's movement from agony to vindication does beautifully foreshadow the cross-resurrection pattern.

But as Stott observes, this reading has a significant weakness: "Why should Jesus have quoted from the Psalm's beginning if in reality he was alluding to its end? It would seem rather perverse."³¹ If Jesus wanted to express confidence and triumph, why open with the most agonized verse of the entire Psalm? The "cry of victory" interpretation turns the cry into a kind of coded message that would have been nearly impossible for anyone present to decode. I think it is more natural—and more theologically rich—to take the opening words as expressing the genuine experience of the moment, rather than as an indirect pointer to a later section of the Psalm.

Interpretation 4: A Cry of Real Dereliction

The fourth interpretation—and the one I believe is most faithful to the text—is to take Jesus' words at face value. He experienced a genuine, real sense of abandonment. Something happened in the darkness at Calvary that can only be described as the Son's experience of bearing the full consequences of human sin, including the consequence of separation from God.

Let me be very precise about what I am and am not saying here, because this is one of the most sensitive and important theological issues in the entire book.

Stott captures this delicate balance with remarkable precision. He argues that an "actual and dreadful separation took place between the Father and the Son; it was voluntarily accepted by both the Father and the Son; it was due to our sins and their just reward." But he immediately insists that "the God-forsakenness of Jesus on the cross must be balanced with such an equally biblical assertion as 'God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ.'" And he approvingly cites Charles Cranfield, who emphasizes both "the truth that Jesus experienced, 'not merely a felt, but a real, abandonment by his Father'" and "the paradox that, while this God-forsakenness was utterly real, the unity of the Blessed Trinity was even then unbroken."³²

This is paradox, not contradiction. It is the kind of mystery that pushes our finite minds to their limits. But I believe it is the reading that best honors both the seriousness of Jesus' words and the theological reality of the Trinity's unbreakable unity.

What Happened in the Darkness

Let me try to unpack this mystery a bit further, even while acknowledging that it ultimately exceeds our capacity to fully comprehend.

The Gospels tell us that from the sixth hour (noon) to the ninth hour (3 p.m.), darkness covered the whole land (Mark 15:33; Matthew 27:45; Luke 23:44). It was out of this darkness that Jesus uttered the cry of dereliction. The darkness is significant. In biblical symbolism, darkness represents the absence of God, who is light (1 John 1:5). It represents judgment, chaos, and separation from the divine presence. The three hours of darkness over the land were, as Stott suggests, "an outward symbol of the spiritual darkness that enveloped him."³³

What was happening in that darkness? I believe the answer is found in the substitutionary framework we have been tracing throughout this book. Jesus was bearing "our sins in his body on the tree" (1 Peter 2:24). He was being "made sin" for us (2 Corinthians 5:21, discussed in Chapter 9). He was "becoming a curse" for us (Galatians 3:13, discussed in Chapter 9). And part of what it means to bear the full weight of sin and its consequences is to experience the separation from God that sin produces. Sin is, at its core, alienation from God. And when the sinless Son of God entered into the full reality of bearing human sin, He entered into that alienation—not as one who had sinned, but as one who was voluntarily absorbing the consequences of others' sin.

Rutledge makes a compelling point about the significance of the cry of dereliction in the overall structure of the Gospels. She notes that it is "the only saying to be reported by not just one, but two Evangelists," and that Matthew and Mark present it as Jesus' only word from the cross—all other sayings come from Luke and John. The fact that the earliest and most stark Gospel traditions preserve this cry as the defining utterance from the cross suggests that the early church understood it as absolutely central to the meaning of Christ's death. It was not an embarrassment to be explained away but a revelation to be pondered.³⁴

Rutledge also emphasizes the "godlessness" or "Godforsakenness" of the cross as a fundamental category for understanding what happened. The cross was, in her phrase, "a specifically godforsaken event"—not merely a scene of physical suffering or political injustice, but a descent into the very condition that sin produces: the absence of God's experienced presence.³⁵

The Father's Heart at Calvary

But here I need to say something that is absolutely critical, and it connects to one of the central convictions of this entire book. When Jesus experienced the consequences of sin on the cross—including the darkness of separation from the Father's experienced presence—this was not the result of the Father pouring out His anger and wrath upon the Son.

I want to be as clear as I possibly can about this. The Father did not turn against the Son. The Father did not become Jesus' enemy. The Father did not "punish" Jesus in the sense of a wrathful deity taking out His frustrations on an innocent victim. The Trinity acted in unified, self-giving love throughout the entire event of the cross. The Son voluntarily offered Himself. The Father voluntarily gave His Son. The Spirit sustained and empowered the sacrifice. The cross was a single act of the Triune God, not a battle between an angry Father and a suffering Son.

