Luke 22:39-46

The Agony Of The Lord Jesus In The Garden

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I'm going to read from the ESV. Again, I'm on Luke 22, and I'm going to start with verse 39. And he came out and went. This is Jesus, as was his custom to the Mount of Olives. And the disciples followed him. And 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 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 the disciples and found them sleeping for Sarah. And he said to them, Why are you sleeping? Rise and pray that you may not enter into temptation. May the Lord bless the reading of his precious holy word. I, as I indicated, I was greatly changed while I read and studied for this message today. Incidentally, I used a couple of commentaries in my message. One called The Expository Thoughts on the Gospels, the Gospel of Luke by R. C. Ryle. R. C. Ryle is one of my most favorite preachers and writers. And as well, I did use some passages from the Reformed Expository Commentary, which is a commentary I go to quite regularly. It's edited by Philip Graham Riken, and I will refer to those, but I wanted to make sure that they got their due. I was greatly changed while I read and studied for this message today. I better understand both the humanity and the divinity of the Lord and the times when I saw his human will and his divine will being explained throughout the Gospels. It brought me, honestly, to another level of understanding, as dim as it most surely still is with me, of who Jesus is and what he has done for me. And my prayer is that it will likewise do the same in your hearts and your minds. You know, we may read this passage rather nonchalantly, thinking that we know it well. But if we are careful, we should approach this with special reverence as we honestly are peering into deep, deep things of God. As the God man Jesus prepares to take upon his own perfect, sinless body the sins of the world. This is obviously no small matter. This very moment in the life of Jesus, this very moment in the history of the world will have effects on everything that are so profound that, in my opinion, there is no mind great enough, there is no scholar learned enough, there is no preacher spirit-filled enough that any of us can fully comprehend what we have just read. It is that momentous in my mind. It is that critical to the entire world from the Garden of Eden forward. We are indeed stepping onto holy ground, beloved. Let us have an attitude of veneration for what we just read and what we, I hope, are about to discover. Now, before we dig into this deep, deep recesses of agony that caused our Lord to writhe in anguish so profoundly that his human body would produce sweat like blood, let us think on a couple other important issues that our Lord brings to our attention in this passage. The first thing is that this passage reminds us what every believer should do in times of trouble. As the majestic head of the body called the church, our Lord Himself provides us that example right here, right now. We are told here that when he came to the Mount of Olives, the night before he was crucified, he knelt down and prayed, reminding us to go to the Father in prayer during times of trouble in our lives, is found numerous times in both the Old and the New Testaments. Here's just a couple of examples. In Psalm 50, verse 15, we read this Call upon me, the Lord says, In your day of trouble, I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me. You will glorify the Lord when you are in trouble and you go to him. James tells us, is anyone among you suffering? Suffering for any reason. Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Jesus tells his disciples to pray so that they won't fall into temptation. And I'm not sure if there was a specific temptation that Jesus was referring to, or temptation in general. But perhaps it was that he knew they needed to stay awake and pray that they would not be tempted to depart from him when he may have needed them the most. Right there in the garden when Judas kissed him and was about, and Jesus was about to be carried off to the mock trials and eventually go to the cross. But Mark tells us that unfortunately they all left him and fled. Prayer is the remedy that Jacob used when he feared his brother Esau. Prayer is the prescription which Job used when property and children were suddenly taken from him. There are literally hundreds of examples of prayers in the Bible. As a matter of fact, I looked this up, not counting the book of Psalms. There are 650 recorded prayers in the Bible, with no fewer than 450 answers being recorded. And we see that prayer is this is the prescription which the Son of God himself was not ashamed to use in the days of his flesh. In the hour of his perplexing agony, he prayed. J.C. Ryle writes this: Let us take care that we use our master's remedy if we want comfort in affliction. Whatever other means of relief we use, let us pray. The first friend, capital F, we should turn to ought to be God. The first message we should send ought to be to the throne of grace. No depression of spirits must prevent us. No crushing weight of sorrow must make us silent. It is a prime device of Satan to supply the afflicted person with false reasons for keeping silence before God. Let us be aware of the temptation to sulk quietly over our wounds and our troubles. If we can say nothing else, let us say what Isaiah told us in 3814. Be my pledge of safety. Secondly, we see in these verses what kind of prayers a believer ought to make during times of difficulty and trouble. Once more, the Lord Himself grants us a model