Dvd 05 - Gethsemane — Art Katz

Every Occasion as a Once-and-for-All Moment

In three or four days away from New York, I've already had 30 hours in the air and four flights. Only 13 more to go in the seven weeks that remain in New Zealand, Australia, Kenya, Uganda, Cameroon, Burkina Faso.

Every place laden with great portent and significance, as if it is once and for all, including tonight. You mustn't dismiss that as some romantic propensity on my part that wants to give to any occasion heightened meaning.

But the heck of the matter is, every occasion is heightened. Do you realize that? Young as you are, every occasion is a once and for all. And when the invitation came from Australia that has initiated these days, the brother said, this is your last visit, Art.

I don't know where he got that, but I seem to agree. I think I'm going to go on until I'll be 120. So it may not be the termination of the bodily life, but it may well be the Lord opening a whole new area of involvement, maybe mainland China, Asia, that will not permit the luxury of return to places where I've been privileged to come before.

So share my mentality, which will make you more than a passive audience tonight, that this is a once and for all occasion that shall not be given again. What then does one speak in it? As privileged as I am with revelation and insight and perspectives that are altogether utterly rare.

So many times men say to me, who else sees it the way you do, Art? Who else is saying it this way? And I scratch my head and I say, I don't know of anyone. It may well be that they exist, but they will not be many, and they will not be well known.

They'll be as obscure and as hidden and as unobtrusive as I myself am. So I know that I enjoy a rare perspective, and really, by every reckoning, I should be employing every opportunity to express it.

The mystery of Israel and the church, central to the church's own consideration in the last days. To omit that is to defraud yourself of the reality of your own calling. And yet, it's not my subject tonight.

Gethsemane and the Prophetic Burden

My subject tonight is Gethsemane, Jesus agonizing in the garden, which the Lord stirred for me in Singapore and seems again to be the foremost burden of my heart. So isn't it remarkable? As great as is the weight of every occasion, once and for all, for time and for eternity, the Lord allows you to proceed on nothing more but the faintest intimation of his will.

So you're being treated already to the prophetic phenomenon that is so quiet. Although when I first spoke in Singapore, it was a dread. I never came to a pulpit with a greater sense of dread and reluctance as I came there.

Why? I don't know. Maybe it was the sounding of a whole theme of perspective that began with Gethsemane. Maybe because I sensed all that was at stake, a cherished relationship that came as a result of my last visit to that great city with a prominent congregation that I didn't want to see jeopardized by any failure to be to them what they could have expected on the basis of the last visit.

Every new visit is a risk of loss. You realize that? It can be a life and building in relationship and one mishap, one wrong word, one wrong accent, one unbecoming thing is enough to sunder that relationship and spoil it.

So maybe that's why I came with such trepidation to the platform, to the pulpit, to take that risk. The Lord honored it. He came through. Fact of the matter is, after 41 years in the faith, I can't think of a time when he's not come through.

He's remarkably faithful, not because he's under obligation to a character like me, but because he can't help himself. That's what he is. He's in himself faithful. That's why I said it'll be blessed tomorrow.

All these days in New Zealand and Australia and Africa will be blessed. So Lord, I'm really boasting on you. I hope these people understand and thank you, Lord, for coming again to this land and being reminded of its sweetness the physical delight, the green, my God, that meets the eye, the beauty of this island, this place.

And it's dear, Lord, you made it. You're the very soul of geography itself. The earth is the Lord's and is fashioned in your great wisdom for purposes yet more fully to be revealed. And may something of those purposes be expressed in these days.

So Lord, we're going for broke again. And if I'm in error, I don't think so, of this disposition to think that you in the garden agonizing is something you want sounded to the church, that there's a preliminary for us before our own crucifixion that needs to begin in the garden, which garden New Zealand itself is, then instruct us.

Because everything that you did is not mere episode. It is eschatological design and pattern. It's to instruct us upon whom the ends of the age have come. Everything is fraught with instruction in the things that you both spoke and did with an eye to the consequence of for us in the last days.

So speak, Lord. Thank you. Open our inner ear. Open my mouth. Be blessed by this precious time and opportunity in this land and avail yourself of the occasion as if in fact it's a last. We thank you, give you praise in Jesus' name and God's people said, amen.

Sin, Atonement, and the Meaning of the Cross

Well, you can turn with me to Matthew 26, always admiring how terse the scriptures are. T-E-R-S-E. The Singaporeans were wise enough to have behind me a screen and when some obscure word issued from me, instantly it was flashed on the screen with a definition.

