His Agony and Our Fellowship
His Agony and Our Fellowship
His Destiny (Matthew xxvi. 36–41; iv. 1–4)
Our Destiny as His Disciples (Matthew xx. 22–23; 1 Peter ii. 21)
His Dread (Matthew xxvi. 42–43; iv. 5–7)
Our Dread as His Disciples (Philippians iii. 10; John xii. 27)
His Devotion (Matthew xxvi. 44–46; iv. 8–11)
Our Devotion as His Disciples (Luke xii. 49; Colossians i. 24)
We can never fathom the agony in Gethsemane, but at least we need not misunderstand it. It is the agony of God and Man in one, face to face with sin. The agony or our Lord in Gethsemane is not typical of what we go through, any more than His Cross is typical of our cross. We know nothing about Gethsemane in personal experience. Gethsemane and Calvary stand for something unique; they are the gateway into Life for us. We are not dealing here with the typical experience of the saint, but with the way the saintly life has been made possible.
We must read the record of the agony in the light of the temptation three years previously. There are three recorded temptations, and three recorded spells of agony in Gethsemane, “And when the devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from Him for a season.” In Gethsemane he came back, and was again overthrown. Put away the reverential blasphemy that what Jesus Christ feared in Gethsemane was death on the cross. There was no element of fear in His mind about it; He stated most emphatically that He came on purpose for the Cross (Matthew xvi. 21). His fear in Gethsemane was that He might not get through as Son of Man. Satan’s onslaught was that although He would get through as Son of God, it would only be as an isolated Figure; and this would mean that He could be no Saviour.
Notice again the curious insistence in the records on the fact that our Lord took His disciples with Him, not to share His agony, but to witness it.
His Destiny
“Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called Gethsemane, and saith unto the disciples, Sit ye here, while I go and pray yonder ...” (Matthew xxvi. 36–41). (Cf. Matthew iv. 1–4.)
At His Baptism the Son of God as Son of Man, i.e., as the whole human race rightly related to God, took on Himself the sin of the whole world; that is why He was baptised with John’s baptism, which was a baptism of repentance from sin. It was at His Baptism that the Holy Ghost descended in the form of a dove, and God said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”; and before His birth the angel proclaimed that He should be called Jesus, “for He shall save His people from their sins.”
This is our Lord’s destiny. No human being has a destiny like His; no human being can be a Saviour. There is only one Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the profundity of His agony has to do with the fulfilling of His destiny. The only possibility of God being satisfied with the human race is when the whole human race lives as the Son of God lived; and God became Incarnate that through His Son every one of us might be enabled to live as He lived.
In God’s programme Holy Spirit and man are always identified. Adam was created to be indwelt by Holy Spirit, and God intended him to transform his innocence into holiness by a series of moral choices. But Adam refused to do this; instead, he started up a wrong relationship with the devil, and thereby became the introducer of the heredity of sin into the human race (Romans v. 12). The entering in of sin meant the departing of the Holy Spirit from the home of man’s body, not the departing from him of the Spirit of God as Creator. ‘Elohim’ has reference to God in correspondence with human flesh. When Adam sinned, this correspondence with God ceased until God became manifest in the flesh in Jesus Christ. At His Baptism the Holy Ghost came upon Him as Son of Man, and His coming was the seal of our Lord’s accepted vocation. Jesus Christ represented ‘Elohim,’ God manifest in the flesh, God and man one in the Person of the Son of Man. The sin of the world upon the Son of God rent the Holy Ghost from Him on the Cross, and the cry on Calvary is the cry of the Holy Ghost to Jesus Christ—“My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” It was not the cry of Jesus Christ to His Father. Jesus never spoke to God as ‘God’; He spoke to Him always as “ Father.” “Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, ... He said, It is finished.” These words of our Lord mean that God and the human race in the Person of the Son of Man are now one for ever in that one Person. Holy Spirit may be partaken of by any one. Anyone can erter into real fellowship with God, into fellowship as real as the communion which Jesus had with His Father, and the way into it is by means of His agony. Ephesians iv. 13 is a picture of the human race redeemed by Jesus Christ. He is God’s revelation in one Person of the human race as God intends it to be.
We are dealing here with revelation, not with experience. Revelation is that upon which we must nourish our faith; experience is that which encourages us that our faith is on the right track. The need to connect revelation and experience must never be overlooked.