for believers, you and me, to follow. We are told that he said, Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done. Now, before we go any farther, we may find it questionable that Jesus would have a different will than the Father. After all, isn't he God? And he is. Then shouldn't his will be exactly that of his father's? He who spoke these words, we must remember, had two distinct natures in one person. He was both fully man and fully God. He had a human will as well as a divine will. When he said, Not my will be done, he meant that will which he had as a man, with a body like ours, flesh and blood, just like our own. The words used by our Lord and the garden show us how the spirit of our prayer should be in times of distress. Like Jesus, we should readily spill our desires candidly to our Heavenly Father and lay out those desires freely before Him. But like Jesus, we should do it all with an entire submission of our will to the will of God. We should never forget that there may be wise and good reasons for any affliction that He has chosen us to go through. We should carefully qualify every petition that we make to him for the removal of any cross that he has given us to bear with the meek, obedient clause, if you are willing. We should always amend our prayers with the humble confession: not my will but yours be done. Let me say this to all of us. Yielding our will with the goal of elevating his will in our prayers and lives is one of the greatest signs of true love for Jesus and faith in Jesus that can magnify the Christian character. It is one which a child of God ought to aim at, not only in prayer, but in everything, if we desire to please him and be like him. Once again, we can learn from J.C. Ryle when he states this: But at no time in such submission of will, so necessary as in the day of sorrow, and in nothing does it shine so brightly as in a believer's prayers for relief. The one who can say from their heart, when a bitter cup is before them, not my will but yours be done, has reached a high position in the school of God. End quote. out of Psalm 119. Muller recounts how he prayed when he had discovered that his wife had rheumatic fever. Yes, my father, the times of my darling wife are in thy hands. Thou wilt do the very best thing for her and for me, whether in life or death. If it may be, raise up yet again my precious wife. Thou art able to do it, though she is so ill. But howsoever thou dealest with me, only help me to continue to be perfectly satisfied with thy holy will. When she died, Mueller said, I bow. I am satisfied with the will of my heavenly Father. I seek by perfect submission to his holy will to glorify him. I kiss continually the hand that has afflicted me. Without an effort, my inmost soul habitually joyed in my departed wife. Her happiness gave joy to me. However, my dear daughter and I would not have her back, were it possible to produce it by the turn of a hand. God himself had done it. We are satisfied with him. Thirdly, we will shortly see another very important point. In these verses, we will see the overwhelming and considerable guilt and sinfulness of our trespasses against a holy God. How egregious they all are, how sinful is our sinfulness, how abhorrent are sins to a holy God. I hope we will all see this clearly as we dig into Christ's agony and bloody sweat, along with all the incomprehensible distress of our Lord's body and mind, which this passage has described to us. This understanding at first glance may not be clear to the casual reader, but if we look, the lesson is clearly there. We need to try and account for the agony in which our Savior suffered on the mount. But before we do, it's very important, I believe, that we describe what agony is. The Greek word for agony found in this passage in Luke is agonia. Strong's dictionary tells us this: that the Greek word for agony means a struggle for victory, wrestling of severe mental struggles and emotions, agony and anguish. I quote this from one of the commentaries. It is a word for the bitter striving of a fierce conflict. Here it means much more than simply that Jesus went through a strenuous experience of inward pain. It means that there was a fight within his very soul. As Jonathan Edwards explained it, the Greek word for agony implies no common degree of sorrow, but such extreme distress that his nature had a most violent conflict within it, as a man that wrestles with all his might against a strong man. There can be little doubt that at this moment in Gethsemane, our Lord's affliction and anguish of body and mind was most intense and most severe. It seems that Satan was permitted to harass and assail him with unique and particular temptations. The Prince of this world had indeed come. And because of what Satan was assailing our Lord with, I believe that it may be reasonable to suppose that as fully man, our Lord felt a desire to shrink from the death and suffering he knew was about to take place. But that begs for more insight. I am sure many of us have read stories about scores and scores, or maybe even hundreds, of Christian martyrs that have been known to suffer the most painful deaths without having the mental and the bodily angony that are described to us as we read of what our Lord is experiencing here in the garden? How are we to account for this? How are we to explain the remarkable circumstance that our Lord appears to have felt far more distraught than many a martyr has felt, even in the prospect of that martyr being burned alive or tortured beyond imagination? How can we account for the deep agony which our Lord underwent here in the