July 22, 2018 Strengthened To Suffer by Pastor Josh Sheldon

Luke 22:43 and the Angel Who Strengthened Jesus

Put it in gear, and it drives like any other car, but because it's what it is, she won't drive it. So she does need a ride in her condition, I think. Well, let us look again to God's Word. Lord willing, He will strengthen me, which is an appropriate request on my part, as we look at Luke 22, 43, another devotion on the cross of Jesus.

This is Luke 22, 43, and there appeared to him an angel from heaven strengthening at him. And of course we come to our Lord Jesus as He anticipates the cross, His final evening, before the passion of the following day, and of course His death, His burial, and His resurrection.

And we come upon our Lord as He is in this prayer, this thrice repeated prayer, where He calls out to the Father, if it is possible, we could say, if there's any other way, then take this cup from me.

And at the third request of our Lord to His Father, there appeared to Him an angel from heaven strengthening Him. So we need to understand that Christ's vehement cries, they didn't fail in their course to the altar that stands before the Father.

It's not as if they were ignored or unheard. Jesus told us over and over again that our prayers are fruitful because our Father always hears us. But we'd ask Him, could He hear us and not hear His own only begotten Son?

The need of the moment was persevering strength, and that is what the Father provided to our Lord. It was an angel who met this mission. It was an angel who strengthened our Savior. And it was then, it was at this moment, Luke records, that the earnest prayers became like, His sweat became like drops of blood as He went through these prayers.

So our Lord's perfect life here is, it's a cornerstone of our faith. Without it, what could possibly be imputed to us? If there was even a single error in Jesus's obedience to the Father, if there was the slightest stepping off the path of perfect obedience to Him, then He would have been a lamb with a blemish.

He would have been a sacrifice unworthy of God the Father. And if that were the case, then we are forever lost in our sins because our great High Priest would have owed a sacrifice for Himself before He could intercede for others.

And if that were the case, then His suffering was all for Himself with nothing left over to be imputed to anyone else. But the church needs to cry out a great hallelujah here because His obedience was perfect, and His obedience was constant.

Christ’s Perfect Obedience, Sinlessness, and Kenosis

And so the Apostle was able to say, He was tempted in all ways as we are, yet without sin. And Peter was able to write, He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in His mouth. Perfect life, and it was characterized by a self-renouncing humility.

As a Son of Man said over and over, He came not to be served, but to serve. And so Philippians 2 .7 comes to bear, He made Himself nothing, says the Apostle. Some translations say of no reputation. Theologians call this because of the Greek word for emptying, the kenosis, the emptying.

B .B. Warfield, he cautions us to stop way short of thinking that Christ's deity was laid aside. Even His glory was His, even while He walked on the earth. He took no advantage of His glory while He walked here with us.

And that would have been His just due just because of His nature. But it was never other than truly and completely and always His. Truly God, truly man. I don't think we even have to distinguish by saying Christ's dread was the outflow of His human nature.

I mean we've said that before. It's common. It's nothing heretical or anything like that. But it could have the effect of dividing in our minds what was perfectly blended in God's. Christ God, Christ man.

And so the Christ is the one who's making these pleas to God. Again, B .B. Warfield says no Christian heart will be satisfied with a Christ in whom there may be no Godhead while He was on earth or in whom there may be no humanity now that He has gone to heaven.

A Christ less than man could not have paid for our sins. A Jesus less than God cannot bring us to God or provide a full atonement to God. Jesus' emptying of Himself is described in Him coming in the form of sinful flesh.

He took the form of a servant, of a servant. In one sense, He could say the Father is greater than I without contradicting Himself and also say, pardon me, I and the Father are one. You know too often I think we're almost offended by that angel who comes.

We think it was God answering by an intermediary rather than by Himself. As if this was where God turned away and God couldn't be with Jesus. But Jesus didn't make any such complaint. A few moments afterward, He reminded Peter that His Father would immediately send 12 legions of angels to rescue Him.

And even then, He wouldn't have needed the angels, would He? This is the same Jesus who when the arresting party came and He said, I told you I am He, they fell down as dead men. So Christ wouldn't have needed to call angels.

All He would need to do is speak a word against them and they would have been gone. And when those men, that arresting party, fell to their faces as dead men, there they would have stayed had not the same voice that had said, Lazarus come forth, also said to them, now you may rise and carry out your warrant.

Calvin writes here, there was no want of power in Him, therefore, to restrain their hands if He had thought proper, but He wished to obey His Father by whose decree He knew He was called to die. And more recently John Murray writes, He did not by flinching evade any stroke.

Strengthened for the Cross by the Father’s Will and Covenant

So the angel's mission was well done. The Lord was strengthened and that's evidenced by all that came after. The Father's will in eternal covenant with the Son was accomplished. Our salvation for the glory of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit is secure by Christ's obedience, helped along by the angel bringing heavenly measures of strength.

Now I've often wondered, and I wonder if anybody else has ever pondered this, what did the angel actually say or do when he was there strengthening of Him? And it's a matter on which the scripture is silent, so I don't want to speculate too far.

But the way it's recorded here, this angel's mission was one of extreme importance. In Luke 18 .43, he comes to Jesus. In 18 .44, the very next verse, the blood became or his sweat became like the drops of blood.

So we don't know what the angel said. We don't know what the angel did, but maybe the text allows for a little bit of guarded speculation. He might have said to Him something like, the Father's will is the cross.

