Transcript

The Bible teaches us about two important gardens that had two drastically different outcomes: the Garden of Eden and the Garden of Gethsemane.

In Eden was the first Adam, and in Gethsemane was the last Adam. In the Garden of Eden, the first Adam chose to disobey God, choosing his will over God’s. In the Garden of Gethsemane, the last Adam chose to obey God and chose the Father’s will.

Adam’s decision in the Garden of Eden affected all who are related to Adam; Christ’s decision in Gethsemane affects all who are related to Him by faith. In Eden, God sought Adam. In Gethsemane, Christ sought God.

The Garden of Eden brought disaster and suffering to mankind and the world, while the Garden of Gethsemane would lead to deliverance. In Eden, Adam took the fruit from Eve’s hand. At Gethsemane, Christ took the cup from His Father’s hand.

In the Garden of Eden, Satan inhabited a serpent. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Satan inhabited a man, Judas. In Eden, Satan led Adam to partake from a tree that led to his death. From Gethsemane, Christ went to a tree that led to our life.

Adam’s pride, rebellion, and fall in the garden brought sin and death into this world, but Christ’s humility, submission, and obedience in the garden led to victory over sin and death at the Cross.

Matthew 26:36-39: “Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called Gethsemane, and saith unto the disciples, Sit ye here, while I go and pray yonder.

“And he took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful and very heavy. Then saith he unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me.

“And he went a little further, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.”

The Lord and His disciples had come from the upper room where they partook together of the Passover Meal or the Last Supper, and Christ then instituted a remembrance of His death or the Lord’s Supper. The Lord had also washed the disciples’ feet, and taught and prayed with them at this time.

Following this, Christ and the disciples make their way east through the streets of Jerusalem, out one of the gates of the city walls, down across the Kidron Valley and up to a garden spot with a grove of olive trees, called Gethsemane.

The Garden of Gethsemane was a walled garden on the western slope of the Mount of Olives, just east of the temple.

Gethsemane means “oil press.” On the Mount of OLIVES there were OLIVE trees.

And in this garden, when olives were harvested, they were pressed and crushed in an olive press under the weight of a large, heavy, revolving stone, out of which they would gather the valuable oil for the purposes of cooking, using in lamps, and other things.

And it is interesting and appropriate that just as olives were pressed here, so this is the location where our Lord was pressed and crushed in Himself, as He agonized in prayer in the shadow of the Cross.

As they came to the Garden, with Judas already gone to do what he was going to do, Christ turned to His remaining disciples and instructed eight of them to sit and remain near the entrance, while He went further into the Garden and prayed.

Christ knew that Judas was coming to betray Him, and unbeknownst to these eight, their positioning near the entrance served as a sort of outer guard to watch by the gate of the garden for the arrival of Judas.

The Lord then took three of them with Him deeper into the garden: “Peter and the two sons of Zebedee,” who were James and John.

On two other occasions, Christ took these three with Him separately from the rest: on the Mount of Transfiguration and when He raised Jairus’ daughter from the dead. These three men witnessed Christ’s glory at the transfiguration and His agony in Gethsemane.

The presence and company of others give solace to a heavy heart. These disciples could not bear any part of our Lord’s grief, but sitting with Him, and watching and praying with Him would be a comfort and support, so the Lord took these three men with Him.

At this time, the Lord “began to be sorrowful and very heavy.” These words refer to Christ being grieved and deeply distressed. Christ was greatly troubled knowing the physical and spiritual horror that awaited Him at the cross.

At this point, in the garden, the Lord spoke to the three disciples and told them that He was “exceeding sorrowful even unto death.”

These words are expressive of sorrow in the highest degree. The words “exceedingly sorrowful” mean to be overcome with sorrow, and to be grieved all around. Christ was surrounded by grief; it was all around Him.

The Lord was overwhelmed with sorrow. He was indeed “a man of sorrows,” as Isaiah prophesied (53:3).

One writer described this moment this way: “Grief enveloped Him, surrounded Him, and saturated His mind. It was so deep it was as if death had wrapped its fingers around His shoulders.”

And again, His anguish had to do with the anticipation of the cross which was just hours away. The cross now loomed large on the horizon.

Christ fully knew what lay before Him. As God, from eternity past, He knew the death that He would die, and He knew all that it would entail.

