A SERMON DELIVERED ON LORD’S-DAY MORNING. OCTOBER 18, 1874,
BY C. H. SPURGEON,
AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON.
“And being in an agony
He prayed more earnestly: and His sweat was, as it were,
great drops of blood
falling down to the ground.”
Luke 22:44.
OUR Lord, after having eaten the Passover and
celebrated the supper with His disciples, went with them to the
Mount of Olives and entered the Garden of Gethsemane. What induced Him to select
that place to be the scene of His
terrible agony? Why there, in preference to
anywhere else would He be arrested by His enemies? May we not conceive that
as in a garden Adam’s self-indulgence ruined
us, so in another garden the agonies of the second Adam should restore us?
Gethsemane supplies the medicine for the ills
which followed upon the forbidden fruit of Eden. No flowers which
bloomed upon the banks of the four-fold river
were ever so precious to our race as the bitter herbs which grew hard by
the black and sullen stream of Kidron.
May not our Lord also have thought of David,
when on that memorable occasion he fled out of the city from his
rebellions son, and it is written, “The king
also, himself, passed over the brook Kidron,” and he and his people went up
barefoot and bareheaded, weeping as they went?
Behold, the greater David leaves the Temple
to become desolate and
forsakes the city which had rejected His
admonitions! And with a sorrowful heart He crosses the foul brook to find in
solitude a solace for His woes. Our Lord
Jesus, moreover, meant us to see that our sin changed everything about Him
into sorrow—it turned His riches into poverty,
His peace into travail, His glory into shame—and so the place of His
peaceful retirement, where, in hallowed
devotion He had been nearest Heaven in communion with God, our sin
transformed into the focus of His sorrow, the
center of His woe. Where He had enjoyed most, there He must be called to
suffer most.
Our Lord may, also, have chosen the Garden
because, needing every remembrance that could sustain Him in the
conflict, He felt refreshed by the memory of
former hours there which had passed away so quietly. He had prayed there
and gained strength and comfort. Those gnarled
and twisted olives knew Him well—there was scarcely a blade of grass
in the Garden which He had not knelt upon. He
had consecrated the spot to fellowship with God! What wonder, then,
that He preferred this favored soil? Just as a
man would choose, in sickness, to lie in his own bed, so Jesus chose to endure
His agony in His own place of prayer where the
recollections of former communings with His Father would come vividly
before Him.
But, probably, the chief reason for His resort
to Gethsemane was that it was His well-known
haunt. John tells us,
“Judas also knew the place.” Our Lord did not
wish to conceal Himself. He did not need to be hunted down like a thief,
or searched out by spies. He went boldly to
the place where His enemies knew that He was accustomed to pray, for He was
willing to be taken to suffering and to death.
They did not drag Him off to Pilate’s Hall against His will, but He went
with them voluntarily. When the hour was come
for Him to be betrayed—there He was, in a place where the traitor
could readily find Him. And when Judas would
betray Him with a kiss, His cheek was ready to receive the traitorous
salutation. The blessed Savior delighted to do
the will of the Lord though it involved obedience unto death!
We have thus come to the gate of the Garden of Gethsemane, let us now enter—but first,
let us take off our shoes, as
Moses did, when he saw the bush which burned
with fire and was not consumed. Surely we may say with Jacob, “How
dreadful is this place!” I tremble at the task
which lies before me, for how shall my feeble speech describe those agonies for
which strong crying and tears were scarcely an
adequate expression? I desire, with you, to survey the sufferings of our
Redeemer, but oh, may the Spirit of God
prevent our mind from thinking anything amiss, or our tongue from speaking
even one word which would be derogatory to Him
either in His immaculate Manhood or His glorious Godhead!
It is not easy, when you are speaking of one
who is both God and Man, to observe the exact line of correct speech. It
is easy to describe the Divine side in such a
manner as to trench upon the human, or to depict the human at the cost of the
Divine. Make me not an offender for a word if
I should err! A man had need, himself, to be Inspired, or to confine himself
to the very Words of Inspiration to fitly
speak, at all times, upon the great “mystery of godliness”—God manifest in the
flesh—and especially when he has to dwell most
upon God so manifest in suffering flesh that the weakest traits in
manhood become the most conspicuous.
