Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Mark: The prayer that Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane has been widely discussed and read. There are many important aspects to this time that Christ spent in the garden. Today, Dr. Philip Ryken will explain this passage for us from the Gospel of Luke.

Welcome to Every Last Word, a radio and internet program with Dr. Philip Ryken teaching the whole Bible to change your whole life. Today's message shows just how much suffering Jesus went through getting ready for his death. Phil, before the crucifixion, Jesus went through a very difficult time. What was he dealing with that night in the Garden of Gethsemane?

Phil: Well, there was a lot of suffering that night, wasn't there Mark? The betrayal that was about to come that Jesus knew about, the death itself, which Jesus knew would involve suffering. But I think as much as anything, it was his knowledge that he would, in his sufferings and death, for a time be abandoned by the Father. He has a premonition of that already in the Garden of Gethsemane, and so his soul is in great distress.

Mark: As Jesus was suffering that night, he called upon his disciples to pray, but they failed that calling again and again. Phil, what should we do when we fail Jesus in the same way?

Phil: I suppose, Mark, that's a question that every believer asks at some point in the Christian life, because we do fail to answer Christ's call to prayer. Sometimes when we realize that we really haven't been living a life of communion with God through prayer, we're almost embarrassed to come back to God and pray again.

But what we ought to do is hear again the call and we should realize how graciously God receives us even when the first thing we need to say is that we've really let him down in the life of prayer. One of the amazing things about that night in the garden is that at the very moment his disciples were letting him down, Jesus was preparing to offer himself for their salvation. That's how much Jesus loved them and how much he loves us, even in all of our failures. I hope that will be an encouragement to our listeners today, Mark.

Mark: Okay, thank you, Phil. Let's turn in our Bibles now to Luke chapter 22, verses 39 through 46, and listen to Dr. Ryken.

Phil: I want to invite you please to turn in your Bibles to Luke chapter 22. I also want to ask you to think of the darkest place where you have ever been. Think of the place of anguish and of pain, of discouragement and even of despair. Think of the place where you were alone in your suffering and it seemed like all of your worst fears were about to come true.

Think of the place where the one thing that you wanted was the very thing that God had decided not to give you. Think of the place where you wished to God that you could be anywhere else in the universe except the place where you actually were. Think of the place where things got so bad that you thought that you would die and maybe you almost did.

The Lord Jesus Christ went to that dark place and to a place even darker than that in the garden they call Gethsemane. As we follow him, as it were, through the olive trees to that secret spot where he met with the Father alone and in anguish, we know that we are standing on holy ground. For to hear the tortured cries that Jesus uttered that night is to encounter the deepest mysteries of the Son of God and to catch at least a glimpse of how much he suffered for our salvation.

In his marvelous essay, "The Emotional Life of Our Lord," the great Princeton theologian, B.B. Warfield, wrote this: that in these supreme moments our Lord sounded the ultimate depths of human anguish. The scope of these sufferings was very broad, embracing that whole series of painful emotions which runs from a consternation that is appalled dismay through a despondency which is almost despair, to a sense of physical tortures, to a sense of well-nigh complete desolation. In the presence of this mental anguish, the physical tortures of the crucifixion retire into the background. We may well believe that our Lord, although he died on the cross, yet died not of the cross, but of a broken heart, that is to say, of the strain of his mental suffering.

Now the place where Jesus endured these trials was one of his favorite places to go. Gethsemane was, we see from the opening verse of this passage, beginning at chapter 22, verse 39, a place where he customarily went. For after the Last Supper, Jesus came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives and the disciples followed him.

This was the secret garden where Jesus loved to go with his disciples. He seems to have gone there virtually every night in the last week of his passion, slipping out of Jerusalem before nightfall, going to this place up the hillside away from those men who had decided to kill him. What sweet fellowship our Lord must have enjoyed there. We can imagine the joyful singing, the thoughtful discussion, and the fervent prayer that he enjoyed with his disciples, very likely also the easy laughter of close friends.