In the temptation of our Lord Satan’s first attack was in the physical domain. In Gethsemane his onslaught is against our Lord as Son of Man, not against Him as Son of God. Satan could not touch Him as Son of God, he could only touch Him as Son of Man; and this is his final onslaught on the Son of God as Son of man. ‘You will get through as Son of God, I cannot touch You there, but You will never get one member of the human race through with You. Look at Your disciples, they are asleep, they cannot even watch with You. When You come to the Cross Your body will be so tortured and fatigued, so paralysed with pain, and Your soul will be so darkened and confused, that You will not be able to retain a clear understanding of what You are doing. Your whole personality will be so clouded and crushed by the weight of sin that You will never get through as Man.’ If Satan had been right, all that would have happened on the Cross would have been the death of a martyr only, the way into Life for us would never have been opened. But if Jesus Christ does get through as Son of Man, it means that the way is open for every one who has been born or ever will be born to get back to God. Satan’s challenge to our Lord was that He would not be able to do it; He would only get through as Son of God, because Satan could not touch Him there. The fear that came upon our Lord was that He might die before He reached the Cross. He feared that as Son of Man He might die before He had opened the gate for us to get through, and He “was heard in that He feared,” and was delivered from death in Gethsemane.
When our Lord came to the Cross, His body, soul, and spirit were completely triumphant, there was perfect self-possession. Did the pain of the body cloud His mind? “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” His mind was as clear as a sunbeam—“Woman, behold thy son!” And He was so triumphant in spirit, in His essential personality, that He cried with a loud voice, “Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit.”
The Garden of Gethsemane is the agony of Almighty God: the Cross of Christ is one terrific triumph, a triumph for the Son of Man The cry, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” is not the cry of the Son of God in destitution; it is the cry of the Holy Ghost being torn from the Son of God by the weight of sin upon Him. Gethsemane is the agony of the Son of God fulfilling His destiny as the Saviour of the world, and the veil is taken aside to show us what it cost Him to make it easy for us to become sons of God.
Our Destiny as His Disciples
“But Jesus answered and said, Ye know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with? They say unto Him, We are able. And He saith unto them, Ye shall drink indeed of My cup, and be baptised with the baptism that I am baptized with: but to sit on My right hand, and on My left is not Mine to give, but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared of My Father” (Matthew xx. 22–23). (See also 1 Peter ii. 21.)
Our destiny is determined by our disposition. Our Lord’s destiny was determined by His disposition. Our destiny is preordained, but we are free to choose which disposition we will be ruled by. We cannot alter our disposition, but we can choose to let God alter it. If our disposition is to be altered, it must be altered by the Creator, and He will introduce us into a totally new realm by the miracle of His sovereign grace. Redemption means that Jesus Christ can give us a new disposition. At regeneration the Holy Spirit puts in us a totally new disposition, and as we obey that disposition the life of the Son of God will be manifested in our mortal flesh.
Within certain limits we have the power to choose, for instance, a man has the power to refuse to be born again, but no man has absolute free will. There comes a time when the human will must yield allegiance to a force greater than itself. God is the only Being Who can act with absolute free will, and when His Spirit comes into us, He makes us free in will, consequently our obedience becomes of value. It is not obedience when a man does a thing because he cannot help it, but when a man is made a son of God by Redemption, he has the free power to disobey, therefore the power to obey. If we have no power to disobey, we have no power to obey. Our obedience would be of no value at all if the power to sin were taken away.
Our destiny as His disciples is to be in fellowship with God as Jesus was. The cup and the baptism of our Lord are the gateways for every human being to get into perfect oneness with God. Jesus Christ gives us salvation and sanctification, but the places we take hereafter depend upon our obedience and the disposal of the Father. There is no respect of persons with God for salvation, but there are degrees of position hereafter. We are all saved by the cup and the baptism of our Lord, but the position we take individually depends entirely upon our obedience to Him. We are born again through our Lord’s cup and baptism, i.e., through Him fulfilling of His destiny; we do not have to agonise and suffer before we can be born from above. All the distress and all the sacrifice in the world will never atone for sin. We must be born again through His sacrifice into the Kingdom where He lives, and when we are there we have to follow in His steps, and we find we can follow now that we have His Spirit, His nature. Our fear starts when we imagine that we have to live this new life by the energy of our human nature, because we know that it cannot be done, and every time we think of what we were before, we falter. The Bible reveals that when the Holy Spirit has come into us, every command of God is an enabling. Jesus Christ gives the power of His own disposition to anyone, that is why He is apparently so merciless on those of us who have received the Holy Spirit, because His demands on us are made according to His disposition, and not according to our human nature. The old nature says it cannot be done. Jesus Christ says it can be done—‘I did it, and I can do it in you if you will enter My life by means of My death.’ It is no use trying to be what we are not. We are children of God when we are born from above, and God will never shield us from the requirements of being His children. “Follow His steps”—that is the conduct of regenerate human nature. The life of Jesus is the life of the normal man of God, but we cannot begin to live it unless we are born from above. Unless we have been taken up into His destiny, we cannot fulfil our own destiny. If we are born from above, are we trying to follow His steps, trying to work out in our mortal flesh that which God has worked in? (Philippians ii. 12–13). Salvation is a sovereign gift of the Redemption of the Lord Jesus. Many will be saved through the fulfilling of the destiny of the Son of Man who have not been worth anything to God in this life, their life has been self-centred and wrong, it has not been lived on the foundation of the Son of God. Our destiny is to work out what God works in. It is not that our eternal salvation depends upon our doing it, but our value to God does, and also our position in the Kingdom of God.