O Lord, open my lips that my tongue may utter
right words! Meditating upon the agonizing scene in Gethsemane
we
are compelled to observe that our Savior
endured, there, a grief unknown to any previous period of His life. Therefore
we
will commence our discourse by raising the
question, WHAT WAS THE CAUSE OF THE PECULIAR GRIEF OF
GETHSEMANE? Our Lord was the
“Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief” throughout His whole life and yet,
though it may sound paradoxical, I scarcely
think there existed on the face of the earth a happier man than Jesus of
Nazareth! The griefs which He
endured were counterbalanced by the peace of purity, the calm of fellowship
with God and
the joy of benevolence. This last, every good
man knows to be very sweet—and all the sweeter in proportion to the pain
which is voluntarily endured for the carrying
out of its kind designs. It is always joy to do good, cost what it may.
Moreover, Jesus dwelt at perfect peace with
God at all times. We know that He did so, for He regarded that peace as
a choice legacy which He could bequeath to His
disciples. Before He died, He said to them, “Peace I leave with you, My
peace I give unto you.” He was meek and lowly
of heart, and therefore His soul had rest. He was one of the meek who
inherit the earth. He was one of the
peacemakers who are and must be blessed. I think I am not mistaken when I say
that
our Lord was far from being an unhappy Man. But in Gethsemane all seems changed, His peace is gone, His calm
is
turned to tempest.
After supper our Lord had sung a hymn, but
there was no singing in Gethsemane. Down the
steep bank which led
from Jerusalem
to the Kidron He talked very cheerfully, saying, “I am the Vine and you are the
branches,” and that
wondrous prayer which He prayed with His
disciples after that discourse is full of majesty—“Father, I will that they,
also, whom You have given Me be with Me where
I am”—is a very different prayer from that inside Gethsemane’s
walls,
where He cries, “If it is possible, let this
cup pass from Me.” Notice that all His life you scarcely find Him uttering an
expression of grief. But here He says, not
only by His sighs and by His bloody sweat, but in so many words, “My soul is
exceedingly sorrowful even unto death.”
In the Garden the Sufferer could not conceal
His grief and does not appear to have wished to do so. Thrice he ran
backward and forward to His disciples—He let
them see His sorrow and appealed to them for sympathy. His
exclamations were very piteous and His sighs
and groans were, I doubt not, very terrible to hear. Chiefly did that sorrow
reveal itself in bloody sweat, which is a very
unusual phenomenon, although I suppose we must believe those writers who
record instances somewhat similar. The old
physician, Galen, gives an instance in which, through extremity of horror, an
individual poured forth a discolored sweat, so
nearly crimson as, at any rate, to appear to have been blood. Other cases
are given by medical authorities.
We do not, however, on any previous occasion
observe anything like this in our Lord’s life. It was only in the last
grim struggle among the olive trees that our
Champion resisted unto blood, agonizing against sin. What ailed You, O
Lord, that You should be so sorely troubled
just then? We are clear that His deep sorrow and distress were not
occasioned by any bodily pain. Our Savior had
doubtless been familiar with weakness and pain, for He took our
sicknesses, but He never, in any previous
instance, complained of physical suffering. Neither at the time when He entered
Gethsemane had He been grieved
by any bereavement. We know why it is written, “Jesus wept”—it was because His
friend Lazarus was dead—but here there was no
funeral, nor sick bed, nor particular cause of grief in that direction.
Nor was it the revived remembrance of any past
reproaches which had lain dormant in His mind. Long before this
“reproach had broken His heart,” He had known
to the full the vexations of contumely and scorn. They had called Him a
“drunken man and a winebibber.” They had
charged Him with casting out devils by the Prince of the devils—they could
not say more and yet He had bravely faced it
all—it could not be possible that He was now sorrowful unto death for such
a cause. There must have been a something
sharper than pain, more cutting than reproach, more terrible than
bereavement, which now, at this time, grappled
with the Savior and made Him “exceedingly sorrowful, and very heavy.”
Do you suppose it was the fear of coming
scorn, or the dread of crucifixion? Was it terror at the thought of death? Is
not such a supposition impossible? Every man
dreads death and as Man, Jesus could not but shrink from it. When we
were originally made, we were created for
immortality and, therefore, to die is strange and uncongenial work to us. The
instincts of self-preservation cause us to
start back from it, but surely in our Lord’s case that natural cause could not
have
produced such specially painful results. It
does not make even such poor cowards as we are sweat great drops of blood!
