Truth For Life

Bob Lepine: Is it true that Jesus can identify with our sufferings? Some suggest that because he's God, his human experience must have been somewhat cushioned or easier to endure. But today on Truth For Life, we'll see how the Bible challenges this perception as Alistair Begg considers Jesus, the suffering servant, in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Alistair Begg: Now we're going to read from Mark 14 and verse 32. Before we read this, perhaps we should just remind ourselves: we looked first of all at the importance, the necessity of being in Christ; that once in Christ, it is God's eternal, existential, eschatological purpose to make us like Christ. We've thought about that in terms of his humility, in terms of his compassion, in terms of his work as a preacher of the gospel and personal evangelism, and this morning, finally, in terms of his being a suffering servant.

You remember when Paul expresses his great longing to know Christ, he says, "I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death." This is a perhaps more difficult concept for us to wrestle with, but with this we will wrestle. And we read from verse 32:

They went to a place called Gethsemane, and Jesus said to his disciples, "Sit here while I pray." He took Peter, James, and John along with him, and he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death," he said to them. "Stay here and keep watch." Going a little farther, he fell to the ground and prayed that if possible, the hour might pass from him. "Abba, Father," he said, "everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will." Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping.

Now, we can have also, if it's helpful to you, our fingers in Luke chapter 22, which is the parallel passage in Luke's Gospel, beginning in verse 39. And the reason I say that is because sometimes this morning I'll say something and you'll be looking at Mark and you'll say, "But it isn't in there," and then if you go to Luke, you'll find it there and vice versa. And so as not to be tedious and be constantly saying, "I mean Luke, I mean Mark," whatever, I'm just going to assume just I'm just going to recognize what an intelligent group this is and that you'll be figuring this out for yourselves. So, let us pause and pray.

And now we humbly pray, make the book live to me, O Lord, show me yourself within your word, show me myself and show me my Savior, and make the book live to me, for Jesus' sake. Amen.

For many of us, this passage of scripture is familiar territory. We at least have read it on an annual basis, if not more frequently in the course of the Christian calendar. It is of interest, I think you will agree, that while the gospel writers provide us with no description of the physicality of Jesus—nowhere are we told his height or his weight, the color or length of his hair, the shade of his eyes, and so on; all of that a veil of silence is cast over, purposefully presumably as a work as a result of the Spirit's work in the lives of the gospel writers.

And given that, I think it's all the more interesting that we should be given an insight, as it were, into the chemistry of Christ, into something of the psychological makeup of Jesus. That while we have no right to say that he looked like this, we have some indication of the kind of thing that he experienced as a man and that which was going on inside of him. And so it is to this quite disturbing view of Jesus that we turn on this final occasion.

Jesus, you will remember, when he was asked concerning prayer, had given a pattern of prayer to those who were his listeners and his followers. And in the course of that prayer, it is common for us to pray, "Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Our Father, who art in heaven, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." And what Jesus encouraged his followers to pray, we now discover him putting into practice.

And in this little scenario here that is for us in Mark and again, as I say to you, in Luke, I want us to try and navigate our way through it by employing three simple verbs. Every elementary school teacher knows the importance of teaching their class about looking properly, listening carefully, and learning eagerly. In fact, when I was a boy growing up, there was a magazine in Scotland that was a sort of pseudo-educational tool that was entitled Look and Learn. I had a few copies, but I was never a great fan of it, I must confess. I was more interested in football magazines than Look and Learn magazines. I should have paid more attention to it, and don't use me as an excuse, young people, if you're listening to me now. The importance of looking, listening, and learning.

Well, first of all, we're going to look. We have these passages in the Bible in order that in the reading of them, we may conjure up in our minds some sense of what is taking place. It is there for us that we might do so. So, let us then look at what we're told. I want to suggest that we look carefully at what we're told, that we don't allow familiarity with this passage to prevent us from seeing what is actually a striking and somewhat incongruous picture.

The gospel readers were familiar with Jesus as he had been introduced to them as a rabbi and as a teacher. They had become aware of his ministry as a worker of miracles. They were aware of all that had been said and written concerning him as someone who was a friend of sinners. But now, as these early readers of the gospel take this material and turn to it, many of them will not be ready for the picture that is provided by the gospel writers here. For this is a picture of a distressed Christ. This is a picture of a distressed Christ.

