THE SHADOW OF
CALVARY
by Hugh Martin, (1821—1885)
GETHSEMANE ,
THE INCIDENTS
(Matthew 26:36-46)
Then Jesus brought them to an olive
grove called Gethsemane, and he said, "Sit here while I go on ahead to
pray." He took Peter and Zebedee's two sons, James and John, and he began to
be filled with anguish and deep distress. He told them, "My soul is crushed
with grief to the point of death. Stay here and watch with me."
He went on a little farther and fell face down on the
ground, praying, "My Father! If it is possible, let this cup of suffering be
taken away from me. Yet I want your will, not mine." Then he returned to the
disciples and found them asleep. He said to Peter, "Couldn't you stay awake
and watch with me even one hour? Keep alert and pray. Otherwise temptation
will overpower you. For though the spirit is willing enough, the body is
weak!"
Again he left them and prayed, "My Father! If this cup
cannot be taken away until I drink it, your will be done." He returned to
them again and found them sleeping, for they just couldn't keep their eyes
open.
So he went back to pray a third time, saying the same
things again. Then he came to the disciples and said, "Still sleeping? Still
resting? Look, the time has come. I, the Son of Man, am betrayed into the
hands of sinners. Up, let's be going. See, my betrayer is here!"
Between the city and the Mount of
Olives lay the Valley of Jehosaphat, traversed by the little streamlet, or
winter-brook, called the Cedron. Across this brook Jesus and the eleven now
wend their way by the light of the moon—for at the Passover the moon was
full—to a place called Gethsemane, where was a garden.
The transaction of which this
ever-memorable garden now becomes the scene is, with the exception of our
Lord's actual crucifixion, perhaps the most awful and solemnizing which even
the Scriptures of God contain. How can we approach the consideration of it
with sufficient reverence? How can we be deeply enough affected with the
insight which it gives us into the sorrow of the blessed Redeemer's soul?
Shall we not feel and own our utter helplessness to speak or think of this
scene in a manner befitting its amazing and affecting disclosures? The Lord
give us the Spirit of grace and supplications, that we may look on Him whom
we have pierced!
Leaving the nature and causes of
Christ's mysterious sorrow, and the nature and meaning of His prayers, to be
considered more fully afterwards, and in the meantime speaking of the agony
itself only very generally, let us try to place the affecting facts clearly
before our minds.
He came, then, with the disciples
"to a place called Gethsemane."
The account given by John is more
circumstantial, though he passes over the events of which the garden was the
scene. He says, "When Jesus had spoken these words, He went forth with His
disciples over the brook Cedron, where was a garden, into which He entered
and his disciples. And Judas also, who betrayed Him, knew the place: for
Jesus often resorted there with His disciples" (John 18:1, 2).
From this we learn that the garden
of Gethsemane was a well-known retreat of the Redeemer. Though about to be
the scene of a conflict unparalleled in His history, it had often been the
scene of His prayers—the place of His secret meditations and communings with
God. For He was emphatically a man of prayer. It was by prayer that He kept
up fellowship with the Father from whom He had come forth, and to whom He
was soon to return. It was by prayer that He vanquished all the trials
and sorrows and griefs assigned to Him in His pilgrimage in the flesh.
It was by praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit,
that He sustained His faith in the safety of His person, and His cause in
the love and faithfulness of His Father. It was by prayer that He sued out
all the promises made to Him in his covenant with the Father; for concerning
His own possession of them, as well as His people's, it may be said that,
while they are absolutely given, and must inevitably be fulfilled, "yet for
all these things will I be enquired of, says the Lord." The law of His
humiliation and reward is in these words—"Ask of Me, and I will give
you the heathen for your inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth
for your possession." And in this, as in other respects, His people must be
conformed to Him, that He may be the firstborn among many brethren, He who
sanctifies and those who are sanctified being all of one.
Gethsemane, then, had witnessed
Jesus many times in prayer and supplication, though never so emptied (Phil.
2:7) and abased as now. This was the crowning act of what had indeed been a
long series—what had been a habit. "Ofttimes He resorted there."
And so Judas knew the place. "And
Judas also who betrayed Him knew the place" (John 18:2). Hence Jesus was
not fleeing from His fate when He betook Himself to Gethsemane. He was
voluntarily going forward to meet the sword of which He had spoken that it
should smite Him. It was very necessary that His death should be
voluntary—that it should be in the spirit of the ancient oracle: "Lo, I
come, in the volume of the book it is written of Me; I delight to do Your
will, O my God" (Ps. 40:7). Without this it could not have been acceptable
to God, nor valuable as a sacrifice for sin. And it was needful also that
His death should be seen to be voluntary, that the eleven might not
be utterly cast down—stumbling to rise again no more—in the conviction that
His power was at length exhausted, that against His will He had been
arrested or overpowered by a might which He could not set aside.
How numerous were the methods by which Jesus forewarned
them that He went forward of His own accord to all His sufferings. "I lay
down My life of Myself," He said; "no one takes it from Me; I have power to
lay it down, and I have power to take it again" (John 10:15-18). And now
when the hour is at hand, He leads the way to no place of concealment to
baffle the traitor's design, but to the place which Judas knew, for He
ofttimes resorted to it. Every step towards the garden had in it the voice,
"Lo, I come! I come, knowing the things which shall befall Me here." Yes,
Jesus loved the Church, and gave Himself for it. He loved me, says Paul, and
gave Himself for me.
Arrived within the garden, Jesus stations the larger
number of His disciples near the entrance, with the injunction, "Sit
here, while I go and pray yonder." It is the "Captain of Salvation"
making disposition of His forces for a battle in which the weapons of
warfare should not be carnal, in which He Himself should bear all the fire
and terror of the conflict, at once the victim and the conqueror, wounded
for our transgressions, and ultimately carrying the victory by yielding
Himself to death. How solemnizing must this have been to the eight disciples
to whom He thus assigned their position! They must have felt instinctively,
from their Master's words and tones and manner, that He was Himself
unusually sad and sorrowful. To the other three, indeed, He was to open up
more fully the depths of anguish which now began to distract Him. But
already even His countenance must have borne traces of the coming conflict
of his soul: and His words to them must have implied that such was the
crisis now at hand, and such their Master's views of it, that immediate
prayer alone could enable Him to meet and face it. "Sit here, while I go and
pray yonder." He speaks with authority, assigning them their post of duty.
Yet He speaks to them not as servants, but as friends, telling them plainly
what their Lord does. "I go," says He, "I go to pray yonder." All my hope
now lies in prayer. Where then will your strength lie? Remember the
word that I said to you, "The servant is not greater than his Lord." Praying
always with all prayer and supplication.
"And He took with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee—Peter
and James and John—and began to be sorrowful and very heavy."
Leaving the main body of the disciples, Jesus, we see,
advances, as if to meet the adversary in company with the three most valiant
of His friends. And yet it is not that He calculates on their strength and
aid, for He knows how miserably they will fail in the hour of trial: and
their failure serves rather to prove that Jesus wrought a work, and bore a
shock in this conflict, to which no mortal power or vigor was adequate. For
if these three failed to acquit themselves as the sore exigencies of that
dread hour demanded, there were none on earth who could stand when they had
fallen. They were the strongest of the disciples; the flower and choice of
the little flock. They had been more with Jesus than others. They had been
admitted with Him where others had been excluded; and especially they had
been with Him in the holy mount, and were eye-witnesses of His majesty, when
He received from God the Father honor and glory. They had seen the Savior
transfigured, His face shining as the sun and His garments white as the
light. They had heard the voice from the excellent glory, saying, "This is
my beloved Son, hear Him." They had seen their beloved Lord in the utmost
glory in which He had ever appeared on earth in the days of His flesh.
And now they were to see Him lying prostrate on the ground, crushed with
sorrow, weeping tears of anguish, shedding the blood of the "agony."
Thus high privileges prepare for sore trials; and the abundance of the
revelations needs a thorn in the flesh to balance it!
If Peter could have gotten his own
way, he would have been on the transfiguration mountain still, and there
never would have been the agony of Gethsemane. He would have made
tabernacles and dwelt there enjoying the glory, and shrinking from the
shame. But then this proposed arrangement of his would have cost the world's
salvation; for it was not amidst the glory and the radiance of the holy
mount, but amidst the darkness and anguish of the garden and the
desertion of the cross, that redemption was achieved and sealed. Thus
the foolishness of God is wiser than men.
Yet, surely those who had seen most
of the Savior's majesty and glory, and of Heaven's testimony to His
beloved person and His holy mission, were best selected to see most also of
His terrible trial. Their faith, cherished by such precious
recollections, might have been expected to withstand severer ordeals. These
who had almost reigned with Him on the mountain, might have watched and
suffered better with Him in His agony—but no! Yet such as they were, they
were His only confidants—his truest bosom friends on earth. And so when He
begins to be sorrowful and very heavy—"to be sore amazed and very heavy"
(Mark 14:33), he opens up His heart to them, and "said to them, My soul is
exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death." Jesus did not usually tell His
grief. He had ever been a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. But
He had been well accustomed to bear His griefs in secret, and seldom sought
relief from making others privy to them. Now His soul is filled with sorrow
to overflowing, and so it bursts forth, and is poured into the bosoms of His
friends. He can conceal His anguish no more.
And what, it must be asked, was the
cause of the tormenting sorrow and amazement which now so greatly
weakened and agitated the Son of God? It is a solemn question, worthy of
long and reverent consideration. But doubtless His sorrow arose from the
source that His prayer was concerned with—the vivid view and near approach
of that cup which the Father was just giving Him to drink. That curse of
God, from which He came to redeem His elect people—that sword of the Lord's
wrath and vengeance which He had just predicted—the penal desertion on the
cross—the withdrawal of all comfortable views and influences—and the present
consciousness of the anger of God against Him as the surety-substitute, a
person laden with iniquity—these were the elements mingled in the cup of
trembling which was now to be put into His hands: and the prospect caused
Him deadly sorrow!
And He told the three. For
sorrow seeks sympathy when it will conceal no more; and the man of
sorrows was in all things like His brethren. The relief which pouring His
anguish into their bosom could bring—even this was precious to Him in the
crisis of his sore affliction!
But it must be poured into His
Father's bosom, for nothing short of that could bring Him real relief and
strength. And so He plants His three dearest followers on their post of
observation, and then advances alone to conflict directly with the hour and
the power of darkness.
And now, mark by what successive
steps, and how thoroughly, Jesus has separated Himself to be alone with God.
He and the eleven had left the city, with all its life and stir and care,
behind them. Here is the first step. Arriving at the entrance of the garden,
He leaves there the greater number of His followers, and advances further
with the chosen three. Here is the second step. But presently, He must leave
these also, and go forward alone, to meet the danger alone, to wrestle and
agonize with God concerning it. But before He leaves the three, He gives
them also an injunction as He had previously given to the others: "Wait
here, and watch with Me." Now this was the injunction which they so
blameably neglected to observe. And the circumstances were such
as—notwithstanding the excuse which the tender Savior made for them—rendered
them inexcusable in not observing it. How affecting was it to hear Him whom
they loved imploring the little service which this request implied! That He
whom they had learned to regard as the Son of the living God, whom the winds
and the sea obeyed, and whom these three had seen as if on the margin of
heaven receiving the homage of glorified just men made perfect; that He
should be reduced to such extremity as to express His desire that they
would help Him, by their watching with Him in meeting the sore conflict
to which He was now going forward alone; ought to have touched all the
deepest feelings of their nature; and doubtless it did do so, and perhaps
more truly and tenderly than we can understand. But if it made this
impression at the time—if this pathetic appeal struck the chords of sympathy
in their hearts—the evil was that they did not practically follow up such
feelings by a careful, persevering, "watchful and prayerful" sympathy unto
the end.