Why, then, should it work such terror in Him?
It is dishonoring to our Lord to imagine Him
less brave than His own disciples, yet we have seen some of the most
feeble of His saints triumphant in the prospect
of departing. Read the stories of the martyrs and you will frequently find
them exultant in the near approach of the most
cruel sufferings. The joy of the Lord has given such strength to them that
no cowardly thought has alarmed them for a
single moment—they have gone to the stake, or to the block with songs of
victory upon their lips! Our Master must not
be thought of as inferior to His boldest servants! It cannot be that He
should tremble where they were brave. Oh, no!
The noblest spirit among yon band of martyrs is the Leader, Himself, who
in suffering and heroism surpassed them all!
None could so defy the pangs of death as the Lord Jesus, who, for the joy
which was set before Him, endured the Cross,
despising the shame!
I cannot conceive that the pangs of Gethsemane were occasioned by any extraordinary attack
from Satan. It is
possible that Satan was there and that his
presence may have darkened the shade—but he was not the most prominent
cause of that hour of darkness. This much is
quite clear, that our Lord, at the commencement of His ministry, engaged in
a very severe duel with the Prince of
Darkness, and yet we do not read concerning that temptation in the wilderness a
single syllable as to His soul’s being
exceedingly sorrowful. Neither do we find that He “was sore amazed and was very
heavy.” Nor is there a solitary hint at
anything approaching to bloody sweat. When the Lord of Angels condescended to
stand foot to foot with the Prince of the
power of the air, He had no such dread of him as to utter strong cries and
tears
and fall prostrate on the ground with
threefold appeals to the Great Father.
Comparatively speaking, to put His foot on the
old serpent was an easy task for Christ and did but cost Him a
bruised heel. But this Gethsemane
agony wounded His very soul even unto death. What is it then, do you think,
that so
peculiarly marks Gethsemane
and the griefs thereof? We believe that, then, the Father put Him to grief for
us. It was then
that our Lord had to take a certain cup from
the Father’s hand. Not from the Jews, not from the traitor, Judas. Not from
the sleeping disciples, nor from the devil
came the trial, then—it was a cup filled by One whom He knew to be His
Father, but Who, nevertheless, He understood
to have appointed Him a very bitter potion, a cup not to be drunk by His
body and to spend its gall upon His flesh, but
a cup which specially amazed His soul and troubled His inmost heart.
He shrunk from it and, therefore, you can be
sure that it was a draught more dreadful than physical pain, since from
that He did not shrink. It
was a potion more dreadful than reproach—from that He had not turned
aside. It was more
dreadful than Satanic temptation—that He
had overcome! It was a something inconceivably terrible and amazingly full
of dread—which came from the Father’s hand.
This removes all doubt as to what it was, for we read, “It pleased the
Lord to bruise Him, He has put Him to grief:
when You shall make His soul an offering for sin.” “The Lord has made to
meet on Him the iniquity of us all.” He has
made Him to be sin for us though He knew no sin.
This, then, is that which caused the Savior
such extraordinary depression. He was now about to “taste death for
every man.” He was about to bear the curse
which was due to sinners because He stood in the sinner’s place and must
suffer in the sinner’s stead. Here is the
secret of those agonies which it is not possible for me to set forth before
you! It is
so true that—
“’Tis to God, and God alone,
That His griefs are fully known.”
Yet would I exhort you to consider these
griefs, that you may love the Sufferer. He now realized, perhaps for the first
time, that He was to be a Sin-Bearer. As God
He was perfectly holy and incapable of sin. And as Man He was without
original taint—He was spotlessly pure—yet He
had to bear sin, to be led forth as the Scapegoat bearing the iniquity of
Israel upon His head. He had
to be taken and made a Sin Offering—and as a loathsome thing, (for nothing was
more
loathsome than the sin offering)—to be taken
outside the camp and utterly consumed with the fire of Divine wrath!
