Saying, Father, if Thou be willing, remove this cup from Me. Nevertheless, not My will but Thine be done. Luke 22:42
The setting of our text is one that grips our attention. With our imagination, we picture the garden scene in which the Lord Jesus is prostrate in prayer as His disciples doze a short distance away. The intensity of His prayers wrings the perspiration in great drops from his straining form. This was not a brief prayer, either, its intensity lasting for periods long enough that His disciples go to sleep as they conduct their fitful watch. As all this is occurring, we are aware that the Lord Jesus is fully experiencing the awful anticipation of what lies before Him, and can already hear the beat of the feet of those who will come to arrest Him. Are the words of the prayer that Jesus utters at this moment a plea for release from the torment of the cross? Is Jesus making a decision at this point whether to go through with Calvary? No. Even in the agony of the awful anticipation, He is declaring that the unchangeable purpose of the Father is the unalterable purpose of the Son.
Revelation 13:8 reminds us that the Lamb was slain from the foundations of the world. Throughout the Old Testament are foreshadows, promises, and types that declare the Seed of the Woman Who would bruise the serpent’s head. For the Scriptures to be fulfilled – and be fulfilled they must – the Lamb must be offered and the Saviour must suffer. All of the Word of God foretold and described it. So there was no decision to be made in Gethsemane.
If we follow the birth, life, and ministry of the Lord Jesus, we will find constant references to His death for sins. Simeon spoke of it as he held the holy Infant in the temple. Jesus spoke of it as He conversed with His disciples (Matthew 16:21). His institution of the Lord’s Supper on the Passover night provided a deep insight into the sacrifice that would transcend the paschal lambs of Egypt’s delivery. After all that He had declared, there was no question of the outcome of His passion in Gethsemane.
The agony of Gethsemane was not something that we can even understand. But this we know, that its agonies changed nothing about the Father’s giving of His Son for us, and of the Son’s commitment to be our Lamb of God. -Jim MacIntosh