Yet on this particular night, Jesus endured more excruciating suffering than we can possibly imagine. One commentator rightly says that no man will ever be capable of sounding the depths of what the Savior experienced in Gethsemane when the full reality of his suffering in soul and body penetrated into his immaculate spirit. Nevertheless, even if it is true that we cannot sound down to those very depths, we can at least believe what the Bible says that Jesus endured on the night before he went to the cross.

As we read Luke's account of this dark night of the Savior's soul, we see that Gethsemane was a lonely place for Jesus. This was part of his suffering, the loneliness of it. Oh, he had gone to the garden with his disciples, everyone of course except Judas. But when he came to the place where he wanted to pray, he told them to watch and to pray, but then he withdrew from them about a stone's throw, we read in verse 41, and he knelt down and prayed.

You see, although Jesus was with his disciples that night, there was a place that he needed to go all by himself. So when it came time for him to pray, he went off by himself to be alone with the Father. Of course, when he returned, he saw how very alone he had been, for his disciples failed to keep this vigil.

Judas already had left to betray him. Soon Peter would be denying him, and after that, all of the disciples would run away. Now instead of preparing for that night by watching and praying like Jesus had told them to do, they were sleeping of all things. It was even for the disciples, I think, a pathetic effort and left Jesus alone through all that long dark night.

And there's a lesson in that, I suppose, that when it came time for our Savior to do the work of our salvation, the disciples did not help him one little bit. It's a marvelous thing in a way that it's in the Gospels like this. We can see it was something Jesus did all by himself for our salvation without any aid from any other man.

Jesus alone was called to the cross and alone Jesus wrestled with that calling. For this Gethsemane was a place of lonely struggle. I say struggle because Luke uses the word here, "agony," verse 44. It says that he was in an agony, a word that depicts a bitter striving, a fierce conflict. It is a word of struggle. It means something more than just that Jesus went through some kind of inward pain. It is giving us a hint that there was a fight within his soul.

I think we see the source of this intense conflict in verse 42. No, Jesus was wrestling with those powers of darkness that were driving him to the cross, but he was also wrestling with the will of the Father who was leading him there. So he said, "Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done."

There is expressed in this verse a kind of battle of the wills. You have the will of the Father, which is for the Son to drink the cup, but there is also the will of Jesus, which is asking if there might be some other way, any other way except the way of the cross. Was there any easier way for Jesus to save his people? Was there any alternative to the cross?

We sense, as we even begin to think of these things, that we are being drawn into the very deepest mysteries of the incarnation. Jesus Christ is both God and man, one person with two natures, a divine nature and a human nature. These two natures, although they cannot be divided, can be distinguished as Jesus himself is distinguishing them here in a way.

Among other things, the incarnation of the God-man means that Jesus had both a human will and a divine will. That's been the orthodox teaching of the church from the very beginning. It's part of what we mean when we confess that Jesus Christ is both God and man.

With respect to his divine nature, of course, Jesus had no other will than the will of the Father, for the Father and the Son are one. Yet with respect to his human nature, Jesus himself makes a distinction here and other places in the Gospels between his will and his Father's will, which means that if he did the Father's will, it was because he chose to do it, not because it always came easily or automatically.

Here in Gethsemane, we see the human will of Jesus wrestling with the divine will. I think we can say that humanly speaking, Jesus did not want to suffer the cross. It was evil in itself. It was deadly pain. It would separate him from the Father for the time of the suffering of the wrath of God.

I say humanly speaking because here we see the true humanity of Jesus is clearly as we see it anywhere in the Gospels. As a human being, Jesus had that same instinct to preserve his life that anyone has. I doubt you will ever meet anyone who loved life more than Jesus Christ loved it. You see it all the way through the Gospels: his great love for the thing that he was doing in the world, his great love for life itself and all of the things in life.

How could it be his will to suffer the torture of his body and the curse of his death? It was not his will with respect to his human nature. So in the agony of his soul, he asks the Father if there might be some other way to bring salvation. Do you see what a lonely place this was for Jesus, what a place of struggle it was for Jesus? Do you see what a place of suffering it was? Because in this crucible of spiritual conflict, Jesus suffered more anguish than we will ever know.

