Trinity Baptist Church

The Book of Mark

The Agony of the Cup

Mark 14:32-42

 

As we come to chapter 14 of Mark and verses 32 to 42, we come to the very familiar account of our Lord’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane as He wrestles with the reality of the coming cross later that day. If I’ve figured right, it is now early in the morning on Wednesday, and later that day, He will be crucified and died.

 

As I studied this text, I found my mind going back to our recent study of Isaiah 53 where we find a prophecy that the Messiah would be “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”

 

I think it safe to say that in the thirty-three years of his earthly life, He was made very well aware of the sorrows of life.  He not only knew the outward, visible demonstrations of sorrow, but He knew the heart and soul and inside of what man was experiencing.  He not only saw people suffer, but He felt their pain. He understood the grief and the sorrow that goes along with a fallen world. 

 

But as much sorrow as He had seen and experienced, nothing even came close to what He is about to experience in the Garden because this experience is so severe, that it almost kills Him. It brings Him to the point of loud crying and tears and even the sweating of blood. 

 

Let’s look at it again

 

Mark 14:32-42

The verses unfold in four scenes.  First, we see

 

 

verse 33

 

So why did the Lord take with Him Peter, James and John and leave the other eight behind?  Well these are the three main leaders. These are the guys that are going to be the influences on the other, so they need to learn a lesson. So Jesus says, “Come with Me, cause you have something to learn. And if you learn it, you can teach it to the rest.”

 

So what was the lesson?  They were going to learn how important it is to pray so that you will be triumphant in temptation and they were going to learn it by failing to pray and falling to the temptation. They were going to learn the way that we learn the best, by failure. They were going to learn out of the disaster of their prayerlessness.

 

By the way, it is not coincidental that these three are the ones He chooses.  He is about to expose their weakness and it is because of their self-confidence and pride they are chosen.  After all, they’re the ones asking for the thrones and arguing about who is the greatest.  Peter was the one talking about how everyone else would fail except for him. 

 

So Jesus takes them in to pray. By the way, if Christ Himself needs to pray in the face of temptation, how much more do we need to pray?  If He drew on the Father’s power and protection, then how much more do we need to? So in the three go with Jesus to a certain point.

 

And notice, verse 33 says, He began to be very distressed and troubled. Distressed is a very interesting word. It is a compound form of the verb “to be amazed”.  So what is it that amazed Jesus?  After all, He is omniscient. He knows everything.  He is omnipotent; He possesses all power.  So what is going to amaze Him? What is going to stun or shock

 

Is there any experience He’s never had? Is there anything He doesn’t know?  Well, as a matter of fact, there is.  There is an experience He’s never had and He’s about to experience it and He knows He’s about to experience it.  And as the time draws near, He is amazed, distressed, at what He is experiencing because it is totally alien to everything He has ever experienced and ever known.

 

In fact, it causes Him to be troubled.  That is another very strong word meaning to be astonished. This is amazement and astonishment in anguish. The word troubled means to be anguished, to a level of really incomprehensibility. So He is amazed and astonished at the level of anguish that He’s feeling over this. This is something new to Him.

 

So what was it? What was causing this? Was it the rejection to the nation Israel? Was it the defection of Judas? Was it the desertion of the eleven soon to happen? Was it the injustice of those mocked trials to come later in the morning? Was it the mockery? Was it the spitting? Was it the punchings in the face? Was it the scourging? Was it the crucifixion? Was it dying? What was it that caused these kinds of amazed feelings of anguish?

 

 

No doubt, those things caused Him a great deal of sorrow. But the anguish and amazement that captures Him now is something beyond that. It is the anticipation of experiencing the Father’s will and embracing the role of becoming a sacrifice for sin, and in fact, becoming sin. 

 

As the perfect, sinless Son of God, He has never known sin. He has never known the wrath of God. He has never known alienation from God.  Now let me slow down a moment and give you some time to process this thought.  

