Our Savior's Sorrow: How to Face Adversity, Matthew 26:36-46

 

Open your Bibles with me to Matthew chapter 26. We have been in Matthew now for almost three years and it may take us a little while going through the last part because there is not only so much here, but also each of these last three chapters is extremely long. There is so much in some of these sections. Even though it is mostly narrative this section we are in right now has conversation, it has dialogue, and that is important to understand.

 

There are things said here that are not always understood. It goes beyond our finite minds to fully comprehend the depths of the suffering that the Lord went through that night before he went to the cross as he anticipated what would happen the next day. But there are important things that we can understand, and in my reading and study of a lot of things that have been written about the Lord's time in the garden of Gethsemane and his prayer, it also has impressed me that there are aspects to this that are just not probed. They are not probed for number of reasons, but they're just not, and there are some fascinating things that are going on here—not that I'm going to cover everything exhaustively but try at least to answer some questions, and to probe what's going on here because we know that all Scripture is given to us for instruction, for rebuke, for correction and instruction in righteousness.

 

So we are to learn from this that all Scripture has been breathed out by God. And this extends to every word. These aren't just interesting little stories are descriptions of things that happened a long time ago in the life of Jesus, but they are recorded for our benefit and for us to learn. Today were going to look at this as a pattern for how to handle and face adversity.

 

What we have seen so far is that this is part of the last week of our Lord on the earth. And as I examined the Scriptures and we look at the Gospels there's so much that is in the Gospels. I think somewhere between one fourth to one third of what we know about the life of our Lord Jesus Christ occurred in that last week; maybe a little bit more because we have in the Gospel of John we have chapters 13-18, 19 and 20 when you include the crucifixion and resurrection. That's a huge chunk of the Gospel of John. We have in Matthew from chapter 20 as Jesus is ascending to Jerusalem about seven days before the cross, from Matthew chapter 20 through Matthew chapter 28. That's eight chapters, so when you combine that, that's a huge chunk, and we have two of the largest sections in Scripture of His instruction recorded that took place during this time. We studied the Olivet discourse, which had to do with answering questions related to God's plan for Israel and the Jewish people in terms of fulfillment of prophecy. That was in Matthew 24 and 25.

 

And then, it is not part of our study but in the Gospel of John is what is called the upper room discourse, from John 13 through 17, which all relates to the upper room and what He taught on the way to the garden of Gethsemane, and then what began to transpire there. All of that is recorded for us. That is a big chunk of our Lord's teaching, which was just within this last week.

 

We have seen that the context of our section here that begins in verse 36, where we read that Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane and said to this disciples, "Sit here while I go and pray over there".

 

They are walking from the roughly the area of what is known as Mount Zion, which is a little bit to the south and west of the Temple Mount, and they are coming around the edge of the Temple Mount.

 

There was an area that was called a garden of Gethsemane. Now what we think of as a garden is something that has been a well kept. It may be a vegetable garden, it may be a flower garden, and so that communicates something to the English mind that is not exactly what the way in which it was used at that time. There is the same problem when it talks about the tomb of Christ: that there was a garden near the place of crucifixion. A garden can just be an area where there are trees, an area where there are no buildings. It can be it can be a flower garden, it can be a grove of olive trees, it can be any of those kinds of things.

 

This is a time of testing for our Lord, it is a time of testing for His disciples, and as I pointed out last time testing has two aspects. The word PEIRASMOS, the noun, has can also be translated temptation, because in the midst of an objective test there is the attraction to disobeying, to do things the wrong way. That's the internal subjective side of a temptation, and often because we are sinners we are drawn to that sinful side. Scripture defined sin is anything that is contrary to the will of God, anything that is apart from faith. In other places it is anything that is contrary to the character of God. That is the nature of sin. When we try to go it alone instead of in dependence upon God that leads to sin. That is what sin is; it is acting apart from God, being independent of God rather than dependent upon God.

