August 25, 2020 Show with Geoff Thomas on “Christ in Gethsemane”

Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at IronSharpensIronRadio .com.

This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 25th day of August, 2020, and I am doubly thrilled that we are going to have,

God willing, for the next two days as our guest, Reverend Jeff Thomas, who, beginning in 1965, served for over 50 years as pastor of Alfred Place Baptist Church of Aberystwyth, Wales, and on day number one today, we are going to be addressing

Christ in Gethsemane, and tomorrow, day number two, we will be addressing the theme,

Prayer, Impotence, Grasping, Omnipotence. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Reverend Jeff Thomas.

Well, it's as much and more my privilege to talk to you again on the air and to many people, some known to me and some not as yet, but whom we shall soon meet at Jesus' feet.

Amen. Well, I know that you are retired after half a century pastoring

Alfred Place Baptist Church, but I know that your grandson has taken the mantle and is now pastoring there.

Why don't you tell our listeners about this place where you served for 50 years and are still a member? Yes, it's a little university town, 20 ,000 people, 10 ,000 students on the

Irish Sea in Cardigan Bay, and it has suffered because of the coronavirus with shops closed and all the educational facilities closed down, and people then full of anticipation now that school is opening up later on this week, we're wondering how it's going to go.

The church hasn't met for some months. It's watching through Zoom, longs to be meeting together again.

And the great conference that takes place in Aberystwyth, 1 ,300 people fill the great hall of the university for a week of meetings, lots of other meetings in the day, and open their preaching on the promenade and children's meetings and so on.

That's not being held this year. We are totally depending on the

Zoom. And we went and wandered on the promenade and met other people who booked holiday cottages and were there on vacation too, but we're missing the heart of that lovely week, always the second week of August, when we gather and hear the word of God from great preachers from around the world, whether it's

Conrad in Bayway or whether it's Sinclair Ferguson or Joel Beattie.

What blessings we've known in the past, and we hope next year that this will come to an end.

I have a little grandson. He's six years of age, insisting going to the Zoom prayer meeting with his father, and he prays every week,

Oh God, end this coronavirus. And we all say amen to that.

Amen. And speaking of Conrad in Bayway, one of my favorite preachers of all time, right in the same company with you,

Conrad, who's been my friend since 1995, has just within the last couple of days confirmed that he will be coming to the

United States next year to be my keynote speaker at the next Iron Sharpens Iron radio pastor's luncheon.

Actually, I don't know if it will be the next one, but it will be the 2021 Iron Sharpens Iron radio pastor's luncheon.

We will likely have one before that. But as many of you may remember, Conrad was already supposed to be our speaker in May, but could not because we did not know that the coronavirus pandemic was going to break out, shutting everything down and preventing

Conrad from traveling outside of Africa. And so we are just excited that he is going to be coming here next year to speak at in Carlisle, Pennsylvania at the

Iron Sharpens Iron radio pastor's luncheon. Well, you selected as your topic today one of the most moving portions of Scripture and also something that Christians even disagree over everything that took place in that scene.

A very somber, sorrowful, heart -wrenching, moving scene, deeply heart -moving scene.

In fact, I'm going to read the Luke account, the account of Gethsemane in the

Gospel of Luke, chapter 22, 40 through 46. When he, meaning

Jesus Christ, arrived at the place, meaning Gethsemane, he said to them,

Pray that you may not enter into temptation. And he withdrew from them about a stone's throw, and he knelt down and began to pray, saying,

Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me, yet not my will, but yours be done.

Now an angel from heaven appeared to him, strengthening him. And being in agony, he was praying very fervently, and his sweat became like drops of blood flowing down upon the ground.

When he rose from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping from sorrow.

And he said to them, Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not enter into temptation.

And that is the reading of God's inerrant word from Luke, chapter 22, 40 through 46, about the account from the

Garden of Gethsemane, and that is from the New American Standard Bible, my favorite version of the

Scriptures. But if you could, Reverend Jeff, tell us why you selected this specific passage, an account of Christ's life today.

Well, you know that Lord Jesus led, in many ways, a very true human life that unfolded from day to day, week to week.

I'm sure that many of those days were very ordinary, unmoved by any particular drama or trauma.

Our Lord increased in wisdom and stature and favor with God and man. But then there are these particular moments of crisis and special significance that we should know about.

The baptism of Christ, the temptations, the Sermon on the Mount, his preaching there, the

Transfiguration, the Upper Room, the First Lord's Supper, and especially this event that took place in the

Garden of Gethsemane. And I want to reflect, what lessons is

God offering us in this narrative? Because it seems to me that even at the most pragmatic and practical level, many of the

Church's problems arise because our lives aren't controlled by the example of Jesus Christ.