His Dread
“He went away again the second time, and prayed, saying, O My Father, if this cup may not pass away from Me, except I drink it, Thy will be done ” (Matthew xxvi. 42–43). (Cf. Matthew iv. 5–7.)
The disciples are the representatives of the human race in connection with Redemption, and Satan’s sneer in Gethsemane is, ‘You will never do it, these men are the specimens of the best You have, and they are asleep. You should have gone to heaven from the Mount of Transfiguration, but instead, You came down and declared You would redeem the human race, and I am determined that You shall not.’ Our Lord’s dread in Gethsemane was born of the knowledge that if He did not get through as Son of Man, the redemption of mankind was hopeless; we could only then have imitated Him, we could never have known Him as Saviour.
This is the agony of God as Man, not a human agony. Our Lord did not want human sympathy, His agony come anywhere near. The darkness was produced because it looked as if Satan were going to triumph, and the disciples, who represented the new humanity, were without the slightest element of understanding what Jesus Christ was doing. He “offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto Him that was able to save Him from death, and was heard in that He feared.” His prayer was answered every lime, and when He came to the Cross His relationship to His mother, and to John, and to His murderers, showed that His mind and His reason were triumphantly clear. It was not only a sign that our Lord had triumphed, but that He had triumphed to save the human race, so that every human being can get through into the presence of God because of all the Son of Man went through. Jesus Christ is either all that the New Testament claims Him to be—the Redeemer of the human race, or else a futile dreamer, and the only proof is in personal experience. Can God form the life that His Son lived in us? Jesus Christ claims that He can. Then have we let Him do it?
Our Dread as His Disciples
“That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death ” (Philippians iii. 10). (See also John xii. 27.)
Our dread as His disciples is lest we fail Jesus Christ in our service, lest in our experience of the revelation we forget the God Who gave us the experience, forget all about Jesus Christ. As disciples we have not to serve God in our own way, not to tell Him what we are going to do for Him, not to ask Him to baptise us with the Holy Ghost to make us something. ‘If you would be My disciple,‘ says Jesus, ’give up your right to yourself to Me, and take up your cross daily.’ No man can carry the cross of God. The Cross of God is the Redemption of the world. The cross we have to carry is that we have deliberately given up our right to ourselves to Jesus Christ, and we steadily refuse to be appealed to on any other line than He was appealed to on when He was here. With regard to all the pleasures and sciences and interests of this life, push this simple consideration, ‘Is this the kind of thing the Son of God is doing in the world, or is it what the prince of this world is doing?’ Not, ‘Is it right?’ but ‘Is it the kind of thing the Son of God would be doing in the world?’ If it is not, then don’t touch it. If you only give up wrong things for Jesus Christ, don’t talk any more about being in love with Him. If you want to do a thing all the time, it is no virtue not to do it! Jesus Christ takes the ‘want to’ out of us and enables us to do in this world the things He would be doing if He were here. We say, ‘Why shouldn’t I? it isn’t wrong!’ What a sordid thing to say! When we love a person, do we only give up what is wrong for him? Love is not measured by what it gets, but by what it costs, and our relationship to Jesus Christ can never be on the line of, ‘Why shouldn’t I do this?’ Our Lord simply says, ‘If any man will be My disciple, those are the conditions’ (see Luke xiv. 26, 27 and 33). Is He worth it? Will He cast it up at us that we never gave up anything for Him? No, He will never do that, He will never tell us what sneaks we have been, but we will find it out (Matthew x. 26). Our dread is to be lest we forget Him. Do we know Jesus Christ better today than ever we did?
If we have been put right with God through the agony of the Son of God, have we enthroned Him as Lord and Master as well? (John xiii. 13; Luke vi. 46). Is He absolute Master of our body? (1 Corinthians iii. 16–17). We have no business to be master of our own body. Our dread is lest we forget that our body is the temple of the Holy Ghost. We are to know Jesus Christ and the power of His resurrection in our body, to know the fellowship of His sufferings in our body. “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself.” There is no ‘if’ in connection with salvation, only in connection with discipleship. The conditions of discipleship are found in Luke xiv. 26, 27 and 33. If the commands of Jesus Christ in our life clash with the most sacred relationships on earth, it must be instant obedience to Him. We must hate the claim that contends with His claim; hate it that is, in comparison with our love to Him. We must abandon to God at all costs. Abandon is of infinitely more value than self-scrutiny.
