Jesus at Gethsemane

Father, let this cup pass from me. I don't want to touch it. I don't want to look at it. I don't want to drink it. I know my hour has come, but oh Father, there has to be some other way.

So please, let this cup pass. But I don't think he took a breath before he said, Nevertheless, not my will, but Your will be done. It is hard to comprehend what Jesus went through as He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, and then to drink that cup and experience the wrath of God for His people.

But He did, to redeem the people for Himself. It's Sunday, and we're continuing R.C. Sproul's sermon series through Luke's gospel on Renewing Your Mind. Today, Dr. Sproul takes us back to the Garden of Gethsemane, a truly agonizing time leading up to his arrest and eventual crucifixion, and helps us see what was taking place here and why Jesus prayed, Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.

Here's Dr. Sproul. We'll continue now with our study of the gospel according to St. Luke. We're still in chapter 22, and I'll be reading verse 39 through verse 46, which is a record of Jesus' prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. And ask the congregation, please, to stand for the reading of the Word of God. And He came out and went as was His custom to the Mount of Olives, and the disciples followed Him. When He came to the place, He said to them, Pray that you may not enter into temptation. And He withdrew from them about a stone's throw, and knelt down and prayed, saying, Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from Me.

Nevertheless, not My will but Yours be done. And there appeared to Him an angel from heaven strengthening Him. And being in an agony, He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground. And when He rose from prayer, He came to His disciples and found them sleeping for sorrow.

And He said to them, Why are you sleeping? Rise and pray that you may not enter your temptation. Again, we have heard this poignant account that Luke gives us of the struggle of our Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane in the final hours of His life. This account is the inspired record of this event, inspired by God, and it is His Word of truth.

Please receive it as such and be seated. Let us pray. In our Father, we hear this account, and we are as it were observers to the distant past of what was endured by our Savior for our account. And we have precious little understanding of the cost that was paid by Him for our redemption. And so again, we ask that the Spirit of truth would descend upon us, illumine this text for us, pierce our souls with it. For we ask it in Jesus' name.

Amen. This was a night of drama, a night of intense drama that began innocently enough with the instructions of Jesus to His disciples to prepare and make ready for the celebration of Passover. He already was troubled in His soul. He already was overcome by a profound sense of sorrow, and He said, I earnestly desire that one more time, one last time that I might eat the Passover with you.

And so the preparations were made, and they met in the upper room. They celebrated the event, and we call it since then the institution of the Lord's Supper. It was a night punctuated by the ominous announcement that some of the group who was present, someone in that group would betray Him. And when that person was identified as Judas, Jesus dismissed him summarily and said, What you have to do, do quickly. In like manner, He announced to His disciples that even Simon Peter would publicly deny him, to which announcement Simon vehemently protested and denying that it should ever come to pass.

But we know better. It was the night that was the birthday of the Christian church when Jesus instituted a new covenant that was in His blood for the remission of sins. It was a night of instruction where the most lengthy discourse that we find anywhere in sacred Scripture of the person and work of God, the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity was given by Jesus. It was also a night of intense prayer, a night when Jesus offered the longest recorded prayer of intercession that He made for His disciples and for us in what is called His High Priestly Prayer. It was a night followed then by His movement to the Garden of Gethsemane where He interceded, not for us, but for Himself. It was the night in which He was betrayed with a kiss by His friend, was arrested by men with swords and clubs, and taken away for a kangaroo court and a trial before the Jewish authorities and then by the Roman authorities, a night in which He was mocked and scourged and tortured, a night in which He was sentenced to execution in the hours to come. This was a very dramatic night in the life of Jesus. And so Jesus, we are told, went to the Garden of Gethsemane, and He went with His disciples, particularly Peter, James, and John, and then He said to them as we read in the other gospels that He requested that they watch with Him, and then He removed Himself about a stone's throw distance even from this inner circle of disciples and began to pray alone. And in this prayer, we find a very difficult to understand tension between His description of His will and the will of the Father, in which He said to the Father, let this cup pass from Me. Well, if we reflect upon this question theologically, we might find it difficult to understand was Jesus pruning to Himself? This is the God-man.

How do we understand this discourse that was going on? As long as Jesus had been alive, even from His conception, there had been a perfect unity between His will and the will of the Father. At no time in the history of His earthly ministry had the will of the Father and the will of the Son ever been in conflict. In fact, the Scriptures teach us that it was the meat and drink of Jesus to do the will of the Father.