Do you wonder that His infinite purity started
back from that? Would He have been what He was if it had not been a
very solemn thing for Him to stand before God
in the position of a sinner? Yes, and as Luther would have said it, to be
looked upon by God as if He were all the
sinners in the world, and as if He had committed all the sin that ever had been
committed by His people—for it was all laid on
Him and on Him must the vengeance due for it all be poured. He must be
the center of all the vengeance and bear away
upon Himself what ought to have fallen upon the guilty sons of men. To
stand in such a position, when once it was
realized, must have been very terrible to the Redeemer’s holy soul.
Then, also, the Savior’s mind was intently
fixed upon the dreadful nature of sin. Sin had always been abhorrent to
Him, but now His thoughts were engrossed with
it. He saw its worse than deadly nature, its heinous character and
horrible aim. Probably at this time, beyond
any former period, He had, as Man, a view of the wide range and allpervading
evil of sin and a sense of the blackness of
its darkness—and the desperateness of its guilt as being a direct
attack upon the Truth of God. Yes, and upon
the very being of God! He saw, in His own Person, to what lengths
sinners
would go. He saw how they would sell their
Lord, like Judas, and seek to destroy Him as did the Jews. The cruel and
ungenerous treatment He had Himself received
displayed man’s hate of God, and, as He saw it, horror took hold upon
Him and His soul was heavy to think that He
must bear such an evil and be numbered with such transgressors—to be
wounded for their transgressions and bruised
for their iniquities. But not the wounding nor the bruising distressed Him
so much as the sin itself. That utterly
overwhelmed His soul.
Then, too, no doubt, the penalty of sin began
to be realized by Him in the Garden—first the sin which had put Him
in the position of a suffering Substitute.
Then the penalty which must be borne because He was in that position. I dread,
to the last degree, that kind of theology
which is so common, nowadays, which seeks to depreciate and diminish our
estimate of the sufferings of our Lord Jesus
Christ. Brothers and Sisters, that was no trifling suffering which made
recompense to the Justice of God for the sins
of men! I am never afraid of exaggeration when I speak of what my Lord
endured. All Hell was distilled into that cup
of which our God and Savior, Jesus Christ, was made to drink! It was not
eternal suffering, but since
He was Divine He could, in a short time, offer unto God a vindication of His
Justice which
sinners in Hell could not have offered had
they been left to suffer in their own persons forever.
The woe that broke over the Savior’s
spirit—the great and fathomless ocean of inexpressible anguish which dashed
over the Savior’s soul when He died—is so
inconceivable that I must not venture far lest I be accused of a vain attempt
to
express the unutterable! But this I will
say—the very spray from that great tempestuous deep—as it fell on Christ,
baptized Him in a bloody sweat! He had not yet
come to the raging billows of the penalty itself, but even standing on the
shore, as He heard the awful surf breaking at
His feet, His soul was sorely amazed and very heavy. It was the shadow of
the coming tempest. It was the prelude of the
dread desertion which He had to endure when He stood where we ought
to
have stood and paid to His Father’s justice
the debt which was due from us! It was this which laid Him low. To be treated
as a sinner, to be smitten as a sinner, though
in Him was no sin—this it was which caused Him the agony of which our
text speaks.
Having thus spoken of the cause of His
peculiar grief, I think we shall be able to support our view of the matter
while
we lead you to consider WHAT WAS THE CHARACTER
OF THE GRIEF ITSELF? I shall trouble you, as little as
possible, with the Greek words used by the
Evangelists. I have studied each of them, to try and find out the shades of
their meaning, but it will suffice if I give
you the results of my careful investigation. What was the grief itself?
How was it
described? This great sorrow assailed our Lord
some four days before He suffered. If you turn to John 12:27, you find
that remarkable utterance, “Now is My soul
troubled.” We never knew Him say that before! This was a foretaste of the
great depression of spirit which was so soon
to lay Him prostrate in Gethsemane.
“Now is My soul troubled; and what shall I say?
‘Father, save Me from this hour’? But for this cause came I unto this
hour.” After that we read of Him in Matthew
26:37, that, “He began to be sorrowful and deeply distressed.” The
depression had come over Him again. It was not
pain. It was not a palpitation of the heart, or an aching of the brow. It
was worse than these. Trouble of spirit is
worse than pain of body—pain may bring trouble and be the incidental cause
of sorrow—but if the mind is perfectly at
peace, how well a man can bear pain! And when the soul is exhilarated and
lifted up with inward joy, bodily pain is
almost forgotten, the soul conquering the body. On the other hand the soul’s
sorrow will create bodily pain, the lower
nature sympathizing with the higher.
