The Garden of Gethsemane

Today on Renewing Your Mind… Dr. R.C. Sproul turns to the Gospel of Mark chapter 14 and addresses this important question. We will learn what it means for Jesus to submit to the Father.

Here's Dr. Sproul. This morning I'm going to depart from my normal method of preaching, which method is called expository preaching, where I look at the text and try to unpack the text for you in a verse-by-verse sequence. That is the style of preaching that I believe that we are called to and that I pray that would happen in every pulpit in America that people might be fed on a regular basis by an exposition of the Word of God. Now, I am going to give an exposition, just not the normal type of exposition and not the what we would call a directly exegetical or biblical exposition, but what I want to do this morning is to give a theological exposition of matters that are found in this text.

The reason why I'm… well, there are two reasons why I'm departing from my normal pattern are these. The first is that I have often exposited on this record of the Gethsemane experience of Jesus, particularly on Maundy Thursday evenings, which many of you have attended, but not all, but next year all of you will, God willing. And secondly, that there are times where theological exposition is so vitally necessary to protect the saints from all sorts of distortions, errors, and even heresies. And so the couple of questions that I want to address today with you are these that come out of this record. First of all, what is going on when Jesus goes into the garden and prays earnestly that that cup would be removed from Him? Questions come out of this text like this. If Jesus is God-incarnate, how do we have God pleading with God to change the decree of God?

That's one question that comes from this. The second question that comes from this text has to do with Jesus' announcement to Simon Peter that He will deny him three times before the rooster crows twice on the following morning. How is Jesus able to predict the future with such accuracy? Not only does He predict in this text the denial of Peter, but He also predicts His own resurrection when He says, After I am raised, I will meet with you all in Galilee. So here Jesus has insight into the future, and we would expect the God-man to know something about the future. But if we just turn back a page or so in our Bible and remember what was said at the end of chapter 13 that our Lord mentioned concerning His return, He said in verse 32, But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

Do you feel the difficulty of that? Where here Jesus says, Even though I may predict My coming, even though I may predict the destruction of Jerusalem, even though I may predict the destruction of the temple, even though I may predict with uncanny accuracy the denial of Peter, the betrayal of Judas, nevertheless there are some things I don't know. Does that trouble you? I mean again this is the God-man who out of His own lips and by His own testimony is placing a limit upon His knowledge. Now we were taught from the time we were little that God is omniscient.

He knows everything past, present, and future, even all possibilities of future events. So how is it that Jesus can place a limit here on His knowledge? This really vexed Thomas Aquinas, the angelic doctor of the Roman Catholic church and one of the most brilliant and astute theologians the world has ever known. Aquinas came to this text where Jesus limits his own knowledge, and he said of it, It can't be. This is the God-man that the divine nature and the human nature are in perfect unity. Jesus had to know the day and the hour.

So how do we deal with this text? Well, here's one of those cases where the great genius of theology took a nap for a few moments, and I hope you'll see that nap, where Aquinas explained it this way. He said, Jesus really did know the day and the hour, but the knowledge was too high, too holy, too wonderful to communicate to mortal souls such as His disciples. So to accommodate Himself to their weakness, He simply told them He didn't know. That saves the idea of the omniscience of Jesus, but it raises in its wake an even more serious problem. If Jesus told His disciples He didn't know something, when in fact He did know something, we call that a falsehood. And even if it was a small one, even if it was a peccadillo, that peccadillo would be just enough to disqualify Jesus from being our Savior.

So Thomas, you're just going to have to do better than that. However, the Roman Catholic church in the wake of Thomas' accommodation theory, which I've just explained to you, developed a concept that's going to sound a little bit abstract to you for a second, but I'll try to explain it, of what they called the communication of attributes, the communicatio idiomata. That's simple enough, right? The communication of attributes. That is, in the incarnation, divine attributes were communicated to the human nature. That's what makes it possible for the body of Jesus to be, as we mentioned last week, in Pittsburgh, Paris, Seattle, and Orlando all at the same time, a feat that most human beings cannot accomplish because our humanity, by virtue of the limitations of creaturehood, is always limited by space and time. I can't be here and in Pittsburgh the same time, can I? I know that was the case a couple of years ago during the Super Bowl that I was not able to be preaching Sunday night and watching the Super Bowl at the same time. I had a spy there, of course, one of our congregations with a cell phone who called me at eight o'clock to tell me how things were going.