 

Now the reason I'm emphasizing this as we go through this section is because part of the questions that are that come to people's mind in the midst of this is that it's clear that Jesus is going through an emotionally traumatic event. That is often overlooked by a lot of people because it raises questions about the impeccability of Jesus. Now that's a big word. It refers to his sinlessness, and the idea that the sinless Jesus has this emotional turmoil somehow doesn't gel with our preconceived notions of Jesus in a perfect humanity: that if you are perfect and have omniscience you are not going to have these kinds of problems. But as a human being, even as a sinless human being, He has the same nature that we do.

 

That is why God had to enter into human history and become a man. God could not die for sin, but a man had to die for sin, to stand in the place of man, and as such he had to be two things. He had to be true humanity. He was in some sort of blend between God and Man—sort of take a little deity, take a little humanity and mix it together. That was one early misconception in the church. And it is not that these are so disparate, so distinct that they are not united.

 

When we study what we call the hypostatic union—hypostatic is the Greek word HUPOSTASIS, which refers to substance or the nature of Jesus—He has the full one hundred per cent nature of God, He is undiminished deity on the one hand; on the other hand, He is perfect humanity. He is complete human; He is not missing anything. And these two natures were somehow united together in the single person of Jesus.

 

Sometimes you will hear people say, well Jesus did that in His deity. That's not the best way to put it. A better way to put it is, that Jesus could do that reveals that He was fully God, that Jesus suffered emotional anguish in the garden of Gethsemane shows that he was truly human; but the one person. That definition that goes back to the Nicene Creed in 325 AD, that you have the undiminished deity and the true humanity of Jesus, united together in one person.

 

The one person of Jesus is suffering anguish at and got Gethsemane. It's that one person who turned the water into wine. Changing water into wine showed that he was fully God. That demonstrated that He was the creator. Healing the lepers demonstrated that he was fully God. It is not like this multiple personality, He is one person united together.

 

Now that's a heavy thought for a lot of people because it goes beyond our ability to fully comprehend it. We can understand the truth, but we can't understand it exhaustively. The writer of Hebrews says a lot about this. Hebrews 4:15 says that we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses. That is a double negative. Do not and cannot cancel each other to make a positive. So what he is saying is that we have a high priest who can sympathize with our weaknesses. Why? Because He was fully human. He went through the same kinds of things that we did. Yet, as it says here, without sin.

 

So whatever happens in the garden of Gethsemane reveals to us that He is going through the pressure of the test, but He is not choosing to respond to the test in a way that violates the will of God. But the pressure is real, it is significant, and it is very much a part of His of his maturation process in His humanity.

 

Hebrew 2:10 NASB "For it was fitting for Him [God the Father], for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to perfect the author of their salvation [Jesus] through sufferings".

 

In His humanity He had to grow from being a baby to being an adolescent to being an adult, and He had to grow spiritually. He had to learn the Scriptures, He had to memorize the Scriptures, He had to apply the Scriptures, and He had to because He is a pattern for every human being.

 

Now when we take these elements of who Jesus is, and we look at what's going on here, we recognize that that something profound is happening, something that that makes a lot of people a little bit uncomfortable because they don't slice the baloney thin enough.

 

One of my seminary professors always loved that phrase, that some people sliced the baloney too thin. It just means that we have to get detailed enough in our understanding to realize that on the one hand, Jesus doesn't sin but on the other hand, He is profoundly pressured to sin. And what we see here is that pressure that is perfectly pictured by that olive press imagery that's going on in Gethsemane. I pointed out last time that this is revealed by these words in Matthew that He is sorrowful, is deeply distressed. Mark uses also uses the word for being deeply distressed, but he uses a different word for troubled. Matthew's two words are LUPEO for sorrowful, which has to do with the grief, grieving, being set extremely sorrowful, and ODEMONEO, which means to be burdened. He is under pressure.

