GETHSEMANE – THE CONFLICT
“Going a little farther, He fell to the ground and prayed that if possible, the hour might pass from Him. ‘Abba, Father,’ He said, ‘everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.’” (Mark 14:35,36, NIV).
Although this is a familiar passage of Scripture to most of us, we may not realise what the real issue was for Jesus. In order to understand this, we need to go right back to the beginning.
God created man in His own image (Genesis 1:27) to be a visible reflection of Himself on the earth. Of what did this image consist? We find the answers in Exodus 34:6, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness…” and Deuteronomy 6:4, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” Adam and Eve lived in perfect oneness with each other and with God until sin entered and destroyed their unity with the Father and distorted His character in them.
According to the Apostle Paul, Jesus came as “the last Adam”, (! Corinthians 15:45), to do what Adam failed to do, perfectly to reflect the Father in His oneness with Him and in His character as gracious, compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love and faithfulness, as a flesh-and-blood human.
Just as the devil targeted the unity between God and His earthly son, the first Adam, and destroyed it through his deception of Eve, so he targeted the unity between God and Jesus, His Son, to lure Jesus down the same road as Adam and Eve and disqualify Him from being the perfect man and the perfect sacrifice for our sin. But, throughout His earthly life, one thing Jesus protected and defended, His unity with the Father, by His obedience and submission.
Now, when His struggle was the fiercest, in the Garden of Gethsemane, His unity with the Father was being challenged and tested to the limit, to the point where He was so pressed with the conflict between the terrible price of the world’s sin and His passion to obey the will of the Father that the blood vessels in His skin burst and mingled with His sweat that fell to the ground.
The battle raged in His soul and He longed for the support of His disciples, but they slumbered, oblivious to the war between light and darkness being waged only a stone’s throw from where they lay.
The conflict finally ended with a quiet, deep commitment to submit to the will of the Father no matter what it cost Him. In Hebrews 9:14, we learn the secret of His power to obey the Father and give Himself over to His agonising ordeal of suffering: “Christ…through the eternal Spirit, offered Himself unblemished to God.”
From that moment until He entrusted His spirit to the Father, Jesus completed His life of perfect obedience.