Our Lord’s main suffering lay in His soul—His
soul-suffering was the soul of His suffering. “A wounded spirit who
can bear?” Pain of spirit is the worst of
pain. Sorrow of heart is the climax of griefs. Let those who have ever known
sinking spirits, despondency and mental gloom,
attest the truth of what I say! This sorrow of heart appears to have led to
a very deep depression of our Lord’s spirit.
In Matthew 26:37, you find it recorded that He was “deeply distressed,”
and
that expression is full of meaning—of more meaning,
indeed, than it would be easy to explain. The word, in the original,
is a very difficult one to translate. It may
signify the abstraction of the mind and its complete occupation, by sorrow, to
the exclusion of every thought which might
have alleviated the distress.
One burning thought consumed His whole soul
and burned up all that might have yielded comfort. For a while His
mind refused to dwell upon the result of His
death, the consequent joy which was set before Him. His position as a Sin
Bearer and the desertion by His Father which
was necessary, engrossed His contemplation and hurried His soul away
from all else. Some have seen in the word a
measure of distraction—and though I will not go far in that direction—yet it
does seem as if our Savior’s mind underwent
perturbations and convulsions widely different from His usual calm,
collected spirit. He was tossed to and fro as
upon a mighty sea of trouble, which was worked to a tempest, and carried
Him away in its fury. “We did esteem Him
stricken, smitten of God and afflicted.” As the Psalmist said, innumerable
evils compassed Him about so that His heart
failed Him. His heart was melted with sheer dismay. He was “deeply
distressed.”
Some consider the word to signify at its root,
“separated from the people,” as if He had become unlike other men,
even as one whose mind is staggered by a
sudden blow or pressed with some astounding calamity, is no more as ordinary
men are. Mere onlookers would have thought our
Lord to be a man distraught, burdened beyond the possibility of men,
and borne down by a sorrow unparalleled among
men. The learned Thomas Goodwin says, “The word denotes a failing,
deficiency and sinking of spirit such as
happens to men in sickness and wounding.” Epaphroditus’ sickness, whereby he
was brought near to death, is called by the
same word, so that we see that Christ’s soul was sick and faint—was not His
sweat produced by exhaustion? The cold, clammy
sweat of dying men comes through faintness of body. But the bloody
sweat of Jesus came from an utter faintness
and prostration of soul. He was in an awful soul-swoon and suffered an
inward death whose accompaniment was not
watery tears from the eyes, but a weeping of blood from the entire man.
Many of you, however, know in your measure
what it is to be deeply distressed without my multiplying words. And
if you do not know, by personal experience,
all explanations I could give would be in vain. When deep despondency
comes on. When you forget everything that
would sustain you and your spirit sinks down, down, down—then can you
sympathize with our Lord. Others think you
foolish, call you nervous and bid you rally yourself, but they know not your
case. If they understood it, they would not
mock you with such admonitions. Our Lord was “deeply distressed,” very
sinking, very despondent, overwhelmed with
grief.
Mark tells us, next, in his 14th chapter and
33rd verse that our Lord was “sore amazed.” The Greek word does not
merely import that He was astonished and
surprised, but that His amazement went to an extremity of horror, such as men
fall into when their hair stands on end and
their flesh trembles. As the delivery of the Law made Moses exceedingly fear
and quake, and as David said, “My flesh
trembles because of Your judgments,” so our Lord was stricken with horror at
the sight of the sin which was laid upon Him
and the vengeance which was due on account of it. The Savior was first
“distressed,” then depressed, “heavy,” and
lastly, sore amazed and filled with amazement—for even He, as a Man, could
scarcely have known what it was that He had
undertaken to bear.
He had looked at it calmly and quietly and
felt that whatever it was He would bear it for our sake. But when it
actually came to the bearing of sin He was
utterly astonished and taken aback at the dreadful position of standing in the
sinner’s place before God—of having His holy
Father look upon Him as the sinner’s Representative, and of being
forsaken by that Father with whom He had lived
on terms of amity and delight from old eternity. It staggered His holy,
tender, loving Nature—and He was “sore amazed”
and was “very heavy.” We are further taught that there surrounded,
encompassed and overwhelmed Him an ocean of
sorrow, for the 38th verse of the 26th of Matthew contains the word
perilupos, which signifies an
encompassing around with sorrows.