 

Mark uses this word EKTHAMBEO, which has the root idea of something that can cause a surprise. So some people raise the question: What surprised Jesus at this time? I think the answer that can be somewhat subjective, but one writer, a former seminary professor of mine who many years ago wrote a paper on this, makes the suggestion. He is right on target, but I think he's not the center of the target but I think he's close, and that is there's an element of pressure that is going on here in the garden of Gethsemane that's related to the angelic conflict, that there is a temptation. We haven't heard much from Satan. You look at the fact that in the life of Jesus you start off back in Matthew four with the temptation where Jesus ago is taken by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to the three temptations of Jesus by Satan. We don't hear anything about Satan again until we get later on when you get to the point where Peter is encouraging the Lord to go ahead and bring in the kingdom, and Jesus says get behind me Satan.

 

 What Peter is saying there has its origin from satanic influence. And then when we get to this point, we recognize that Satan has indwelt Judas, that Jesus has told Peter that Satan has asked for permission to sift him, and that Satan suddenly seems to be more a focal point. Even though he's not mentioned right in this context this is the ultimate struggle between righteousness and evil as its Jesus is preparing to go to the cross to pay for our sins. And so this is part of this dynamic that is going on here. In some sense, Jesus in His humanity is becoming aware of a dimension of this pressure, and He is seeing what is going to happen the next day.

 

It's not new news to Him. How many times have we heard that He has proclaimed that He is going to go to Jerusalem, He is going to be betrayed, He is going to be crucified, He is going to be buried, and He is going rise on the third day. None of that is new information, but I think in His humanity there is a new realization that on the next day the sins of the world are going to be poured out on Him and He is going to be judicially separated from the Father, and this is a profound realization that is causing this anguish.

 

We can't minimize this anguish. Some people want to minimize the anguish because they're not comfortable with Jesus being emotional. You avoid this. There is a state of the emotion that occurs when somebody is under extreme pressure where he sweats blood. Luke the physician is the only one who tells us this: that the pressure became so great in this time in the garden that our Lord sweated blood. It is just the pressure is so great that the tiny capillaries begin to leak blood into the sweat glands. It is extremely rare, but there are known cases of this taking place. This happens because of the degree of pressure that our Lord is feeling.

 

The writer of Hebrews, later on, says in reference to those who are not resisting temptation says, have you resisted to the point of death?  Jesus is fighting this external pressure, so that tells us that whatever the pressures may be in your life or mine they don't even come close to the pressure that Jesus felt in his humanity when He is in the garden of Gethsemane—the pressure to disobey God, the pressure to go His own way, the pressure to follow an independent will, as it were.

 

Hebrews 5:7-9 NASB "In the days of His flesh, He offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety. Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered. And having been made perfect, He became to all those who obey Him the source of eternal salvation"

 

"in the days of his flesh when he had offered up prayers and supplications". He uses those two words to emphasize the intensity of his prayer. When Jesus is in the garden--we don't know how long He was there—He makes this statement to Peter: "You couldn't watch for just an hour", so He probably was there for more than 15 or 20 minutes. He was certainly praying what we have recorded here. For example, in verse 39 he prays, "Oh my Father". "My father" is an extremely intimate phrase. Mark in the parallel uses the phrase, "Abba Father". Abba but is Hebrew for daddy. It's an intimate term. Paul says that we now cry Abba Father. We have that kind of an intimate relationship with the Father once we are saved. We are in the family of God, we are in the body of Christ, and we have that same intimate relationship. This is the only time that we have Jesus using this term expressing this close intimacy and dependence on the Father. This is a time of intense prayer.

 

I believe that the writer of Hebrews, though he doesn't specifically identify this time, indicates that this is what he is talking about through the context rest of what he says. The days of his flesh, that is, His humanity, His incarnation. "É when he had offered up prayers and supplications". Notice the

Next line. "Éwith vehement cries, with intense cries, audible cries." Then when you look at the text in the Synoptics and at what Matthew says,

 

Matthew 26:39 NASB And He went a little beyond {them,} and fell on His face and prayed, saying, ÒMy Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as You will.Ó

 

He fell on his face. That's an important thing, Luke says that he knelt down and prayed. Mark says he fell down. Matthew gives us the full account: He fell on his face and prayed. He is prostrate.