But I was limited by my humanity to being here, and so were you. Now, in the fifth century, the year 451, the church called a great ecumenical council at Chelseadon, one of the most important ecumenical councils of all time. That council was called to combat several heresies, and the most significant heresy that was facing the church in the fifth century was what was called the monophysite heresy. There we go again with those terrible theological terms, monophysite. We're going to learn today what that word means.

It's not hard. It has a prefix and a root. The prefix mono, you know what that means.

What does it mean? One, right. Monophysite refers to monofuses, and the word fuses is the word for the English word physics, which is the study of nature. So monofuses simply means one nature. The monophysites claimed that Jesus did not have two natures, a divine nature and a human nature, but He had only one nature. So far so good? Understand everything?

Not so hard? One nature, one nature only. Now that one nature was neither completely divine nor completely human. It was a single nature that involved, however you look at it, a deified human nature or another way to look at it, a humanized divine nature. And so the monophysite said, Jesus is one person, one nature, a divinely human nature or a humanly divine nature, however you want to slice it. Now over against that very serious heresy that was serious for two reasons, it denied on the one hand the full deity of Christ, and on the other hand it denied the real humanity of Jesus. And against that, the church in 451 declared that Christ was vera homo vera deus, truly man and truly God, two natures in one person.

Now here's the difficulty. How do we understand the union of a human nature with a divine nature? Going back to the Scriptures, the Bible says that in the incarnation, God or the second person of the Trinity, the Logos, took upon Himself a human nature. Now when the Word took upon Himself flesh, a human nature, He didn't deify that human nature.

That human nature remained human. Now let's just take that for a second, come back to the Garden of Gethsemane and ask the question, when Jesus is pleading with the Father, is it the divine nature? Is it the eternal Logos pleading with the Father to change His mind when we know that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all full persons of the Trinity, were in total agreement from all eternity on how our redemption was going to be accomplished?

Let me make it simpler. When Jesus in His agony began to sweat, were those beads of perspiration divine sweat? Think of it. Was the perspiration that rolled down His forehead divine, eternal, omnipresent, omniscient perspiration? Or did that perspiration manifest the human nature of Jesus? When Jesus gets hungry, does God get hungry? Of course not. When Jesus has to take a nap, does God go to sleep?

Of course not. Those are manifestations not of the divine nature but of the human nature. Now at Chalcedon, in dealing with the mystery of the incarnation, affirming the two natures of Jesus, the church said that the two natures, divine and human, are perfectly united in such a way that they're not confused or mixed, divided or separated. Let me say it again, that the two natures are without mixture, confusion, division, or separation. So you can't mix them together like the Monophysites did, where you deify the flesh or humanize the spirit.

Do you see that? And yet at the same time, you must not ever separate them. They are always and everywhere remaining united. And then the kicker, those four negatives of Chalcedon, are further qualified by this phrase, each nature retaining its own attributes. That is, in the incarnation, God does not surrender any of His attributes. The divine nature is still eternal. It's still infinite. It is still omniscient. It is still omnipresent. It is still omnipotent.

It is all those things that belong to deity. God didn't stop being God when He took upon Himself a human nature in Jesus. And at the same time, the divine nature retained its own attributes, being finite, contained, not able to be at more than one place at the same time, limited in knowledge, limited in power. All of those things that are attributes of humanity remained attributes of Jesus' humanity.

Am I going too fast? This is crucial that you understand it. Last week or the week before when I mentioned Jesus instituting the Lord's Supper saying, this is my body, and I talked about the great controversy that erupted in the sixteenth century, I mentioned to you that for the human nature of Jesus to be present at more than one place would be a violation of this Council of Chalcedon. The only way that could happen is if a divine attribute were communicated to the human nature of Jesus, which is exactly what Rome taught and sadly Martin Luther taught as well. And I said, no, that Jesus' humanity is limited, can only be in one place at the same time. Somebody well-meaning at the end of the service said, but aren't you separating the two natures? I hope not, because if we separate the two natures, then we fall off the horse in the other direction and deny the perfect unity of the two natures.

Remember? Without mixture, confusion, division, or separation. I said, no, we're distinguishing them. It's one thing to distinguish between two natures.

It's another thing to rend them apart. This very moment Jesus is in heaven touching His human nature, but He is perfectly united to the divine nature even now. And the divine nature can be here and in Pittsburgh and Seattle and Paris at all times, and wherever the divine nature is, the person is, even though the physical body is in heaven. Now Thomas Aquinas suggested that Jesus really did know the day and the hour of His return because of the communication of attributes.

