Didn't Jesus cry "My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?" Wasn't that the Father turning away and pouring out wrath?

This is the verse a careful reader holds up, and you should, because on its surface it sounds exactly like abandonment, and it would be dishonest to brush past how it lands. It is also the strongest text the penal-substitution reading has, and meeting it honestly is the only way to answer it. So grant the weight of it fully, and then hear the Hebrew in it.

He is not coining a fresh cry of despair. He is quoting, word for word, the opening line of Psalm 22, and in His world to speak a psalm's first line was to invoke the entire psalm. So go and read the one He reached for in His last breath. It opens in what feels like abandonment, describes a crucifixion a thousand years before Rome built one, and then it turns: "He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and He has not hidden His face from him, but has heard when he cried to Him" (Psalm 22:24). The very psalm He quotes denies the forsaking. And it ends on "He has done it" (Psalm 22:31), the Hebrew behind "It is finished." The cry was never a status report of abandonment. It was a dying man pointing the whole watching world to the one text that says exactly what is happening and exactly how it ends.

Do not take it from me. Read all of Psalm 22, start to finish, and decide for yourself whether it is the psalm of a forsaken man or a vindicated one.