 

This is not uncommon in a Middle Eastern personality. We, most of us, come out of a Indo-European background and we don't want to get too in touch with our emotions, and we certainly don't want to get too emotional to excited about anything. So when we pray we are going to close our eyes. One of our heads about 20¡ tilt; we don't want anybody to think that we might be getting emotional. But if you were Jewish you would typically get down on your knees when you prayed, and you would pray out loud. We often think of prayer is something that is just silent. We have silent prayers more than audible prayers. Not that that's wrong, that's just the difference in culture and orientation. But when things were intense, they would get down, prostrate lying down on their face, fully stretched out in a position of subservience and submission to God in their prayer. And that physical posture is designed to exhibit the intensity and the importance of the prayer. And so Jesus falls on his face and He prays.

 

One of the important things for us to realize when we are going through any sort of testing or temptation is prayer. I often talk about the spiritual skills, the stress busters, the problem-solving devices. Prayer in and of itself is not a problem-solving device. Prayer is a tool, because we pray in confession, we pray to express trust, we pray to express our love for God. Prayer is a vehicle for all of these different, distinctive things that we've identified. So prayer is the vehicle, prayer is communicating to God what our needs are and how we are trusting God. It is a way in which we work through a situation.

 

We have seen this as we talked about the psalms: that the psalms express the emotions that David feels. In many cases, David is overwhelmed by his circumstances. These circumstances that generated emotions from fear, worry, anger, and sometimes he's totally confused by what God is doing, and he expresses that to God, not in a sinful way. Remember in the Psalms he says, be angry and do not sin. He is angry when he looks out at the world and the wicked are prospering and the righteous are suffering, and he comes to God, he said I don't understand it; this isn't right. He's not saying academically, "I don't understand the problem of evil here, Lord". He's not having a philosophical discussion in the way he's expressing himself in these psalms.

 

Part of what it means to go to the Lord with our problems is to be willing to be honest with God that it's a problem. Not in a way where we are just accusing God, but to work through the solution to a difficulty in our life. We have to first of all, admit, acknowledge there's really a problem here. I'm confused; I'm upset; I don't understand. Then what happens is, we don't stop there. A lot of people stop with their anger with God, their bitterness, their resentment and they just stop there upset; they don't work through the process. They get to bat and then they strike out.

 

In the Psalms we see the same pattern that we see with our Lord here. There is a progression of thought. As David thinks about who God is and the problem, he works from identifying and admitting and expressing the problem to talking about the character of God, talking about the plan and the purpose of God. And many times he will rehearse things that God has done for him in the past. As he does this his mental attitude shifts from the problem to the perfect solution to the problem, and his trust in God. And he closes with praise to God. That's what we do in the process.

 

It's not just because sometimes someone has said you ought to express your anger to God. People say, well why? It's being honest. Otherwise become to God and act like everything's okay, and were really got have it together, and were just blowing smoke God, to be honest we have to express where we are emotionally, but don't stop there. Don't sit and dwell in it. Don't have a little spiritual pity party; don't have a little anger attacking God, you move through it as you think. You have to have doctrine in your soul. You have to have the teaching of the word of God in your soul, you have tom have Scripture that's memorized, you have to understand who God is and what His planning purpose is, so you can apply it in the thought progression. Otherwise, your prayers are pretty empty because there's nothing to have a conversation about. That's why people find that reading the Psalms is so important, because it impacts how they are thinking.

 

Jesus is offering up prayers and supplications with vehement cries and tears. Notice the level of the emotion that there is. He's weeping. :É and tears to him who was able to save him from death". Now this isn't physical death. When it gets into the point when Jesus prays, let this cup pass from me, it is clear that that cup is a reference to the cup of God's wrath. The term that is used here in the Greek is a term that is used is one word in particular that is used when talking metaphorically of the cup of God's wrath. It is talking about judgment, and that judgment to come on the cross is not the judgment of physical death. The judgment it's going to come is the judgment of spiritual death, the judicial separation of the Son from the Father. You can't have an ontological separation. That means that He can't be separated in His being from the Father; He and the Father are one. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one in the Trinity; you can't split Him off. But when the Father imputes the sins of mankind to Jesus on the cross, because the Father can't have fellowship with that which is sinful—He is judicially He isn't a sinner but Paul says He becomes sin for us—so that He is judicially separated from the Father. And as He anticipates that, that is what he is talking about here: to save him from spiritual death.