Because I tell these Chinese they have only a functional English. I use the word pusillanimous, taking it for granted that everyone knows what that word means. And the first word they flashed was pusillanimous.

You understand what terse means? T-E-R-S-E. Compact. Few words. And they crucified him. I'm so appreciative of the Lord all the more after Mel Gibson and his passion because that was so profuse, so schmaltzy, so overdone, so wringing out the last drop of emotional sympathy in a Catholic way that makes Jesus an object of pity and could therefore excite by that same inducement to look upon Jews as Christ killer, which in fact they are.

But not to be told that as they have historically heard it throughout their European existence as the statement that preceded another onslaught of pillage, rape, looting, murder, death. They need to be told one day by an Elijah people who can speak the truth and an appropriate compassion that yes, alack and alas, not just your fathers but you yourself are guilty of his death.

And in fact, your involvement and arrangement and participation was necessary. He made himself your victim because he knew your frame. As Jews, you have no sense of sin. You're the utter humanist. You think that total depravity of man is a Catholic, a Christian concept.

You're immune to understanding yourself as sinners. For you, if you sin, it's an error, a boo-boo, a fault. You made a mistake. I wish I could show you my clippings on my floor there in my Brooklyn apartment from the New York Times, which I receive daily.

There's not an issue that I'm not scissoring out some article on collapsed CEOs, executives who have taken for themselves $145 million in retirement bonus and various other ways of greed in remarkable frequency every day.

There's another what's the word? Scandal. But the men themselves who perpetrate these scandals are not embarrassed. And when they're caught, then they have to pay a penalty of so many millions. What is that after they have profited by the billions by their skullduggery?

And with the agreement that, yes, they'll pay the penalty, but they will neither acknowledge nor deny the offense. Who has an understanding of sin, even in the church? And if we have not an appropriate understanding of sin, how shall we understand appropriately atonement?

How shall we understand the cross? How shall we understand the necessary death? How shall we esteem the blood if we do not adequately understand what Jesus came to attend that was chronic, that afflicted a whole mankind, and for which there was no remedy short of his sufferings unto death?

It's for the want of these elementary considerations that the cross is now the customary piece of jewelry hanging on Madonna's breast to draw your attention, not to the cross, but to her cleavage. But of course, it's laden with diamonds.

And now she's becoming very spiritual and is studying Kabbalah. You know what Kabbalah is? That's Jewish Judaic mysticism. It's remarkable that they cannot find any answer in Christ, but they can find it in esoteric, excuse my language, Judaism.

A number of movie stars have embraced Kabbalah, and it's out of the pit. Wearing their crosses, as do our American athletes, mostly black, and they can well afford the most ornate cross together with their earrings because they're making robber baron fortunes that run to millions per year.

Contracts like 25, 30, 50 million. Some kid out of high school gets seven million dollars just for signing. Hey, where can there be sanity in a world that gives that kind of compensation to men who play with balls?

So the church, the cross has suffered loss. It has become a superficial external piece of jewelry or something for the architecture, but we need to apprehend it afresh. And for some reason, good reason, the issue of the cross does not begin at Calvary.

The Cross as the Nature of God

It begins at Gethsemane. The fact of the matter is, I even said to the Singaporean Chinese, it begins in heaven. Jesus coming down from heaven, where he had abided with the Father since his inception in a prized and cherished relationship in the ethereal, holy, sinless realm that heaven is, when he agreed voluntarily to leave it in order to come down and take upon himself the form of man and Jewish man, and also that of a slave unto death, that decision made in heaven, even from the foundations before the foundations of the earth were laid, because it was the lamb slain before the foundations of the earth.

That decision, that willingness was already the cross. And it was even the cross before the decision. It was always the nature of God. The cross is not an event of 2 ,000 years ago. That was its conspicuous manifestation.

The cross is intrinsic to God himself as God. It's his self-giving nature in love that opens him to suffering for others. And that's a pitifully inadequate statement. So we need to know the cross is not a Johnny-come-lately final, you know, thing.

It ever and always was, and even presently is, the essential nature of God as God. Can you say amen to that? Now I got you. Because if you can say amen to that for God, what must you say for yourself?

If that's the intrinsic nature of God, what ought to be the intrinsic nature of his church, which is his body? And if you read Oswald Chambers today, or was it Spurgeon, both are in my devotional readings.