What makes the cry of dereliction so agonizing is not that the Father suddenly became angry at Jesus. It is that the Son, out of love for us, voluntarily entered into the very condition our sin produces—separation from God—and experienced it from the inside. He did this not because the Father was punishing Him but because the consequences of our sin had to be absorbed, had to be borne, had to be exhausted by someone. And the Son, in union with the Father and the Spirit, willingly stepped into that abyss so that we would never have to.

Philippe de la Trinité, writing from the Roman Catholic Thomistic tradition, offers a perspective closely aligned with what I am arguing here. He insists that Christ was a "victim of love" who acted "in union with His Father" and offered Himself through "a loving sacrifice." On Philippe de la Trinité's reading, the atonement is grounded not in retributive justice directed at the Son but in the preeminence of divine mercy. The Father and the Son are united in purpose, united in love, and united in their sacrificial action for the salvation of the world.³⁶

This means that when we hear the cry of dereliction, we should not picture a scene in which the Father is standing over the Son with a clenched fist. We should picture a scene in which both the Father and the Son are enduring something together—something unspeakably costly—for the sake of a world that has turned its back on God. The Father gives His Son (John 3:16). The Son gives His life (John 10:17–18). The Spirit offers and sustains the sacrifice (Hebrews 9:14). The cross is the unified action of the Trinity, and the dereliction—as real and as agonizing as it is—occurs within the context of that Trinitarian love, not as a violation of it (see Chapter 20 for a fuller treatment of this theme).

The Psalm 22 Connection: Suffering and Vindication

While I have argued that the "cry of victory" interpretation (Interpretation 3 above) is insufficient on its own, it does contain an element of truth that should not be discarded. Psalm 22 does move from lament to vindication. And while I believe Jesus was genuinely expressing the experience of the opening verse—not merely pointing ahead to the Psalm's resolution—I also believe that Jesus would have known the entire Psalm and would have held the ending in mind even as He experienced the agonizing beginning.

In other words, the cry of dereliction is not the last word. It is followed by "I thirst" (John 19:28), then by the triumphant shout "It is finished!" (tetelestai, τετέλεσται—John 19:30), and finally by the serene self-commendation "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit" (Luke 23:46). The progression is striking. From the depths of dereliction, Jesus moves to a declaration of accomplished victory and then back to addressing God as "Father." As Stott observes, this sequence makes no sense if the cry of dereliction was a permanent condition. Rather, it represents the depths of Christ's substitutionary suffering—the moment when the weight of the world's sin was most fully upon Him—from which He emerged victorious.³⁷

The word tetelestai deserves special attention. It is in the Greek perfect tense, meaning "it has been completed and remains completed." As Stott puts it, "it means 'it has been and will for ever remain finished.'" What had been finished? Not merely His suffering, but His mission. He had "borne the sins of the world. Deliberately, freely and in perfect love he had endured the judgment in our place. He had procured salvation for us, established a new covenant between God and humankind, and made available the chief covenant blessing, the forgiveness of sins."³⁸

The cry of dereliction and the cry of victory together form the complete picture of what happened at Calvary: a substitutionary bearing of sin's consequences (dereliction), followed by the triumphant completion of redemption (tetelestai), sealed by the restoration of the Father-Son relationship in the Son's final breath ("Father, into your hands I commit my spirit"). The darkness gives way to light. The separation gives way to reunion. The substitute has finished His work.

Allen's and McCall's Contribution: The Trinity Was Not Fractured

Before we bring together the threads of this chapter, I want to highlight an important contribution from David Allen and the theologian Thomas McCall that confirms and enriches the position I have been arguing for.

Allen cites McCall's conclusion that "the Trinity was in no way 'fractured,' 'broken,' or 'ruptured' when Christ died on the cross." McCall argues this on both biblical and theological grounds. Biblically, the only text that directly addresses whether the Father "hid His face" from the Son is Psalm 22:24, which explicitly says He did not: "He has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hidden his face from him, but has listened to his cry for help." If we take Psalm 22 as a messianic prophecy fulfilled in Christ—which both the New Testament and the Christian tradition affirm—then verse 24 tells us that the Father was present with Christ even in His darkest hour.³⁹

Theologically, McCall argues that orthodox Trinitarian theology makes any "rupture" within the Trinity impossible. The Father and the Son share a single divine essence. They cannot be separated ontologically any more than a person can be separated from their own nature. "Careful study of the biblical text makes such a view unnecessary," McCall writes, "and orthodox trinitarian theology makes it impossible."⁴⁰

Allen also cites the great nineteenth-century Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck, who insists that "also on the cross Jesus remained the beloved Son, the Son of his Father's good pleasure.... Precisely in his suffering and death, Christ offered his greatest, most complete obedience to the will of the Father."⁴¹ This is a critical corrective to popular portrayals of the cross that depict the Father turning away in disgust from the sin-bearing Son. The reality is precisely the opposite: the cross was the supreme moment of the Son's obedience, and it was received by the Father not with wrath toward the Son but with approval of His loving self-sacrifice.