 

I think it's more than that, and I'm still working through a lot of this is. I'm reading and studying and thinking it through, but some of the language that is used here suggests that Jesus is fearful that He s going pay the penalty for sin, but there's not going to be the recovery, restoration, and resurrection that comes afterwards. This is the midst of this intense spiritual conflict in the angelic conflict. Later on He is going to pray in the second prayer, "If this cup cannot pass away from me unless I drink it, your will be done." It will pass but only if He drinks it. But His prayer is basically to make it through the whole process, culminating in that resurrection.

 

That's why when we read in Hebrews 5:7, "tears to him who is able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his godly fear". God didn't keep Him from either physical death or spiritual death, but He took Him through the process and brought Him out the other end, and He was resurrected, and He ascended and is at the right hand of the Father.

 

Hebrews 5:8 says: "Though he was a Son, yet he learned obedience by the things he suffered." When it uses the phrase Son, that's a reference to His deity. But because He is also human He had to grow. He had to learn obedience by the things he suffered. That doesn't mean that he was ever disobedient, but He had to go through that same learning process that every one of us goes through. But we learn more from what we fail in than what we do right. Jesus is the perfectly obedient Son, but He has to be obedient for that maturity to engage. That is how He has perfected. Perfect doesn't mean flawless because He was already flawless. Being perfected is the idea of being matured, being brought to completion, spiritual growth. So having been perfected, He became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey Him.

 

What we see here is something that takes us back to basic material that we covered many, many times over the course of our study. That is, that when we face adversity in life we have to understand that there's a difference between the external adversity and that which happens internally.

 

I want to go back and just try to take something abstract and chart it out for us. Every human being is made up of three components. We have a physical human body that was made from the dust of the earth, the chemicals of the soil—Genesis chapter 2. Then God breathed into man the breath of life. He has a soul that is in the image of God. He is a self-consciousness (I am). He has a mentality (I think). He has a conscience (I ought), and he has volition (I will). That's what makes up soul.

 

Then there is a third element that which binds it all together, what we describe as the human spirit. When man dies spiritually that human spirit is lost. So that he is soulish. The Greek word is PSUCHIKOS. The unsaved person is referred to as a natural man. The Greek word, there is PSUCHIKOS, he is just soulless, he is not spiritual. He doesn't have that spirit. He is spiritually dead.

 

He still has biological and mental functions, but he is separated from God who is the source of all life. And when we trust in Christ we receive the human spirit, we are regenerate, we are born again; and that can never be taken from us.

 

We have our soul is inside of our brain. But when we have external adversity, we normally respond with our sin nature, and that right and that creates fragmentation in the soul. We associate that with all those negative emotions. With negative volition we choose not to obey God, so that puts us in nature control; it controls our soul.

 

But Jesus doesn't have that. So when Jesus faces adversity it is just putting external pressure on Him. But that pressure was severe at this time. This is this is His final test in His humanity before He goes to the cross. We learn from this how He addresses the solution in terms of His will versus God's will. Jesus had as a person, second person of the Trinity, a will, but that will has always been dependent upon the Father. He has never exercised it independently. That was the pressure, the test in the garden. It was that He operate independently of the Father, and that's the test we all face as human beings.

 

Our default position is to operate independently from God. Our default position is to do it our own way. Our default position is to first try our solution and then try His solution. But Jesus doesn't have that internal pressure from the sin nature. He is pressured though to take a different course to avoid the cross. But He says in verse 39, "If it's possible". Theoretically, it is possible. He uses a first-class condition. He says, assuming it's possible let this cup pass from me, but He also knows that it's not possible because He has to complete the plan of salvation. And then He says, "Not as I will, but as you will".

 

He says I'm not going to operate independently of your plan. No matter how great the pressure is we are going to do it your way, and then He comes back to the disciples in verse 40.

Slides