garden? What reason can we give for the intense suffering, both mental and bodily, which he manifestly endured? I believe there is only one satisfactory explanation of Christ's intense agony, and it is the doctrine of imputed sin. For you see, he became a man to put on and die for the sins of the world. His death was a vicarious death. As our substitute, he was about to bear the sins of the whole world, including your heinous iniquities and my heinous iniquities, to suffer for you and for me, to pay our debts to God with his very own body and blood. He was about to be counted a sinner and be punished, that we might be counted righteous and be delivered from that punishment. The sins of the world began to be laid upon him in a special manner in the garden. He was being made a curse for us by bearing our sins. This was the principal cause of his agony and his blood sweat. The words of Isaiah were being fulfilled. He hath put him to grief. And the Lord made the iniquity of us all to be borne by him. The following quotations on this most important subject are worth hearing. Richard Baxter says this agony was from the deep sense of God's wrath against sin, which he as our sacrifice was about to bear, causing him greater pain than mere dying. Sir Matthew Hale said, Christ stood under the imputation of all our sins, and though he was personally innocent, yet judicially and by way of imputation, that is, taking your sin and my sin and placing it on himself. By way of imputation, he was the greatest offender that ever was. As our Lord was pleased to be our representative in bearing our sins and to stand in our stead, so all these affections and motions of his soul did bear the same conformity as if it acted right upon us. As he put on the person of the sinner, so we put on the same sorrow, the same shame, the same trembling under the apprehension of the wrath of his father that we would have gone through. And as imputed sin drew with it the obligation to punishment, so it did by necessary consequences raise all these storms and compassions in the soul of Christ. End quote. But it wasn't just those powers of darkness that were driving him. Jesus knew that it was also the will of his father. Here we see a battle of wills. There was the will of the Father, which was for the Son to drink the cup. But there was also the will of Jesus, the God man, which asked if there might be some other way, any other way, except for the way of the cross. You know, back in the wilderness where Jesus wrestled with the devil before he began his earthly ministry, he was tempted to seize the crown without suffering the cross. Now at the end of his earthly ministry, he is now struggling with that same question. Was there any way out? Any alternative to the cross? Any easier way to save Jesus' lost people whom he loves so much? Again, we are now drawn into the mysteries of the incarnation. Jesus Christ is both God and man. He is one person with two natures, a divine nature and a human nature, which cannot be divided but only distinguished. Among other things, the incarnation of the God man Christ means that Jesus had both a human will and a divine will. And this has been the Orthodox teaching of the church since at least the Third Council of Constantinople in A.D. 680. With respect to his divine nature, he had no other will other than the will of the Father. Because the Father and the Son are one. Remember that back in John chapter 10, when the Jews said to Jesus, Tell us plainly who you are. And in verse 30 of that same chapter, Jesus says, I and the Father are one. Yet with respect to his human nature, Jesus himself made a clear and careful distinction between his will and the Father's will. If he did the Father's will, this was because he chose to do it. Not necessarily because it always became automatic or that it was easy. In Gethsemane, we see the human will of Jesus, wrestling with the divine will of the Father. Jesus and his humanity did not want to suffer the cross, which was evil in itself and dreadfully painful. And he knew the horrific punishment he would endure by the Father for the sin he was about to take upon himself. So in the agony of his soul, he asked the Father for some other way to bring salvation. So again, We must carefully remember that while the two natures were united in the one person of Christ, the two wills have never been confused. Our Lord had a will as perfect man, he also had a will as perfect God. As God, he had a will in entire harmony with the will of his Father, a will to suffer, to die, to bear our sins, and to provide redemption on the cross. But as a man, he had a human will which naturally desires to forego death and pain, as everything which has breath of life instinctively does. This is the will which we hear speaking in the verse before us. J.C. Ryle says this. It's worth quoting. How the Lord Jesus could be at the same time God and man, as man weak, but as God Almighty? For what reasons we see him sometimes in the gospel speaking as God, sometimes as man, why we see him sometimes veiling his divinity and sometimes exhibiting it most clearly. All these are questions which it is more easy to ask than answer. Enough for us to know that it is so and to believe and admire what we cannot explain. One thing, however, we may safely remark, Ryle says, that at no period of our Lord's earthly ministry does the reality of his manhood come out so clearly as in his agony in the garden and his death on the cross. As man, he endured temptation for us and overcame Satan. As man, he showed the intensity of his sufferings by bloody sweat, strong crying and tears. As man, he thirsted on the cross and said, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The infinite merit of his passion unquestionably arose from the inseparable union of his Godhead and his manhood. But the nature which is most prominently brought before us in his passion, here in the garden, is his nature as man. End quote. This agony, this cup, was caused by the burden of taking the sin of the world upon himself, and it began to press ever so hard upon him in ways that only the Godhead could ever understand. It is beyond us. You see, he had undertaken to be sin for us, to be made a curse for us, and to allow our iniquities to be laid on himself. 