In all ordinary miseries there is, generally,
some loophole of escape, some breathing place for hope. We can generally
remind our friends in trouble that their case
might be worse. But in our Lord’s griefs, worse could not be imagined, for
He could say with David, “The pains of Hell
get hold upon Me.” All God’s waves and billows went over Him. Above
Him, beneath and around Him, outside Him, and
within—all—all was anguish and neither was there one alleviation or
source of consolation. His disciples could not
help Him—they were all, but one, sleeping—and he who was awake was
on the road to betray Him. His spirit cried
out in the Presence of the Almighty God beneath the crushing burden and
unbearable load of His miseries! No griefs
could have gone further than Christ’s and He, Himself, said, “My soul is
exceedingly sorrowful,” or
surrounded with sorrow “even unto death.”
He did not die in the Garden, but He suffered
as much as if He had died. He endured death intensively, though not
extensively. It did not extend to the making
His body a corpse, but it went as far in pain as if it had been so. His pangs
and anguish went up to the mortal agony and
only paused on the verge of death. Luke, to crown all, tells us in our text,
that our Lord was in an agony. The
expression, “agony,” signifies a conflict, a contest, a wrestling. With whom
was the
agony? With whom did He wrestle? I believe it
was with Himself. The contest here intended was not with His God—
no—“not as I will but as You will,” does not
look like wrestling with God. It was not a contest with Satan, for, as we
have already seen, He would not have been so
sorely amazed had that been the conflict. It was a terrible combat within
Himself, an agony within His own soul.
Remember that He could have escaped from all
this grief with one resolve of His will and, naturally, the Manhood in
Him said, “Do not bear it!” And the purity of
His heart said, “Oh, do not bear it, do not stand in the place of the
sinner.” The delicate sensitiveness of His
mysterious Nature shrunk altogether from any form of connection with sin—
yet infinite Love said, “Bear it, stoop
beneath the load.” And so there was agony between the attributes of His Nature—
a battle on an awful scale in the arena of His
soul. The purity which cannot bear to come into contact with sin must have
been very mighty in Christ—while the love
which would not let His people perish was very mighty, too. It was a struggle
on a titanic scale, as if a Hercules had met
another Hercules—two tremendous forces strove and fought and agonized
within the bleeding heart of Jesus.
Nothing causes a man more torture than to be
dragged here and there with contending emotions. As civil war is the
worst and most cruel kind of war, so a war
within a man’s soul, when two great passions in him struggle for the mastery,
and both noble passions, too, causes a trouble
and distress which none but he that feels it can understand. I marvel not
that our Lord’s sweat was, as it were, great
drops of blood, when such an inward pressure made Him like a cluster trod in
the winepress! I hope I have not
presumptuously looked into the Ark,
or gazed within the veiled Holy of Holies. God
forbid that curiosity or pride should urge me
to intrude where the Lord has set a barrier. I have brought you as far as I
can and must again drop the curtain with the
words I used just now—
“’Tis to God, and God alone,
That His griefs are fully known.”
Our third question shall be, WHAT WAS OUR
LORD’S SOLACE IN ALL THIS? He sought help in human
companionship and it was very natural that He
should do so. God has created in our human nature a craving for
sympathy. We do not err when we expect our
Brethren to watch with us in our hour of trial. But our Lord did not find
that men were able to assist Him—however
willing their spirit might be, their flesh was weak. What, then, did He do?
He resorted to prayer and especially prayer to
God under the Character of Father. I have learned by experience that we
never know the sweetness of the Fatherhood of
God so much as when we are in very bitter anguish. I can understand why
the Savior said, “Abba, Father”—it was anguish
that brought Him down as a chastened child to appeal plaintively to a
Father’s love.