He left us an example that we should follow in his steps.

And I think we're not letting the Spirit of Christ as manifested in the life and suffering of Christ discipline and inform our own ambitions and aspirations and the providences that we meet, like you had to meet,

Chris, a providence a few months ago that sent you to hospital.

We are the followers of an enfleshed Christ. We are the followers of an involved

Christ who went to weddings and feasts and funerals, who lost precious friends and was upset by the state of his city.

We are followers of a humiliated and despised

Christ who sweat blood and spat and was beaten up and despised and rejected.

And all these great facts are of enormous influence in instructing us in the correctness of our response to God's providences.

When we come to decide on the tone and quality of our own lifestyle, not just individually, but the texture of our worship, when we come and gather together, are we controlled then by the

Spirit of Jesus Christ that's in us? And that's why I think it's so important for us to keep coming back to the description of the incarnate

Savior afforded to us in the great gospel narratives. And that's why hearing you read from Luke this narrative, there's no point more astonishing, no point in many ways more magnificent, no point more challenging, and even no point more devastating.

So this great moment in the Garden of Gethsemane, and it's tremendously meaningful for our whole grasp of God.

This is the only God who sent his only Son here into the world.

And it is then by implication of enormous importance for the quality and behavior of our own daily

Christian lives. So I want to consider, and especially today, the

Lord's emotional condition. We're told he began to be greatly distressed and troubled.

He says, my soul is overwhelmed and very sorrowful, even to death.

So we find a Christ who is brokenhearted, a Christ who is deeply troubled, deeply overwhelmed, who is experiencing the depths of human sorrow.

I'm not hiding that fact. He says to Peter James and come, come and watch with me, listen, see.

He stands before us not simply as divine, a person characterized by august grandeur and unflappability.

Not just like that, he's not like Buddha at all, enigmatically smiling.

No, no, he stands before us not as Mr. Cool, majestic and controlled, but in the glory of his own human vulnerability, exposed to an experience of the deepest psychological distress and trouble.

One who knows human feeling and human emotion. And those emotions, not only the bright side of joy unspeakable and contentment, but one who knows the dark side too.

One who cried, why? One who was capable of the most profound emotion and wasn't ashamed to show those emotions to the men who were with him.

A Christ who was very close to the situation which emotionally, as a man, he was unable to handle.

I don't say that he crossed that threshold. I don't say that he ever broke.

But I'm saying he stands before us so very, very close to that point when he's overwhelmed.

When the whole situation is simply too much for him at an emotional level.

And it seems to me, Chris, that in many ways there's nothing more glorious in the whole gospel of God than to see the

Savior of mankind, the Son of God, in this state, in this

God. That's why I thought I'd like to speak and think about it myself and share some of my thoughts with you.

Yes, and an excellent account of Christ's life and passages to address.

Why do you think, or what do you believe, is the reason why

Christ was in such great agony? Christ was not facing, on an earthly, physical sense, anything that was more torturous than martyrs before and after him.

There have been Christians, in fact, in some cases, who, in a physical sense, have experienced even more gruesome, torturous deaths than he.

And yet he, the God -man, someone who is fully God and fully man, he never stopped being fully

God when he was in Gethsemane. And yet he was in such agony that an angel had to comfort him.

Why was this? It certainly underlines the fact that he's in our nature, in our physicalness, and in our psychology.

That's so glorious. He comes into our experience. He's right there in the valley of the shadow of death where we are.

He's come into our pain, into our relationships, into our fears, into our bondage and our poverty.

He was tested in all points as we are. He's come into our bereavement, into the agony of death itself.

Christ in my valley. And even more glorious is the fact that in my valley he feels, he reacts exactly as I feel and react with distress and sorrow and telling us he's overwhelmed.

And he wants us to know his deep distress. And I'm still not answering your question because I want you to see the pressures that have put on the

Lord's people to be stoical, and I despise them, to be unemotional, to be always in total control of their affections and reactions and feelings.

And here's this marvelous reality of an almost broken God the Son, an overwhelmed

Christ, a Lord who is going through emotional trauma. And in many ways it's a mandate for your humanness when you're lying in a hospital bed,

Chris, when you're feeling broken, when you've lost your dear wife as I lost my wife.

And so many of those things which in God's providence I encounter in this valley. And from the moment when

I read these great narratives and Gethsemane, I always know it's not subhuman to howl with grief.

