“There is a rare medical condition where extreme anguish and physical stress can cause your capillary blood vessels to burst and mix with sweat. There are some accounts recorded in history of this happening to men on the battlefield. But whether you think it is literal or metaphorical, the point that Luke is making cannot be denied: Jesus’ inner struggle, His agony was so great that manifests itself in great physical trauma.”
“Jesus is using the image of a cup in His prayer because this was a familiar image used throughout the Old Testament. It essentially referred to someone’s portion, whether positive or negative but it most commonly referred to the judgement of God.”
“The undeniable reality is that this cup that Jesus stares into is our cup. This cup is reserved for sinners like you and I. Every single drop in this cup of horror and desolation is the just and righteous response of a Holy God to my sin, to your sin.”
“And over course of the next 24 hours Jesus would be stripped naked, mocked, spit upon, laughed at – he would be denied by Peter, put on trial and falsely accused, beaten nearly to the point of death and then hung on a criminals cross in the most humiliating, painful death we could imagine. And yet, none of the physical suffering would compare to what experienced when He would drink our cup on the cross.”
”Do you live in the goodness of this reality? Do you live aware, grateful, amazed that the cup you drink is full of God’s love and blessing. Ephesians 1 tells us God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. Do you live each day, not just aware, but grateful and satisfied in the reality that the cup you deserve to drink is a cup of God’s unmitigated wrath, yet the cup you drink is full of His eternal favor. When we talk about preaching the Gospel to yourself or rehearsing the Gospel… this is what we mean.”
QUOTES:
CJ Mahaney- “When we look at Jesus in the pages of the unfolding Gospels - allowing ourselves to walk closely alongside Him through those three exciting years of ministry - words like authoritative, assured and fearless truly describe Him. He’s unfailingly steady and controlled. But there comes a moment, as we follow Him into “a place called Gethsemane,” when all is radically changed. Suddenly we encounter a Savior we’re unfamiliar with. What we observe is foreign and frightening.”
Charles Spurgeon - “Since it would not be possible for any believer, however experienced, to know for himself all that our Lord endured in… mental suffering and hellish malice, it is clearly far beyond the preacher’s capacity to set it forth to you. Jesus Himself must give you access to the wonders of Gethsemane: as for me, I can but invite you to enter the garden.”
Jonathan Edwards - “[Agony] implies no common degree of sorrow, but such extreme distress that His nature had a most violent conflict with it, as a man that wrestles with all his might with a strong man.”
John Calvin - “…because He had before His eyes the dreadful tribunal of God, and the Judge Himself armed with inconceivable vengeance; it was our sins, the burden of which He had assumed, that pressed Him down with their enormous mass… and tormented Him grievously with fear and anguish.”
Donald Macleod - “The wonder of the love of Christ for His people is not that for their sake He faced death without fear, but that for their sake He faced it, terrified. Terrified by what He knew, and terrified by what He did not know, he took damnation lovingly.”
ADDITIONAL SCRIPTURE:
Hebrews 2:17
Isaiah 51:17
Psalm 75:8
Psalm 11:6
Ezekiel 23:33-34
2 Corinthians 5:21
John 3:36
APPLICATION:
As we head into this weekend where we will celebrate Good Friday and Easter Sunday - Consider the Garden. Consider what Christ embraced for you. Consider the unimaginable He drank. Consider the undeserved cup you now drink.