Are they in yours? I don't even have devotional readings. Shame on you. You dare commence the day without a time of devotion before the Lord, in word and in prayer, and in the legacy that is given us by these brilliant, saintly English writers?

They're all English. I don't know what it is about Great Britain when it was great, before the advent of punk rock culture and the Beatles, whom I've never heard once, but to read Spurgeon morning and evening.

I think it's today's selection where he talks about when the cross was set into its socket, there was a shudder of a convulsive kind that registered throughout the whole of creation and maybe precipitated that earthquake.

But what he's—that I understood, and I'm intuitive and have long understood—but what he said is, every bone in his body was jarred by that painful weight, the weight of his own body on the cross nailed, that when that thing came into its socket, when it was raised up and went into its hole in the ground, the shock of that was felt in every joint, so much so that the scriptures can say that every bone of him was, so to speak, broken.

He was set out of joint by that enormous jolt. And then he raises this question, what then ought to be experienced by those who composed that body? This will save you from New Zealand shallowness, and something has got to come to that end, that only Spurgeon can see that if his body was so affected by that jolt of being set into that socket, ought not that to be in some measure the experience of all that comprises his body?

Like us? Have you ever felt the jolt? There's a basic thud, a shudder, a—I don't have a word for it, and if I don't have a word for it, it's something deep— that he necessarily had to experience in his body.

What is the corollary, spiritually speaking, of that physical thing for us? Can we really be the body and have no sense of the anguish which he experienced in that terrible jolt together with the whole thing that made up the horror of his crucifixion?

It's for the want of that that the cross has lost its significance and that we are essentially shallow, because this is God's great provision not only for sin, but for self. We've got to get this into our grit and into our gut.

Something needs to save us from New Zealand, if you understand me, or Australia, and more so Singapore, every place in the earth that is externally pleasant and seductive and parades as reality. We need to experience something that goes back to the beginning, and it ought to resonate in our essential personality always.

That's why my kinsmen are going to catch it. That's why they're going to tread a road to Calvary. That's why there's going to be a universal suffering for my Jewish people, an uprooting and a casting out in nations where they'll have no beauty that any should desire them.

They're going to be whipped to a pulp and beaten and flee, and most of them will not survive that final time of Jacob's trouble. But the remnant that does and finally returns to Zion as the redeemed of the Lord, whose mourning and sighing flees away, will never ever be totally healed of the remarkable last day's suffering that marks their return to God through walking a road to Calvary comparable to his.

As a priestly nation now come into its call, because the gifts and callings of God are irrevocable, the very foundation of their priestliness will be their last day's suffering. There's something about suffering that leaves its mark upon the soul.

Even after the body has been healed physically, having passed through something of an excruciating kind sets up a tremor, a resonance that is good for us. It will be good for my people. I want to say this.

If they don't experience that, they're disqualified to be a nation of priests. They'll not be a light to New Zealand, where heaven knows that light is needed. They can only bring it in a demeanor and a posture and an attitude of soul that was conditioned profoundly by their last day's suffering.

And we also are called a nation of priests and a royal priesthood. But if you don't have a quotient and dimension of sorrow and suffering, if you have not felt that convulsive shock when that thing was set in its socket, how then can you be priestly?

If you're the body, there's some kind of mystic union with the head that enables you in the realm of spirit to pick up the vibrato and shock that came when that thing was set into the hole in the earth that should affect you permanently.

I've never talked like this before. First time. Don't feel obliged to understand me. Okay, so before the cross comes the garden, which in fact is the cross, before the actuality of the cross. So in verse 36 of chapter 26, then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called Gethsemane and said unto the disciples, sit you here while I go and pray yonder.

He took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee and began to be sorrowful and very heavy. Then he said unto them, my soul is exceedingly sorrowful even unto death. Carry you here and watch with me.

The Sorrow of Christ and the Pattern for the Church

So what do you think, you dear New Zealander saints? Was that his Jewish national personality being expressed? A kind of Shakespearean morbid sense of sorrow that need not afflict you because you're Anglo-Saxon in your origins?

Or is this appropriate for Christ? Sorrow, grief, burden that lies too deep for words. It's not a man sorrowing for himself that is about to face an ordeal of an ultimate kind physically and morally. It's deeper than that.

It's something of what is coming to pass in a moment of time, a head-on collision that is as ancient as creation, a showdown with the powers of darkness and a final contest of an irrevocable and ultimate kind that makes his own soul to shudder.