In the bitterness of my soul I have cried,
“If, indeed, You are my Father, by the heart of Your Fatherhood have pity
on Your child.” And here Jesus pleads with His
Father as we have done. And He finds comfort in that pleading. Prayer
was the channel of the Redeemer’s
comfort—earnest, intense, reverent, repeated prayer—and after each time of
prayer
He seems to have grown quiet and to have gone
to His disciples with a measure of restored peace of mind. The sight of
their sleeping helped to bring back His griefs
and, therefore, He returned to pray again. And each time He was
comforted, so that when He had prayed for the
third time, He was prepared to meet Judas and the soldiers and to go with
silent patience to judgment and to death. His
great comfort was prayer and submission to the Divine will, for when He
had laid His own will down at His Father’s
feet, the feebleness of His flesh spoke no more complainingly—but in sweet
silence, like a sheep dumb before her
shearers—He contained His soul in patience and rest.
Dear Brothers and Sisters, if any of you shall
have your Gethsemane and your heavy griefs,
imitate your Master by
resorting to prayer, by crying to your Father
and by learning submission to His will. I shall conclude by drawing two or
three inferences from the whole subject. May
the Holy Spirit instruct us.
The first is this—Learn, dear Brothers and
Sisters, the real Humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ. Do not think of Him
merely as God, though He is assuredly Divine,
but feel Him to be near of kin to you, bone of your bone, flesh of your
flesh. How thoroughly can He sympathize with
you! He has been burdened with all your burdens and grieved with all
your griefs. Are the waters very deep through
which you are passing? They are not deep compared with the torrents with
which He was buffeted! Never a pang penetrates
your spirit to which your Covenant Head was a stranger. Jesus can
sympathize with you in all your sorrows, for
He has suffered far more than you have ever suffered! He is able, therefore,
to succor you in your temptations. Lay hold on
Jesus as your familiar Friend, your Brother born for adversity, and you
will have obtained a consolation which will
bear you through the uttermost deeps.
Next, see here the intolerable evil of sin.
You are a sinner, which Jesus never was—yet even to stand in the sinner’s
place was so dreadful to Him that He was
sorrowful even unto death, What will sin one day be to you if you should be
found guilty at the last? Oh, could we
understand the horror of sin, there is not one among us that would be satisfied
to
remain in sin for a single moment! I believe
there would go up from this House of Prayer this morning a weeping and a
wailing such as might be heard in the very
streets, if men and women here who are living in sin could really know what
sin is, and what the wrath of God is that
rests upon them—and what the judgments of God will be that will shortly
surround them and destroy them!
Oh Soul, sin must be an awful thing if it so
crushed our Lord! If the very imputation of it fetched bloody sweat from
the pure and holy Savior, what must sin,
itself, be? Avoid it, pass not by it, turn away from the very appearance of it,
walk humbly and carefully with your God that
sin may not harm you, for it is an exceeding plague, an infinite pest!
Learn next, but oh, how few minutes have I in
which to speak of such a lesson, the matchless love of Jesus, that for
your sakes and mine He would not merely suffer
in body, but consented even to bear the horror of being accounted a
sinner! Coming under the wrath of God because
of our sins—though it cost Him suffering unto death and sore
amazement—yet rather than that we should
perish, the Lord stood as our Surety! Can we not cheerfully endure
persecution for His sake? Can we not labor
earnestly for Him? Are we so ungenerous that His cause shall suffer lack while
we have the means of helping it? Are we so
base that His work shall flag while we have strength to carry it on? I charge
you by Gethsemane,
my Brothers and Sisters, if you have a part and lot in the passion of your
Savior, love Him much
who loved you so immeasurably! Spend and be
spent for Him!
Again, looking at Jesus in the Garden, we
learn the excellence and completeness of the Atonement. How black I am,
how filthy, how loathsome in the sight of
God—I feel myself only fit to be cast into the lowest Hell and I wonder that
God has not long ago cast me there! But I go
into Gethsemane, I peer under those gnarled
olive trees and I see my Savior!
Yes, I see Him wallowing on the ground in
anguish and hear such groans come from Him as never came from human lips
before! I look upon the earth and see it red
with His blood, while His face is smeared with gory sweat. And I say to
myself, “My God, my Savior, what ails You?”