Ever the keen medical observer, Dr. Luke reports in verse 44 that his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground. It's a detail you can imagine that Luke was very interested to know. Jesus did not weep often, I think. We don't find him in the Gospels weeping often, but when we do find him weeping, we find that his tears come from the very depths of his soul. There's a kind of perfection of the emotion of grief or of sorrow or of sadness, whatever it is that is prompting those tears.

On this occasion, the great bloody drops of sweat falling from the Savior's brow showed that he was at the utmost extremity of human anguish. He was at the very limit of what anyone can endure. It explains in part, I think, why he fell down to pray rather than standing, as would have been the custom.

Jesus was at the very end of his physical and emotional endurance. Indeed, according to the Gospel of Mark, his soul was very sorrowful, even to death. The horror of the coming cross had brought him to the very point of death, almost killing him in Gethsemane before he ever made it to Calvary. Oh, this lonely place of our Savior's struggle was a hard place of suffering.

What was it that caused such great distress to Jesus? What was it that filled his soul with such a sense of dread? Oh, it was the approach of death, to be sure, but surely it is more than that. After all, other men have also been crucified, including very likely some of the very disciples that we meet in the Gospels. Many brave martyrs have faced the prospect of death with less obvious agony and more apparent bravery than Jesus did. Besides, the Jesus that we meet everywhere else in Luke seems to be fearless in the face of every danger.

What made him go through such a dark night of the soul? Surely it was not simply the fact of death. No, it was because of the unique and excruciating suffering that his death and his death only would bring. For in dying on the cross, he would suffer for sins.

J.C. Ryle asked, "How can we account for the deep agony which our Lord underwent in the garden? What reason can we assign for this intense suffering which he manifestly endured? There is only one satisfactory answer: it was caused by the burden of a world's imputed sin."

Why, we might go on to ask, should sin bring so much suffering? It is because sin deserves judgment. Therefore, when Jesus took our sin upon himself, he became subject to the punishment that sin deserves. Of course, that was the wrath and the curse of God that's revealed everywhere in the scriptures.

His agony, wrote the Puritan Richard Baxter, was not from the fear of death but from the deep sense of God's wrath against sin, which he as our sacrifice was to bear in greater pain than mere dying. You see, this explains, I think, why Jesus used the image of the cup to describe his coming ordeal. You see what he says in verse 42: "Father, remove this cup from me." Now, what is this cup? To what does this cup refer?

If you look at the Old Testament, you'll find that the cup was a common image for a person's portion in life. It was whatever God had decided that you should have. On occasion, that image is used in a very positive way. You might think of the Shepherd's Psalm, Psalm 23: "My cup overflows."

But it is more frequent in the scriptures for the cup to refer to the judgment of God. I think that's the background of what Jesus is talking about here. "Let him rain coals on the wicked," the Psalmist said, "fire and sulfur and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup."

Or consider the words of the prophets when the people of God were suffering judgment for their sins. Isaiah said that they had drunk from the hand of the Lord the cup of his wrath right down to the very dregs. You find the same thing in Ezekiel, you find it in Jeremiah who said, "Take from my hand this cup of the wine of wrath."

See, that's the cup that Jesus was called to drink on the cross. It was the bitter brew of the judgment of God. So it was not just the prospect of death that made our Savior suffer, but knowing what kind of death it would be, a death that would propitiate the very wrath of God. His horror was not then at death as a passage out of the world, wrote John Calvin, but because he had before his eyes the dreadful tribunal of God, the judge himself armed with inconceivable vengeance. It was our sins that pressed him down and tormented him grievously with fear and anguish.

So when we see Jesus kneeling in Gethsemane at prayer, what we are really seeing is how much it would cost him to hang on Calvary, bleeding and dying for the guilt of our sin. When we see the blood on his sweaty brow, it is almost as precious to us as the blood that he shed on the cross for our sins because here in the garden, we see how much he suffered in making that choice to be the Savior who died for our sins.

We should never imagine that somehow all of this was easier for Jesus because he was the Son of God. Oh, how easily we slip into that way of thinking even when we see Jesus in anguish in the garden. We have a sort of reservation about that. "Yes, but he was the Son of God. It was easier for him. He had more resources at his disposal."

