The following sermon was delivered
on Sunday evening, February 2, 1997, at the Trinity Baptist Church
of Montville, New Jersey. Now may I encourage you to turn
with me to the 26th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, and follow as I read a portion
of the account of those final hours in the life of our Lord
Jesus that we read at our communion service last month as we work
our way through passion narratives of the four gospel writers in
Matthew chapter 26 beginning with verse 36, the
incident that we commonly call our Lord's Prayer in the Garden
of Gethsemane. Matthew chapter 26, and I begin
the reading at verse 36. Then comes Jesus with them into
a place called Gethsemane, and said unto his disciples, Sit
here while I go yonder and pray. And he took with him Peter and
the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful and sore
troubled. Then said he unto them, My soul
is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. Abide here, and watch
with me. And he went forward a little,
and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, My father, if it be possible,
let this cup pass away. Nevertheless, not as I will,
but as you will. He comes to the disciples and
finds them sleeping, and said unto Peter, What, could you not
watch with me one hour? Watch and pray that you enter
not into temptation, the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh
is weak. Again the second time he went
away and prayed, saying, My father, if this cannot pass away except
I drink it, your will be done. And he came again and found them
sleeping, for their eyes were heavy. And he left them again,
and went away, and prayed a third time, saying again the same words. Then he comes to the disciples,
and says to 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. Arise, let us be going. Behold,
he is at hand that betrays me. In a recently published little
book entitled, The Cross He Bore, Very Choice, Helpful Meditations
on the Sufferings of Our Lord Jesus, the author Frederick Leahy,
a ministerial colleague of our dear friend and esteemed brother,
Pastor Ted Donnelly of Northern Ireland, wrote on page 67 these
very pregnant words, Our thoughts might well be of
the cup Christ drank, the cup he refused, and the cup from
which he will drink with us in glory." That was the concluding
statement of his meditations on the cup Christ refused, the
cup of drugged wine. And when I read those words on
the morning of January 9, in conjunction with my own devotions,
I wrote beneath that sentence, for there's a lot of blank page
at the end of that chapter, possible communion meditations. And when
it was decided that I should plan to bring the next few communion
meditations, my mind was immediately drawn back to that statement
of Frederick Leahy, and as I reflected upon it, the more I reflected,
the more I was convinced that perhaps God would be pleased
to own as our communion meditations over the next couple of months,
God sparing us, a treatment of the three cups of our Savior. The cup that He drank, the cup
that He refused, and the cup that He will yet drink. And tonight we focus our attention
upon the first of those three cups of our Savior, the cup that
He drank. And as we attempt to focus our
minds upon the cup that He drank, our minds are immediately thrust
into the holy ground of that place called Gethsemane. I don't know if it's ever struck
you that of all the recorded words of our Lord spoken from
the cross itself, the so-called seven words of Christ, Only one
of them begins to take us into the depths of his own inner struggles
as he was bearing our sins in his own body up to and upon the
tree. Only the words, My God, My God,
why have you forsaken me? are, as it were, an inlet to
the deepest recesses of his soul. The other words are primarily
concerned either with the needs of others. Father, forgive them,
for they know not what they do. Today you shall be with me in
paradise. Woman, behold thy son. Son, behold thy mother. Or they
are an expression of his physical agony. I thirst. Or of the triumph
of his work. It is finished. Into your hands
I commend my spirit. So we are given very little of
the inner struggle of the soul of our Lord Jesus when upon the
cross. But when we come to Gethsemane,
we have that which the servant of God of another generation
called the shadow of Calvary. And there in Gethsemane we see
a dark but clearly defined, sharply etched shadow cast backward from
the cross, the events of which were yet to unfold that in many
ways give us a deeper insight to the very agony of the cross
than do the things recorded about the time that our Lord actually
spent upon the cross. Throughout the Gethsemane account,
the language is nothing short of vigorous and vivid, and at
times, if we take it at face value, it is shocking and pathetic
in the true sense of that word, full of the deepest pathos. Reading
the parallel accounts of Matthew 26, Mark 14, and Luke 22, we
find such words as, He was greatly amazed and sore troubled, exceeding
sorrowful even to the point of death. that he fell upon his
face or in the more vivid graphic description of Mark he uses a
form of the verb that he was continually falling upon his
face. The picture of a man wounded
or drunk who staggers and falls and rises and staggers and falls
in repeated acts of rising and falling. We read in Luke that
being in an agony His sweat became, as it were, great drops of blood