In Mark 10:33-34, the Lord told His disciples, “Behold, we go up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man shall be delivered unto the chief priests, and unto the scribes; and they shall condemn him to death, and shall deliver him to the Gentiles:

“And they shall mock him, and shall scourge him, and shall spit upon him, and shall kill him: and the third day he shall rise again.”

In our sinful and mortal flesh, we cannot fully grasp the conflict in the holy soul of the Lord Jesus Who would bear the awful sin of the world and be made sin, and face God’s full wrath and judgment against them and be separated from the Father.

It caused Him exceeding sorrow, and the Lord did not hide His anguish from His disciples, but rather He told them and then asked for them to “tarry ye here, and watch with Me.”

He asked them to wait and remain where they were in the garden, and though the hour was late, Christ further asked them to “watch,” or out of sympathy for His state, to remain awake and not go to sleep.

And to watch with Him also meant that they needed to be vigilant and prepared for the approaching danger and upheaval that was coming to their lives with the arrival of Judas and the soldiers, because their world was about to be turned upside down.

After telling them this, Christ went a little farther into the garden by Himself.

Luke 22:41 states, “He was withdrawn from them about a stone’s cast, and kneeled down, and prayed.” Luke then tells us that Christ kneeled down to pray. Here in Matthew we read that He “fell on His face, and prayed.” Both are true.

Our Lord first kneeled in His prayer, and then in the fervency and intensity of His prayer, and from the depth of His anguish, He fell on His face and prayed.

It’s important to pause and think about the Lord, the Supreme One, the Greatest of All, humbly laying prostrate on the ground in that garden as He prayed to the Father. Christ went as low physically as He could go when He prayed here.

In that position, Christ prayed, “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me.”

As He prayed, Hebrews 5:7 tells us of Christ, “Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death…” The words of Christ’s prayer to the Father were uttered with powerful and deep emotion, with “strong crying and tears.”

Christ cried out, “O my Father,” and in these words, we see the closeness of the relationship between the eternal Son and the eternal Father, as Christ addressed the Father as “MY Father.” In Mark’s version of Gethsemane, he recorded that the Lord, in this moment of deep distress, prayed, “Abba, Father.”

“Abba” is a tender term of endearment, affection, and love. Being so close to the Father, Christ used a family term reflecting a child’s familiar name for his father. Daddy is the best equivalent in our English language to Abba.

The Lord lovingly asked His Father in heaven, to “let this cup pass from me.” The Lord and the disciples had just drunk together from cups during the last supper in the upper room, but now Christ referred to a cup that He alone had to drink.

Christ’s agony and prayer for the cup to pass from Him had nothing to do with the fear of men or death. The “cup” refers to the cross and all that it entailed, both its spiritual and physical sufferings.

It entailed the full cup of divine fury against sin. As Isaiah 51:17 states, “Awake, awake, stand up, O Jerusalem, which hast drunk at the hand of the Lord THE CUP OF HIS FURY.”

In the future Tribulation when the city of Babylon is judged, Revelation 16:19 reads, “and great Babylon came in remembrance before God, to give unto her THE CUP OF THE WINE OF THE FIERCENESS OF HIS WRATH.”

The cup the Lord agonizingly prayed to pass from Him was the cup of God’s fury, the fierceness of God’s wrath against sin that He would face on the cross.

At the Cross, Christ knew He was to drink the full cup of God’s wrath against all the sin and rebellion of all the men and women through all the ages.

In Isaiah 53:6, Israel was told, “the LORD hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” In 2 Corinthians 5:21 we learn that the Savior was “made sin for us.” And 1 Peter 2:24 states, “Who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree…”

As the sin-Bearer, the sins of the world were placed upon Him, and He bore all our sins. And at the Cross, God’s wrath and fury were unleashed and poured out against Him in full measure. And the Father turned away from His sin-filled Son and forsook Him.

The extreme bitterness of these spiritual sufferings from this cup was heard from the Cross when our Lord cried out: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46).

But not only that, the cup also involved His physical sufferings and His sacrificial death. We see that when James and John asked the Lord to sit on His right hand and left in His kingdom, and Christ told them:

“Ye know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with? They say unto Him, We are able. And He saith unto them, Ye shall drink indeed of My cup…” (Matt. 20:22,23).