No, I tell you, this was as hard a thing as any man has ever done, for it was as a man that Jesus suffered alone in the garden. It was as a man with all of the physical weakness and all of the emotional anguish common to our humanity. He too was tempted, he too was tormented, he too was weak and in need of God's strength. He too went through the agonizing conflict of wrestling with the Father's will.

Jesus suffered all of this in his lonely struggle and more. He suffered temptation without giving in and so the temptation never relented. He was tormented to the very point of death. I dare say few of us can say that we have been to that point. He was so weak that in mercy, the Father sends an angel from heaven to strengthen him. That shows us how weak he was, how much in need of support he was. He was in such agony that his sweat ran red with blood. Oh, who can ever tell what suffering Jesus endured for our salvation? Not just on the cross of Calvary, but even already in the Garden of Gethsemane as he was preparing for that cross.

In one of his sermons on this passage, Charles Spurgeon made a remark, I think it was a wise one. He says, "Since it would not be possible for any believer to know all that our Lord endured in this place of mental suffering and hellish malice, it is 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."

And if I may, by way of invitation, let me share a personal experience that seemed at least to me to give a little glimpse of what Jesus went through for my salvation. It was back in January and I'm sure you'll remember this, 13 miners were trapped underground in West Virginia. You'll remember there had been a collapse in the Sago Mine.

As I watched the drama of those desperate days, I found myself imagining and wondering what it would be like to be buried underground. I dare say many of you had the same thought. What would it be like to be down there? What would it be like to be entombed under rock and dirt?

As I thought about that, I remembered an experience I had in Turkey with a large group of people. We had gone down into some underground caves in central Turkey, caves where Christians had gathered at times in history to escape persecution. We entered one fairly long, narrow tunnel and we were crouching and then crawling to make our way through.

Let me just say I'm not particularly prone to any acute feelings of claustrophobia. I don't feel panicked underground usually in most circumstances. But on this particular occasion, it looked to me like the person in front of me was just about stuck in the tunnel. I wasn't sure whether he would be able to make it through and make his way out to the other side. There were dozens of people pressing right behind me and in that moment I had a sudden sense of what it would be like to be trapped underground. I had a kind of shuddering feeling of dread.

Now as things would happen, he was able to make it through and there was room for me to follow. But that was an experience that gave me a little glimpse of what it would be like. It would be an absolute terror for me to be buried underground.

Then I had a kind of thought that one sometimes has, or at least that I have, I guess I can't speak for anyone else. I said to myself, "But you could do it for your family, couldn't you? I mean, if there was some dark hole that you had to crawl into for some strange reason and it would kill you, but it would save your family. I mean, it would be for Lisa and for the children. You could do that, couldn't you, for them, for someone else, if it was really worth it? You could do it."

Well, I don't know. I don't know. Could you crawl into that dark hole? "Oh God," I said, "I hope I never have to find out."

In that moment, it occurred to me that that's something like what it was like for Jesus in Gethsemane. That's the dark hole that he was thinking about: the dark hole of death and all the suffering that would come with his crucifixion on the cross. He felt the terror of the tomb just as much as you would have felt it. As far as his human will was concerned, he didn't want to die that death at all. The coming crucifixion filled him with so much dread that it almost killed him.

You may think, "Well, of course, he knew it would be worth it. He knew he would save all his people." I mean, that's easy for you to say, isn't it? Much easier to say than it was for Jesus to do. Nevertheless, Jesus was willing to suffer the horror of that dread for your salvation, for my salvation. He chose to drink the bitter cup that our sins deserve.

If we understand Gethsemane at all, we should understand that Jesus loves us even more than we can imagine. It's not just that he was willing to die for us, but this kind of a death, a horrible, God-forsaken, damnable death that no one would ever want to die and that Jesus himself, with respect to his human will, did not want to die.

And yet, there was no other way for sinners to be saved. There was no easier road to redemption. There was no alternative to the cross if the plan of God would be fulfilled. Here is the wonder of our salvation: that Jesus volunteered to do what the Father willed, choosing in love to do the one thing that would bring the most suffering to his body and his soul.