So this sorrowing and grief is not some kind of manic depressive of the Jewish personality, although we Jews are famous for it, for the wrong reasons. This is the Lord. This is appropriate. This is real.

There should be a component in our own souls for sorrow. There should be a place for grief. There should be something of the eternal note of sadness that enters in, even in the midst of our celebrations.

I'm that fool who called the charismatic worship team to shut up and stop when they were doing their thing in the Israeli manner. I said you have no right to carry on like that. As if Israel has already passed through the travail of the last days and you're anticipating her joy, then is your celebration appropriate?

But if you have not factored in the suffering that is yet to come, your present celebration now is vulgar, bizarre, and obscene. Stop it. Jesus was a man of sorrows, not just in the moment when he's facing the prospect of his cross.

There was always that underside. And I'll tell you what, he's the pattern son. If it was appropriate for him, it's appropriate for us. And I'm not asking you to cultivate some morbid kind of thing until you get into that mood.

I'm asking you to come into the reality of Christ, into the essential personality of the son of the living God who reflects the Father. So the Father must equally then be a sorrowing deity. Or have you nothing to sorrow about?

You got it all together? Society is on an upturn? Prosperity in view? All problems solved? Everything hokidory? No reason for sorrow? No broken lives? No kids freaking out? No unhappy marriages? We have every reason to anguish for the conditions that prevail in the earth today and not allow ourselves to be distracted or seduced by what seems to visibly be a much better appearance of things.

So it's interesting, the groaning of Jesus in the garden, the things that he was contending for, were ultimate, and that the word agony itself—I looked it up in the dictionary, and I was surprised to find it means to contend, to contest against something.

There was a struggle of the deepest kind in his soul. He was contending against evil, against death, but he was equally contending against the garden itself. Where did you get that, Cass? I don't know.

I was driving to that meeting in Singapore and passing through that idyllic civilization. If ever I retire, that's the place where I'd like to be. And I thought, this is like a veritable garden. And I'm going to call the church there to agonize with Christ.

They need to agonize and contend against the garden itself. Though it comes of God, though its nature, though it's prolific, though there's a beauty, but it's a beauty that can seduce us. And the spirit and powers of this world want us to believe that that external and visible thing constitutes reality itself.

But the Lord who is grieving and sorrowing saw through those appearances, and he knew what ultimate issues were, and what was at stake. And he had to wrestle, so to speak, against the seductive power of the garden.

Singapore is a garden, and to a great extent, I think the whole of New Zealand is. Isn't that a remarkable thing? I'm a nature lover. Love your scenery, love the climate, love all that constitutes your remarkable environment.

And yet I recognize prophetically that that very thing, even given of God, can be a seductive distraction from ultimate and utter reality. Because if we're not tuned into reality, how then are we the church?

And when we're tuned into reality of things as they are, and need to be seen through that which constitutes appearances vying for us to recognize that as being real, then we will sorrow. I'm speaking like the fool tonight.

You'll never again have to hear something like this, but you need to hear it once. And that one time has come to save you from being New Zealanders, and to make you to be pilgrims, strangers, and sojourners in the earth.

Don't get too comfy here. Don't get too habituated. See through and what constitutes the real issues of life for which you were born both physically and again in the spirit. There are things yet to be contended.

There's a contest yet going on that's not finished. Yes, Jesus stripped them at the cross, and made of them an open spoil, and stripped them of their power. There's another word like militancy of their arms, but he didn't abolish them.

The final stroke that will do them in once and for all, and liberate the mankind who still is under their bondage, must take place through the church, in a contest where an agony is required in the garden of New Zealand.

The Church’s Contest Against the Seductive Garden

And you'll be looked upon as being freaky, especially if you're young. And I said to the Chinese pastor there who's an extraordinary man, your mandate is to commend an alternative reality to that which your congregation knows.

And should you succeed, despite every obstruction, everything will be pitted against that success, because the powers of darkness want even to persuade the church that this outward visible and external garden constitutes the reality to which men should aspire and give their life and energy.

As if this is the whole issue, and that there's nothing beyond that physical life called eternity. If you shall succeed in disabusing that garden for them, and giving them an alternative by the word and spirit, you will have rendered them pilgrims, strangers, and sojourners in the earth.

You will have unfitted them for success in Singapore. That's true here also. So he went a little farther, though he was exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death. Terry here, and watch with me, and he went farther, fell on his face and prayed, saying, oh my father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me, nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.