Let all else fade in the light of the glory He's going to receive by the salvation you are about to accomplish. Something like that. The cross was not taken away. It couldn't have been. Jesus had said earlier to the disciples, this cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Covenants are sealed how? With blood. Back in the Exodus days, when the people became the people of God, what did Moses do? He sprinkled them with the blood of the covenant. So here we have Jesus strengthened by whatever the angel did.

We know the angel did what he was sent to do. And we know the result was that he was strengthened. And here Jesus seals his determination to complete his Father's will with his blood. This is how I think the angel strengthened him.

We need to understand also that the Father was not indifferent to his son's pleadings any more than he is to ours. This suffering in the garden was part and parcel with the entire passion of our Lord.

Now a man named Roderick Finlayson wrote beautifully about this. He said, the finger of the Father was upon the pulse of the lonely sufferer in Gethsemane. And when the heartbeats of the one in conflict seemed to weaken, heaven concerned itself about him and an angel was commissioned to hasten to his physical aid.

Christ meant what he said when he said, my sorrow is unto death. This moment here when heaven just at the right time, like for us where we come boldly to the throne of grace and there find help in our time of need, often paraphrased, right in the nick of time, right exactly when we need whatever it is God sends.

We have here in Gethsemane this crucial moment. Jesus said, my sorrow is unto death, but he couldn't die in the garden. He couldn't die there. That would do no one any good. He needed to go to the next day.

He needed to be brought to the cross, to the grave, and then to eternal life that speaks to our coming destiny. Jesus said in John 20, 17, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.

So the Lord, far from being removed, was given what he needed to persevere. So God the Father, he's the ultimate Father. He's the model for all of us. We human parents, we cannot remove all the trials from our children's paths.

Even if we could, we often don't. We prepare them for what might come. We raise them in the fear and the admonition of the Lord. We train them up in the way they should go. We set ourselves as examples of endurance, of doing what is right in the Lord's eye, as the psalmist says, even to our own hurt.

To paraphrase some of Jesus' own words, if we being evil are wise enough to know we must not remove all difficulties, but prepare our children for hardships so that they can withstand them when they come, which they surely will, how much more our Father in heaven, and especially how much more in regards to his only begotten Son.

So the angel, we need to understand, brought no relief, only strengthening for the course ahead. Providence can be hard, but God does not leave us alone any more than he did Jesus. We think of Acts chapter 16 and verses 4 and 5.

As they went on their way through the cities, they delivered to them for observance the decisions that had been reached by the apostles and elders who were in Jerusalem. So the churches were strengthened in the faith and they increased in numbers daily.

If you read about the Jerusalem council and the purpose for which they met, the church was in a crisis. Those outer lying churches, the churches that came to faith without the Jewish background, needed to be instructed, needed to be strengthened.

And here this decree goes out from the Jerusalem council, the elders, the apostles, those who saw Jesus with their own eyes, our eyewitnesses to his death, burial, and resurrection. Those men sent this letter out that strengthened those churches, gave them just what they needed, just when they needed it.

Strengthened by the Spirit for Suffering and Service

Ephesians chapter 3, Paul says, God strengthens when it's needed. Jesus, by an angel, we by his spirit. Jesus came to preach the gospel, but as one man puts it, his chief object was that there would be a gospel to preach.

So we can thank God for Christ's obedience. It is his eternal plan that brought Jesus, it is his, the father's, eternal plan that Jesus brought to completion. And we say to God, be all the glory. But I wonder, as I pondered Luke 18 -23 here, when we're in glory, when we see Jesus as he is, do you think we'll have a chance to meet that angel?

It doesn't really matter. We'll see Jesus, and that's all that matters. But I would be curious just to, I don't know, can you shake an angel's hand? I don't know what it's going to be like there. And ask him, what did you say to Jesus when the father sent you to strengthen him?

How did you do that? I'd just be curious to know the working of God the father, because you know, the angel did whatever the father sent him to do, and did it perfectly. And that Jesus did go through the next day's proceedings and procured our salvation.

Now, we may never see that angel, and it won't matter because we will see Jesus, and nothing is going to compare to that. And so we have this short meditation on this one verse in Luke about that angel who seems to have come at this crucial moment to pull Christ through the evening's torments as he anticipated the cross.

The table before us this afternoon, this one to which we're called, Jesus says, as often as you do this, it's a reminder of these things. Had the Lord not been strengthened to stay his course, this would just be bread and wine.

But he did stay the course. Jesus did go to the cross. His body was broken for you. His life was poured out for you, and all that in our place. And so we come to a memorial meal this afternoon, as we do each Sunday, that actually means something.

A meal that should do something for our souls. A meal that should remind us of Christ Jesus, his perfect obedience to the Father, even to the death on the cross. A death, a suffering so hideous that Jesus, pure God and perfect man, all in one, that he needed to be strengthened for what lay ahead of him.

This means something. This should do something for our souls. See, there deserved I to go. God's eternal wrath for my sins deserved by me. God is just, God is good, God is holy, and yet in his mercy, in his eternal plan of salvation, poured out upon Jesus.

This table before us this afternoon means that we stand without fear before our God and Father because, what? Because there's no longer a barrier of sin between us and the Father. Because why? Because Christ Jesus, Galatians 2 .20, who loved me and gave himself up for me, and so joins us together as a church, as those for whom Jesus gave himself up, that we can take this meal and by this be strengthened for what lays ahead of us, whatever that may be, knowing that God is good and knowing that whatever strengthening we need, whatever we need to go through the day, the week, the month ahead, God, in his goodness, because of Christ Jesus, whom we worship here this day, gives us all that we need.

Amen.