The lesson we must always learn when we come to the Garden of Gethsemane is that Jesus did these things on our behalf so that we ourselves would not have to suffer this agony. Luke is not showing us the agony of Jesus in the garden to arouse our pity primarily or simply so that we will see our Savior's humanity. No, he is showing us these things to help us see once again the love that Jesus has for us in dying for our sins, how much it cost him, the agony of his soul in doing these things. We will never have to suffer what Jesus suffered in Gethsemane or Calvary, for the very reason that everything he suffered there was in our place and on our behalf.

The first response we should make to Jesus when we see the things that he suffered is always to have faith in his saving work. This is the first application we should make of this passage for sure. The first request that we should make of Jesus as we come to him: give us that faith so that we can believe in what you did for us, the things you did for us so that we will never have to do them, suffer the wrath of God.

Well, I think by following his example, we can also see what we should do in any dark and desperate situation. I think the main thing for us to do is to pray. That's what Jesus told his disciples to do here. This would be the greatest trial of their lives, the things that they would go through that very night.

So what was the most important thing that Jesus could say to them? He said to them, "Pray," verse 40, "that you may not enter into temptation." He said the same thing again when he found them all asleep from emotional exhaustion. He rose up from his own prayers, verse 45, he came to the disciples sleeping for sorrow. He said, "Why are you sleeping? Rise and pray that you may not enter into temptation."

You see, even when their prayer lives were a complete failure, Jesus did not stop telling his disciples to pray. He said, "Pray," and then he said it again, "Pray." When he found them not praying, he said it again, "Pray." This is the thing that we should do in every dark and desperate situation.

And it is what all the men and women of faith have done all through history when they didn't know what to do. When the Lord took what he had first given and Job lost everything he had, in that dark and desperate time, he prayed to the Lord and he spoke words of blessing and of praise. When Hannah was desolate without children, she prayed to the Lord in her heart. When Hezekiah was attacked by enemies, he took the ultimatum to the temple and he spread it out before the Lord and he turned to the Lord in prayer. There's no situation in life, no situation we could ever face which is too desperate for prayer.

Think of the words that James spoke in the difficult days of the early church. He said, "Is anyone among you suffering?" We could apply that same principle to ourselves. Is anyone among you suffering? Is anyone alone and afraid? Is anyone filled with sorrow and grief and confusion? Is anyone feeling desperate about their situation in life? What should you do? James says, "Let him pray." Let that person pray. When you don't know what to do, the thing to do is to pray.

It's not only what Jesus told his disciples to do, it's also what he did himself. He didn't give in to his exhaustion the way that the disciples did. But even in the extremity of his greatest distress, he persisted in prayer. Rather than giving up on prayer because he was having so much of a struggle, Jesus prayed more than ever.

Be in agony, verse 44, he prayed more earnestly. Rather than giving up on prayer because he was having so much of a struggle, Jesus prayed more than ever. What a lesson there is in that. The harder things get, the more earnestly we should pray when we're feeling most afraid of the future, most discouraged in work or in ministry, most worried and anxious about finances, most despondent in our grief, most anxious and concerned about our families, most defeated by the devil. Whatever "most" it is and all of the difficult circumstances in life, that is just the time when we should be most in prayer.

And we should pray this way: the way that Jesus prayed. What a marvelous prayer it is, beginning with that first word, "Father." "Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done."

You see here is a prayer of willing submission. Jesus is saying to the Father the same thing that he said we should say to the Father, "Thy will be done." Here it was, the final drama of our Savior's complete and full surrender to the will of the Father. Would he do the Father's will? Would he do it no matter what the cost? Would he do it no matter how much he wanted things to be some other way?

Praise God for our salvation, Jesus fully submitted to the Father's will. When he did, his prayers were answered. The Father's will was done. It was done on the cross. It was done into, through, and out of the empty tomb. It was done for the glory of Jesus Christ. It was done for the everlasting joy of all his children.

Now Jesus himself is empowering us to follow this example in surrendering our own will to the will of our God. Oh, not that it's wrong to tell God what we truly desire, Jesus did that in this prayer, didn't he? But even the things good in themselves that we want must always be surrendered to the superior wisdom of God's fatherly will.