 

As God, Jesus is not temptable. Is that not what we just learned in James 1:13?  James says, “God can’t be tempted.”  And Jesus is God in the flesh, so as God, He is not temptable.  That means God can’t sin.  And Jesus, as God, can’t sin either. 

 

However, as man, Jesus is temptable. In fact, Scripture reminds us He was tempted in all points like as we are, and yet, He came through them all without sin.  So as God, He was not able to sin and as man, He was able not to sin. 

 

So that raises an interesting question.  As God He can’t be tempted, but because He’s the God/Man, He can be tempted. So can He be tempted successfully? No. I don’t think it was possible for Jesus to sin, but He is able to be tempted. His struggle is not like ours.  We are tempted by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, the Bible says.

 

But Jesus had none of those. He had no human sinfulness. He was fully man but had no human sinfulness, nothing in His nature that would be drawn to sin.

So when Satan tempts the Lord, he is not approaching Him at the point of sin.  His vulnerability is not like ours.  Instead, He attacks Him at the point of holiness. In this temptation, Satan is focusing on His holiness.

 

Let me explain what I mean. We struggle because the power of evil is so strong in us, right? We are vulnerable to temptations that appeal to our weaknesses and to our sin nature. 

 

But that is not true of Jesus.  In fact, He struggled in the exact opposite way because of His holy nature, because of His sinless purity, because of His total righteousness, because of His perfect love and obedience to God. He struggled because the power of holiness was the only thing in Him, that righteousness was the sole single motive and impulse of His holy soul is clearly indicated in Scripture.

 

And what God sent Him here to do was to take upon Himself sin, not as a sinner, but as a sin bearer.  He came to take God’s wrath and punishment for sin on behalf of others.  We struggle with sin because the power of sin is so strong in us. He struggled with sin because the power of holiness was so strong.  How can He possibly become a sin bearer and receive the wrath of God when He can’t stand sin? 

 

And the level of the temptation is staggering because it’s not just sin at a moment in time, but it multiplied eterniites of wrath and punishment.  He is accepting the punishment for every sinner who ever lived and deserved an eternity of hell. 

 

And here He is, holy, harmless and undefiled, separate from sinners.  That’s why the struggle was so immense.

 

Now wonder we eead what we read in

 

Verse 34

 

The phrase literally means “surrounded by sorrow.  He’s engulfed in this grief to the point of death.

 

And there had never been a time in eternity when He had experienced alienation from His Father. He had never before had to agree to being a sin-bearer for the world.  He had never know punishment and now, just the thought of it almost killed Him. In fact, so intense is His anguish, Luke tells us God sent an angel to strengthen Him. 

 

Luke is also the one who tells us of the sweat drops of blood.  There’s a clinical name for that.  It’s called hematidrosis.  It is the process where the body literally sweats blood.  It is most often seen oozing from the forehead and nails and other skin surfaces, as well as the nose and eyes.  Very often it is accompanied by headaches and abdominal pain. 

 

And the Bible tells us the anguish and distress was so profound that an angel had to save His life or He might well have bled to death from the sheer struggle and stress of it.

 

One must wonder what went through the minds of these three disciples as Jesus told them to remain where they were and keep watch as He went a little farther and began to pray.  

 

We’re not holy, so we can’t relate to this. Some people say, “Well wait a minute, doesn’t this show weakness on Jesus’ part? Doesn’t this show reluctance to obey His Father?”

 

I think it verifies just the opposite.  Without this violent reaction to sin, one would wonder whether or not He really was holy.  This is the only possible response of for a holy person to offer as He contemplates the thought of bearing sin and guilt and judgment.

 

We can’t identify with that, but this is the most acceptable, normal, expected response for a perfect Savior Who is a perfect God to give. Everything in His being was repulsed by the thought of iniquity. His plea is absolutely consistent with His nature as God. He’s too pure to look on things that are sinful, can’t even behold them, Habakkuk 1:13 says. No wonder He came almost to the point of death, blood loss, so severe that an angel had to come and rescue Him in some way.

 

There are three more scenes that unfold in this Garden scene and we’ll save those for next time.