You will notice that Mark tells us that he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. To be deeply distressed and troubled. Indeed, the terminology as it is written in the Greek is of the most profound significance. The terminology that is used is hardly adequately covered for us by the idea of a deep distress. And you will have noted, if you're familiar with your Bible, that earlier the gospel writers had been made aware that the evening of these events was a cold evening. It was an evening that was cold enough for a fire to have been kindled in the home of the high priest. For you will remember that it was at that fire that Peter warmed himself and was confronted by the questions of the servant girl in that house.

So on an evening that is cold enough for a fire, what is happening here that we find Jesus sweating profusely? It would be one thing if it was a phenomenally humid evening. We would be able to say to ourselves, "Well, understandably, he along with all the other people would simply be responding to the nature of the climate at the time." But no, there is no indication given of that at all. And in his experience of deep distress and trouble, it would be surprising if his immediate companions, namely Peter, James, and John, according to verse 33, if they were not made aware of the nature of his condition and if, in a sense of compassion, they did not say to him, "Jesus, what is wrong? Jesus, why are you the way you are?"

This was a whole new experience for those who had been aware of their lives being marked by fearfulness, by despair, even in the area of their greatest capacity as fishermen being overwhelmed by the prospect of death on the Sea of Galilee, for them to have had Jesus stand and rebuke the winds and the waves and for them to look at one another and say, "What manner of man is this, that even the winds and the waves obey him?" For as good Jewish boys they knew from their reading of the Old Testament that only God was in control of the winds and the waves. Therefore, for this Jesus to stand at the stern of their boat and command the seas to silence was nothing other than an indication of the vastness of who he was in all of his proclaimed Messianship.

Given all of that, what now is happening to Jesus that he is so deeply distressed? Well, he says and explains to them in verse 34, "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death." Now, I say again to you, look carefully at this. Your sensible people, you have Bibles. Our familiarity with this material, especially those of us who have been reared in it, is such that frankly, I think most of us miss this. Or, because it is so distressing to us, we tend to say, "I don't want really to handle this." Jesus proclaims to those who are his nearest and dearest, in his experience of distress and trouble, "I'm actually overwhelmed." Jesus is overwhelmed.

He says so. All of the pent-up emotion that presumably is represented in his life as he has been moving now over a period of weeks steadfastly towards the cross. All of this, for example, the statements as in John 4 when the disciples come and say, "Did somebody bring him food?" and remember what he said: "My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work." In Mark 8, after the great declaration of Peter concerning his Messianship, he then says, "Now, fellows, I need you to know that I am setting my face steadfastly towards Jerusalem, where I will be handed over to cruel men who will crucify me and on the third day I will rise again." And at that point, the disciples are recoiling from it and saying, "No, Jesus, this must never happen to you." "Yes," he said, "this is my destiny and to this I move."

And how they must have marveled that he could walk so straightforwardly towards this great meeting at the cross. Well, now, now it's a different picture. Now he shrinks from the cup. He shrinks from the cup. He knows it to be the will of God. He has repeatedly asserted, affirmed the divine necessity of his suffering. That is not in question. But he is now confronted by the immediacy of the ordeal. And look at the description of it: deeply distressed, deeply troubled, overwhelmed to the point of death. Luther, looking at this scene, wrote in his commentary, "No man ever feared death like this man." Does that not seem wrong? Wouldn't we expect that Luther would have said, "Nobody like Jesus breezed through death. After all, he was the Messiah, he was the one who would come out on the far side in the resurrection." No, Luther says, "Nobody ever feared death like this man feared death, for no one would ever die a death like this man."

Says Macleod, the Scottish theologian, he went to the outer limits of human endurance. So close to the absolute limit that he was almost overwhelmed. To the limits of human endurance. Now look again. Look at what we have before us in this picture. Jesus, the one who is utterly and entirely without sin. Jesus, the beloved and uniquely precious Son of the Father, is about to be destroyed at the Father's hands. Isn't that right? Isn't that what the prophet said in Isaiah 53? "It was the Lord's will to crush him and to cause him to suffer." Doesn't Paul, taking that picture, reflecting on the scene, give to us in Romans 8 these words: "He did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all."

What you have here is the innocent about to suffer at the hands of God. What you have here is the sinless about to bear the wrath of God in himself for sin. What you have here is the prospect of the perfect one being nailed on a cross on a garbage heap outside Jerusalem between two thieves, abused and disabused. And why? Paul tells us, "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him."