falling down upon the ground. Then added to all of this graphic
descriptive language is the unveiled mystery of the internal struggle
which the holy, unsinning humanity of Jesus is expressing in this
unashamed expression of aversion to what lay before Him. O my
Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me." He prays
again similar words the second and the third time. And central
to all of this descriptive language, culminating in this aversion
of his holy sinless will to all that lay before him, is this
issue that centers around the cup that he must drink. I ask you to note that in Matthew
26, 39, this is explicit in the words of Jesus. He went forward
a little and fell on his face and prayed, saying, My Father,
if it be possible, let this cup pass away. From me, in verse
42, again a second time, he went away and prayed, saying, My father,
if this, the this being the cup, cannot pass away, except I drink
it, thy will be done. And so we must ask several questions
with respect to this that is central to all of the graphic
and vivid language that pertains to the agony of Gethsemane, a
shadow of Calvary and of Golgotha. And the first question we must
ask is this, what was this cup? The cup that our Lord must drink,
and the cup that He does drink, for in John 18.11 He says, the
cup that my Father has given me, shall I not drink it? What was this cup? Well, I know
no answer more condensed and yet more biblically accurate
than is given by the man I've referred to earlier, Hugh Martin,
the Scottish theologian and pastor and preacher of the 19th century,
who wrote in answer to that question, what was that cup? This is what he said. But doubtless
the sorrow arose from the source that his prayer was concerned
with, the vivid view and near approach of that cup which the
Father was just giving him to drink. That curse of God from
which he came to redeem his elect people, that sword of the Lord's
wrath and vengeance which he had just predicted, the penal
desertion of the cross, the withdrawal of all comfortable views and
influences, and the present consciousness of the anger of God against him
as the substitute of his people, a person laden with iniquity,
these were the elements mingled in the cup of trembling which
was now to be put into his hands. And the prospect of this caused
him deadly sorrow. The cup to which our Lord makes
reference here in the Gethsemane event is the cup that is nothing
less than that vessel filled with the unmixed fury of God
against the sins of those whom Christ is willingly, voluntarily
representing, standing before the bar of eternal justice on
behalf of all of His people, the great multitude whom no man
can number, out of every kindred, tribe, and tongue, and nation,
and people. And there in that cup, as it
is put as it were in His hands, and is brought near to His spiritual
senses there in Gethsemane, there is the fetid stench of the wrath
of Almighty God against the sins of men. There is the horrible
sight of what it will mean for him to be plunged into the abyss
of outer darkness, to feel the intense pangs of the everlasting
burnings of hell itself. That cup had to be drunk even
as it is described in the book of the Revelation. where we read
in Revelation 14 a very vivid description of a similar cup. In Revelation 14 in verses 9
and 10, And another angel, a third, followed them, saying with a
great voice, If any man worships the beast in his image, and receives
a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he shall drink of the
wine of the wrath of God, which is prepared unmixed, undiluted
in the cup of his anger. And he shall be tormented with
fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the
presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment
goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest day and night. You see the picture of the cup
of God's wrath unmixed with mercy, undiluted with pity. Nothing
in this cup but the wrath of God. And here it is described
as poured out upon the wicked. Poured out unmixed is the cup
of His anger. It was this cup. that is presented
to our Lord Jesus, the cup that all of His elect would have to
drink in their own persons if He does not drink it as their
appointed and willing substitute. It is the cup composed of those
elements which God's righteousness and justice demanded as he beholds
the sins of his people, sins whose wages demand death, sins
imputed as to their guilt and culpability to Jesus, the Lamb
of God who bears away the sin of the world. What was this cup? It was a picture. of the unmixed
fury of God against the sins of his people. Now, the second
question we ask is, what was he to do with the cup? What was
he to do with the cup? Well, it's clear that once the
cup is presented to him, Jesus knows there is no alternative
as to his action in reference to the cup, but to drink it.
When you drink something, when I drink the water, I see that
objective reality, the glass that holds the water, the water
within the glass. And when I drink it, I ingest
it, I internalize it, the water becomes a part of me. And our
Lord knows when the cup is presented there in Gethsemane that it's
presented not to look at it, not to admire the pure holy justice
of the Godhead that framed the cup, not to look at the cup and
to admire the plan of redemption set in the councils of eternity
which determine there should be a substitute for sinners.