Yet here He makes a distinction between His will and the Father's will. In the seventh century in Armenia, there arose a very serious heresy called the monothelite heresy. It was the heresy that taught that in the mystery of the incarnation, in the union between the two natures, the human and the divine, there was only one will. There were two natures, one person, but only one will, a sort of mixture or blend between the divine and the human will. And this, of course, was in stark contrast to the teaching of the church in the earlier years when they faced the heresies of Arianism and then later on that of monophysitism and Nestorianism, which were culminated in the Council of Chalcedon 451, where the church declared that the mystery of the incarnation involved a true unity of two natures, one that was vera homa, truly human, and another vera deus, truly divine. And the two natures were without mixture and confusion, without division or separation semicolon, each nature retaining its own attributes, which formulation of our understanding of the person and work of Christ has been mutilated and butchered in every generation since. But in any case, it didn't take long until the seventh century that the Armenian Christians were carrying on a monophysite error by saying that there was only one will, neither human nor divine, but a mixture between the two. Well, the Scriptures tell us very plainly that there was not just one will. There were two wills. But I guess the reason why this error, this heresy emerged is because we were so accustomed and the church was so accustomed to seeing that perfect and pure unity between the divine will and the human will. But now there's tension. There is something touching His human nature Jesus didn't want to do. There was conflict between His desire and the mandate of His Father.

And so He asked permission to be excused from His mission. Father, let this cup pass from Me. I don't want to touch it. I don't want to look at it.

I don't want to drink it. I know My hour has come and this was My destiny, My appointment from eternity in the covenant of redemption. But oh Father, there has to be some other way.

So please, let this cup pass. But I don't think He took a breath before He said, nevertheless, not My will. I've just expressed My will.

Not My will, but Your will be done. Now again, I don't think there's a chance that this side of heaven we're going to have an exhaustive or comprehensive understanding of this passionate agony and struggle in which Jesus was engaged. But we have to ask the question, what was in the cup?

Why was He so terrified of the content of that cup? To get us a hint of that, let me read briefly from a passage in the book of Revelation chapter 14, where we read in verse 17, Then another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle. And another angel came out from the altar, the angel who has authority over the fire, and he called with a loud voice to the one who had the sharp sickle. And here's what he said, Put in your sickle, and gather the clusters from the vine of the earth, for its grapes are ripe. And so the angel swung his sickle across the earth and gathered the grape harvest of the earth and threw it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the winepress as high as the horses bridle for sixteen hundred stadia.

You've heard these words in different form. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He's trampled out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He slews the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword. His truth goes marching on.

How these words ever became incorporated into a political and military hymn called the Battle Hymn of the Republic escapes me altogether. But it gives us a clue as to the contents of the cup. What was in the cup was the grapes of wrath, the grapes that had been trampled outside of the city and prepared for consumption. And Jesus looked at that cup and its content, and in His heart and in His will He said, No, no, no, let it pass from me. I don't want anything to do with that horrible cup. Stop for a minute.

Use your imagination. Suppose it was you praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. And what you faced was what Jesus faced, that horrible cup. When I think of my being in that situation, I think that if God asked me to take that cup and put the rim of that cup up against my lip, not to drink it, not to swallow it, just to touch it with my face, would be enough to experience a cosmic blast of wrath that would blast me to smithereens.

I couldn't endure its touch, nor could you. But it's not like God said, Take this cup and put it against your lips. No.

He didn't even say, Jesus, I know how terrible this is, how frightened you must be, but son, this is your mission. This is your duty. And I have to ask you, as my beloved son, just take a little sip. No.

That's not what the Father was asking. Jesus, take this cup. Don't just sip it. Swallow it to its bitter dregs. Ingest it.

Let it fill your stomach and then your soul. When I was a young man and about to be ordained to the gospel ministry over 50 years ago, there was a tradition in the church in which I was ordained that on the occasion of the celebration of ordination that the person who was to be ordained had the privilege of selecting the ordination hymn for that occasion. And the hymn that I chose for my ordination was a somewhat obscure hymn called "'Tis Midnight and on Olive's Brow."

Some of you may have heard it and know it, and most of you probably don't. But it describes the lonely venture into the garden where the suffering Savior prays alone. And it goes on through a few verses that are quite moving. But then it comes to one sentence that to this day jars me and startles me and troubles me theologically because it says in that one verse, the suffering Savior is not forsaken by His God.

And I thought, what? Have you not read the Scriptures? What do you mean that the suffering Savior is not forsaken by His God?

What was in the cup? It was the curse of God. It was the wrath of God. It was His absolute forsakenness that Jesus had to experience for your salvation and for mine. Even so, He cried from the cross, my God, my God. Why have you forsaken Me? He wasn't just quoting poetry from the 22nd Psalm. He was forsaken.

