Alexei, your questions really do create a challenge to respond to. Thankyou for them I know my answers are long, but believe me, I really try and think through your questions and comments about things I have written.
Let me try and answer these ones
1. How can you say God turned His back on Jesus? Please don't humanise God or limit His power,
Alexei, I could never do that. God is as you have said All merciful and All powerful and wholly unlike you or me. But, please let me share some thoughts with you which might help you understand that statement that God could turn his back on Jesus and yet remain completely God.
If you stop to think about it, you will find that in Islam, God is in relationship with his creation, and in time and place. You believe that God sent a Messenger to men... God established a relationship to man with this action. The Qur'an says in Surah 73:15,16
Lo we have sent a messenger as witness against you, even as We sent unto Pharoh a messenger. But Pharoh rebelled against the the messenger, whereupon we seized him with no gentle grip."
The Qur'an also encourages man to establish a relationship with God, His Creator, and states that Gd loves us as is show in Sura 13:159 And when thou art resolved, then put thy trust in Allah. Lo! Allah loves those who put their trust in Him.
God shows Himself capable of having a relationship with his creation in the discussion of Muhammed's request to have the fifty daily ritual prayers reduced as recorded in The Prophet's Chronicles by Ibn Hisham 3:276
and please also consider this.. Bukhari 4:68 declares Is there anyone praying to me and I will answer Him? Anyone beseeching of me and I will give him? Anyone who repents before me and I will forgive him?"
The Arabic understanding of a God with no human elements (TANZIH) makes God totally detached and isolated . Furthermore, in denying that God can become flesh you actually limit His power and attribute a level of impotence on Him as in "your mind", this all powerful God is unable to incarnate as a man and yet not change His essence... His Godness. Christians state that the incarnation (God becoming man) does not involve a change in the divine nature. Muslims however, cannot imagine a God who can do this or would do this.
To the Christian, to believe that the second basic element of God in the Godhead (Arabic UQNUM) did not forfeit His Deity when He was united to human nature is basic to our faith. He is the Almighty Lord, the one God, when He raised the dead, cured the blind and the lepers, forgave sins and silenced storms and waves by His command.
The bible tells the Christian that He appeared in the Flesh in a supernatural way, because He is the creator of the bodies of humans and has no difficulty in being united to them. To believe to the contrary, is an admission that the creator of bodies and natures is not God but some being other than God.
Any wise and sane person can adjust to his enviroment and circumstance. How much more logical is it to think that the All wise, Almighty God should be capable of incarnation without any change occuring in His essence?
Now.. please note the usage of human features that is given to Allah in the Quran
Surah 57 speaks of a bounty in the Allah's hand
Surah 48 speaks of Allah having an eye
Surah 20 speaks of God enduing people with love that comes from Allah.
Now the hand, the eye and the capacity to love are very much human body parts. If the incarnation of God is a blasphemy, how can these verses be explained?
2. how can God who initiated these wonderful teachings do the opposite of what He said and turn his back to Jesus even if Jesus held the sins of this world?
Alexei, the simple answer to this is because God IS God and not man.
You and I both believe that God has willed that sins can be and will be forgiven through repentance and turning to God. This is the point we can agree on.
However, God's nature is more than just as a forgiving God. Repentence cannot overrule judgement and consequently lift punishment, because to just "forgive and forget" would not meed the demands of God's Justice. God has rules and consequences that cannot be broken as they are as eternal as He is, and so much part of his nature as to be one with it. To break those rules, would cause him to turn against His own nature, something He cannot do.
I have already said in this post, that God becoming man is totally possible because he is God. I have already said that God is in relationship with man.
God chose the only possible way to both meet the requirements of those eternal rules and consequences and to show Himself in relationship with man.. He became a man Himself and walked on this earth amongst us as it says in John chapter one.
As I said earlier, If God is God, this poses no difficulty to Him and certainly it doesn't cause Him to deny or stop being God... or I suggest being "ONE GOD". There is not one Christian alive, who would not agree with Dueteronomy 6:4 Hear oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one".
So why would the one true God, state the verses in Matthew that you have reminded us of, and yet, then turn His back on Himself?
Again, we come back to the Nature of God and the fact that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are ONE GOD, ONE Essence and yet three persons in that ONE essence.
In these verses, Jesus is comparing the religious rules of the day with what God was actually asking of them by those rules. he said "you say and replies with a BUT I say" the entire chapter shows that our best attempts at living are actually leaving us unable to meet the demands of God. Yes, they are very nice words of how we should live, but their very demands show us unable to live up to them.
Now, that reopens the discussion on God's holiness and our sin. Our lives will always fall short of God's glory, no matter how "good" we try to be. God's nature demands the penalty for our sin, which in eternity past was separation from God "eternal death".
When Jesus died on the cross and became sin for us.. when all the sin I committed was placed on Him, God wasn't playing games, or telling anyone the demands of Holiness that were placed upon us, He was showing us the consequences of that sin in a practical way. The cry of Jesus from the cross was "My God my God, why have you forsaken me", was not just a cry of one in pain, but of one who for the first time in eternity is out of relationship with himself because of that sin.
Remember, Jesus did remain true to His teaching, on the cross he also cried out "Father forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing." so he prayed for his enemies. In those verses you mentioned, what was the key word, the word to describe the reason why you should love and forgive your enemies? it was LOVE.. He was telling them to love with such genuiness and perfection that they would love even their enemies. The Bible speaks out loudly that "God so loved the world He gave His only son."
Alexei, God the Father "turned his back" on God the son as the supreme example of the love Jesus was telling them would make them "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."
May you know His perfect love in all your days.. peace until next time
Carol