Our Lord in this passage is referring to “the cup” of physical sufferings and even death that James and John would have to face for His name’s sake in their ministries.

Thus, the cup Christ prayed to pass from Him at Gethsemane entailed the Cross and everything about it in His payment for sin.

In these hours before the Cross, the Lord agonized over the divine wrath, suffering, and separation from His Father. In His humanity, He sorrowed over the crushing and painful sacrifice He was about to face.

And Christ even asked the Father “if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.”

In other words, He asked the Father, “If it is possible that the redemption of man and the price for sin could be paid consistent with Your justice and righteousness by any other way than by this extremity of sorrow and suffering, let this cup pass from Me.”

But it was not possible. It is not possible for salvation to come any other way. The Cross was the only way redemption for man and salvation from sin was possible.

The Father did not grant the release of the Son from this cup because there was no other way for our just and holy God to deal with our sins.

The cross was the only way to resolve the problem of sin. Sin must be punished, and the wages of sin is death. At the cross, God’s love and justice came together.

In love, Christ, our Substitute, took the judgment that we and our sins deserved, and He died for our sins. And because He fully paid our sin debt, God freely gives us Christ’s righteousness when we believe.

The only way for mankind to be saved was through the substitutionary death and payment for sin by God’s Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Lord Jesus, knowing the Cross was the only way and knowing His Father’s will that He must go to the Cross, willingly submitted His will to His Father’s will, and thus, He said, “not as I will, but as thou wilt.”

And as Philippians 2:8 says, “being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” By His words, “not as I will, but as Thou wilt,” we see His obedience unto the death of the Cross.

Christ was not resisting the Father’s will here but yielding Himself to it.

The Lord’s prayer at Gethsemane revealed His humanity, and as a Man, Christ truly felt the great burden He would carry, knowing He would bear the full weight of the sin of the whole world and face God’s undiluted wrath against it.

But He also knew that this was His mission, the Father’s will, and the very purpose for which He came to this world, thus He submitted Himself to the Father, and said, “nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt.”

Matthew 26:40-46: “And he cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with me one hour?

Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. He went away again the second time, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.

“And he came and found them asleep again: for their eyes were heavy. And he left them, and went away again, and prayed the third time, saying the same words.

“Then cometh he to his disciples, and saith unto them, Sleep on now, and take your rest: behold, the hour is at hand, and the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise, let us be going: behold, he is at hand that doth betray me.”

The time was the middle of the night. After an hour of praying, the Lord returned to the place where the three disciples, Peter, James, and John, were, and He found them sound asleep and that they had been unable to stay awake.

The Lord woke Peter and said to him, “What, could ye not watch with me one hour?”

Peter had just made some gallant and bold proclamations in the upper room. He had told the Lord, “Though all men shall be offended because of thee, yet will I never be offended,” and then after the Lord told him that he would deny Him three times, “Peter said unto Him, Though I should die with Thee, yet will I not deny Thee.”

Peter said he would never forsake the Lord and that He would die first before he’d ever deny Him, yet he wasn’t able to stay awake for an hour when the Lord had asked him to.

Thus, the Lord told him to, “Watch and pray,” and in light of Peter’s resolve to follow Him and never deny Him, he was to do so “that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit is indeed willing, but the flesh is weak.”

Christ told Peter to stay awake and pray “that ye enter not into temptation,” or the temptation to forsake the Lord or deny Him. Peter’s spirit was indeed willing to never forsake or deny Christ, but his flesh was weak. Thus, Peter needed to pray to ready himself and ask God for strength to be prepared for what was about to happen.

The Lord knew Peter would fail; yet He encouraged him to victory, knowing that the resources for victory were found in prayer and faith and dependence on God.

Peter’s spirit was also willing to stay awake and to pray as Christ told him, but his flesh was weak, and we find here that he just couldn’t keep his eyes open.

And as Peter’s and the other disciples’ subsequent response to Christ’s arrest demonstrated, not heeding Christ’s words and sleeping instead of praying left their hearts unprepared for the test they faced that early morning.

There is a principle here that shows that in the spiritual warfare, a battle is often won or lost before the crisis comes.