No, he knows the cup is presented to him for one purpose and one
purpose only. Therefore, he says in verse 39
of Matthew 26, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. Pass from me. Why? Because I
know that it's presented to me with one end in view. Verse 42,
My Father, if this cannot pass away, except I drink it, He knows
what he is to do with the cup. He is to drink it. He is to ingest
into his soul as I just ingested into my body the water in that
glass. He knows that he is to voluntarily
ingest into his soul the wrath of God unmixed in the cup of
his fury. It is that which is presented
to him And it was that that he knew he must do with that cup. And then we ask the third question,
was it right for him to feel an aversion at this prospect? If the cup was the presentation
of wrath unmixed with fury, And if his action in reference to
the cup was to drink it, to ingest it, to take into his soul so
as to exhaust the contents of the cup, all of the fury, all
of the wrath of God against the sins of his people, we ask the
question, was it right for him to feel an aversion, an aversion
so strong that three times he prays for its removal? An aversion so strong that in
wrestling with compliance with the presented cup, his agony
becomes so intense that it ruptures blood vessels in the capillaries
near the surface of his skin until it mingles with sweat and
looks like drops of blood, so profuse that they drop to the
ground. Was it right for him to feel
an aversion so deep and so intense that he rises and staggers and
falls to rise and stagger and fall again? This is no serene. This was not done for primetime
news on Channel 4. I answered, not only was it right,
It would have been the grossest form of impiety and hardness
of heart to have looked into that cup with anything other
than a holy aversion. Moses asked the question in Psalm
90, Who knows the power of thine anger? And by wrath, according
to the fear that is due unto you, who knows, O God, the power
of your anger, and knows it in such a way that he can render
a fear and dread of that anger commensurate with its reality?
Because of our sin, we are dull to the culpability of our sin.
Because of our blindness, we do not see clearly what our sin
deserves. But here is pure, spotless moral
purity in the person of the Son of God, exposed in His holy human
nature to bearing the unmixed fury of Deity. And He does know
the power of the wrath of God. He can gaze upon it with an eagle's
eye, undimmed by sin. He can feel by way of anticipation
its horrors, for he has never had a soul calloused by rationalizing
sin, by excusing sin, by thinking lightly of sin. Was it right for him to feel
this aversion? Anything less would have been
the height of presumption and impiety. Listen again to Hugh
Martin who writes, Considered simply in itself to desire exemption
from the wrath of God was the dictate of his holy human nature. Considered as at once both sensitive
and reasonable and holy. Not to have felt this desire
instead of being holiness to the Lord would have argued what
we tremble even to think of while we know it could not be. It would
speak daring contempt of the divine anger and will. No, to
have such impressive views as Jesus now has of His Father's
wrath, and not to be filled with an earnest longing to escape
from it, considering the matter simply by itself, would have
argued that He did not possess a true human nature with all
the sinless sensibilities which are of the very essence of humanity. For anyone to look, as it were,
into the dark abyss of outer darkness, into the seething flames
of the eternal burnings, and not to recoil, is to be inhuman
as well as ungodly. Therefore, for our Lord in His
sinless humanity to wrestle and to have a holy aversion to what
was in the cup was right and proper. But you see, there was
something of greater concern to our Lord. His thirst for our
salvation and His commitment to doing the will of the Father,
the very purpose of His incarnation. Lo, I come. It is written in
the roll of the book, I come to do your will. O God, a body
you have prepared me. And in those wrestlings that
were real, this is no sham wrestling to give us some impressive display
of the semblance of real humanity. This was real wrestling in the
real human soul and will and affections and disposition of
our blessed Lord Jesus. The overriding concern which
brings Him ultimately to the triumph of conquest He finds
as he prays and says, nevertheless not my will but yours be done. Not your will be done passively
upon me, but your will done actively by me. And everything from this
point on he walks forth with princely dignity to put himself
into the hands of those who come to apprehend him. And from there
all the way from Gabbatha And on to Golgotha. Our Lord Jesus
goes forward, the aversion notwithstanding. He chooses the will of God. And it was in the choice of the
will of God that he went to Gabbatha. He went to Golgotha. And it was