His Devotion
“And He left them, and went away again, and prayed the third time, saying the same words. Then cometh He to His disciples, and saith unto 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. Rise, let us be going: behold, he is at hand that doth betray Me ” (Matthew xxvi. 44–46). (Cf. Matthew iv. 8–1 l.)
‘Still sleeping? It is all right now, it is all finished, the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.’ That is a joyful utterance. Our Lord is absolutely sure that as representative Man before God He will get the whole human race through, in spite of everything the devil can do, and the Cross is an absolute triumph. Our Lord, as Son of Man, has been through the depths of His agony in Gethsemane, and He has won at every point. He has won for the bodies of men, He has won for the minds and souls of men and for the spirits of men; everything that makes up a human personality is redeemed absolutely, and no matter whether a man be a vile sinner or as clean as the rich young ruler, he can enter into the marvellous life with God through the way made by the Son of Man.
“Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit,” that is, the spirit of the Son of Man, the spirit of the whole human race represented by the Son of Man getting through to God on the Cross. “Though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered” (Hebrews v. 8). He did not learn to be a Son, He was a Son, and He came to redeem as Man, and He learned obedience as Redeemer by suffering. His agony is the basis of the simplicity of our salvation. His suffering is the basis of all our light and liberty and joy. His Cross makes it simple enough for any one to get into the presence of God.
Our Lord in His agony was devoted to God’s purpose. The supreme obedience of Jesus was never to the needs of men, but always to the will of His Father. The Church goes astray whenever she makes the need the call. The need is never the call; the need is the opportunity; the call is the call of God.
Our Devotion As His Disciples
“I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled ?” (Luke xii. 49). (See also Colossians i. 24.)
“Our God is a consuming fire,” and when God comes on to this earth in the effective working of the Redemption of Jesus Christ, He brings pain and havoc and disaster (Matthew x. 34). The first result of the Redemption of Jesus Christ in human life is havoc. If any human life can stand before God on its own basis, Calvary is much ado about nothing. If it can be proved that rationalism is the basis of human life, then the New Testament is nonsense; instead of its being a revelation, it is a cunningly devised fable. There is no need for redemption, Jesus Christ is nothing but a martyr, one of whom it was true that He was stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. If we can stand before God apart from Jesus Christ, we have proved that Calvary is not needed. immediately Jesus Christ comes in, He produces havoc, because the whole world system is arrayed against His Redemption. It was the world system of His day, and particularly the religious system, that killed the Son of God.
“And fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh”—for Redemption’s sake? No, “for His body’s sake, which is the church.” On the ground of Jesus Christ’s Redemption, we can enter into identification with His sufferings, but we do not need to unless we like. I Corinthians xiii. and Matthew v. 43–48 are practical home-coming Christian truths. “Come unto Me.... Take my yoke upon you, and learn of Me,” ‘then go and bear with others for My sake.’ What have we suffered for Jesus Christ? Think of the passionate indignation we get into when someone slanders us!—“Consider Him.” We do not need to take the blow, but if we do not, it will go back on Him. We will get off scot free, and everyone will applaud us for doing so, but the blow will fall upon Jesus Christ. If we let it come on us, it will not fall on Him. We have always the privilege of going the second mile. It is never our duty to do it, but will we go the second mile with God? Are we deliberately filling up that which remains behind of His sufferings, or becoming mere critical centres? If we have been brought into a right relationship with God by the Redemption of Jesus Christ, He expects us to Put on His yoke and to learn of Him.
The devotion of the saint is to “fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ for His body’s sake,” nothing remains behind to be filled up for Redemption’s sake. How did Jesus Christ suffer? Because people misunderstood Him? Because He was persecuted? Because He could not get on with men? No, He suffered for one thing only—that men might be saved; He let Almighty God do His whole will in and through Him without asking His permission. He suffered “according to the will of God.”
How can we fill up the sufferings that remain behind? 1 John v. 16 is an indication of one way, viz., that of intercession. Remember, no man has time to pray, he has to take time from other things that are valuable in order to understand how necessary time for prayer is. The things that act like thorns and stings in our personal lives will go instantly we pray; we won’t feel the smart any more, because we have got God’s point of view about them. Prayer means that we get into union with God’s view of other people. Our devotion as saints is to identify ourselves with God’s interests in other lives. God pays no attention to our Personal affinities; He expects us to identify ourselves with His interests in others.