In one of the other gospel accounts, it says he sweated drops of blood. Some renditions say clots of blood. You know what I think about that? That is the blood of atonement. It did not have to wait to be extracted by the brutality of man.

The first expression of the blood of Christ, given for the propitiation of our sins, was not extracted, but given. It was extruded. Excuse my language. It'll soon be over, sis. Hang on. Something came out of his gut.

Something came out of the agony of wrestling and of contending that broke through the pores of his skin and fell as great clots of blood on the earth. And I don't know why it is, but I'm rejoicing that the first blood of Jesus did not wait to be extracted by the torture of men, but was voluntarily expressed and extruded through his own willing, voluntary suffering and prayer as he contended against the evil he was soon to face head on at the cross.

Maybe Paul knows when he said, have you wrestled against sin unto blood? Something like that. Who of us have wrestled against sin unto blood? It's descriptive. I think it's literal. But most of our lives are lived at the surface.

It's shallow. We've not come to that deep unto deep of agonizing, gasping, feeling a sense of dread as we prophetic preachers do every time we're required to stand up and speak in his name. And if the church is called to be prophetic, it should not be our unique experience alone.

You should know the dread of having to open your mouth and speak for God from God in a once and for all way for which you'll be held accountable. We're in a contest, you guys. There's a struggle that's still going on and will be consummated with this age.

But don't think it's going to end with a whimper. It's going to be a head on final collision because those powers of the air are deceived. They are the very soul of deception. That's why had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

But now, even having learned their mistake, they still think that they can triumph over him and over the church, which is his body. Oswald Chambers got me started on this in a selection from my utmost for his highest.

You can look it up in your own edition on April 5th, in which his title is His Agony and Our Fellowship. That's why I looked up the word agony. His blood falling as clots on the ground was a statement of the internal agony in his soul over which he was wrestling and contending, not out of a fear for his mortality or for his human body and what the physical dimension of his suffering would be.

To believe that that was what Jesus was crying about, let this cup pass from me, is to miss it entirely, is to project upon him your own cowardice. He wasn't talking about spare me this pain physically.

He was talking about not having to become sin and have the face of the father turned away who could not look upon him and have to cry out, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? He who knew the unspeakable delight of an eternal pre-incarnate fellowship with the father knew that in having to become sin, the father would have to turn away his face.

And at the crucial time in his suffering, when his soul cries out more than ever for the sense of the solace and comfort of a father who is physically sensed and present, at that very moment he has got to experience the reality of God-forsakenness.

And if you'll believe it and follow in the way, that's your experience also. That's why I reprimanded those hotshots at that prophetic conference in America years ago who came to teach us how to invoke the presence of God through choruses, as if he's Johnny on the spot and we can manipulate him by something we perform musically to bring his presence down.

My God, what a statement of where we are in unreality if we believe that. What kind of notion of God can you have if you believe that you can manipulate him through your amplifiers and compel him to come down?

And if you're getting some sense of presence, you need to question whose it is, because your condition is so abysmal and so carnal, it would be nothing for the powers of the air to give you an answer that solaces your carnal heart in which you think that that's God.

So I called a halt to that proceeding, and I said, you guys teaching us how we can invoke the presence, you would do better to teach us how to be faithful and obedient unto death in the absence of the felt presence of God.

That's what Jesus had to bear, and that's what we will have to bear. He's the pattern son. Everything that we read in the garden at the cross, his cry in Psalm 22, Isaiah 53, in some measure Israel will be required to pass through it, in some measure so also will we.

Some of us are experiencing that measure already. I can't understand why in the crisis of our personal situation, God is not to be felt as present. That would be for us such a solace and comfort that we might bear it.

Why does he withhold himself? Because of his remarkable love that has as its intention something more than your momentary comfort but your ultimate sonship and maturity. Got the picture? The blood of Jesus was not extracted at the first but extruded, drawn out by his own agony of contending and prayer in depths of a kind that few of us have ever begun to approach.

Why should we? What issue is there that is so demanding that we have to groan and pray unto blood? After all, the issue for us is an enjoyable service, nice meeting, good program. New Zealand is too much with you if that's what you think this thing is about.

Wrestle against this garden. It wants to subdue you and capture you and make you to believe that it constitutes the reality that you can play a religious accompaniment to that that fits it. We need to agonize against the garden itself.

I'm not calling you to disloyalty. In fact, you'll be doing New Zealand a greater service to see through the appearance of external things than to submit to it. Jesus was contending. He was competing for something ultimate, and if we have lost that sense or have never known it, how are we the church?