there in those three mysterious hours of darkness that he was
given to know that the dreaded anticipation of Gethsemane did
not exceed the anguish and the torment of the actual drinking
on Golgotha. May I repeat that? As he enters
into the darkness of those three hours from high noon to three
in the afternoon, he was given to know that the dreaded anticipation
of Gethsemane did not exceed the anguish and the torment of
actually drinking the cup. For thereupon the cross, the
cup is no longer presented before Him, but is placed to His lips
by His Father. And He drinks, and He drinks,
and He drinks. and drinks until the agony of
his soul burst forth in the cry, My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me? Then in a cry of triumph he said,
Tetelestai! It stands accomplished! It is
finished! He drank and drank and drank
until the last dark, fetid drop of that cup was drained. And in the reckoning of God,
that cup was thrown down and dashed to shivers on the blood-stained,
rocky soil there on Golgotha. and it has lain there shattered
ever since. O Christ, what burdens bowed
thy head, our load was laid on thee. Thou stoodest in the sinner's
stead, its bear all ill for me. Death and the curse were in our
cup. O Christ was full for thee. But thou hast drained the last
dark drop. Tis empty now for me. That bitter
cup, love drank it up. Now blessings draft for me. That's the cup that he drank. The cup that now no longer exists
for us. dashed to shivers on the blood-spattered
rocky ground at the foot of His cross. Now then, what does all
of this say to us sitting here tonight? Well, it speaks a very
powerful and sobering word to every unconverted man, woman,
boy or girl in this building tonight. If the sinless Son of
God supported by the power of the Spirit given to him without
measure. Think of it now, my unconverted
friend. Listen to me. The sinless Son of God, whose
humanity, body, soul, all that He was, supported by an unlimited
supply of the Spirit, for the Spirit was not given to Him by
measure. If that humanity, the human soul
and body of the Son of God, upheld by the fullness of the Holy Spirit,
trembles and quakes and shivers before the cup of divine fury. What, I ask you in God's name,
will you do, poor, weak, frail sinner? upheld by nothing but
divine omniscience that will keep you in everlasting existence
when Almighty God puts the cup of His fury to your lips and
says, drink. And every mouthful you drink
He will replenish. so that you drink and drink and
drink and drink and drink forever and God will fill it and fill
it and fill it forever. Isn't that what Revelation 14
says? They shall drink the cup unmixed
and they shall be tormented day and night forever. My unconverted
friend, does it not strike dread to your soul when you look into
Gethsemane and see the Holy Son of God with no accusing conscience
for sins committed by His own person? bearing imputed sin,
upheld by divine grace and power, yet he staggers like a drunk
man, falls to the ground, sweats great drops as it were of blood,
cries out in agony. What will you do when Almighty
God puts that cup to your lips? What will you do? Do you really
think You're up to the challenge? You
can go sauntering out of here tonight as you've done dozens
of times, testing and tempting Almighty
God to cut you off in your sins and give you the foretaste in
the disembodied state of what will be your frightening experience
for all eternity. God have mercy on you, my poor,
pathetic, blinded, unconverted friend tonight. If anything should
make you say, oh God, thank you that you've not cut me off in
my sins in the midst of my days. You've given me yet another opportunity
to run to this Christ who grants the cup for all, who will flee
from their sins and hide in the virtue of his substitutionary
curse bearing. all who will throw the weight
of their souls upon the one who drank the cup for sinners will
find him to be the gracious, loving friend of sinners. But there is more profoundly
even a word to us as God's people as we prepare to come to the
table and first and primarily and above all else It is a word
of consolation that comes to us from our contemplation of
the cup that he drank. Death and the curse were in his
cup. And it was full for him, but
as the hymn writer said, he has drained the last dark drop. It is empty now for me. Romans
8 in verse 1, there is therefore now, in the present moment, right
now, no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. Child of God, if you come to
the settled, marvelously comforting conviction that whatever a fatherly
chastisement is necessary to bring you into conformity to
Christ, Whatever is necessary of God's darker providences to
make you know what is in you and to discover more fully the
plenitude of grace in Christ, there is nothing of penal judicial
wrath. It was expended, exhausted, totally
vented upon Christ. The cup can hold not a drop. The cup itself was dashed to
shivers when he cried in despair. Do you exult in that tonight?