Nothing less would do. Hymns are wonderful things, but sometimes they can be conveyors of awful heresy. And I chose one for the occasion of my ordination. Luke also tells us that when Jesus knelt to the ground, He began to sweat profusely. And that the sweat was so intense that Luke says that it was like weighty drops of blood falling to the ground. Well, one little detail. If you notice that just a bit later in the text, after Peter followed Jesus at a distance and he was gathered with spectators outside the judgment hall where the trial of Jesus was taking place, that those who were gathered on that occasion built a fire.

Why? Because it was cold that night. But as cold as it was out there, Jesus wasn't running. He wasn't actively involved in any exercise that would produce this sweat other than the exercise of being subjected to the will of the Father in light of the cross. He was sweating it out so profusely that it says He sweat drops of blood. Now that may simply be a metaphor, but like Jonathan Edwards, I believed that Jesus really did sweat blood, that His agony was so intense that as He concentrated on this vision, the capillaries in His forehead burst and streams of blood began to flow down His face. And in just a few hours, those that would judge Him and mock Him placed a crown of thorns upon His head that pierced His skull again. But the pain of those thorns was not worthy to be compared with the pain of the sweat that He was enduring as He faced that cup that was set in front of Him. We live in a time where we find it difficult to understand what Jesus was going through for many reasons, but you know what I think is the main reason why we struggle with this text because we don't believe in the wrath of God. It doesn't bother us.

No sweat. Maybe if Jesus would have just taken a drive up I-4, He would have seen the billboard that said, God is not angry. Had I read that billboard and said, wow, why am I sweating?

I might as well go take a nap or go on vacation. Beloved, there is nothing more real, nothing more terrifying than the wrath of God. And don't you think for a moment that even Jesus' work on the cross ended the wrath of God forever? The salvation that He won for us is salvation from what? From the wrath that is to come, and it will come. And if your life is not hid in Jesus Christ, it will come upon you, and you will drink that cup with no assistance from Jesus.

I hear people say to me, I don't need Jesus. I say, are you crazy? You want to drink that cup by yourself? Go ahead. If you want to stand naked someday before the wrath of Almighty God, be my guest. But you're not thinking.

You're denying reality. Three times Jesus went over to see His disciples in the middle of this prayer. Every time He went over there, they were sound asleep. It had been a busy night. They were tired. They were sorrowful.

And sometimes sorrow is a weighty drug, a soporific that makes us want to retire to our beds and go to sleep. Jesus didn't say to the disciples, come on please and watch over Me. He said, please watch with Me. But they couldn't do it.

They fell asleep. And Jesus was puzzled, and He said to them, can't you watch with Me one hour? I'm not asking you to drink that cup. I'm not asking you to carry My cross. I'm not asking you to give your life for the sins of other people. All I wanted you to do was to watch with Me for one hour.

But they couldn't do it. But beloved, it was not like no one was watching over Jesus. We're told in this text that at one point in His prayer, while the disciples were asleep, an angel appeared and ministered to Him. It's only mention of one angel, but do you think there was only one angel there? Jesus even said, you know, at the time of His execution, if I want to, I can give the nod, I can say the word, and there's a heavenly host up there, invisible to your eyes, Herod, invisible to your eyes, Pilate, invisible to your eyes, centurion.

But there's a panoply of a heavenly host staring at this very moment, observing everything that is taking place, listening to every word that I utter or has spoken to me. But they watched, and they waited. And at the commander of the Lord of Hosts' command, they watched Him die and drink the cup to its final drags. And they watched Him be carried to the tomb and to be placed there for a while until the Father shook His head, get that stone out of there. And they came and rolled the stone away and set Him free because it was impossible for death to hold Him or the grapes of wrath to destroy Him. And the disciples and the angels together said, my eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

He's trampled out the vintage where the grapes of wrath were stored. He has taken the sickle to that wrath for you if you believe it. How can we not be filled with gratitude when you hear R.C. Sproul remind us that Jesus drank the cup of God's wrath to its final drags? I'm glad you're with us for this Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind.

I'm Nathan W. Bingham. Today's sermon is one of 113 that R.C. Sproul preached to the congregation of St. Andrew's Chapel as he walked us through Luke's Gospel. And these sermons would form the foundation of his expositional commentary on Luke. And today only, we'll give you the ebook edition of that commentary for your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. You can use this commentary for your personal study but also for devotional reading as you work through Luke's account of the life and ministry of Jesus. So visit renewingyourmind.org today and request your copy. As we follow this account in Luke's Gospel, Jesus would soon find himself on trial. And that's where Dr. Sproul will pick up next Sunday here on Renewing Your Mind.