How then do we put this together? I believe the answer is something like this: Jesus genuinely experienced the consequences of bearing human sin, and those consequences included the experiential reality of alienation from God. But this experience occurred within the context of the Trinity's unbroken unity and love. The Father did not abandon the Son; rather, the Father and the Son together accepted this agonizing separation as the cost of bearing the world's sin. The cry of dereliction is real—but it is the cry of a Son who is loved by the Father even in the midst of the deepest darkness, and who is obeying the Father's will even as He endures what no human being could endure.

This is the view that I believe best accounts for all the biblical data. It takes the cry of dereliction with full seriousness—refusing to explain it away as mere feeling or mere quotation. It preserves the substitutionary heart of the atonement—Christ genuinely bore the consequences of our sin. And it protects the Trinitarian unity of God—the Father, Son, and Spirit were never divided, never at war, never in conflict. The cross is the supreme expression of the Triune God's self-giving love, and the cry of dereliction is the measure of what that love cost.

Bringing It Together: The Petrine Witness and the Mystery of the Cross

As we draw this chapter to a close, let us step back and see the full picture that has emerged.

Peter's testimony about the cross is remarkably consistent and remarkably clear. In 1 Peter 1:18–19, he tells us we were ransomed by the precious blood of Christ, the spotless lamb. In 1 Peter 2:24, he tells us that Christ bore our sins in His body on the tree, fulfilling the Suffering Servant prophecy of Isaiah 53, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. In 1 Peter 3:18, he gives us the most compressed statement of substitutionary atonement in the New Testament: the righteous one suffered for sins in place of the unrighteous, to bring us to God. And woven throughout his letter are themes of covenant, sacrifice, suffering, vindication, and hope.

The cry of dereliction from the cross adds depth and gravity to Peter's testimony. It shows us what it actually cost Christ to bear our sins. It was not a painless transfer of a legal document. It was not an accounting fiction. It was an entry into the very heart of what sin produces—alienation from God—by the one who had never known a moment of alienation in all eternity. The sinless Son willingly tasted the bitter fruit of our sin so that we would never have to.

And yet—and this is the crucial point—the dereliction was not the final word. The cry "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" gave way to "It is finished!" and then to "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." The substitutionary suffering was followed by triumphant completion and then by restored communion. The darkness was real, but it was not permanent. The separation was genuine, but it was overcome. The substitute finished His work, and the Father raised Him from the dead three days later in the ultimate vindication.

This is the gospel. This is what Peter preached on the day of Pentecost and proclaimed in his letters to suffering Christians scattered across Asia Minor. And it is what I believe the full witness of the New Testament confirms: Christ died as our substitute, the righteous for the unrighteous, bearing our sins in His body on the tree, entering into the full consequences of our rebellion against God, so that He might bring us home to the Father.

Conclusion

The Petrine witness to the atonement deserves far more attention than it often receives. Too many discussions of atonement theology focus almost exclusively on Paul, as though Romans 3 and 2 Corinthians 5 were the only texts that matter. Peter's contribution is both independent of Paul's and deeply complementary to it. His language is concrete, vivid, and rooted in his personal experience of watching Jesus go to the cross and of meeting the risen Lord on the other side.

What we find in Peter is not a vague, generalized claim that "Jesus died for us" in some unspecified way. We find precise, theologically loaded language that draws on the Old Testament sacrificial system, the Suffering Servant prophecy, the ransom tradition, and the Passover lamb imagery—all converging on a single, unshakable claim: Christ stood where we should have stood, bore what we should have borne, and paid what we could never pay. He did it voluntarily, lovingly, and completely. And He did it so that we—the unrighteous, the straying sheep, the enslaved—might be ransomed, healed, forgiven, and brought into the presence of God.

The cry of dereliction confirms the depth and the cost of what Christ accomplished. It tells us that the substitution was not superficial. Christ did not merely die physically while remaining spiritually untouched. He entered into the full depth of sin's consequences—including the agony of experienced separation from the Father—on our behalf. And He emerged victorious, declaring "It is finished!" and commending His spirit to the Father who had never stopped loving Him, even in the darkest hour.

I find myself returning again and again to the simple, beautiful, devastating words of 1 Peter 3:18: "Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God." In that one sentence, Peter captures the essence of everything this book is trying to say. The atonement is substitutionary—the righteous for the unrighteous. It is effective—it actually accomplishes our reconciliation. And it is relational—its purpose is to bring us to God. That is the gospel according to Peter. And it is the gospel that has been the hope of the church for two thousand years.

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