"And He went a little farther
(or, as Luke says, "He was withdrawn from them about a stone's cast") and
fell on His face, and prayed, saying: O my Father, if it be possible, let
this cup pass from Me: nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will."
No language can describe the
impression which a statement like this ought to make upon us. The person who
is here set before us—the position of prostrate, yes, all but abject
supplication—the cry of anguish wrung out from Him in the prospect of a
stroke about to fall upon Him which He trembles lest His weak, frail human
nature should be unable to bear—all these considerations, and each of them,
ought to fill us with the liveliest and most inexpressible astonishment. It
is deeply to be feared that too many read the verses before us in a state of
mind indefinitely approaching to unconscious yet real infidelity. Is it
possible that there could be such an amount of insensibility in any mind
that steadily contemplated this scene as an event which really occurred?
Could this transaction be viewed with more indifference than it is by
multitudes, even though it were announced as a mere fiction? No; suppose it
were a fiction, it would be a grander one unspeakably than the imagination
of the thoughts of any man ever devised. Regarded as a mere idea, though
forgotten as a fact, it is still fitted to produce a most powerful effect,
to arrest and compel attention, to fill the mind with amazement and with
awe.
But the startling idea, the awful conception of the
living God, enthroned in the supreme government of a myriad of worlds, each
one of which with its countless multitudes of living beings hangs upon His
nod: of this great, self-existent, independent Jehovah, with His Godhead
dwelling in the frail garb of human nature, lying prostrate on the cold
ground in the attitude of deepest abasement and most prostrate prayer;
the idea, combined with the assurance that it is an idea that was actually
realized in this garden of Gethsemane! Oh! it reveals to us the carnality of
our minds when we feel that we can meet a fact like this with so little of
that adoring wonder and love and praise which reason and conscience tell us
it is worthy and fitted to call forth. Truly no truth is more fully proved
by experience and observation than that we need the Spirit to take of the
things of Christ and show them to us—that we need the Spirit of grace and
supplications to be poured upon us before we can look on Him whom we have
pierced and mourn.
But how could Jehovah-Jesus, the
Eternal Son of the Highest, be reduced to such straits as these, to be
prostrate on the ground, and lift the cry of helplessness so affectingly?
The answer is that this is exactly "the mind that was in Christ Jesus, who,
being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but
made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and
was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, He
humbled Himself and became obedient—obedient unto death, even the death of
the cross" (Phil. 2:5-8). But did He not speak as one whose faith was
shaken?—as one whose fear was awakened? As one whose fear was awakened; yes.
But not as one whose faith was shaken. For in the very agony of His sorrow,
when He groaned in spirit, He groaned in the Spirit of the Son, crying,
"Abba, Father." "Father, if it be possible." But did not this
cry imply that He began to regret His covenant engagements, and to repine
against the sufferings which they entailed? No: for His language is full of
perfect and absolute submission. "Father, if it be possible, let this cup
pass from Me; nevertheless, not My will but Yours be done."
But did not this imply at least that
in some respect Jesus longed earnestly to escape from His sufferings? It did
indeed. It implied that, except for His Father's will, appointing them and
appointing His people's salvation by means of them, except for this,
it was most desirable that He should have no such sufferings to undergo.
Could they have been real; could they have been anything else than imaginary
and feigned; had not this been the Savior's feeling concerning them? Could
He have had a true body and a reasonable soul, and not sensitively shrunk
from undergoing "the terrors of the Lord"? Could His soul have been holy,
could He have truly feared God, and not trembled in sorrow and in anguish in
the prospect of His anger, or the presence of His wrath? And how could He
have "learned obedience by the things which He suffered" but by subduing His
natural and sinless repugnance to endure them, and thus denying and
sacrificing Himself?
But still, was it not something like a weakness and
imperfection on the part of Jesus that He should speak as if He thought it
possible that this cup should pass from Him? "Father, if it be possible, let
this cup pass from Me." And truly it is not to be denied that here we
have Jesus revealed to us in weakness, even as the Holy Spirit testifies
that He was "crucified through weakness" (2 Cor. 13:4). Yet let us observe
of what nature this imperfection was. It consisted in nothing more than the
powerful predominance—or, we may perhaps say, the sole presence—in His mind,
for a moment, of the one thought of the desirableness of being exempted
from the abyss of misery which yawned before Him in His Father's curse.
That His holy human nature, considering the matter solely in itself, could
not but desire to be exempt from such woe, we have already seen. Considered
simply in itself, to desire exemption from the wrath of God was the
dictate of His holy human nature, considered as at once sensitive and
reasonable and holy.
Not to have felt this desire, instead of being holiness
unto the Lord, would have argued—what we tremble even to think of while we
know it could not be—daring contempt of the divine anger and will! No: to
have such impressive views as Jesus now had of his Father's wrath, and not
be filled with an earnest longing to escape from it (considering the matter
simply by itself) would have argued that He did not possess a true human
nature with all the sinless sensibilities which are of the essence of
humanity. And if Jesus did for a moment consider the matter simply by
itself; if He looked to the intense desirableness of this cup passing from
Him, without for the moment taking the matter in connection with past
appointments or future consequences; if there was a moment during which the
one only object which stood straight before His mind's eye and filled all
His vision, was the terror of the vengeance of the Omnipotent; did this
indicate any imperfection but what was absolutely sinless and holy?
His true human soul, not infinite (which is a character
only of his Godhead) but finite, without which it had not been true, could
not possibly behold all elements of truth in one act of contemplation. In
unutterable sorrow and sore amazement, the object of dread for an instant
engrossed the whole reflective faculty; and in that moment the desire,
not unwarrantable but holy, which was suitable to that one instant of His
sore experience, in the view of that one object which for the instant
exclusively was in view—the desire, which, limiting His emotions to the
single object now awakening them, it would have been unnatural,
unreasonable, unholy, not to have felt—was emitted as the true and
genuine and not undutiful desire of the moment—"Father, if it be possible,
let this cup pass from Me"—while, immediately admitting other thoughts;
looking back on Eternal Counsels and irrefragable Scriptures and promises
inviolable; the Savior's soul, admitting these other thoughts, and with them
the feelings suitable to them also, qualifies His desire with the
expression of entire submission—"Nevertheless, not as I will, but as You
will."
Yes, and the inconceivable intensity with which, without
any disparagement of His love to His Father or His love to His Church, He
exclaimed—"Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me" is just an
index by which to mark the truth, or a line by which to fathom the depths,
of that love to both, under the force of which He added: "Nevertheless, not
My will but Yours be done." For is it not unutterably desirable to flee from
the wrath to come, whether, O sinner, it be in your own case, or in
Christ's? And if He fled not, it was not because He was insensible to the
terrors of His Father's wrath, as sinners are who do not flee; but He fled
not, that sinners might have a hope set before them to flee to; He fled not,
because He was not a hireling, but the good Shepherd who gives His life for
the sheep.
It is here, doubtless, that we
should introduce into the narrative the glorious statement, which is made
only by the evangelist Luke: "And there appeared an angel unto Him from
heaven strengthening Him" (Luke 22:43). Are they not all ministering
spirits sent forth to minister to those who shall be heirs of salvation?
What wonder, then, if we find them ministering to Him who is the elder
brother, whom God has appointed heir of all things? We know how they
announced and celebrated His advent as the babe of Bethlehem; how they
waited on Him as the tempted One in the wilderness; how they ministered
amidst the transactions of the resurrection morning, rolling away the stone,
and guarding the place where the body of Jesus lay. All these and such like
acts of service to the Mediator's person, into whose redemption work they
desire to look, were so many and very obvious instances of the fulfillment
of the Father's glorious oracle concerning Him, as it is written, "When He
brings in the first-begotten into the world, He says, Let all the angels of
God worship Him" (Heb. 1:6).
We are not told how the angel
on this occasion strengthened the agonizing Redeemer. Yet if he came that he
might visibly fulfill the terms of the oracle and "worship" Him, we may see
how suitable and seasonable such a ministration must have been, and how
strengthening! For it was not with Jesus at this moment as in the times when
His mighty and miraculous powers went forth; when the energies of His
Godhead were in operation to attest His Messiahship, or bless and relieve
His followers. The attributes of His divine nature were at this moment
held in abeyance. They slumbered, or retired, to admit of that humiliation
which, had all their glories pressed forward into view or into action, would
have been impossible.
And while the Godhead in the second person was
indissolubly and eternally united with humanity in one person in the man
Christ, the sufferings of "the man" reached their crisis and their
complication—just as the positive action of His Godhead's powers and
attributes was more and more withdrawn and resigned. This was the precise
nature of His abasement, that though it was no robbery for Him to be equal
with God, He yet laid aside the reputation though never the reality thereof;
and, remaining still, as He must ever remain, the same God unchangeable, He
yet appeared in the form of a servant, not drawing on His divine might and
energies, but denying Himself their exercise and forth-putting—concealing,
retiring out of view, withdrawing from the field of action, those
prerogatives and powers of Deity, which in the twinkling of an eye might
have scattered ten thousand worlds and hells of enemies. He withdrew
them all from action that He might taste the weakness of created nature. And
in thus denying Himself the consolation and energy and support which the
action of His divine upon His human nature, had He chosen, would have
furnished to Him boundlessly, in this consisted the test and the
trial of His submission to the Father's yoke, in the body which He had
prepared him. To draw unduly on the resources of His Godhead, and in a
manner inconsistent with His relation and His duty towards the Father, as
the Mediator between God and man in the days of his flesh, was precisely
that act to which the devil in vain sought to tempt Him when he said, "If
You are the Son of God, command these stones that they be made bread." For
Jesus to have done so would have been to "make Himself of" some
"reputation." It would have been to recoil from the form and the duty of a
servant. It would have been to abandon His position as one made under the
law.
But preeminently in the closing
scenes of His obedience and sufferings were all manifestation and action and
supporting influence of His divine nature withdrawn, as if all divine
glories and perfections enfolded and enwrapped themselves into mysterious
concealment within. So that the divine suppliant, though He was indeed
divine, lay prostrate with His face upon the ground in all the weakness that
could overtake a mere—mere man.
How unspeakably seasonable and
consoling, that at such a crisis, by the adoring worship of an angel, the
glory of His own Divine Person should be presented to the view of His
created mind, to countervail in some measure the anguish and the shame to
which in His human nature He was at this moment reduced! True, the very
nature of the case forbade that the arm of His omnipotence should spring
forth and bear His weakened body up against the infirmity and trembling
which astonishment and sorrow had evoked; or that the light of His
omniscience should gush in upon His human soul, as in God's full flood, and
reveal to it the glories and the joys which His sufferings should achieve.
Not thus in the hour of His anguish and prostration could His eternal power
and Godhead come into action to relieve and comfort Him.