It's not always a breakdown in courage to be in heaviness.

Here's the man Christ Jesus, the archetypal man, the model man, God's great definition of man,

God's great statement of what it really means to be an authentic human being.

Here's the pattern man, the proper man, Luther calls him the right man, and he's overwhelmed and troubled.

And I know that in my trouble and my disturbance, my

God understands. Because he's come into the valley, in Christ, he's been troubled and overwhelmed.

And I know that God in Christ, in the very midst of the throne, as he contemplates our human struggle and observes our human pain,

I know that God has been touched with a feeling of our infirmities.

One of my favorite hymns says, in every pang that rends the heart, the man of sorrow's had a part.

He sympathizes with our grief, and to the sufferer sends relief.

I know that God has never forgotten that great moment in Gethsemane. There are no memory cells in the mind of Christ that have died.

Gethsemane is as vivid to him today, now, as then.

He's not simply the unmoved and impassive observer, but that great sufferer on whose spotlight we are placing him now.

He was a man of sorrows. So, when I find my soul overwhelmed, and then

I think of the discourse that's going on between the glorified Son and the

Holy Father, and the Son is saying to the Father, I know how that man in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, feels.

I know what that woman in New York is going through. I know what that teenager is experiencing.

I know what it is to stand before Providence that I found unbearable and almost overwhelming.

That caused tremendous stress and trauma in the heart of the Savior. And that's what we'll come to next.

To answer your great question, why? What was it that brings this Colossus, this great worker of miracles, the unchangeable

God, the King of the Cosmos, in whose earthly career he was so masterful?

What was it that brought him to this point where he tells us he was overwhelmed?

That's what we look at now. Amen. Let me ask you a question that has been prompted by good

Reformed men who I've heard when they are exegeting this passage and preaching on this passage.

I have heard some say that it could not merely have been the physical, torturous execution that he knew that he would experience that struck such terror and agony in him.

They have said that it had to be, first and foremost, not excluding the physical aspect, that it had to be first and foremost the fact that he knew the

Father's wrath would be poured upon him. Would you agree with that? What I think is very important is that it was not the mysteriousness of what lay before him, the unknownness.

It is often with us. We go to a doctor and I have a test and so the doctor calls us in a few days and he says he's a little unhappy and he wants further tests and then we're concerned because we don't know what lies ahead.

That's not the case with Christ. He knew what lay before him.

In fact, his sorrow and his trouble was not a consequence of ignorance and of knowing only too well, he knew only too well what was lying before him.

The central reality of what you have said, the Father's wrath, the basics of our own salvation.

Christ was troubled because he knew what tomorrow would bring. It was going to bring not only

Gethsemane but Golgotha and the cross and all that Calvary meant and he well knew what that cross meant.

He knew he was to experience in his own soul all that's prefigured in the

Old Testament sacrifices. He knew that tomorrow he'd become the great

Passover lamb whose blood would be shed. He'd become the great sin offering to which sin was imputed.

He would at last be disposed of in ignominy outside the camp. He would become the

Holocaust, the burnt offering, consumed by the majestic rectitude and glorious wrath of Almighty God.

He knew holiness would consume him. He knew he'd be the suffering servant of Isaiah 53.

He knew in his own soul the fulfillment of that terrible reality. It pleased the

Lord to bruise him. Tomorrow Jehovah was going to bruise him. Tomorrow the sword of God would awaken against the man who was

God's fellow and he would be plunged right into the depth. It would be plunged into the depth of his own soul.

And so I do agree it was not simply the physical pains that he knew he would have to bear but all that was implied in the prefigurements and the shadows and the

Levitical system and the prophecies of the suffering of the high priest of God when he came into the world.

And of course there has been disagreement and controversy over one particular verse that is in Luke's account of this where it says in verse 44 and the second half of that verse, and his sweat became like drops of blood falling down upon the ground.

There have been some that actually have sought to medically explain that there were actual blood drops that have burst forward from his brow due to the extreme level of agony and terror that he was experiencing.

They have medically explained how these things could happen. And there are others who just say, no, that's just a picture that's being painted.

They were just drops of sweat but they appeared as drops of blood or they were falling to the ground like drops of blood and perhaps using an allegory of the shed blood that he was going to offer as a propitiation for the wrath of his father.

But how would you view this? I'm not sure. We are simply told those basic facts,

Chris, about how the emotional and psychological trauma that he had to endure then registered itself upon his body.

So that incredible phrase, his sweat was, as it were, drops of blood and I let that hang there.