Let me just say parenthetically, for those of you who may still not be believers in Christianity, who may not have come to trust in Jesus: I was greatly helped some time ago when I read John Stott's little sentence. And this is what he said, "I could never believe in God were it not for the cross. I could never believe in a God who was removed from the pain and overwhelming distress of human suffering." For what we have in this, in this description of the suffering servant, is not a reluctant Jesus. For he said, "Nobody takes my life from me. I have the power to lay it down, I have the power to give it again." It is not that Jesus is reluctantly going to the will of God the Father, for he goes purposefully and obediently and submissively, the way the Christian ought to go.

But in his humanity, he inevitably recoils from it because he's a man. He is a real man. And so before the events that are about to transpire, he recoils. Because you see, without substitution, the cross of Christ is unintelligible. And I think that's why people disregard it. Because the way in which many of us talk about it is completely unintelligible. Because maybe we don't even understand what we're talking about, in which case then we can be forgiven as to the dreadful job we're doing of trying to explain it to people who ask us. Because if all we say concerning the cross is concerning something about the manifold love of God and in order to show us how much he loved us, this is what he did to Jesus, the person says, "Well, there must be a missing piece in this puzzle, is there not?"

Well, of course there is. It was the love of God. We were so messed up that Jesus had to die for us, and we were so unbelievably loved in Jesus that he was pleased to die for us. But as he comes to the point of departure, the gospel writers tell us that he was distressed and he was troubled and he explained he was overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. The atonement, the death of Jesus on the cross for sinners, is not a theory. It's not a mathematical equation. It's a flesh and blood reality. And there was nothing, there was nothing in Christ's humanity to blunt his emotions or to anesthetize his sensitivity. And as a result of being entirely compos mentis, and perhaps in the immensity of his love this was part of it, if he had taken that drugged potion, how could he have looked down and said to his beloved disciple, "Look after my mother, will you?" or how could he have been available to say to the thief on the cross, "Today you will be with me in paradise"? He refused the wine mingled with gall. He suffered at a level that no one has ever suffered. He endured everything for the sake of his own.

What an amazing thing it is. And what a stupidity it is that 21st-century Western Christianity offers itself to the world as a panacea for all ills, as the best grades at university, as the most significant job, as the cutest girls, as the high school quarterback boys. "We are the people who've got it all together, you see. Why not come and join us?" And then these interested agnostics begin to read their Bibles and say, "How did you get here from here? What is this fellowship of suffering that the Apostle Paul was on? What was he talking about when he said, 'I want to know Christ'?" We stop. "I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection." That'll be enough for us. Finish the verse right there. There is no power of his resurrection except as it is experienced in the fellowship of his sufferings. It is only through his sufferings in Calvary that there is the reality of the resurrection. And the same, my friends, is true for you and me. And every attempt to deny that is known by our own hearts as fraudulent, is condemned by the scriptures clearly, and every well-thinking, cynical, agnostic friend that I have says you're full of absolute bunk. And you know what? If I were to suggest that that was the essence of Christianity, they would be absolutely right.

Bob Lepine: You're listening to Bible teacher Alistair Begg on Truth For Life. We'll hear more about the suffering servant tomorrow. As Alistair mentioned, it's possible to become so familiar with the stories we read in the Bible that we miss the details. And familiarity can actually become a distraction when we're studying scripture. It can dampen our zeal or cause our growth to dwindle. Ever find yourself wishing you could reignite the spiritual vibrancy that you enjoyed when you first came to faith in Jesus?

Well, we are recommending today a book that is a great supplement to our current series, *To Know Christ*. It's called *Christ Our All: Gaze at Him*. This is a brand new devotional that will help you tune out distractions and focus your eyes and your heart on Jesus. It's a short book, just 14 meditations, but it will reintroduce you to Jesus and remind you of who he is, all he's done, and how much he cares for you. You'll reflect in this book on the many roles he plays in our lives. For example, you'll learn about how he is our light, our Savior, our brother, and our great reward.

Ask for your copy of the book *Christ Our All: Gaze at Him* when you donate to support the ministry of Truth For Life today. You can give your gift online at truthforlife.org/donate or call us at 888-588-7884. And if you'd rather mail your donation along with your request for the book, write to Truth For Life at PO Box 396000, Cleveland, Ohio, 44139.

I'm Bob Lepine, thanks for joining us today to study God's word. Does your life make the gospel appealing? Tomorrow, we'll find out how we can be attractively righteous. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth For Life, where the learning is for living.