Saturday, March 5, 2005
Matthew 26:36-37 Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and said to the disciples, "Sit here while I go and pray over there." . . . and He began to be sorrowful and deeply distressed.
A TALE OF TWO GARDENS
All the weight of suffering, shame and death which Jesus was to bear had its beginning in the Garden of Eden with the rebellion of Adam and Eve. There the first seeds of sin were sown, promising wonderful fruit but producing nothing but pain and sorrow and death. And down through the centuries the dank growth of sin spread and increased -- rank, fetid, dense -- leaving no one and nothing untouched, choking off all future for the human race.
Now Christ must deal with it all, taking up not just the guilt of Adam's disobedience but all the accumulated guilt of countless idolatries and adulteries, thieveries and blasphemies, covetings and cursings, lies and abuse, envies and jealousies, cruelties and tortures and murders. And the just judgment which justice pronounced on all this foulness was as hard, cold, implacable and unrelenting as that rock upon which Jesus is often pictured leaning as He prays in Gethsemane.
Now the world's sin-guilt had been taken up by Jesus during His whole ministry but here in Gethsemane the final hours of bearing its entire crushing weight arrived all at once. All that is horrible, unspeakable, hellish, damnable in our guilt rose up to meet Him in this Garden. All this the Tempter then used to try to turn Christ aside from His mission and goal. It was Satan's last great attempt to sabotage the work of atonement. He used one of His most tried and true weapons: fear -- fear of temporal, eternal and spiritual death. It didn't work!
Thousand, thousand, thanks shall be, Dearest Jesus unto Thee. 