I think what is important is that our

Lord's mind was becoming focused and terribly aware of what Calvary is going to mean.

And I just want us to ponder in all humility and gratitude the tremendous courage of the

Lord Jesus. Hours before Calvary, suddenly he's overwhelmed with the reality of what being a

Savior of a sinner like you and me, what it meant. Behold the

Lamb of God that takes away our sin and what it meant for him to take it away.

Our Lord would surely have been troubled by the physical reality because he must care for his body and love his body and look after it properly.

It was a body God had prepared for him. He hadn't built into it any immunity to pain, any kind of inherent analgesic, a painkiller that would reduce his sensitivity.

But he was a true human being with a true human central nervous system with the sensibilities and sensitivities of human physiology.

And our Lord knew that he was going to be lacerated and whipped and wounded and nailed and suspended on the cross.

And I know we are dissuaded often and I agree with it about giving any emphasis to the physical details of Calvary.

Like you've asked what does that mean? The drops of blood and we're not sure.

And what was it that he endured physically on the cross? The New Testament was written to readers who knew the horrendous reality of crucifixion.

They need details to be expounded to them. I'm not going to harrow a congregation's feelings by describing the enfleshment.

That's there. It just says to us our redemption is not a transaction that was conditioned in the realm of ideas and doctrines and speculation.

It was conducted in the three -dimensional reality of human history. It was flesh and blood, filth and gall, sweat like blood, bodies, soldiers, execution.

And our Lord was just aware of that. Like Job covered in boils, scraping them off him and our

Lord distressed. Like we are when we're in pain and when we're conscious of more pain ahead.

That's the first reason that our Lord was in such agony.

That's only the beginning. Please give us your first name, at least your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. Please only remain anonymous. If your question involves a personal and private matter, let's say you disagree theologically with your own pastor, or own denomination over something over which you are asking that we are discussing, we will understand that being a valid reason to remain anonymous.

But please, if it's just a general question, give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside the

USA. And the email address again is chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

Don't go away. We're going to be right back after these messages with more of Jeff Thomas and Christ in Gethsemane.

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Christ in Gethsemane, and our email address, if you want to join us, is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

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USA, only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

And we do have a question from Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and he says, how do you respond to someone who might blasphemously suggest that Christ, wanting to back out of his commitment to be the atonement for his people, by asking the

Father to pass the cup from him if it were possible, was an act of cowardice on the part of Christ?

Yeah, I want to deal with that later on in some more detail than a brief answer.

I think our Lord never cracked. He looked into the jaws of death and the gates of hell, and he saw what was before him, and he then must plead, like asking

God to deliver us from suffering and pain is not a sub -Christian thing to do.

But can I say, hang in with me, and I'll deal with that in a fresh and more comprehensive way today and tomorrow, as we look at the praying

Christ and why he prayed, Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.

It's a very important question that you have raised, but I'm not as prepared at this moment to answer it as I will be later on.

Okay, Harrison, hang in there, and you'll get a more thorough answer later, God willing. Well, you wanted to go to the second aspect or the second part of the importance of this incident.

Yes, why our Lord was in such distress, and I think another reason would be,

I said the physical as well, but another would be the social reality. We've had women, more than men, who've been in lockdown.

Their children have not been allowed to enter their houses, and they've not been allowed to leave, and they've known three months of loneliness, and that is a desolating experience.

Our Lord was social. Our Lord grew in favor with men. He was gregarious, wasn't he?

It was a perfect humanness. It was modeled on the triuneness and the pluralness of God himself.

Christ longed for fellowship. He chose twelve people. Why? To be with him.

He wasn't a lone ranger. He wasn't a loner. And yet, in Gethsemane, he knew that in a few short hours, these three wouldn't be there with him.

The other ten, nine, they would all forsake him. They would all flee, and then he knew the dread moment of the physical horror of Calvary, and the moment of his desolation.

He was going to be utterly and totally alone. Not a hand to hold. Not an eye to catch him and beam at him and say,

I know why you're going through this, and I do appreciate it. Not a word of whisper.

He was going to be forsaken and betrayed and denied. You appreciate how real the

Lord's relationships were. His love for Peter, real. His love for John, the beloved disciple.

His love, too, if you bear with me, his love even for Judas Iscariot. I tell you something more wonderful, his love for me.

And his love for you. And yet, we just rejected him for years.

And they're all going to forsake him. And they're all going to flee. And in that emotional wrench, the

Lord was going to be alone. You know, there'd always been the father.