When a bird is sleeping on its perch, it does not fall off. How does it manage to do this?

The secret is in the tendons of the bird’s legs. God designed the legs that when it is bent at the knee, the claws contract and grip like a steel trap.

The claws refuse to let go until the knees are unbent again. The bended knee gives the bird the ability to hold on to his perch so tightly.

Bending our knees in prayer in Scripture is about earnestness in prayer, and when we pray diligently and with intensity, whether literally bending our knees in prayer or figuratively bowing our hearts to Him, it is about us holding on to God tightly. And it is our dependence on Him that will keep us from falling in life.

The Lord went away a second time to pray. Luke adds a couple of facts to the Lord fervently praying in Gethsemane. First, he stated, “And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him.”

Christ desired to have the company of Peter, James, and John near Him as He prayed for support and comfort. But since He was not receiving any strength or companionship from these sleeping disciples, His Father sent an angel to help and encourage Him.

Luke also describes the Lord’s intensity of His Garden prayer in Luke 22:44 this way, “And being in an agony He prayed more earnestly: and His sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”

In his book, The Case for Easter, Lee Strobel interviewed Dr. Alexander Metherell, who has extensively studied the historical, archaeological, and medical data concerning the death of Christ. And they discussed Christ sweating blood in Gethsemane.

Dr. Metherell stated, “This is a known medical condition called hematidrosis. It’s not very common, but it is associated with a high degree of…stress.

“What happens is that severe anxiety causes the release of chemicals that break down the capillaries in the sweat glands. As a result, there’s a small amount of bleeding into these glands, and the sweat comes out tinged with blood.”

Interestingly, Luke, a physician, is the only Gospel writer who noted this phenomenon.

Just the fact that Christ was sweating as He prayed is significant. Because on this night at Caiaphas’s house where Peter denied the Lord, John 18:18 tells us, “And the servants and officers stood there, who had made a fire of coals; FOR IT WAS COLD: and they warmed themselves: and Peter stood with them, and warmed himself.”

Christ not only was sweating while He prayed, but in the stress and agony of His prayer, it was a bloody sweat of “great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”

The Lord’s second prayer is one of determination. He prayed, “O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.”

A. J. Gordon put it well that, “‘Thy will be done’ is the keynote to which every prayer must be tuned.”

The first time He prayed, the Lord made a positive request, “If it be possible,” but now He prayed and His request was negative: if it is not possible. In the first request, He longed for the cup to pass from Him, but now He mentions drinking the cup.

In the first plea, He said, “Nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt” and the second time He prayed simply, “Thy will be done.”

The main thought in the second and third prayers of Gethsemane is not “let this cup be taken from Me,” but “Thy will be done.”

Christ knew that His Father’s will must be accomplished and that the only way was the way of the Cross, and so in submission, obedience, and determination, He committed Himself to drink that cup, whatever the cost.

He had a spirit of resolve that since this cup was not to pass from Him and that He must drink it, He was going to the cross to fulfill the Father’s will.

After praying a while longer, Christ returned to find Peter, James, and John asleep again. Their eyes were heavy and they did not have the strength to keep their eyelids open. But this second time He came back, the Lord did not wake them.

Instead, the Lord left and prayed a third time, saying the same words as He had been.

Our Lord, praying three times, speaks of the earnestness of His prayer to the Father. It reminds us of the Apostle Paul and how he prayed three times that his thorn in the flesh be removed, showing his earnest desire that it be removed.

After His third time praying, the Lord returned to the disciples and woke them up, telling them, “Sleep on now, and take your rest,” or you may as well sleep now, it’s too late to pray and gain strength for the testing ahead, here they come.

Christ told them, “behold, the hour is at hand,” as it was the hour of His betrayal and the time for drinking the cup of God’s wrath at the Cross.

Christ told the disciples that the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners, as Judas and the arresting party were entering the garden, and it was time to rise and be on their way. The Lord’s words, “Let us be going,” refer to advance and not retreat.

Christ made no effort to escape from His betrayer; He submitted Himself to the will of God. Christ was going forward toward the cross to do the Father’s will.

And as it’s been said, “The sleepers…have lost their opportunity to gain strength through prayer. By contrast Jesus has prayed in agony, but now rises with poise and advances to meet His betrayer.”