That's why a man like me thinks every speaking is the last time. Every occasion is a once-in-for-all. We're in an ultimate contest, and this arrangement tonight is not makeshift. Even my coming here, it's all to do with the ordination of God, with his sovereignty, with moving toward a great consummation and climax of the age for which every speaking and every convocation of saints is a step toward that end.

We've got to consider the end or our present is bankrupt. We've got to know we're in a contest and a struggle and one that we cannot bear alone because even his disciples slept. They could not watch for an hour, and that's where most of us are.

So I couldn't do more for the Church of Jesus Christ in New Zealand than to awaken it to its apostolic and prophetic core, to the ultimacy of the faith at the end of the age in which the great issues are going to be propounded in the nations and need to be anticipated and prepared for not only physically but morally.

Moral Struggle and the Church’s Calling

Now, there's a word. Morally? You mean, ought that we have to watch the length of our skirts, you simple brack-a-bracks? No. Moral. Hmm. What a word. Do you love it, or is it just me? Jesus' agonizing in the garden was a moral struggle.

The issues of life that are ultimate are moral, and we simpletons have not even begun to grasp the moral issues that constitute real life and reality. We don't see our struggles in our situations as having a moral content and reason, and to rob mankind of a moral consciousness is to rob him of his humanity.

This is moral. This is ultimate. This is struggle for things that are invisible, unseen, that offer no prospect of reward, but rather you open yourself to be candidates for suffering. In fact, your agonizing in prayer is a suffering.

Little wonder that we avoid it. If your prayer is convenient and easy and glib, forget it. It doesn't reach the heaven. It doesn't transact with God. He hears agonizing travail. He wants something in the deeps of our being.

He wants a commiseration. He wants a union with a people on earth like himself, because you know what? He is still a man of sorrows and grief to this very hour and ever and always will be. It's not over for him.

It's his nature. It's his depth. The only people I've ever seen who recognized that were the sisters of Mary, Basilia Schlink, who wanted to be with Jesus and comfort him and share with him in his present griefs and sorrow.

Will that make you ill-fitted to be a nice guy and be popular in your culture? Probably. They might even have you to see a psychiatrist. How ungainly that nice, healthy New Zealand young people have developed this morbid propensity for sorrow and a sense of grief, seeing the things that are invisible are more effective to them than that which is seen.

That's either insanity or ultimate sanity. So we're told to fight the good fight, fight to the finish, wrestle, which is ultimate conflict, ultimate extension, not only of our bodily strength and skill, but the ultimate issue of who wins in wrestling is beyond the physical dimension and even the element of skill.

It's the element of grit. It's the element of what is moral in man, who will not allow defeat, who recognizes that the stakes are too great, the issues are too ultimate, that that failure can be conceded to the powers of darkness who seem to have all the marbles.

It's that moral element that made Jacob into Israel, who would not let God go except that he blessed him. Now, is that Jewish and you Gentiles are disqualified from that kind of earnest and compelling nature?

Or can God encourage you and give it to you by the spirit that you would transcend being limited to being Gentiles, that you would come into this Hebraic Jacob and Israel urgency by the grace of God, because it befits you as the church.

And only in that condition can you be the church and fulfill its mandate and its calling. Aren't you glad this is being recorded tonight? Who can understand all this gibberish in the first hearing by a man who's beside himself for your sake?

So I wrote here, Jesus had also to contend even against the beauty of the garden, which is so contrary and belies the sea of iniquity, which is the concealed truth of mankind's condition for which he must grow on.

So also must we in the bringing forth of an alternative reality to a world that is essentially untroubled and seems to have everything together, all the marbles, yet lies in the wicked one, must we also wrestle against the garden, wrestle against being seduced by the things that purport to be which are not.

The victory at Gethsemane must proceed and prepare that of Calvary. Yet now as then, then even the best of us as disciples sleep. If Jesus had to pass through Gethsemane before he passed through Calvary, if he had to pass through Calvary before he would pass through resurrection, if he had to pass through resurrection before he could enter into ascension and enthronement, what then must we?

To what degree is he the patterned son? Is this just we can look back historically that this is what he had to experience? Or is his experience, his every experience, something for us as a pattern in some measure incumbent upon us as the body, if we are to fulfill and complete the things for which he agonized even unto death at the cross.

Why they slept, I don't know, but it's significant that they did. And Jesus went back again and again until finally he said, take your rest now. The one who has betrayed me is at hand. It's over. You've missed it.