I hear Him reply, “I am suffering for your
sins.” And then I take comfort, for while I gladly would have spared my
Lord such an anguish, now that the anguish is
over I can understand how Jehovah can spare me, because He smote His
Son in my place! Now I have hope of
justification, for I bring before the justice of God and my own conscience the
remembrance of my bleeding Savior, and I say,
“Can You twice demand payment, first at the hand of Your agonizing
Son and then, again, at mine? Sinner as I am,
I stand before the burning Throne of the severity of God and am not afraid
of it! Can You scorch me, O consuming Fire,
when You have not only scorched but utterly consumed my Substitute?”
No, by faith my soul sees Justice satisfied,
the Law honored, the moral government of God established and yet my
once guilty soul absolved and set free! The
fire of avenging Justice has spent itself and the Law has exhausted its most
rigorous demands upon the Person of Him who
was made a curse for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God
in Him! Oh the sweetness of the comfort which
flows from the atoning blood! Obtain that comfort, my Brethren, and
never leave it! Cling to your Lord’s bleeding
heart and drink in abundant consolation!
Last of all, what must be the terror of the
punishment which will fall upon those men who reject the atoning blood and
who will have to stand before God in their own
proper persons to suffer for their sins? I will tell you, Sirs, with pain in
my heart as I tell you, what will happen to
those of you who reject my Lord! Jesus Christ, my Lord and Master, is a sign
and prophecy to you of what will happen to you.
Not in a garden, but on that bed of yours where you have so often been
refreshed—you will be surprised and
overtaken—and the pains of death will get hold upon you. With an exceedingly
sorrow and remorse for your misspent life and
for a rejected Savior you will be made very miserable. Then will your
darling sin, your favorite lust, like another
Judas, betray you with a kiss! While yet your soul lingers on your lips you
will be seized and taken off by a body of evil
ones and carried away to the bar of God, just as Jesus was taken to the
judgment seat of Caiaphas.
There shall be a speedy, personal, and
somewhat private judgment by which you shall be committed to prison where,
in darkness, weeping and wailing, you shall
spend the night before the great assize of the Judgment Morning. Then shall
the day break and the resurrection morning
come, and as our Lord then appeared before Pilate, so will you appear before
the highest tribunal, not that of Pilate, but
the dread judgment seat of the Son of God whom you have despised and
rejected! Then will witnesses come against
you, not false witnesses, but true—and you will stand speechless, even as Jesus
said not a word before His accusers. Then will
Conscience and Despair buffet you! You will become such a monument of
misery, such a spectacle of contempt as to be
fitly noted by another Ecce Homo, and men shall look at you and say,
“Behold the man and the suffering which has
come upon him, because he despised his God and found pleasure in sin.”
Then you shall be condemned. “Depart, you
cursed,” shall be your sentence, even as, “Let Him be crucified” was the
doom of Jesus. You shall be taken away by the
officers of Justice to your doom. Then, like the sinner’s Substitute, you
will cry, “I thirst,” but not a drop of water
shall be given you! You shall taste nothing but the gall of bitterness. You
shall be executed publicly with your crimes
written over your head that all may read and understand that you are justly
condemned. And then will you be mocked as
Jesus was, especially if you have been a professor of religion and a false one!
All that pass by will say, “He saved others,
he preached to others, but himself he cannot save.” God Himself will mock
you! No, think not that I dream! Has He not
said it—“I, also, will laugh at your calamity. I will mock when your fear
comes”? Cry unto your gods that you once
trusted in! Get comfort out of the lusts you once delighted in, O you that are
cast away forever! To your shame and to the
confusion of your nakedness, you shall, that have despised the Savior, be
made a spectacle of the justice of God forever.
It is right it should be so. Justice rightly
demands it. Sin made the Savior suffer an agony—shall it not make you
suffer? Moreover, in addition to your sin, you
have rejected the Savior. You have said, “He shall not be my trust and
confidence.” Voluntarily, presumptuously and
against your own conscience you have refused eternal life! And if you die
rejecting mercy what can come of it but that
first, your sin, and secondly, your unbelief shall condemn you to misery
without limit or end? Let Gethsemane
warn you! Let its groans, tears and bloody sweat admonish you! Repent of sin
and
believe in Jesus! May His Spirit enable you,
for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
PORTIONS OF SCRIPTURE READ BEFORE
SERMON—Mark 14:32-42, and Psalm 40.
Adapted from The C.H. Spurgeon Collection, Ages Software,
1.800.297.4307.
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