Now here's where it gets a little bit difficult, and you're going to have to put on your thinking caps. It's one thing for the divine nature to communicate information to the human nature, which indeed took place in the incarnation. Things that only God could know were communicated to the human nature so that Jesus could make predictions about the future with perfect accuracy. But again, the communication of knowledge from God to man in a supernatural way happened multitudes of times in the Old Testament in the case of the prophets who were given information that they couldn't possibly have learned through their own human research. And in like manner, the apostles in the New Testament, chiefly the Apostle Paul, who was an agent of revelation, communicates to us things that he couldn't possibly know on his own but which God communicated to him. So that there is the communication of knowledge between the divine nature and the human nature is no difficult thing to imagine. But it's one thing to say that the divine nature communicates information. It's something else to say he communicates a divine attribute.

Do you see the difference? If the reason why Jesus knows tomorrow is because the attribute of omniscience is communicated to His human nature, then we would expect Him touching His human nature to know everything. But He Himself indicated there were limits. Thomas Aquinas notwithstanding. And so if we understand that the divine nature communicates information without communicating omniscience, we don't stumble over these passages. If we understand that we distinguish between the human and the divine nature, it is obviously the human nature that is going through this agony at Gethsemane.

It is the human Jesus praying to the divine for relief from this agony, and yet at the same time indicating His perfect commitment to obeying the Father's will. The two natures without mixture, confusion, separation, or division remain intact. But there are certain things that manifest the divine nature, other things that manifest the human nature. Again as I say, hunger, tiredness, sweat, a body, legs, arms, and eyes, we know that they belong to the human nature of Jesus, not to the divine nature. And I take the time to go over this because it's been said that every ancient heresy that the church combated in the first eight hundred years is repeated in every generation.

I have said if you watch Christian television for one day, you will hear every single heresy from the ancient world restated in our time. And so we have to be careful in every generation lest we fall into these heretical ideas that distort these matters. Now having said that, we don't know all there is to know about the mystery of the incarnation. Notice that what happened at the Council of Chalcedon is that Chalcedon drew the boundaries. They set the limit of our speculation.

They said if you go over this boundary, you're going to end in the monophysite heresy. If you go over this boundary, you're going to end up separating the two natures as Nestorius had done, and so that you end up being careful to stay within the boundaries of legitimate reflection. They say we don't really know how the divine nature and the human nature are co-joined, but we know what it is not. It's not by confusion. It's not by mixture.

It's not by separation, and it's not by division. And we know that however else the divine nature and the human nature are united, that in that perfect union, each nature retains its own attributes. The divine nature does not stop being divine.

The human nature does not stop being human. This is why I say sometimes I get upset when we sing some of these hymns about God dying on the cross. The God-man dies on the cross, but the divine nature doesn't die on the cross. Good heavens, if God actually died on the cross, what would that mean? Not only would Jesus die, but the Holy Spirit would die, the Father would die, the cross would perish, Jerusalem would fall into oblivion, the whole universe would cease its existence because the universe depends for its moment to moment existence by the upholding hand of God.

If God perishes, everything perishes. Now the God-man dies as the new Adam in His human nature on the cross for us. Now even when He was a corpse in the tomb, He remained united to the divine nature. His human spirit was given to the Father in His last breath. The union of the divine and human was not broken. It was not separated.

And again, we don't separate the two natures, but we must distinguish them to avoid every conceivable heresy. Well we had to put on our thinking caps today, didn't we? But what a profound and helpful message from Dr. R.C.

Sproul. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Lord's Day. Thank you for being with us.

I'm Lee Webb. Like many of you, I consider myself a Ligonier student, and what I always appreciated about R.C. was his willingness and ability to take complicated theological concepts like the Trinity and explain them with great clarity. And we're grateful for the privilege we have to continue airing Dr. Sproul's teaching. Our resource offer today will help you continue your own examination of God's Word as we make our way through this preaching series from Mark's Gospel. When you contact us with a donation of any amount, we will provide you with a digital download of R.C.

's commentary on Mark. It's a complete examination of the book with easy-to-read reflection on each verse. This is an online offer only, so go to renewingyourmind.org to make your request. I think you'll also enjoy getting to know RefNet. That's our 24-hour internet radio station. Dr. Sproul's teaching is featured on a regular basis along with our teaching fellows here at Ligonier Ministries and other trusted pastors and teachers. Plus you'll hear music, audio books, and Scripture readings. You'll find a full schedule at RefNet.fm, and you can listen for free at any time. Again, the web address is RefNet.fm, or you can download the free RefNet app. Next Sunday we will return to Mark's Gospel, and Dr. Sproul will focus on the events surrounding Jesus' arrest. I hope you'll make plans to be with us again next Lord's Day, here on Redoing Your Mind. Thank you.