2 Corinthians 5.21, Galatians 3.13, and Isaiah 53.6 all tell us those things. You can read it on the screen. It was the enormous weight of these iniquities which he knew would shortly be placed upon him, which made him suffer this agony, and then they have him sweat great drops of blood and have offered up prayers with loud cries and tears, according to Hebrews verse 7. If we reduce down to the basics, what's taking place here in the Garden of Gethsemane, hours before our Lord will go to the cross, we find this. Hebrews 5, 7. We must be vigilant of the notion that our blessed Lord's life and death were only about a great example of self-sacrifice. Such a notion discredits and places confusion over the depths of the entire gospel. We must cling firmly to the old doctrine that Christ was foreseeing having to bear our sins and the punishment for them here in the garden and finally do so on the cross. No other doctrine can ever explain the passage before us. Can we now see the sinfulness of our sin in its true colors? Would we learn to hate sin with a godly hatred? Would we know something of the intense misery of souls in hell? Would we understand something of the unspeakable love of Christ? Would we comprehend Christ's ability to sympathize with those that are in trouble? Then let the agony in the garden come often into our minds, not just this afternoon, but may it often come into our minds. The depth of that agony may give us some idea of our debt to Christ. Now we see lastly in these verses an example of the feebleness of the best of believers. We are told that while our Lord was in agony, his disciples fell asleep. In spite of a plain injunction to pray and a plain warning against temptation, the flesh overcame the spirit. While Christ was sweating great drops of blood, his apostles slept. I hope we see that passages like this not only are deep, but they are extremely instructive for all of us. We ought to thank God that they have been written for our learning. They are meant to teach us humility. When apostles can behave in this fashion, that is to fall asleep when prayer was the order of the moment. The Christians who think they stand should take heed lest they fall. Passages like this are to teach us how much God hates our sin. Passages like this should remind us of the true cost that Jesus paid on the cross to make the doors of heaven open for us. Passages such as these are meant to reconcile believers to death and make them long for that glorious body which they will have when Christ returns. Until we take seriously our sin, the full price paid by Jesus on the cross, the wonder of now being children of God, of being sanctified, justified, and glorified in Him alone, then and not until then shall we be able to wait upon the Lord without becoming wearying and doing good for him and to serve him all day long in response to his love and obedience, which took him to the defining moment in all of history, the cross at Calvary. For the cross alone made this all possible to those who believe. Now, for those who have yet to enjoy all the Son of God has made available to you, let me proclaim the good news to you. But before I do that, first the bad news. You are a sinner. You are desperately wicked. You have fallen short of the glory of God. You are right now separated from him, both at this moment and for all of eternity. Your father is the devil. Your final destination is complete separation from God who loves you and has died and paid the price for your sins. Your eternal destination is hell, a place created for Satan and his angels. As you stand right now as the captain of your own soul, you have no true freedom because you are indeed a slave to your sin. You are a prisoner to your evil flesh. You have no spiritual anchor in your life. You drift like a ship without an anchor or a rudder. You have no real hope. And that is who you are outside of Christ. But all of these things can and will change in the twinkling of an eye if you do one thing. As Jesus proclaimed at the beginning of his earthly ministry, repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. Turn away from your sins and ask him to be your Lord and Savior. It means that you ask him for help in turning your life from the way you have presently lived it, and to trust and rely on him alone for forgiveness and then lordship over your life. It is that easy. Christ has made it that easy because of the agony that he went through in the garden and on the cross. But most men and most women will never do this as the way of destruction is broad, the scripture tells us. But should you feel the tugging of the Holy Spirit drawing you to Jesus this morning, do not ignore his prompting. Put his will ahead of yours and ask him to be the one you wish to obey. If you do so, his promise is that he will turn no one away. You will be his, you will be a new creation, you will become his child forever, and he will never leave you, and he will never forget about you.