This is the daily petition of the Christian life, "Thy will be done." It's certainly what we should say in every difficult situation in life, "Thy will be done." It's the way to pray about our losses and sorrows. It's the way to pray about our situation in life right now with all of its difficulties and discouragements, whatever they happen to be. It's the way we should pray about things in the future that we wish we could control but can't. It's the way we should pray about everything beyond our power that we would give anything to change. We say, "Father, not my will, but yours be done." Have you learned to pray with that kind of full submission to the will of the Father, the way that Jesus instructs you and encourages you and shows you to pray?

Well, I don't know of any better example of a prayer of full submission to the Father in a difficult circumstance than the kind of prayer that was offered from this pulpit not many years ago. Some of you will know the story well, but others of you won't and it's worth sharing a little bit of that story. It's the example of prayerful submission set by our former senior pastor, the late Dr. James Montgomery Boice.

It was in the spring of the year 2000, and on Good Friday of that year, Dr. Boice had received the unhappy news of a diagnosis of cancer, an inoperable cancer of the liver, as it turned out. It was just two weeks after that that he stood in this pulpit and addressed this congregation for the last time. Oh, how well I remember that morning, for I knew in my heart that that would be the last time he would speak to this church. I said, in fact, to my older children, "I want you to be in church before the service starts, paying attention from the very beginning. You'll hear something that morning you'll never hear again, I'll tell you that."

And they did hear it, and many of you heard it as well. As Dr. Boice talked about his circumstances and he sought to give spiritual encouragement to this congregation, I think in the words that he spoke, in so many ways, he was giving us a wonderful example of what it means to follow the Christ of Gethsemane in praying in submission to the Father's will.

He called us all to prayer that morning. He said this: "You have been praying, certainly, and I've been assured of that by many people. A relevant question, I guess, when you pray is 'Pray for what?' Should you pray for a miracle? Above all, I would say, pray for the glory of God. If you think of God glorifying himself in history and you say, 'Where in all of history has God most glorified himself?' He did it at the cross of Jesus Christ, and it wasn't by delivering Jesus from the cross, although he could have. Jesus said, 'Don't you think I could call down from my Father 12 legions of angels for my defense?' But he didn't do that, and yet that is where God is most glorified."

Then you see the point of what Dr. Boice was saying. He was saying that, yes, you can pray for what you desire. You may desire a miracle in some particular situation, but the main thing is to pray for the glory of God. We see that demonstrated most perfectly for us in the cross of Christ and in the way that God answered the prayer of Jesus: "Not my will, but your will be done."

Then Dr. Boice went on to speak about what it means to submit to the will of God in a prayer. He said, "If I were to reflect on what goes on theologically here, there are two things I would stress. One is the sovereignty of God. God is in charge. When things like this come into our lives, they are not accidental. It's not as if God somehow forgot what was going on and something slipped by. No, God does everything according to his will.

What I've been impressed with mostly is something in addition to that. It's possible, isn't it, to conceive of God as sovereign and yet indifferent? God's in charge, but he doesn't care. But it's not that. God is not only the one who is in charge, God is also good. Everything he does is good. And if God does something in your life, would you change it? If you'd change it, you'd make it worse. It wouldn't be as good. So that's the way we want to accept it and move forward. And who knows what God will do?"

Well, that's a wonderful question to ask yourself, isn't it? If God is doing something in your life, would you change it? What wonderful words of spiritual counsel those were from a man facing death himself and also wanting to encourage us to live for Christ, to live for that same Christ who suffered for us in Gethsemane and who died for us at Calvary.

Are you learning to follow the example of Jesus, praying to the Father in every difficult circumstance, praying in full submission to the will of the Father? And who knows what God will do? Well, I think we do know what God will do. He will answer our prayers, just as he answered the prayers that his own Son brought to him in the garden. And he will answer them in the best way, in the wisest way, in the way that will bring him glory and will bring us salvation.

Our Father in heaven, we pray that you would give us a deeper understanding of the great cost of our salvation. Lord, we begin to see it a little bit. Help us to understand it more deeply, and as we see the suffering of our Savior, to enter in more completely and joyfully into that submission and surrender to your will, which will bring glory to your name as well as, we believe, joy to our souls. And it's in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen.

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