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JESUS’ AGONY IN GETHSEMANE
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30
Luke 22:39-46

Hebrews 5:7-9

 

“…being in an agony

he prayed more earnestly…”

 

JESUS’ AGONY IN GETHSEMANE
 
Gethsemane (“oil press”) was an olive tree garden beyond the Kidron Valley, East of Jerusalem, near the Mount of Olives. The “oil press” garden with the twisted branches typical of olive trees vividly portrays the intense agony that Jesus went through. The agony was so great that He sweated drops of blood. Although He struggled in His flesh knowing the pain, suffering, and death to come, yet He willingly obeyed His Father’s will to go to the cross (Heb 5:7-9).
 
At the beginning of His public ministry, Jesus was tempted by Satan in the wilderness. Now at the end, He was tested again, this time by His humanity. Indeed, Christ was tempted and tested to the uttermost so that He might be our sympathetic great High Priest who “was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Heb 4:15).
 
Calvin said, “Those who pretend the Son of God was immune from human passions do not truly and seriously acknowledge Him as a man. When the divine power of Christ is said to have reposed as it were in concealment for a time … to allow Him to fulfil the Redeemer’s role of suffering, this is so far from being an absurdity, that the mystery of our salvation could not have been fulfilled otherwise.”
 
His prayer was answered because He prayed obediently, “not my will, but thine, be done.” Jesus, being fully God and fully Man, has two wills, the divine and the human. His human will would like the cup removed, but His divine will which was the same as the Father’s would have the cup drunk as eternally decreed. Jesus subjected His human will to the divine will. His prayer that the Father’s will be done was answered (Heb 5:7). Although there was a holy tension between His human will and divine will (the dynamics of which we are unable to fathom), His divine will was in perfect harmony with His Father’s—“I and my Father are one” (John 10:30).
 
THOUGHT: (Read James 5:16.)

PRAYER: Father, teach me to pray like Jesus.

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