He'd got up in the morning, he'd appropriated his father. He'd spoken to his father. He'd had his father with him through the day, and at the end of every day, he could say, thank you,

Father, for not leaving me. Not for a moment. Not when men were so horrible and cruel to me, and when my own family didn't understand me, but you understood.

And you were there, and he could thank God. But there'd come a time now when he's going to feel this pain almost tearing apart.

So he was distressed at the physical reality and the social reality of the utter loneliness.

There was one man who said a word to him. He said, Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingdom.

But there came a time when the sufferings were so great for that man that he couldn't help.

He had nothing to say to our Lord to help him. So that's another reason why our

Lord was so filled with, overwhelmed with distress.

And then, of course, there was the third reason, and that is the spiritual reality of Calvary.

Because it's going to involve not just the physical and the social, but the spiritual pain.

It's going to be Satan's hour. It's going to be the power of darkness, and God not sparing him from that.

It was going to be the moment above all when God was going to forsake him.

Now, you bear in mind the background to that great fact of the desolation of Christ.

The marvelous words with which you all know this, how John opens the gospel.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. He'd always been with God.

He'd always been with God in his eternal deity. And then when he took frail, fresh, and blood, he was

God in his developing humanity. He'd grown up as a boy, as a young man.

He'd grown up face to face with God. Constantly in fellowship with God, with intercourse, talking with Him, singing to Him, singing a psalm to God with his friends.

God always there. There to love, there to pray to, helping him, speaking to him.

And he could acknowledge in every single crisis, ah, God is with me.

And the one thing of which he had no experience was the loss of God.

The one reality he'd never known was the loss of God. That was uncharted territory.

And yet he knew, come tomorrow, he would have to go through that valley, the valley of the loss of God.

He would have to be in a wilderness where no man dwelt. In a land where you cried to God, God didn't answer.

Where you said to God, why? And God wouldn't tell him why.

You know, it's not a sin to ask God why. Why, God? Have you allowed this to come into my life?

And for God to be silent, say, what I do you don't know now.

But you will know. You will know one day. Heaven won't be a world of eternal perplexity.

I'll tell you. You won't be asking why forever. The loss that he feared of the place of God.

The loss of the sense of the love of God. The loss of the comfort of God.

The loss of the experience of the promises of God powerfully breaking into his life and being fulfilled.

The loss of the sense of the help of God. God is my refuge and my strength, a very present help.

It was helping him. But he had no joy and no experience of it.

He was going to be without God. And that's why our

Lord was totally overwhelmed. In fact, we have to go to our midway break right now. And we'll pick up right where you left off when we return from the break.

And folks, please be patient with us. This is our longer than normal break in the middle of the show because Grace Life Radio 90 .1

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And Jeff, if you want to pick up where you left off on this very monumental and vitally important passage and incident in the life of Christ.

Fine, yes. I was talking about the loss of God and I think you get a wonderful insight into this if you go back to the lovely narrative of Abram offering up Isaac.

And one of the great things that's built into that story is the emphasis that they went up, both of them, together.

Abram and Isaac went up, both of them, together. Together. And that's the way it was with God the

Father and God the Son in Bethlehem.

The Father's there caring for this baby who is all of God and all of man in one person.

And then in Nazareth, all those years, he's there in that home.

He's with him when he remains in Jerusalem and sits at the feet of the rabbis and teachers and asks them profound questions and answers their questions to him.

He's there in Galilee as he transforms and gathers a congregation of 500 believers that are all to be with him on the

Mount of Resurrection. In the upper room, he's there. Never for a single moment was

God not there. They were together. And then, in the most appalling moment of all, when he most needed

God, they weren't together. There was no one there.

God wasn't there. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

And it's that fact, it's reality, as an imminent reality, as he knows what's going to happen when he'll be made an offering to God and bear in his own body our sin and be dealt with as our perverse and evil ways deserve to be dealt with by a

God who is light and that is only hours away. That loss of God.

That's what our Lord finds overwhelming.

He wouldn't be able to handle it by himself. He's overwhelmed.

We're told he was amazed. And, you know, there are times in our

Christian lives, for all of us, when we should be amazed, we're amazed at the blessings that God gives us.

You look in a room where you see your children, as I see my three daughters, and they are sitting together on the settee, and they're talking, and two of them are gravely listening to another, and then one picks it up and answers, and the other two listen, and they are speaking about being mothers and being wives, and there are different churches, and they're listening with such spiritual concern to one another.

And I'm overwhelmed. I'm amazed. They've seen me at my worst. They've seen the almost angel in the public become an almost devil in the kitchen.

