for us, is to be found in sin, in the separation of man from God.
Now that horror consists, ultimately, in the fact that death is the analogue, or, in New Testament language, the “sign,” of what sin is—separation. If sin is, essentially, the violent and unnatural separation of man, by his own act, from his spiritual environment, death is clearly the separation—and, as our sins have made it, the violent and unnatural separation of man from all that has hitherto been his world. It may be, that the final, extremest pang of death is the supreme moment of agony, when we feel that we are being made to let go our hold on reality, are slipping back into what, in our consciousness of it, must appear like nothingness, the mere blank negation of being. Here, then, we have the explanation of this awful cry. He Who came “for our salvation” into a world disordered by sin, willed so to identify Himself with our experience, as to realise death, not as it might have been, but as man had made it, the very sign and symbol of man’s sin, of his separation from God. That moment of extreme mental anguish wrung from His lips the Cry, not of “dereliction,” but of faith triumphing even in the moment when He “tasted death” as sin’s most bitter fruit, “My God, why didst Thou forsake Me?”
What this view involves is briefly
(i) Death is an experience natural to man.
(ii) Sin has added to this natural experience a peculiar agony, a “sting.”
(iii) This “sting” is an experience of utter isolation at some moment in the process of death, the feeling that one is being violently rent away from one’s clinging hold of existence.
(iv) This “sting” is due to the disorder sin has introduced into the constitution of the world and of man.
(v) In virtue of this, death has become the “sign” in the “natural” world of what sin is in the spiritual.
(vi) Our Blessed Lord so utterly identified Himself with our experience, with the internal as well as with the external consequences of our sin, as to undergo this most terrible result of man’s transgression.
(vii) And He felt the full agony of it as realising, what none but the Sinless One could realise, the horror of sin as separation from God.