Are you bold to say that the conscience of God is satisfied
with the draining of the cup by His Son? My friend, God has
a conscience, and it's a very spructulous conscience. His conscience
is satisfied! He beholds the cup drained and
says, I raise my son from the dead to validate his cry. It is finished. All of the wrath-deservingness
of the sins of those for whom he dies, the punishment of whose
sins comprise the horrible cup, it has been drained. And as we
come to the table to eat the bread, and drink of our cup,
oh, let us remind ourselves he had a cup to drink, a cup of
cursing, a cup of damnation, a cup of dereliction, a cup of
abandonment. Our cup is called a cup of blessing,
a cup of blessing. which we bless. Is it not a participation
in the blood of Christ? Yes, a fresh participation by
faith in the consolations of the gospel that in spite of the
omniscient God's eye continuing to detect the vileness and the
deception and the deviousness yet within me, yet in Christ
there is no condemnation. Are you rejoicing in the blessed
privileges purchased for you, not by way of anticipation alone,
the ones that are yet to come, but present participation, present
possession, now, no condemnation? Surely there is in the cup he
drank a word of fresh consolation to every child of the living
God. But then there is also a word
of conviction. A word of conviction, yes. When
we begin to view our sins in the light of the cup of Gethsemane
and realize that that was the cup that he took to his hands
upon Golgotha, I ask you, can you look into the cup that caused
the Son of God to be sore amazed and troubled and talk about little
sins? Can you look into the cup, the
very sight of which drove him to his knees, caused him to stagger
like a drunk man, to be in such intense agony that his physical
frame, under the exertion of wrestling with the holy aversion,
has burst capillaries? And can you talk about little
sins? Can you? Can you even think about
little sins? A little compromise? a little
irritation with husband or wife, a little look of lust, a little
desire of covetousness, a little inclination to pride and to vanity
and irritation. Every time you are tempted in
the language of one of our wonderful hymns, you who think of sin but
lightly, hear its guilt, may estimate. Bring the cup before
you and that, quote, little sin. sniffeth smell in the cut, its
fetid devilish hellish scent. And pray God for grace in the
power of Christ to flee that youthful lust, to mortify that
sin, to cut off that offending member and to cast it from As we think of the cup he drank,
it brings not only a word of consolation and also a word of
conviction, but finally it brings us a word of instruction. For
this whole incident of our Lord embracing the cup that he drank
is referred to in Hebrews 5 as a peculiar crucible of learning,
the principle of obedience. Hebrews chapter 5, a direct allusion,
a direct reference to Gethsemane. We read in verse 7 of Hebrews
5, Who in the days of his flesh, having offered up prayers and
supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able
to save him from death, and having been heard for his godly fear,
though he was a son A perfect son, a sinless son, yet learned
obedience by the things which he suffered. You see our Lord
learning in a new plateau of experiential awareness the principle
of obedience in Gethsemane. when His greatest act of redemptive
accomplishment is before Him, that for which He had become
incarnate, that towards which He had looked, but now, as the
hour draws near, and He begins to experience in the depths of
His soul what it will actually mean to be the Lamb of God who
finally and fully bears away the sins of the world. What it
will mean to drink into his soul, to ingest spiritually, emotionally,
psychologically, physically, the full unleashed fury of the
wrath of God. There is a holy aversion in all
of his holy humanity. Yet, yet, in that holy humanity,
he deliberately chooses the will of his father, even though it
leads to his deepest baptism of suffering. And if the Son of God needed
that to learn obedience as a principle of life, He learned obedience. I didn't write it, the Holy Ghost
did. You got this silly notion that Christ was divine and as
the divine human Son of God, why, He just sort of floated
into acts of obedience. No, He didn't. He sweat as it
were great drops of blood. Have you ever faced such agony? when there were contrary and
equally pulling alternatives before you, and yet so committed
to do the will of God, that bringing all of your psyche into line
with your renewed judgment, you burst capillaries? I never have.
I've groaned, I've sweat, I've cried, and I've moaned, but I
never took a hanky out and found it red with blood. What a soft
age we are! Shall we be carried to the skies
on flowery beds of ease? What little saintlings we are!
Why? Born in ease! Raised in ease! Immediate gratification! Run
from hardship! Pop a pill! Flip on the TV! Find a feather bed of consolation
in some carnal delight! God have mercy upon us. God's
committed to make us like His Son. And if we're going to be
made like His Son, we'll learn obedience like His Son did. Though
He were a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which
He suffered. The great lesson of the cup is,
we too will follow in the train of our Savior. However, with
this great disparity, Any suffering we endure in the path of obedience
has no penal judgment in it, it has no wrath in it, it has
nothing of the contents of the cup, for He drained those contents. Never will one drop be placed
back in on behalf of those for whom He drank it. So may we as
we come to the table tonight as God's people Know afresh the
consolations of the cup that he drank. May we know the conviction
that ought to come from the cup that he drank. And may we embrace
the instruction that comes from the cup that he drank. Let us pray. Our Father, we confess to you
that at times we feel as though we pollute and defile the very
holy ground of Gethsemane and Golgotha when we attempt to meditate
upon it and speak of it. Take our pathetic efforts to
speak the unspeakable, to expound the inexplainable. O Lord, May
your spirit take the truth as it is in Christ and help us,
oh help us, to grasp with deeper understanding and firmer faith
the realities of the cup that our Savior drank. Seal these
truths to our hearts and oh God would it not please you to answer
our cry that you would take the proclamation of Christ suffering
and crucified for sinners and use it to draw some out of themselves
and out of a state of rebellion and pride and cause them to flee
to Christ. Here you place the unmixed cup
of your fury to their lips and make them drink it for all eternity. Have mercy upon sinners amongst
us, we pray, and continue with us in this period of remembrance
at the table for Jesus' sake. Amen.