They've seen me at my worst, and yet they trust in Jesus Christ.

Isn't that wonderful? You talk to a woman, and the woman will say, I don't understand it.

She says, I've always taken my child to church, and my boy, and now he doesn't believe.

I don't understand it. The voice of grace never speaks like that.

We say it's amazing how they've seen us so inconsistent and poor as Christians, and yet they themselves, some of them have put their trust in Jesus Christ.

How wonderful. The grace of almighty God. We're amazed at the grace of God, and then we are amazed when we are with a loved one and are holding their hand and witness them breathe their last, and we know that this wonderful marriage has come to an end or that the child that we gave birth to hasn't lived for long.

We're amazed at the dealings of God with us. We're told about the disciples on resurrection morning.

They went down, and the tomb was empty, and they were amazed. There was an eeriness, a terrifying otherworldliness about the whole reality, and that's why our

Lord in Gethsemane is overwhelmed at what is looming up, the coming, the car crash that lies before him, that is

Calvary. So those are some of the reasons why our

Lord was overwhelmed, and his sweat was just drops of blood in the garden.

What can we learn about Christ's rebuke of his disciples?

I'm sure there are no doubt many people who are either not

Christian who know the account because it's fairly famous, or they are Christians, but may say in sinful pride, now

I never would have fallen asleep if I was there with Jesus. I would have done a better job than his disciples.

In fact, there are millions, no doubt. In fact, maybe all of us might have said or thought in our heads that they never would have fallen if they were

Adam or Eve in the Garden of Eden, and that they would not have denied

Christ, especially three times if they were Peter, especially when it was just a young girl who recognized him.

But we could go on and on and on. We think more highly of ourselves than we ought, and we might think we would have acted in a different way were we with Jesus.

But what can we learn about his rebuke to his own disciples? We can learn about our responsibility.

He says, just an hour, Peter. Just watch with me for 60 minutes.

And then he catches that up in the next hour, and he says, it was just an hour, and you said, never?

You were so confident in yourself. The great word of the orator, never,

I'll never leave you, he said. I'll never forsake you. I'll never.

I wasn't asking for never, Peter. I was just asking for an hour, and you didn't.

You didn't watch with me. And my friends, the commandments of our

Lord are not impossible commands.

If we are trusting in the Holy Spirit, if we have illimitable access to an indwelling

Holy Spirit, if then Paul speaking on behalf of every

Christian says, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,

I can give him an hour. It simply underlines for us,

Chris, how the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked that we don't know the good that we would, we'd give him an hour, we'd give him our life, and yet we don't.

The good that we do, we don't. The evil that we would not, snoring when we should be serving, praying, and we don't.

And it just reminds us how, if it were not for the immense pity and compassion, how

Jesus goes back and says, it's all right now. Take your rest. He doesn't rebuke them again.

Take their rest. And then he says, come to betray me. And he gets them to their feet so that they are not disheveled and shocked as the swords and staves and torches of the soldiers comes through the olive trees towards him.

So I think it shows us how we must take very responsibly the will of God for our lives, for our family life, for our marriages, for our business, for our

Christian duties, for our church attendance, for our personal private devotions.

Couldn't we give him a little time? That's the thing that we've got to be aware of.

Praise God. We do have a listener who is anonymous.

I'm not sure why. It doesn't seem to be a very personal or private matter, but I'll grant the request anyway.

The anonymous listener says, I still don't understand how

Christ could have been tempted in all ways as we have when it is clear that Christ could not have been lured sexually and wanted to commit the sin as we may have done many thousands of times when he was without sin.

How could he have been tested as we were when he was without sin and never for a moment wanted to disobey his

Father? Well, in every way, the fiery darts were hurled at him.

Satan didn't stop. But there was no combustible material in the heart of Jesus that could cause a conflagration.

But we have gone astray from the womb telling lies.

We've done the things that we ought not to have done and we have been guilty of many, many sins of omission.

And so we are yielded to temptation. Temptation itself is not sinful.

The Old Hymn tells us, but for yielding is sin. It's giving in.

It's appropriating. So I imagine there is the sexual sin that Christ was tempted with, but he never appropriated it.

He never dwelt upon it. He never lusted after it.

He never let his imagination go fully into it.

You don't need to do that in order to know the power of a temptation.

He was tempted by Satan, by a full frontal attack of Satan in the wilderness.

He was tempted to take glory without suffering, to jump off the top of the pinnacle of the temple and nor would angels take him down like an elevator to the ground without being hurt.

