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“In considering our Lord’s abandonment by the Father on the cross, there are two or three preliminary views we must keep before the mind, or we may be beguiled, unconsciously, into perplexity and error. In the first place, let it be premised that in this hour of darkness and desertion through which our Lord was passing, there was no separation, not the slightest loosening of the tie that bound them, of Christ’s Divinity from His humanity. The fulness of the Godhead still dwelt in Jesus bodily; He was not the less Divine now that, in His extreme anguish and suffering, He appeared all the more human. As it was from His Divinity that the atoning sacrifice of Christ derived its virtue, it was not probable, nor was it possible, that, at the awful crisis of His atoning death, there should be the slightest separation between the complex natures of our Lord. His Deity was in union with the humanity at the moment He uttered the cry of desertion, now the subject of our study. To the fact of the existence of a Divine Sufferer, all nature, in her marvellous prodigies, now bore testimony. The earth trembled on its axis- the sun veiled its light- the rock was rent in twain- hades gave back its population- the grave yielded up its dead- all nature was robed in mourning because He who formed the earth created that sun, piled those rocks, and wore in His belt the keys of hades and the grave, was, as man, and for man, expiring upon the tree. It was nature’s testimony to the Godhead of its Maker.
To a like conclusion we may come, beloved, in all our reasoning in seasons of soul-darkness and distress. Through whatever mental or spiritual exercises the children of God may pass, there is not the slightest change in their divine and heavenly nature. The child of God is born again of incorruptible seed; He is a partaker of the Divine nature; and no deeper discovery of the principle of corruption in his heart, no veiling of the light of God’s countenance, touches the spiritual principle, or affects the divine nature. The soul may pass through various eclipses, sometimes partial, at other times total, nevertheless, like our blessed Lord, the profoundest gloom which enshrouds it but shades, not extinguishes, the divine sun within. Rejoice, then, O believer, in the immortality of your divine relationship to God, in the indestructible nature of your spiritual life- once His adopted child, remember that you are His child forever.” ~Octavius Winslow