But if, while all his divine prerogatives were retired,
withheld and resigned from his own enjoyment of them, in order that in
creature weakness He might expiate the sins of His elect—what if from heaven
there come forth one of those ministers of God who do His pleasure, and
literally fulfill the commandment of the Father, "Let the angels of God
worship Him!" To be made the object of divine worship and adoration: to be
with profoundest love and reverence reminded, that, though reproached of men
and despised of the people; though weakened and abased in body and in soul
to the utmost extreme of anguish and of woe; though avenged upon by God as
the surety of countless sinners, bearing their responsibilities and visited
with all their curse; though reduced in His created nature to all the
extremity of helplessness and anguish of which it was susceptible, that
still He was the adorable and true God, the living God and an everlasting
king: to be worshipped still, while Himself a prostrate agonizing
worshipper: still to be Himself worshipped and adored by the messenger from
heaven with all the adoration that messenger had been rendering even at the
Father's throne.
Oh! this was precisely the ministration of strength to
His fainting soul which the crisis of his anguish required. This was to Him
as the foretaste of His coming glory, when angels and principalities and
powers would be subjected to Him, and at the name of Jesus every knee would
bow. This worshipping angel was to Him as His Father's messenger, meeting
Him in the moment of profound abasement to tell Him of the exaltation that
would follow. This answer to His prayer was like the voice of God saying to
the enfeebled man of Gethsemane: "Your throne, O God, is forever and ever."
The two great themes which engrossed the whole testimony
of the Spirit of Christ as He spoke by all the holy prophets were "the
sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow." The time
had been when that glory, as by anticipation, appeared in blessed foretaste
to be realized, and the same three witnesses beheld it. While the "glory"
seemed thus revealed, the "sufferings" were the theme presented to the
Savior's mind, and heavenly messengers descended on the holy mount and
talked with Him of "the decease which He would accomplish at Jerusalem." And
now, when the "sufferings" begin to be realized, and are already endured
even unto the anguish of death, "the glory that shall follow" is the theme
suggested to the mind of Jesus; and an angel comes to strengthen and refresh
His drooping spirit with the seasonable and assured conviction that He shall
yet be glorified with the glory which He had with the Father before the
world was.
Alas! that within a stone's-throw of the place, in the
immediate view of the very scene, where there seemed to meet in one all the
intense variety of the unseen world, ranging in its compass from the cords
of death and the pains of hell, to the worship and the glories of the heaven
of heavens—even in immediate view of such things as these, where the powers
of the world to come had their action so infinitely momentous, so infinitely
important even to themselves, the disciples should have so fallen from
sympathy with Jesus as to fall asleep!
"And He came to the disciples and
found them asleep, and said to Peter, What! could you not watch with Me one
hour?"
Ah! but let us beware lest any of us
be chargeable with guilt of a similar or even deeper dye. There is such a
thing as having the sufferings and anguish of Christ brought under our view,
and seeing Christ set forth in ordinances manifestly prostrated, yes,
"manifestly crucified," for sin, and yet remaining asleep in sin, yes, dead
in trespasses and in sins: without fleeing from the hateful evil which
entailed upon the Savior all His anguish, and without, therefore, fleeing
from the wrath which Jesus dreaded, yet in love to sinners bore. Oh! awake,
you who sleep, and arise from the dead. Do not expose yourself to such
anguish and woe as filled even the soul of the Divine Redeemer with
amazement and exceeding sorrow even unto death. You cannot but know, under a
preached gospel, that either there must be some distinct and personal
transaction, wherein, with hearts alive to the terrible importance of the
case, you choose this once wearied, afflicted, abased Redeemer as your own,
that in those agonies which He suffered and in that death which He
ultimately died, divine justice may accept what is due on your part to the
law of your God which you have broken; or else, that same justice of God
must find the satisfaction of a broken law in your own eternal endurance of
the second death, which is the wages of sin. O careless transgressor! asleep
in a world on which the Son of God travailed in spirit, and died a ransom
for sin; asleep, it may be, nearer to the unseen world than the three
slumbering disciples now were to Jesus, for there may be but a step between
you and death. Awake and flee in repentance and in faith to the hope which
that suffering Savior sets before you. Delay no more, lest the sword should
find you out of Christ, and slay you with the second death!
But may not even believers be asleep? These were
disciples whom Jesus found asleep when He returned from His agonizing
sufferings and prayers. And may not disciples still too often find that an
unseemly slumber is upon their souls? Who among us feels that he is awake
and alive, as he ought to be, to the powerful lessons which a scene like
that of Gethsemane is fitted to teach us? Rather, who does not feel, in
review of such a subject as this, that the sufferings of the Savior's soul,
and the unparalleled love which led Him to endure them—the "love so amazing,
so divine"—deserves not only a larger extent but even another kind of
requital than any we have ever rendered?
What earnest Christian can fail to be ashamed of the
weakness and changeableness of the love which is all that Jesus has ever
received at His hands—of the unheartiness and infrequency of the services he
has rendered in His kingdom; of the slow and inconstant steps with which he
has followed his example, and the much lack of faith and fervency wherein he
has failed to cultivate as he ought a holy and joyful fellowship with Him in
all His ordinances?
Were Christians more with Jesus in the garden of
Gethsemane—more studious to enter into the mind and love of a suffering
Savior—more given to cultivate the "fellowship of His sufferings," and to
realize the deep glories of their own redemption as upspringing endlessly
from the unfathomable abysses of the anguish of the Son of God, and
boundless and secure to them only because His anguish was so great and
all-sufficient—they would be far more awake to the things which are unseen
and eternal, and live both more holy and more blessed under the powers of
the world to come.
Awake, then, you children of God, to a livelier faith and
a more penitent and grateful love to Him who died for you and who rose
again. It is high time to awake out of sleep, for now is your salvation
nearer than when you believed. He who lay prostrate on the ground in
Gethsemane will soon come to sit upon His great white throne. Awake, and
serve Him in faith and love. Serve Him, and fight for Him, under the banner
of His own most free and forgiving and sanctifying love—the love that braved
Gethsemane and the cross for you. And ever tasting that the Lord is
gracious, serve Him with godly fear, remembering that the Lord our God is
holy. So shall you not be ashamed before Him at His coming.
GETHSEMANE ,
THE AGONY OF SORROW
"My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death."
Matthew 26:38
That the sorrow of Christ in Gethsemane was of a very
intense and terrible description, we have many infallible proofs. The
Scriptures testify, recording indeed His own testimony, that He "began to be
very heavy," to be "sorrowful," to be "sore amazed," and "sorrowful even
unto death." And these expressions are far from conveying the great force
and emphasis of the original.
The terms in which Jesus Himself poured His griefs into
the ears of his disciples, combined with the simple fact that He felt
induced and constrained to speak of them at all, afford very affecting
evidence that they were of a nature and degree which only the overhanging
shadow of death with all its woe could have caused to fall upon Him. The aid
and concert of that vigilance which He implored as if their sympathy in His
sore affliction would afford some comfort and alleviation; the fact that He
instantly betook Himself to prayer, that mightiest of all instruments which
created natures can wield; the intensity of earnestness and energy with
which He prayed; the frequency with which He recurred to agonizing prayer as
His only resource; His reiterated but unsuccessful appeals and visits to His
disciples; and the bloody sweat of which His intense wrestlings in prayer
produced, even in that cold night (for it was that same night in which the
soldiers "made a fire for it was cold")—all these are proofs that the
anguish of the Savior's soul in Gethsemane was unparalleled by anything that
even He, the man of sorrows, had yet encountered or endured.
In confining our attention at present to the
consideration of the SORROW of the Lord, to discover what from the
Scriptures may be learned of its nature and causes, we ought to feel that we
specially require the Spirit of the Lord to rest upon us, the Spirit of
knowledge and of the fear of the Lord, that we may not irreverently intrude
where angels might tremble to advance, or gaze with presumptuous eye where
angels might veil their faces with their wings. Deep grief, among mere men,
is for the most part, generously accounted a sacred thing. Here we have the
grief of Him who is the ever-blessed God; the sorrow and weakness and fear
and trembling of Him who is the Lord God Omnipotent; the tears and prostrate
agonies and cries of One who is now seated on the right hand of the majesty
in the heavens, angels and principalities and powers being made subject to
Him!
Perhaps the most impressive proof that can be given of
the inconceivable terrors of Christ's sufferings considered as a whole, and
as constituting the one undivided ransom for sin, results from the fact that
the darkness of Gethsemane must be regarded as but the shadow of
Calvary, this remark, at the same time, opening to us the nature and sources
of what Christ endured when He said, "My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even
unto death." The sorrows of the garden arose from the prospect and
foresight of the sorrows of the cross.
That this was the case is obvious from the tenor of the
Savior's prayers, for surely the one must throw light upon the other.
Without doubt it was the source of His sorrow which formed the subject of
his supplication. Now we learn, from the reiterated prayers which this
sorrow called forth, that Jesus was not at this time directly drinking the
cup of His Father's wrath. That He did upon the cross when, there in
His own body, on the tree, He bore our sins and was made a curse for us, and
suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust. But now, in Gethsemane, the
agony or wrestling of prayer which arose from the agony and anguish of
grief, concerned not the immediate but the ultimate drinking of that cup—not
the immediate drinking of it, but only the immediate and final allocating of
it to Him as a cup which He should in due time drink, and which it was His
now simply to accept and acknowledge as His portion.
It is impossible to read the narrative carefully with a
view to this question without observing that the Savior agonies in His
deadly sorrow and His oft-repeated wrestlings, not from anguish caused by
drinking of this cup, but simply by the prospect of having yet to drink
of it, by the foresight of the dreadful and inconceivable travail of His
soul which drinking it would cause, insomuch that, were it possible,
nothing could be so unspeakably desirable as that this cup should pass from
Him, and by the clear view of the absolute necessity of accepting it to
which His love to His Father's will and His people's salvation finally and
irreversibly committed and engaged Him—"Nevertheless, not My will but Yours
be done."
And so, this paroxysm of the Savior's agony passed away,
not with the cup being drained, but simply with the cup being put into His
hand by the Father's will on the one side, and accepted by Jesus in full
submission to the Father's will on the other. And that the cup thus given
and received was not at this time drained, but simply received, is intimated
by the Savior Himself subsequently when, on His entrance on the final and
ultimate sorrows of death, by the arrest which Judas effected with his band
of soldiers, Jesus reproved the untimely zeal of Peter, saying, "Put your
sword into its sheath: the cup that My Father has given Me to drink, shall I
not drink it." His submitting to be thus arrested as a criminal was the
commencement of His drinking that cup.
From this we may see that the cup which the Father gave
Him consisted substantially in the imputation to Him of a criminal's guilt,
and the assignment to Him of a criminal's position and destiny. No sooner is
the mysterious transaction of Gethsemane over than the secret and spiritual
nature of what was there determined immediately begins to be manifest. From
this moment, onward to His resurrection, Jesus is seen among men no more
in any other character than that of a criminal. Every step now in His
history is that of the history of a criminal. The whole may be summed up
briefly thus: He is arrested, libeled, judged, condemned, executed.
This whole series of His successive positions and endurances as an offender,
a transgressor; so immediately begun, so completely sustained and perfected;
was the cup which He finally drained upon the cursed tree.
This cup, Peter would have had Him to refuse; this
position of a transgressor, Peter would have had Him to renounce; when he
set himself against the first element of it, in his Master's arrest. Jesus
refused to resist His seizure, on the ground that this were refusing the cup
which the Father had given Him to drink. Can there be any difficulty, then,
in understanding what that cup was? That whole treatment of His person as
the person of a malefactor, of which the arrest in the garden was the first
step, constituted the cup concerning which the sorrows and wrestlings of the
garden had been conversant.
We know how unrighteously the blessed Jesus was forced by
men into those attitudes and destinies of an offender. We know that the
arrest was unprovoked: the accusation, false: the trial, a mockery: the
evidence, perjury: the sentence, unrighteous and malicious: its execution,
murder. Yet still, here were all the circumstances and steps, if not the
pomp and dignity, of judgment upon life and death: and if we look beneath
the surface into what infinite wisdom meant in righteousness to shadow forth
by the things which the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God
determined should thus be done, we will find that, even as to hear of Christ
drinking the cup of wrath, is but to hear in a figure of the atoning
sufferings of the surety; so to see Him arrested, accused, condemned, and
led to the death of a special malefactor, is in like manner only to see in a
figure, to see as in a mirror, the successive footsteps of the avenging
justice of the highest, as, armed with a valid commission to arrest, and a
terrific scroll and handwriting of ordinances to accuse, and the warrant of
the judge of all to condemn, and the everlasting sword of heaven's wrath to
avenge—she onwardly and unfalteringly pursues unto the end the Substitute of
the guilty, the Seeker and the Savior of the lost.
That visible seizure of His person which the traitor
accomplished—that libel, judgment, sentence, death, which in quick
succession followed—in themselves so unrighteous; what were they in the
determinate counsel of God, but the outward and visible sign of the hidden
and spiritual process and prosecution which the incensed, avenging judge
carried on against the man that was "numbered with transgressors"? Every
position in which He now stands, whether as a captured criminal in the hands
of constituted power, or accused at the tribunal of authority, or condemned
by the highest voices in the Church and in the State, and led away bearing
the cross, and crucified between two malefactors, one on either side—every
one of these positions, however unrighteous as assigned to Him by man, is
but an index and an emblem of a corresponding and true and righteous
position or relation now assigned to Him, and which He now assumes, towards
the Judge of all the earth. Yes, even the preference of Barabbas, who was a
robber and seditious and a murderer, viewed as the emblem and seal of
Christ's hidden condemnation, is but righteous and necessary. Jesus, as the
substitute of sinners, is more heavily laden than he!
We see then the cup which the Savior drank, the doom
which Jesus accepted, namely, a malefactor's position and a malefactor's
retribution, symbolized with minute, prolonged, sustained accuracy by
all that the wicked hearts and voices and hands of men now accomplished in
him, but realized under and along with, yet far above and beyond
these emblems, in the reckoning He now had to meet with God and the wrath of
God He now had to bear.
And if such was the cup, what could His receiving or
consenting to receive it imply, but His submitting to be made sin for us,
submitting to be numbered with transgressors, submitting to have the
iniquities of His people laid upon Him? This was what Gethsemane beheld
transacted between the Father and the Son. Finally and formally the Father
proposes to Jesus the assumption of the guilt of His Church unto Himself.
Finally and formally Jesus accepts and confirms what had been determined
mutually in the counsel of peace from everlasting. He agrees, or rather
solemnly ratifies all His previous agreements to be responsible in all the
responsibilities of His elect people. "Not My will but Yours be done." "Your
will be done."
The Father lays upon Him the iniquities of all whom He
has given to Him: imputes to Him the guilt of all who shall be redeemed:
makes Him who knew no sin to be sin for us: numbers Him among transgressors,
as bearing in His own person the sins of many; and looks upon Him as lying
under the imputation of all their countless transgressions. It is unto this
that Jesus says, "Your will be done." He assumes, therefore, at His Father's
will, the sins which He is to bear in His own body on the tree; and the
baptism of blood in His agony which follows is the sign and seal of the
covenant, which thus by imputation makes Him out to be the chief and the
most heavy laden of transgressors!
Can there be any difficulty now in understanding
generally what the nature and emphasis of His sorrow must have been? Think
of Jesus coming into this terrible position towards the judge of all—towards
His Father and His God—towards Him whose approbation and pleasure in Him
were the light and joy of his life unspeakable! Think of Him consenting to
have all the sins of myriads imputed to Him by his Father: to underlie, that
is, the imputation, in his Father's judgment, of every kind and degree and
amount of moral evil—every species and circumstance and combination of vile
iniquity! There is a book of reckoning which eternal justice writes in
heaven, in which is entered every charge to which infinite unsparing
rectitude, searching with omniscient glance alike the darkness and the
light, sees the sons of men become obnoxious. This terrific scroll, so far
as the elect of God are concerned in it, was unrolled before the eye of
Jesus in Gethsemane: "the iniquities of us all" which God was now about to
lay upon Him, were therein disclosed: and you have to think of the sorrow
with which He should contemplate His becoming responsible and being held of
God to be responsible, for all that that record charged—His being accounted
of God, in His own one person, guilty of all that that record bore! It was
hereupon that the Christ who, in prophetic Scripture as in the fortieth
Psalm, proclaimed Himself the Father's willing Covenant Servant—"Lo, I come,
in the volume of the book it is written of Me; I delight to do Your will, O
my God; Your law also is within My heart" (Ps. 40:6)—exclaims also, as one
heavily laden with accumulated sins, and trembling, ashamed, and self-doomed
because of them—"Innumerable evils have surrounded Me: My iniquities have
taken hold upon Me so that I am not able to look up; they are more than the
hairs of My head, therefore My heart fails Me" (Ps. 40:17). And by the
consenting testimony of historic Scripture, He began to be "sore amazed" and
"very heavy," and said to his disciples: "My soul is exceedingly sorrowful,
even unto death."
In forming a judgment of the sorrow and anguish which the
imputation of sin to the holy Jesus must have caused, there is a vexing
fallacy to be guarded against. We are ready to suppose that however hard and
terrible to bear must have been the wrath and death which were the wages of
the sins for which He suffered, yet the imputation of these sins to Him
could have, in itself, cost Him little anxiety, or caused Him little sorrow,
in the consciousness that He was not personally guilty of them—the
consciousness of His own unsullied holiness.
Now let it be remembered that the imputations which even
malicious men chose to make him underlie—the reproaches and revilings under
which at man's tribunal He was traduced—did, notwithstanding their very
certain falsehood, cause Him much anxiety and grief in so much that He
exclaims in His Psalm of sorrow: "Reproach has broken My heart, and I am
full of heaviness" (Ps. 69:20); that same affection of His weary soul
which He now endured in Gethsemane, when He was sore amazed and very
heavy. And if these reproaches thus affected Him, let us note these two
points of difference, that is, First, that in the one case, the
imputations cast upon Him were from man and at man's tribunal. In the other
case, God laid upon Him the iniquity of us all. God made Him to be sin. God
imputed to Him—the Father whom He infinitely loved—the judge whom He
infinitely revered as one who could not do but what is right—reckoned Him
among transgressors. And, secondly, in the one case, the imputations of men
which broke His heart and filled it with heaviness, were repudiated and
denied by Him in all their extent, and to every effect. In the other, there
was an imputation admitted as righteous, the proposal of infinitely
righteous love and wisdom—the product and decree of divine Triune counsels
from everlasting. If, then, misdeeds imputed by man and in every sense
denied, and which indeed had no existence at all, were yet unto the breaking
of the heart, what when iniquities are imputed by God and in a true and
righteous sense admitted—admitted in a sense and to an effect which entailed
immediate and full responsibility, avenging and unmitigated reckoning? True,
the sins which were charged upon Him were not His own, but they were so laid
upon Him and so became His, that He could not merely endure, but
accept as righteous, the penalty which they entailed. He did not merely
suffer the death which is the wages of sin: He did voluntarily give Himself
up to death—accepting it as due to Him—acknowledging His holy liability to
it—justifying as very righteous the doom which He trembled to anticipate.
And if the punishment of these sins was thus not in
semblance, but in reality accepted by Jesus as justly visited upon Himself,
must it not have been because the sins themselves had first been made His—verily,
really His—to every effect save that alone of impairing His unspotted
personal holiness and perfection? And if they were His to bring Him
wrath to the uttermost in their penalty, must they not have been His
to cause Him grief and sorrow inconceivable in their imputation? True, they
were not personally His own; and so they were not His to bring
self-accusation, self-contempt, despondency, remorse, despair. But they were
His sufficiently to induce upon His holy soul a shame, humiliation,
sorrow—yes, sore amazement—as He stood at His Father's tribunal, accountable
for more than child of man shall ever account for unto eternity!
Still, confessedly, it is difficult to understand the
sorrow and amazement and agony of a holy being in having sin thus by
imputation imposed upon Him. It is only a legal or judicial arrangement; so
we reason. It is but a scheme of mercy to relieve the miserable. Or, be it
that it is more; that it is a scheme of justice also to absolve the guilty;
why should not the Surety's conscious innocence triumph over the sorrow and
the shame of this imputed sin? Why should He quail and tremble, filled with
anguish and amazement, not merely by the prospect of the penalty which this
imputation will ultimately bring, but in the immediate sense of a shame, and
the immediate endurance of a sorrow, which this imputation itself inflicts?
What can there be in sin, when not personally His own, that can thus cause
Him to agonize in pain and prayer, and offer up supplications with strong
crying and tears?
There is nothing that we know of in all the history of
God's moral administration that can aid us by comparison in considering how
sin imputed by the judge of all to a personally holy being, should fill His
soul with sorrow. But the illustration, which there exists no comparison
to furnish, may be derived from a contrast. The sorrows of imputed
sin may be illustrated, perhaps, by the joys of imputed righteousness.
Sin imputed to a holy one must produce effects directly the reverse of
righteousness imputed to a sinner. And thus, perhaps, in the justification
of the believer and the Church, through the righteousness of Christ, we may
learn somewhat of the terrible shame and condemnation of him who became
responsible for all their sins.
1. To prepare the way for this reasoning from analogy,
and in order to justify us in adopting it, let it be observed, first of all,
that the contrast which we wish to examine is very emphatically stated in
various Scriptures; the one term being represented as the issue and the
fruit resulting and contemplated from the other. "He has made Him to be sin
for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in
Him" (2 Cor. 5:21). "You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that
though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that you through His
poverty might be rich" (2 Cor. 8:9). It is very clearly implied in the
latter of these texts that whatever was contained in the poverty with which
Christ became poor, the very reverse should accrue to us in the riches with
which by his poverty we should be made rich: if sin and sorrow and shame and
death in the one, righteousness and joy and dignity and life eternal in the
other. And in the former text it is very distinctly asserted that if God
imputed our sins to Him who had no sin of His own, it was in order that to
us who have no righteousness of our own He might impute Christ's
righteousness in turn. To effect this marvelous exchange is the design
contemplated in Christ's union with the Church in federal unity, in one
person mystical. He assumes her sin to taste its bitterness and bear its
curse, that she may be enriched with His righteousness, to taste its joys,
and be endowed with its heavenly rewards. This contrast, therefore, is of
express divine constitution—the one term moreover being the glorious fruit
of the other. Sinners can be counted righteous, because the Holy One was
reckoned a sinner.
2. Notice, then, secondly, that he who believes in Jesus
though ungodly, and who is thereby accounted righteous only for the
righteousness of Christ imputed to him, is not the less entitled to rejoice
in that righteousness, even while it is true that it is not his own; yes,
while it is true that he has none of his own; yes, while it is true that he
has nothing but sin of his own. He is entitled to rejoice, as one clothed in
the glorious unsullied robes in which omniscient holiness can find no spot
nor stain. While in himself, that is, in his flesh, there dwells no good
thing, yet in the Lord he has righteousness, and in Him he may glory and
make his joyful triumphant boast.
Even so, Jesus, when He was accounted a transgressor only
for the transgressions of his people imputed to Him, and received in
infinite love to them and submission to His Father, when He said, "Your will
be done," is not the less subjected to inevitable sorrow and shame in that
imputed sin, even while it is true that it is not His own; yes, while it is
true that He has none of His own; yes, while it is true that He has nothing
but glorious and unsullied holiness of His own. He is subjected to sorrow
and shame as one clothed in filthy garments in which omniscient holiness—his
Father's and his own—alike behold unbounded material for abhorrence. While
in Himself He is the beloved Son of God—in whom the Father is ever well
pleased, yes, delighting in Him specially in this very transaction because
of His holy acquiescence in this holy liability in the sins of His sinful
and unpurged Church, yet identified with his sinful and still unpurged
Church in all her unpurged sin, He has ground only for horror and
humiliation.
The believer's own unworthiness ought not to avail to
impair His joy, because a true righteousness is imputed to Him, and he has
the blessedness of Him to whom the Lord imputes not his sin. The Surety's
own unspotted holiness cannot avail to prevent His sorrow, because sin is
imputed to Him and He has voluntarily therefore assumed what misery must
belong to Him to whom the Lord imputes—not His holiness—to whom the Lord
imputes nothing but sin.
3. The fact that the righteousness which the believer
rejoices in is not his own, not only does not diminish his joy, but on the
contrary adds to it an element of wonder, a thrill of unexpected and
surprising delight. To be exalted from a relation fraught with guilt and
wrath and fear and death, and to be brought at once, on the ground of
another's merit, into one of favor and peace and blessedness and eternal
life—to have the angry frown of an incensed avenging judge turned away, and
all replaced by the sweet smiles of a Father's love—this, the fruit of the
imputation of another's righteousness, hiding all my sin, quenching all my
fear, wondrously reversing all my fate, this is not only joyful but
surprising—wonderful, the doing of the Lord and marvelous in our eyes!
And so, for Jesus to be accounted a sinner by imputation
must have added a pang of amazement to the sorrow and humiliation which
ensued. In point of fact, this very element in His sorrow is pointed out. He
began to be "sore amazed." Not but that He fully expected it. Yet
when it came, the change was in its nature "amazing." To pass from a state
of unimpeached integrity to one in which He was chargeable with all grievous
sins—from a state in which His conscious and unsullied love and practice of
all things that are pure and lovely and of good report caused Him to obtain
the announcements to his Father's complacency and love—("I do always those
things that please Him")—to a state in which that love and practice still
unimpaired, He nevertheless justified his Father's justice in frowning on
Him in displeasure by the very horror and the struggle in which He would,
but for His Father's will, have refused to be plunged: this must have struck
into the very heart of all His sorrow an element of amazement amounting to
absolute agony and horror. If an ecstasy of wonder thrills through the
believer's joy in the Lord His righteousness, there must have been a deeply
contrasted paralyzing amazement when the Holy One of God realized Himself as
worthy, in the sins of others, of condemnation at His Father's tribunal.
4. The justified believer finds his joy in the
righteousness of Christ augmented to the highest exaltation by the fact that
this righteousness is not only not his own, but is the righteousness of one
so beloved, so closely related to him as his living head, his elder
brother—"my Lord, and my God." Had it been the righteousness of one standing
in no endearing relation to him (were this conceivable), one who in future
should be nothing more to him than any other, or one never more to be heard
of, or at least never to be enjoyed in the embrace of friendship and the
offices of love: the believer's joy in such a righteousness imputed to him
would have been unspeakably less. The exulting delight, unspeakable and full
of glory, which the believer cherishes in clasping to his heart that
righteousness of Jesus which is all his boast before God and angels, and
which evermore is as a cordial to his fainting heart, the ever-reviving
fountain to him of life from the dead, the secret and inexpressible
exultation of his joy in this righteousness of Jesus just springs from the
remembrance that it is the righteousness of one whom his soul loves; of one
who is all his salvation and all his desire; of one with whom He shall dwell
forevermore—and thus better to him far than had it been his own. Imputation,
therefore, it is evident, can carry with it a fervor and intensity of joy to
which actual and personal possession can never reach.
And ah! why may not this principle operate when
imputation infers sorrow, being the imputation of sin? If Jesus had been
forced to assume the place and responsibilities of the guilty (were that
conceivable) the case in this respect would have been very different from
what it was. It must not be forgotten that it was love that induced Him to
accept the imputation of iniquity—to bear away, as the Lamb of God, the sin
of the world. Had it been the imputation of the sins of those whom He did
not love (were that conceivable) His resulting sorrow would have been
unutterably less; and there might have been some scope or place for the idea
that the sin being merely imputed, and not at all His own, He could afford
to let it lie lightly upon His soul. But it was the sin of those whom He was
not ashamed to call, and could not be induced to refrain from calling
brethren—the sin of His children; his Church; His dearly beloved; His elect;
His bride—"the Lamb's wife." His electing and everlasting love,
therefore—free, sovereign, distinguishing, self-consuming—choosing this
sinful Church into this intensely and divinely endearing relation, wherein
His delights were with her by anticipation before yet the morning stars sang
for joy—bound her iniquity upon Him as His own, even as it bound her
as a seal upon His heart and as a seal upon His arm. Thus came the Holy One
of Israel to have sin to reckon for—sin not His own in His own name, yet
still His own in her name. And so, having guilt, and having
conscience, even while He had not a guilty conscience, His soul was
"exceedingly sorrowful even unto death." For He realized that He was "made
sin"!
Oh, let us not think that, because personally and in
Himself perfectly holy, Jesus could on that account have experienced little
sorrow from being numbered with transgressors.
Not because in himself he is a sinner is the believer
excluded from rejoicing in the imputed righteousness of Christ. Justified by
faith in another's merit, he may rejoice in the Lord, and glory in the God
of his salvation. Yes, the fact that it is another's merit which is the
fountain of all his joy and the ground of all his glorying, infuses an
element of admiration and astonishment into his glorying and his joy. And
that it is the righteousness of his beloved and his friend, gives to his joy
the crowning character of inexpressible delight and sweet and most generous
exultation. Oh, blessed is the man to whom the Lord imputes righteousness
without works! "I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall be
joyful in my God: for He has clothed me with the garment of salvation, He
has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself
with ornaments, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels."
And turning now to the mournful side of this
contrast—surely it should break our hearts (Zech. 12:10) to have to do
it—turning to the mournful side of this contrast, which in its deep abasing
poverty in sorrow has procured for us all this riches in gladness, we may
surely understand how in like manner His personal holiness did not exempt
Him from sorrow when sin was imputed to Him; how, rather, His sorrow was
mingled with a peculiar terror and amazement, springing from the fact that
the sin was the sin of others and not His own; and how that sorrow must have
been deep and terrible in proportion as the love which bound these others to
Him in love even as His own soul, and thus identified them with Himself, did
thereby bind upon Him as his own, in the name of those whom He was
infinitely far from repudiating, all the iniquity which His Father's
justice charged against them.
It is not indeed the joy which a believer actually
experiences as justified in the merit of Emmanuel which can properly be
chosen as the counterpart and contrast to the sorrow of Jesus. It is rather
the joy, in its purest form and fullest measure, which there is ground for
the believer enjoying, that can alone form anything like an accurate, though
even then most inadequate, index to the contrasted sorrow of the Substitute
and Surety of sinners. But we have seen enough in the analogy between
imputed sin and imputed righteousness to show, that as the latter, though
imputed and not personal, does yet lay a ground of righteousness and
surprising joy, so the former in like manner, though also not personal but
merely imputed, does not on that account any less entail amazing sorrow and
shame as its result.
Any aid which this analogy may furnish to us in looking
into the amount of the Savior's sorrow is at the best but small, and the
abyss of his troubles must ever be unsearchable—a matter of faith rather
than of knowledge. But if the analogy is correct, then, to give to our idea
such expansion as it is capable of—measuring still the sorrow of the
Redeemer by the joy of the redeemed, we may observe:
1. That the more the believer sees of Christ's
righteousness, and the more he realizes it by faith as his own, the deeper
does that joy become which he is warranted to cherish in the Lord his
Righteousness. We can conceive his faith, and his believing consciousness,
to attain the consummate strength of a divine and infallible assurance. And,
further, we may suppose the glorious spiritual insight he may have attained
into the moral loveliness and beauty of the righteousness thus imputed to
him to be such, that knowing of God that he is of God invested in this
matchless robe of salvation, his joy thereupon should rise above all power
of sublunary things to shake or overshadow it. This much as to the measure
of the purchased joy—joy in imputed merit—and the conditions on which its
rise and increase depend.
Similar are the conditions necessary to depth of sorrow
in imputed sin. First, infallible assurance (not to be called faith in this
case, yet supplying its place in the other), infallible assurance that the
imputation is effected; and secondly, a profound insight into the
hatefulness and moral deformity of the sin that is imputed. To convey these
to Jesus was verily the Father's object in dealing with Him in the garden.
He gave Him a view of the cup such as revealed to Him the elements with
which it was charged; and accurate and terrible therefore as was the view
given Him of the iniquities thus laid upon Him, profound in proportion must
have been that sorrow of which He spoke when He said, "My soul is
exceedingly sorrowful even unto death."
2. But again, secondly, a believer's joy in the
righteousness of Christ rises to its fullest ecstacy of unmingled exultation
and unassailable security, only when he actually enters the home of the
redeemed and the presence of his Father on high. Then indeed will he glory
in the Lord his righteousness, accepted into everlasting life in virtue of
the righteousness of his Lord. And why should his joy then be bounded only
by his own capacity of joy? For one reason among others, because the
undimmed spiritual eye of his own personal and now unsullied holiness, can
look with hitherto unknown appreciation and blessedness upon the
transcendent moral beauties of the righteousness in which he walks in light.
His perfect holiness now crowns his joy in the righteousness of Christ with
its final and celestial radiance.
Ah! does not the contrast again hold, very affectingly?
Personal holiness and unspotted purity did not diminish the terrible
humiliation and anguish Jesus underwent in being clothed with filthy
garments, in being made sin, in being laden with iniquity and accounted a
transgressor. Ah! no. The stainless personal perfection of Jesus made Him
inconceivably sensitive to all the degradation which His position at his
Father's tribunal as a transgressor implied. The believer, rejoicing in his
Savior's righteousness, must at death be made perfect in holiness and pass
into glory before he can comprehend the glorious depths of perfection in
that righteousness which his beloved and his friend has brought in on his
behalf. But Jesus, ever absolutely sinless, did, in virtue of that very
sinlessness which we would reckon on as if it alleviated His sorrow,
penetrate the depths of moral evil in all its compass and deformity and
vileness which was now to be laid upon Him: and His soul, because it was
holy, was so much the more sorely amazed, and very heavy, and exceedingly
sorrowful even unto death.
3. But the perfection of the contrast lies not between
the joys of a single believer and the sorrows of the one Savior who died for
all. There shall be a people in the realms of day, blood-washed and redeemed
and rejoicing, whom no man can number. Who shall measure the sum of the joy
with which these millions of once apostate but justified transgressors,
saved and sanctified forever, shall joy in the God of their salvation? The
voice of that mighty aggregate of joy shall be loud and long—yes, forever.
It shall be as the noise of many waters, ever springing up yet more and more
from exhaustless abysmal depths. It was that mighty aggregate of joy
to which Jesus gave being by His sorrow. It is with that mighty
aggregate of joy—ever deepening in the Holy Spirit unto eternity—that the
sorrow of Jesus must be contrasted!
Are we not, then, in some measure prepared to rend our
hearts and mourn, to bow our heads and worship, while a still small voice is
asking: "Was there ever sorrow like my sorrow?"
GETHSEMANE,
THE AGONY OF PRAYER
"And being in an agony He prayed more earnestly; and His
sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground."
(Luke 22:44)
Before entering on the consideration of the import of our
Lord's prayer in the garden, there are one or two preliminary considerations
requiring our attention.
1. The Scriptures present Jesus to us as a man of prayer.
At an early period of His ministry we read a statement such as this: "And in
the morning, rising up a great while before day, He went out and departed to
a solitary place, and there prayed" (Mark 1:35). Again, after having fed the
five thousand, Jesus, we are told, "straightway constrained His disciples to
get into a ship and to go before Him to the other side, while He sent the
multitude away. And when He had sent the multitude away, He went up into a
mountain apart to pray. And when the evening came, He was there alone,"
remaining there until the fourth watch of the night, when He marvelously and
miraculously showed Himself to the disciples, walking upon the waters and
subduing the storm (Matt. 14:13). In like manner, the night preceding the
day on which He chose the twelve to be His special disciples and witnesses,
was dedicated to prayer: "And it came to pass in those days, that He went
out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God. And
when it was day, He called unto Him His disciples, and of them He chose
twelve, whom He also named apostles" (Luke 6:12). These are instances in
which Jesus is set before us as preeminently a man of prayer.
2. In the second place, this was of necessity involved in
the fact of His being made in all things like His brethren, sin only
excepted. To identify Himself with His people in all their responsibilities,
and in all their necessities and sinless infirmities, was the Redeemer's
purpose in assuming their nature. He would taste, by experience, all that
was implied in their position, bearing by imputation all the sin that was
involved in it, and entering by personal sympathy into all in it that was
not sinful. He inevitably placed Himself, therefore, in a position of
acknowledged weakness and infirmity—of absolute dependence on God—a
dependence to be exercised and expressed in the adorations and supplications
of prayer. He was made of a woman, made under the law—under the law of
prayer, as of other ordinances and duties—the law by which a man can receive
nothing except it be given him from heaven, and except the Lord be inquired
of for it (Ez. 36:37).
3. That Christ should be a man of prayer was required by
the terms or conditions of the covenant between Himself and the Father. That
covenant, which imposed upon Him certain obligations, made Him the heir also
of many promises. Yet the fulfillment of these promises was suspended on the
condition that Jesus should solicit them in prayer. Whatever was necessary
for the preservation of His person, or the erection of His kingdom, the
Father engaged to bestow, requiring only the Son to ask.
The strength, the grace, the support, the consolation
needed by Jesus personally, had all to be sued out in prayer; as also the
fruits of his death and the ingathering of His children. In all things by
prayer and supplication,
with thanksgiving, He had to make His requests known to
God. For such was the law of His office. Such, accordingly, was the decree
concerning Him, as He Himself rehearses it in the second Psalm: "I will
declare the decree: Jehovah has said to Me, You are my Son, this day have I
begotten You. Ask of me, and I will give You the heathen for Your
inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for Your possession." And
the prayers of the Son of God, David's Son and David's Lord, are predicted
also, when in the eighty-ninth Psalm Jehovah speaks in vision to his Holy
One, and says, "He shall cry to Me, My Father, My God, and the Rock of My
Salvation."
4. The subjection of Christ's divine person, in His
Mediatorial office, to this necessity of prayer, illustrates the true nature
of His humiliation. Prayer is a confession of weakness, of insufficiency.
But how singular is this in one who is a divine person—the Eternal Son of
God! For He who thus prayed was God manifest in the flesh. Surely,
therefore, He was God in a state of humiliation. For observe. From whom did
Jesus seek the grace and power which His frail human nature needed? From
what source did He desire and expect to be supplied with grace sufficient
for Him, with strength made perfect in His weakness? Surely from
Godhead—from the infinite resources and all-sufficiency of Godhead in the
person of the Father. But, dwelt there not all the fullness of the Godhead
in His own person bodily? And if so, why did He not directly, and without
supplicating the Father, lay hold at once on all the resources of strength
and consolation which His own Godhead, in the unity of His Mediatorial
person, could have yielded? Why, if He was, in His own person, true and very
God, did He not make way immediately to enrich, from the treasures of His
own divine energies, that frail human nature which He had exalted into union
with Deity? Surely with such unimpeded and immediate access to the whole
fullness of God, as the man Christ Jesus may be supposed to have possessed,
in virtue of the personal indwelling of the Godhead, He might at once have
laid His hand on the very gift, or measure of divine grace and strength,
which He required, without the circuitous process and the delay, so to
speak, of offering up supplications to the Father?
The fact that Jesus did not thus spontaneously,
and on His own authority, appropriate from His own divine resources and make
over to His human nature the upholding energy He so earnestly desired, but
humbly and patiently sought and waited for it from His Father, is an
illustration of the wonderful statement made by Paul, when speaking of Jesus
he says, "Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal
with God: but made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a
servant, and was made in the likeness of men, and being found in fashion as
a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of
the cross" (Phil. 2:6-8). It was the very God who was found in fashion as a
man, in the likeness of men, in the form of a servant. At His disposal were
all the attributes of which Godhead is possessed—all the strength and graces
and gifts which Godhead can bestow. From His own Godhead He, the God-man,
could have supplied gloriously to His own human nature, as He supplies to
other created natures, all that is required for maintenance and well-being.
It would not have been "robbery" had He done so. Yet He had emptied himself.
His humiliation implied that He should refrain from seeking in this manner
to strengthen His humanity. He was to be found simply "in fashion as a man,"
resigning all claims to wield in His own behalf the powers of that Godhead
which He still possessed unimpaired, though concealed. Though He was "in the
form of God" possessing, exhibiting, exercising the prerogatives of God—He
took upon Him "the form of a servant," exercising Himself unto all the
subjection of a servant—the servant's form alone appearing, the form of God
retired from view. Hence, while still the true God, His were the
infirmities and necessities of a man, and His Father's Godhead was His
refuge and His strength, His very present help in every time of trouble.
Hence Jesus prayed. He required to pray: for in His humiliation, He emptied
Himself, and it was to His Father He applied, that according to His day His
strength might be. His miracles were thus wrought by the Father's power: "My
Father does the works." And He received that power by prayer. As in the
eminent miracle of raising Lazarus we find Jesus "lifting up His eyes and
saying, Father, I thank You that You have heard Me. And I know that You
always hear Me; but because of the people which stand by I said it, that
they may believe that You have sent me. And when He had thus spoken He cried
with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth" (John 11:41-43).
By the Father's power was this stupendous work
achieved—and that given in answer to prayer. For in the depths of His soul
Jesus had prayed, and received secretly the consciousness of an answer: nor
would He have given audible expression to His communion in prayer with the
Father except for the people who stood by. But for their sakes He said it,
that they might believe that the Father had sent Him, that the Father did
the works.
Thus the very nature of Christ's humiliation explains the
necessity and nature of His subjection to the ordinance of prayer: while it
made prayer as truly indispensable to Him as to any of his believing people.
For in His resignation of all right to wield at pleasure the powers of His
own Godhead, He "became poor" as His own poor and needy children, and left
for Himself only what they may ever draw upon—the fullness of the
Father's Godhead and His promises. How truly He became in all things like
His brethren! In his exaltation in our nature He reassumed his Divine rights
and glories, reaccepting full access to the spontaneous employment, for the
Father's glory and His own, of all that was His as the co-equal Son of God.
"Father, glorify Me with the glory which I had with You before the world
was." And as He humbled Himself that He might be made like His brethren, so
in being exalted in our nature, it is that the brethren may be made like
Him, as He testifies in His intercession for them. "And the glory which you
gave Me I have given them."
Proceed we now to consider the prayer in Gethsemane. And
here there are three things calling for attention. First, the
subject; second, the nature; third, the success—of this
prayer.
1. The subject or the matter of this prayer. "O My
Father, if this cup may not pass from Me except I drink it, Your will be
done."
Now we are apt to regard this as an expression of
resignation and submission, and nothing more, as a mere negative willingness
to suffer the will of God. And the expression which Jesus employs often
means this merely. Thus the friends of the Apostle Paul, when told by the
Prophet Agabus the things that should befall him in Jerusalem, entreated him
most vehemently that he would change his purpose, and when Paul would not be
persuaded, they ceased, saying, "The will of the Lord be done." In this they
merely gave a pious yet bare acquiescence when they found that matters could
not be otherwise; and henceforth they were willing, but not at all desirous,
that Paul should go up to Jerusalem. But there is much more than this in the
prayer of Jesus: "O My Father, Your will be done." As when He commanded his
disciples to pray, saying, "Our Father in heaven, Your will be done on
earth, even as it is done in heaven"—meaning thereby that we ought to pray
to be willing to know, obey, and submit to His will in all things as
the angels do in heaven—so, in His own person, He exhibits an example of a
positive and strong desire that the will of God should be done. He prays
desirously that the will of God may positively be done—prays this "more
earnestly" than when He went the first time and said, "Father, if it be
possible let this cup pass from Me"—prays this "with strong crying and
tears"—prays this in a vehement agony of wrestling, more vehement than
Jacob's when he would not let the angel of the covenant go except he blessed
him—prays this in an agony of blood. We do not enter at all into the mind of
Christ if we limit His language to a mere expression of His willingness to
drink that cup which could not pass from Him. We must understand the Savior
as intensely desiring that the will of God should be done.
What was that will of God? Clearly the two sides of the
statement are directly contrasted. "O My Father, since this cup may not pass
from Me, Your will be done." Since it is Your will that it should not
pass from Me, I desire to drink it. I desire to drink this cup, and thereby
fulfill Your will—fulfill Your will in all its extent, in measure and in
manner to secure Your full approbation, and so as to secure all Your most
holy and most gracious eternal purpose.
O My Father, your will be done! Sacrifice and
offering You would not, but a body have You prepared Me: In burnt-offering
and sacrifice for sin You have had no pleasure. Then said I, Lo I come (in
the volume of the book it is written of Me)—Lo I come to do Your will,
O God. By the which will those whom You have given Me shall be
sanctified through the offering of My body once for all. For their sakes
therefore I sanctify Myself—I consecrate Myself a sacrifice for sin—that
they also may be sanctified, separated from the world, consecrated to You,
holy to the Lord (Heb. 10:5-10, John 17:19). The will of the Father
evidently was that Jesus should be an offering for sin—the surety in the
room of the guilty—that He should be made sin. "Sacrifice and offering You
did not will, but in the body prepared for Me I come to do Your will." And
farther, the will of the Father was that hereby the Church should be
sanctified or consecrated, or, in short, saved with an eternal salvation and
with exceeding joy. "By the which will we are sanctified." Hence two things
are implied in Jesus' prayer:
1. He prays for support and grace sufficient to enable
Him to fulfill the whole will and appointment of God in His coming death.
That death was one in which His covenanted engagement was not merely that He
should passively endure what should be laid upon Him, but that He should
actively and positively and obediently offer Himself to God—and pour out His
soul unto death—and make His soul an offering for sin. With this before Him,
He prays for such measures of divine grace—such supply of the Spirit of
God—such communications and degrees of faith and love and zeal—such ardor of
love to God and to the Church, as shall sustain Him not only in
uncomplaining submission, but in fervent and unimpaired obedience unto the
end. For so long as in the spirit of active devotion of Himself to His
sufferings, the spirit of ardent obedience, He embraced every pang of
sorrow, every infliction which it was His to bear in "dying the just for the
unjust," so long would He be a conqueror. In being positively obedient unto
death He would be the conqueror of death; and exactly by dying in such a
manner He would be saved from death. Hence in alluding to His prayer, Holy
Scripture says "that He offered up prayers and supplications with strong
crying and tears unto Him who was able to save Him from death" (Heb. 5:7).
This does not mean that Jesus prayed that He might be saved from
dying, but saved in dying; saved from being swallowed up of death, by
being enabled through death to swallow up death in victory. He prayed to Him
who, by the boundless riches of His sustaining grace, was able to enable Him
to meet death in the spirit of obedience and of zeal for His Father's
commandment, namely, that He should lay down His life for the sheep. He
prayed to Him who was able to strengthen Him unto all endless love, that He
might give Himself, by positive "obedience unto death," a sacrifice to God,
a substitute for sinners. For so long as thus, by holy and obedient
resolution, He presented Himself unto death, He met and faced down
death—never conquered
by death so long as His own obedience was sustained. And
should that obedience be sustained "unto death," then would He be "saved
from death" exactly by dying, and through death He would destroy him who had
the power of death.
Accordingly it was renewed communications of strength
from God that He prayed for in His weakness. With the burden of his Church's
guilt laid upon Him, and the avenging penalty due to it about to be exacted
from Him in the wrath of God poured into His soul—or His own soul, under
that wrath, poured out a victim to divine justice, a sacrifice of a sweet
smelling savor to God—He feels that His weak human nature is utterly
inadequate of itself to bear this burden, or come forth from beneath this
ordeal with His obedience still unviolated. He calls therefore on the Lord.
In an agony He wrestles earnestly. He offers up supplication and prayers
with strong crying and tears. He is filled with holy fear. "According to
Your fear, O God, so is Your wrath" (Ps. 90:11). According, therefore, to
His fear, Messiah knows the power of the Father's wrath as no other
knows it. He trembles, dismayed. He casts Himself prostrate on the ground.
And as in the fortieth Psalm, which is His prayer in full, He who said, "I
come to do Your will," and who, on the imputation to Him of His people's
sins, exclaimed, "My iniquities have taken hold upon Me so that I am not
able to look up," exclaimed also in contemplating the wrath which this
imputation involved: "Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me: O Lord, make haste
to help Me: I am poor and needy, yet the Lord thinks upon Me, you are My
help and My deliverer, make no tarrying, O My God" (Ps. 40:13, 17).
With what earnestness and strong crying Jesus lifted up
His voice and sought the Father's strength may be learned from those Psalms
that are manifestly prophetic of the Messiah, containing indeed the
Messiah's prayers. That the twenty-second and sixty-ninth Psalms are such
every reader of the Bible knows; and from these, therefore, we bring forward
the following supplications as part of those which Jesus offered up: "Save
Me, O God, for the waters have come in unto My soul. I sink in deep mire
where there is no standing: I have come into deep waters where the floods
overflow Me. I am weary of My crying: My throat is dried: My eyes fail while
I wait for My God. But My prayer is to you, O God, in an acceptable time. O
God, in the multitude of Your mercy, hear Me, in the truth of Your
salvation. Deliver Me out of the mire, and let Me not sink; let Me be
delivered from those who hate Me, and out of the deep waters. Let not the
water flood overflow Me, neither let the deep swallow Me up, and let not the
pit shut her mouth upon Me. Hear Me, O Lord, for Your lovingkindness is
good; turn to Me according to the multitude of Your tender mercies. And hide
not Your face from Your servant; for I am in trouble: hear Me speedily. Draw
near to My soul and redeem it; deliver Me because of My enemies. But I am
poor and sorrowful; let Your salvation, O God, set Me up on high" (Ps. 69).
"Be not far from Me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help. For I
am poured out like water, and all My bones are out of joint; My heart is
like wax; it is melted in the midst of My bowels. My strength is dried up
like a potsherd; and My tongue cleaves to My jaws: and you have brought Me
into the dust of death. Be not far from Me, O Lord: O My strength, make
haste to help Me. Deliver My soul from the sword; My darling from the power
of the dog" (Ps. 22). "Withhold not Your tender mercies from Me, O Lord; let
Your lovingkindness and Your truth continually preserve Me. For innumerable
evils have compassed Me about" (Ps. 40:11, 12).
In these supplications the one unvarying object of desire
is divine help, preservation, grace that He may victoriously do and suffer
the whole will of God. His crushing anxiety is that He may not fail
nor waver from His obedience till He shall have done all that will of
God on account of which a body was prepared for Him. For the upholding power
of His covenant God He prays, that His strength may not give way in bearing
the condemnation of the Church and His Father's wrath due to their
iniquities. His work is very dear to Him, and He agonizes in prayer that He
may be sustained unto the discharge of all that it involves. That work was
assigned Him by the Father's will, and with intense desire He cries: "Your
will be done!"
2. But another thing involved in this prayer was a desire
for the fruits of His work—the glory of the Father in the salvation of His
people. For says the Scripture, speaking of this will of God, "By the which
will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Christ once for
all." Hence the prayer of Jesus implied in it a supplication for His Church
that they may be sanctified—that is, separated, consecrated to God, and
finally and fully saved. He prayed that He might so execute all that will of
God, as that the covenanted result might follow in many sons and daughters
being brought to glory. Hence in those Psalms which we have already quoted,
in the midst of the petitions which supplicate grace for Jesus personally
under his baptism of suffering and expiation, there occur, not seldom,
petitions that refer to His people and their salvation—His anxiety to be
preserved from failing in His work being increased by the thought that
otherwise all hope of salvation would be cut off from the Church.
Thus, in the sixty-ninth Psalm, when He represents
Himself as the surety of the guilty, amenable in obligations not His own—for
sins which He nevertheless so embraces in the imputation of them to Himself
and in the penalty due to them as to call them indeed His own, He says: "I
restored that which I took not away: O God, You know My foolishness, and My
sins are not hid from You: Let not those who wait on You, O Lord God of
hosts, be ashamed for My sake; let not those who seek You be confounded for
My sake, O God of Israel." Again when anticipating the all-sufficient grace
which He implored, and the glorious issue in the full expiation of His
people's sins and the full satisfaction of His Father's justice, He says in
the same Psalm (verse 32): "The humble shall see this and be glad, and you
who seek God, your hearts shall live." It is the same in His prayer in the
fortieth Psalm: "Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver Me: O Lord, make haste to
help Me: Let those who seek You rejoice and be glad in You; let such as love
Your salvation say continually, The Lord be magnified." Let Me so be
sustained unto all gracious and holy obedience to Your will, that My
offering of Myself shall be indeed an acceptable sacrifice to God—a ransom
infinitely precious—a ground of salvation and of boundless hope to all who
seek Jehovah and His face—a fountain of redeeming grace so wonderful that
all who love Your salvation shall shout for joy and magnify the Lord with Me
forever.
Such, then, in substance were the two topics of this most
marvelous prayer. First, the Lord Jesus implores all needful grace in
the discharge of His duty of being "obedient unto death"—in His priestly
office presenting Himself through the Eternal Spirit a sacrifice without
spot unto God. Secondly, He implores therein the everlasting
salvation of His people and the glory of His Father thereby.
That "will of God" was the offering of the body of Christ
once for all: to accomplish this He prayed for all necessary strength. By
that "will of God," also, His people are sanctified and perfected: to obtain
this also was the object of His prayer. He had both these things in view
when He said, "O my Father, Your will be done."
2. Consider the nature of this prayer. And in one word
this was a prayer of importunate faith. It was the prayer of faith and
importunity.
(1) It was the prayer of faith.
Jesus, the Eternal Son of God, was a man of faith. By His
incarnation He assumed a nature and a position in which nothing but faith
could have sustained Him. And the very fact that He found it possible and
necessary for Him to exercise faith, notwithstanding His glorious possession
of Godhead dwelling in His person, resulted from that humiliation to which
He subjected Himself and of which we have already spoken. Though He was in
the form of God, He emptied Himself, and was found in fashion as a man—in
all things like His brethren, sin only excepted. Hence the faith of the man
Christ Jesus is stated by the writer to the Hebrews as a proof of the full
extent to which Jesus, the living head of the Church, has identified Himself
with his members: "For both He who sanctifies and those who are sanctified
are all of one for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brethren,
saying, I will declare My name to My brethren, in the midst of the Church
will I sing praise to You: And again; I will put My trust in Him" (Heb.
2:11-13).
So eminent and obvious was the faith which Jesus reposed
in God that it was made especial matter of reproach to Him. "All those who
see Me laugh Me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head,
saying, He trusted on the Lord that He would deliver Him; let Him deliver
Him seeing He delighted in Him." Such was the prophetic testimony of the
Spirit. And it was literally fulfilled; for "the chief priests mocking Him,
with the scribes and elders said, He trusted in God; let Him deliver Him now
if He will have Him" (Ps. 22:7; Matt.27:43). His faith was conspicuous even
to his foes.
Now in order to the prayer of faith, there must be both
the Word and Spirit of the Lord. It must be prayer in the Spirit, and prayer
according to the Word. It must be so with every member of the Church. And
Jesus, the Church's head, is under the same law. He also must pray in the
Spirit, if He would be heard. He also must have God's words abiding in Him,
if He would ask what He will and it shall be given to Him. But the covenant
under which He lives and dies, and rises again, provides for this
abundantly. For, thus says Jehovah to His Christ, thus has the Lord said to
our Lord, "As for me, this is My covenant with them, says the Lord: My
Spirit that is upon You, and My words that I have put in Your mouth, shall
never depart out of Your mouth, nor out of the mouth of Your seed, nor out
of the mouth of your seed's seed, says the Lord, from henceforth and
forever" (Isa. 59:21).
(1) Had Jesus the warrant of the Word for His prayer? Was
it the promise of Jehovah that He pleaded? Was it as one who could say,
"Remember to Your servant the word on which You have caused me to hope"?
Most certainly. When seeking the Father's upholding power He had only to
make mention of the Father's covenant promise to Him: "Behold My servant
whom I uphold, My elect in whom My soul delights; I have put My Spirit upon
Him, He shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles. He shall not fail nor be
discouraged till He has set judgment in the earth, and the isles shall wait
for His law" (Isa. 42:1-4). Or again, thus had Jehovah said in the prophets
concerning Him "whom man despises," "In an acceptable time have I heard You,
and in a day of salvation have I helped You; and I will preserve You and
give You for a covenant of the people" (Isa. 49:8). Hence did He say in
faith: "The Lord God will help Me; therefore shall I not be confounded;
therefore have I set My face like a flint, for I know that I shall not be
ashamed. He is near who justifies Me: who will contend with Me? Let us stand
together. Who is my adversary? Let him come near Me. Behold, the Lord God
will help Me: who is he who shall condemn Me?" (Isa. 50:7-9). Yes, Messiah
had abundant promises, exceeding great and precious promises, all Yea and
Amen in himself. And His prayer was simply an inquiring for the thing which
the Lord had spoken.
(2) But was Christ's prayer also in the Spirit as well as
according to the Word? Now we know that the Spirit of the Lord was given Him
without measure; and if so, He must have prayed in the Spirit. Believers
receive from Christ the promise of the Spirit. According to the measure of
the gift of Christ to each member, the Spirit comes forth to the Church from
her living head to whom the Spirit was given without measure. And if in the
believer the Holy Spirit is a Spirit of grace and supplications, He must
have primarily wrought in this same character, in all His fullness and in
His highest efficacy, in Jesus. There is not indeed any express passage in
Scripture in which Jesus is said to have prayed in the Holy Spirit, yet the
inference is valid and unavoidable. We find it stated by the Apostle that
the Spirit helps our infirmities and makes intercession for us according to
the will of God—that He makes intercession with groanings which cannot be
uttered. Bearing this in mind, let us stand for a moment beside Jesus at the
grave of Lazarus. We hear Him there referring to a prayer which He had
presented, and giving thanks that the Father had answered it. "Father, I
thank You that You have heard Me. And I know that you always hear Me." But
on referring to the preceding context we find in it no record of any prayer
that Jesus had offered up. We find it stated, however, a few verses before,
that when Jesus saw Mary weeping and the Jews also weeping which came with
her, "He groaned in the Spirit." When we take this in connection with the
fact that Jesus afterwards makes mention of a prayer which He had presented,
and in connection with the description which Paul gives of the Spirit's work
in quickening the children of God in prayer, namely that "He makes
intercession in them with groanings which cannot be uttered," are we not
entitled to infer that when Jesus "groaned in the Spirit" He was offering up
in the Spirit prayers and supplications, if not with strong crying, at least
with tears (for at this time also "Jesus wept") unto Him who was able to
hear Him, and was heard, even as He immediately rendered thanks and put
forth the power of giving life to the dead, even as the Father had given
Him. And indeed the Spirit of grace and supplications in the Church is just
the Spirit of the Son in their hearts crying, Abba, Father, as doubtless
that same Spirit it was in whom Jesus cried, "Abba Father, O My Father, Your
will be done."
How closely are the brethren conformed to the
firstborn—He in all things made like them—that they might be conformed to
the image of the Son! Mark it carefully. He is Himself a man of prayer, as
they must be. His prayer is the prayer of faith, as their's must be. His
prayer of faith is in the power of the Spirit, and on the warrant or promise
of the Word; even as they must pray in the Holy Spirit, and with the Lord's
words abiding in them.
2. But, secondly, as this was believing prayer, so it was
importunate. It was such as would take no denial. It was exceedingly
earnest: it was with strong and loud cries to God; it was with tears; it was
with blood. "His sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to
the ground."
There was never such prayer offered to God. Jacob's
prayer was earnest and persevering, importunate and successful, when He
wrestled with the angel of the covenant and would not let him go without the
blessing. But when Jesus wrestled, strove, agonized, it was such prayer as
heaven and earth had never seen. He was charged with the vindication of His
Father's honor—with the maintenance of His Father's law—with the salvation
of countless thousands through eternity. He had to discharge Himself of all
these responsibilities in one only way, by suffering in all the powers and
faculties of His created nature, in soul and body, the infliction of those
stripes which should satisfy divine justice and be in the scales of equity a
righteous equivalent for the second and eternal death of all for whom He
gave Himself. He had an amazing and appalling view of the justice and terror
of such a doom, and His soul became exceeding sorrowful even unto death. No
wonder that meeting such a doom with a body such as ours, sensitive in every
nerve to every pang of physical endurance—and a soul unutterably more
sensitive, in its unspotted purity, to the agony of those spiritual pangs
which the frown and displeasure of the Almighty and the All-holy One caused
Him; He should have labored in the anguish of His spirit
to lay hold, in the prayer of faith, importunate and
invincible, on the divine upholding power through which alone He could
achieve the eternal wonder of an obedient endurance of the coming Cross.
Loving His people also with an everlasting love, and alive to the dreadful
doom from which He came to save them; understanding in the depths of His
created spirit, as He had never till now understood, the bitter endless woe
and shame from which He is about to rescue them; and seeing what that
dreadful destiny is which must pass upon them and abide on them forever, if
He cannot obediently, willingly, wholly and successfully endure it all in
their stead; with a love towards them rising in its action and intensity the
more that He apprehends and appreciates all the endless terror from which it
is His office and His work now to save them; and the more He apprehends and
appreciates that, feeling only all the more unfit for going through with the
work assigned Him, yet all the more resolved to ransom and redeem His
people—no wonder if trembling at the prospect of enduring that wrath of God,
and trembling still more at the thought of failing, and so consigning His
beloved elect to endure it, He throws Himself in agony upon Jehovah as His
refuge and his strength—fulfills His Father's prophecy concerning Him, "He
shall cry to Me, You are My Father, My God, and the Rock of My
Salvation"—appeals with loud cries to His Father's promise, "My hand shall
be established with Him, My arm shall strengthen Him; My faithfulness and My
mercy shall be with Him, and in My name shall His horn be exalted"—and in
the depths of holy fear offers up supplications with strong crying and tears
to Him who is able to save Him from death.
III. What was the success of this prayer? It was an
abundant answer. "He was heard in that He feared." He received all needful
grace, all sustaining strength, qualifying and enabling Him to endure the
cross and despise the shame; and gain an eternal title to the joy that was
set before Him.
Two leading desires were embraced in this prayer.
First, that He might obtain grace and zeal and love even in such measure
as would keep Him positively obedient unto death, that hereby He might
destroy death and attain the perfection of His own office and power as a
Prince of Life. And, second, as the sure fruit of this, the seeing of
the travail of His soul in the salvation of all whom the Father had given to
Him. Now these are the very things which Scripture testifies He received in
answer to prayer.
1. "He was heard in that He feared, and though He were a
Son—the only begotten Son of God—He learned obedience by the things which He
suffered." In answer to His prayer to be saved in dying, God taught Him—God
strengthened Him to learn—that obedience unto death, whereby death should be
destroyed. The Father bestowed upon Him all grace to give Himself willingly
to death; to obey in positive priestly activity and holy zeal the
commandment to lay down His life for the sheep. God taught Him the great
lesson of destroying death and being saved from death, by not passively
suffering death—but by actively and obediently meeting death and offering
Himself in death a sacrifice to God without spot. God taught this lesson in
time of need. God gave this counsel; and His reins instructed Him in the
night season; so as that being thus obedient unto death, "His soul should
not be left in the state of the dead, nor the Holy One suffered to see
corruption" (Ps. 16:8, 9). And Jesus learned the lesson; learned obedience
in the things which He suffered; and in dying obediently He was saved from
death, and exclaimed, "It is finished" or "It is perfected." He Himself in
all His office and work was hereby made perfect (see Heb. 5:7-9).
2. But when Jesus prayed that He might be saved from
death, His petition referred not personally to Himself alone, but to Himself
as the head and high priest of the Church, and therefore to the salvation of
all His people. He prayed that He might emerge from the jaws of death, not
only safe in Himself from all the claims of the king of terrors, but
bringing up with Him also the eternal salvation of all for whom He died.
Hence the Scripture assures us that in this point also He was heard. Not
only was He heard on His own behalf, and saved from death, saved from
succumbing under the last enemy, Jehovah teaching Him the strange lessons of
vanquishing death by being obedient unto death. Not only was He heard on
this point, and, taught and strengthened for obedience in the things which
He suffered, but He received His people's salvation also in and with His
own, so that they dying in His death and rising to newness of life in His
resurrection, "he became the author of eternal salvation to all those who
obey Him" (Heb. 5:9). Hence those Psalms from which we have already quoted,
as giving us in full the prayers which Jesus offered up in His sorrow, all
point to the salvation of the Church—the promised seed—the prospering
pleasure of the Lord—the gathering together of all the elect in Jesus. Thus
in the fortieth Psalm where the answer to the prayer is celebrated in the
outset; "I waited patiently—(He waited who in the seventh verse says,
Lo, I come, in the volume of the book it is written of Me)—I waited
patiently for the Lord, and He inclined to Me, and heard My cry. He brought
Me up also out of an horrible pit and out of the miry clay (the same as in
the sixty-ninth Psalm, "I sink in deep mire where there is no standing")—and
He set My feet upon a rock and established My goings: And He has put a new
song in My mouth—(for "He who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are
all of one, for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying,
In the midst of the Church will I sing praise to You")—He has put a new song
to My mouth, even praise to our God—many shall see it and fear, and trust
on the Lord." Many shall believe to the saving of the soul: many shall
put their trust in the perfected author of salvation: many, even the great
congregation who shall hear Mmy song! Thus also the sixty-ninth Psalm closes
with this joyful answer, "God will save Zion, and will build the cities of
Judah. The seed also of His servants shall inherit it, and those who love
His name shall dwell therein." And precisely the same in substance is the
close of the twenty-second Psalm, "A seed shall serve Him; it shall be
accounted to the Lord for a generation. He shall come and shall declare His
righteousness unto a people who shall be born, that He has done this"—that
"It is finished."
Thus, Him the Father hears always. "For I know that the
Lord saves His anointed; He will hear Him from His holy heaven with the
saving strength of His right hand. The king shall joy in Your strength, O
Lord; and in Your salvation, how vehemently shall he rejoice! You have given
him his heart's desire, and have not withheld the request of his lips."
Such, then, were the subject, the nature, and the success
of our Lord's prayer in the garden.
Deferring the full application, let me close with three
words of exhortation.
1. Be ashamed and confounded, you who pray not for your
own salvation! Shall the king of righteousness and peace, the Son of God,
thus wrestle in supplication, with cries and tears and agony and blood, for
the salvation of sinners, while you yourselves will not wrestle for that
salvation which His prayers and his blood have purchased? Will you despise
and neglect so great salvation, on which the Lord of glory set such a value
that to gain it for such as you, He was content to be prostrate in anguish
and extremity and blood in that garden—and terror unutterable and amazement
seized Him at the bare thought of not succeeding in securing what you
despise? If you live in such prayerlessness, how inevitable and righteous
will be the everlasting loss of your soul!
2. Be encouraged, you who are seeking salvation, to come
for it most confidently to Jesus. What He agonized and prayed with tears and
blood to procure, He will now most joyfully and readily communicate. Only be
alone with Christ, as He calls you to Himself: and as assuredly as He was
Himself heard and "became the author of eternal salvation," He will hear you
and receive you, and redeem you from all your destructions, and you shall
henceforth obey and love Him. Well will you understand the meaning of the
cry: "Do you see Him whom my soul loves?"
3. Let believers offer up supplications and prayers, in
the strength of those of Christ. Enter by faith into the rich inheritance of
the prayers of your living Head, and into all the riches of their answers.
Be in prayer beside the Savior, mingling your strong crying and tears with
His; yes, with what is now His glorious intercession; and when Jehovah looks
on His anointed, He will lift on you the light of His countenance and
fulfill all your petitions.
GETHSEMANE, FAILING FELLOW-WATCHERS
"What! could you not watch with Me one hour?"
(Matt. 26:40)
If we turn now to consider the aspect in which the
disciples present themselves in this crisis, the first thought that strikes
us is the perfect contrast between their infirmity and failure on the one
hand, and the faithfulness and victory of their Lord on the other. It would
seem as if the three chiefest of the apostles had been selected on this
occasion expressly in order to prove how inadequate for such an hour—"the
hour and the power of darkness"—was the utmost human strength. Jesus was
engaged in a work in which none could aid Him. The three most eminent
believers then on earth, far from being able to take part with Him in his
sore travail in redeeming His brethren, failed even in the commanded
vigilance that was necessary if they were even to be mere spectators of the
scene. "When He came to the disciples, He found them sleeping."
Now we may consider—the Sin; the Rebuke; the Exhortation;
the Apology, or rather the Explanation; the Relapses, and the Issue.
|