He didn't take that temptation, but he understood what that temptation was.

He was understanding. He was feeling the power of the temptation, but he never yielded to it.

It's the yielding that is the distinction between the man

Christ Jesus and ourselves, and it is the strength of resistance that is the other distinction between him and us.

He yielded with strong cryings and tears. He threw himself to the ground.

He cried mightily to God that God would deliver him and God heard him.

Every day he appropriated God's presence and power, and we fail to do that, and so we fall into sin.

I don't believe that Christ had to experience any sin in order to know its power.

He knew what sin was because he knew Satan and his reality, and he knew the power of the world, and he broke his heart to see

Jerusalem. He wept over the power of the world. He knew that, but he didn't give in to the world's temptations, to Satan's temptations, or to his own desires.

He was unlike us, made in every point as we are, and yet without sin.

And we have Bobby in Hartsdale, New York, who asks, could a part of the agony of Christ in Gethsemane be that he knew that he was actually going to become sin even though he was perfectly holy and righteous and sinless?

Of course. That is the heart of it, the spiritual temptation that he was going through, that overwhelmed him, that tomorrow he would become the

Lamb of God, that tomorrow Christ would experience what

Zechariah prophesied, that the Lord would lift up his rod against the man who was his fellow, that tomorrow

Christ would suffer what is photographed for us by Isaiah in chapter 53, that it would please the

Lord to bruise him and to put him to shame. What Paul says, he wouldn't spare his own son because of this extraordinary fact.

He loved you, and he loved me, and he was determined to spare us, and so he took our blame, our scoffing, in our place condemned he stood, sealed our pardon with his blood.

Behold, the Lamb of God has done that. Yes, you're quite right that what he experienced on the cross was all that our sins merit and deserve, and he had a foretaste of this then, an awareness by the

Holy Spirit revealing to him what lay before him, and the triumph over it that we'll look at tomorrow, the triumph over it that he experienced there, so that he is composed at the end as he faces the soldiers, the beating up pilot,

Herod, the Sanhedrin, the crucifixion, and he is totally in control.

We have Bebe in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who says, I know that Jesus never lost his deity at any point in his existence, and that he lived for eternity in the past as well as in the future with the

Father, but did he diminish aspects and privileges of his deity, such as his knowledge of the future?

It seems to be portraying that in this account, since he says,

Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me, yet not my will, but yours be done.

It seems as though he did not know whether his father would be willing to remove the cup or not.

There's another verse, you know, that says, who for the joy that was set before him endured, endured the cross, despised shame, because his knowledge was not only of the sufferings, but of the resurrection.

On the third day, that phrase, the third day that is repeated so often in the gospel,

I will rise again. And so, that diminished, that was hidden, the comforts of what those verses say were not given to our

Lord at that time. For that moment, for the 24 hours between Gethsemane and his tasting death and being put in the grave at that time, he, the father never loved him as much as he did during those 24 hours.

But our Lord Jesus did not appreciate and experience that love at that time.

He was the divine, eternal, infinite, unchangeable

Son of God that he had always been. When he's lying on the ground in Gethsemane, when he's shedding drops of blood, he is still the

Eternal One, the Word who was in the beginning with God and was God.

But he doesn't get the comfort and the strength to his heart and soul that that gave to him.

And there's a parallel in a sense with us. Behold what manner of love the

Father has bestowed upon us that we should be called sons of God.

I'm a son of God, but oh, I don't always, I don't always enjoy the privileges, the blessedness of being a son of a king.

It's hidden from me. Because of my own, the clouds of sin that embrace me,

I don't enjoy. And Jesus then, because of sin imputed to him, that he was made sin for us.

Who made him sin? Oh, the Father made him sin. Who laid upon him the iniquity of me?

Did I lay it? Did I think of every sin? And then I laid it one by one, sins of omission, sins of thought, sins of deed, sins of word, sins of action, sins against those who love me the most, and whom

I love the most, and whom I've hurt. Did I one by one lay those sins?

Oh, thank God it was God the Father who laid them all upon his son.

Amen. None was omitted. Everything is covered. The most heinous, the most tricky, the most cynical sin, the most hypocritical sin

I've been guilty of, and the Lord has laid that upon his dear son.

And we have to go to our final break right now. It's going to be much more brief than the last two.

But please, if you intend to send in a question, do it now, because we're rapidly running out of time.

chrisarnson at gmail .com is the email address to send that question to. chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Don't go away. We'll be right back after these messages from our sponsors with more of Jeff Thomas. Chris Arnson, host of Iron Trump and Zion Radio here.

