“…Jesus has reached the lowest point in his humiliation and the most awful moment of his agony. The physical pain is no worse than before, perhaps less, but his soul is in torment: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’…
Jesus stands where no-one has ever stood before or since, knowing himself the bearer of the sin of the world, destined to pay the price for its redemption (Mark 10:45), and now drinking the bitterest dregs of the cup which so discomposed him in Gethsemane. In its very nature, the spiritual content of this climax of his suffering is inaccessible to us. This is the only occasion, even on the cross, when Jesus does not invoke God as ‘Father.’
Donald Macleod; Christ Crucified: Understanding the Atonement, 47–48.
“No preoccupation with God’s love for the human race should blind us to the dreadful paradox of God’s treatment of his Son… It was God the Father not sparing his own Son. Biblically, deliverance from the wrath was secured only through the grief of his Servant. He suffered all that our sin deserved.”
Macleod, 142.