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Welcome back. Jeff Thomas, were you going to answer the question about how to respond to the blasphemous charge that Christ was guilty of cowardice by wanting the cup removed from Him?

I'm going to deal with the cup tomorrow night. Yeah, I'm going to deal with it then.

I'm going to continue when I speak about the praying Christ, the deliverance that came to Him.

That prayer is impotence grasping omnipotence. I'm going to do all of that and see in what ways then

He was He was helped. So, tomorrow, folks.

Well, if you could, I'd like you to have five minutes of uninterrupted time to summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners regarding this text and this incident in the life of Christ.

Thank you very much. What precious five minutes they are. I want to speak really to those of you who are not

Christians yet who have been thinking about it and at times have come very near to the borders of the

Kingdom of God, but have just hesitated and it's almost become a pattern of your life to hesitate.

I want to say some words quite seriously to you. How misguided is the indifference or even the peace of mind with which you and many unbelieving men and women face the possibility of the loss of God.

The God who has blessed you with family and health and prosperity and long life and peace.

And that God who has spoken to you in Jesus Christ and in His words and you've been always saying no.

That was something, the loss of God that amazed and overwhelmed the

Lord Jesus Christ. And I'm saying shouldn't that halt you and make you fearful and concerned?

Let me apply it in this way. Do we ourselves sometimes as Christians ever engage in actions that may we know lead to the loss of God?

And is that loss of God the one thing which above all others terrifies us?

That we lose God? And if we aren't Christians, if we're not saved, do we realize what we're moving towards?

An open -ended experience of such a terrible reality that filled

Jesus Christ with such dread. He was troubled and overwhelmed at the prospect of losing

God. And I can also turn it this way and say this.

That there are times in the lives of some Christians when

God's providence for ourselves takes our breath away. When it makes our hair stand on end.

There are moments when there's an awesomeness in our experience. Remember what

Jacob said at Bethel. This is a dreadful place.

That is this is a place full of dread. And there are moments in our lives when you know you can't cope.

You know that. When the providences that come into your life are unmanageable by yourself, so big with a mysteriousness of God, that you will feel as Christ felt, my soul is overwhelmed.

Now, those are not common experiences. They're not something that every believer has.

But I want you to leave a place in your own theological universe for the possibility that one day you will stand in a situation which, although it's not exactly identical to Christ, has some of the elements of Gethsemane.

I believe that for us, there's never a Calvary. That was

Christ alone. But there are then Gethsemane's moments when we are overwhelmed with a feeling of the sheer heavenly unmanageable pregnancy of the providence through which we are going.

When the smiling face of our Heavenly Father is hidden. And maybe when you see some of the

Lord's people broken. And when you see them overwhelmed. Oh, don't judge them too harshly.

Because you don't know what they're going through. You don't know how

God is dealing with their souls. And so, I leave you with this

Christ in this emotional condition. It's the charter of Christian feeling.

It's the charter for my Christian emotion. It's the charter for me feeling so vulnerable.

So weak. It's the right of a man and a woman of God to be overwhelmed with sorrow.

And distressed. And troubled. And howl out our grief.

And there are moments when this is what we react. I remember the day after the funeral of my wife.

And I got in the car. And I went to drive off 60 miles to my daughter's to spend the weekend with her.

And I looked across. And there was an empty passenger seat. Where she had always sat.

And I howled and wept. And later on, howled and wept again.

And then, ah, the God of all comfort, he helped me and strengthened me.

He sent an angel to sit in that seat that I couldn't see. But he was there.

And he gave me strength like he does. Again and again and again.

Well, praise God. Thank you so much for sharing that very intimate and personal experience.

And I want to remind our listeners that if they are ever visiting Aberystwyth Wales, or if they live near there, or if they have friends and family near there, the website is alfredplacechurch .org

.uk alfredplacechurch .org .uk alfredplacechurch .org .uk And we are going to be continuing our discussion with Jeff Thomas tomorrow.

So make sure you listen in and hear answers to your questions that perhaps we didn't have time to address today.

And also, folks, please, if you have not registered yet for the Biblical Counseling Conference that I will be attending, and where I'll be manning an exhibitor's booth for Iron Trip and Zion Radio this

Friday and Saturday, go to biblicalcounseling .com forward slash scranton dash

PA dash training That's biblicalcounseling .com forward slash SCRANTON dash

PA dash training. I hope to see you there this Friday and Saturday, August 28th and 29th. And I want you all to always remember, for the rest of your lives, that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater