With Christ at the Scene of the Arrest (Various Scriptures)

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I grew up, as many of you know, in police custody. My father was a police officer in Winston-Salem for about three decades. One afternoon, when I was about seven years old, I saw a young man carrying a TV through the woods near our home as we were driving out of our neighborhood. I brought this to my dad’s attention because something didn’t seem right about it, and he had taught me that when things don’t seem right, they usually aren’t. I wanted to see my dad bring the car to a screeching halt in the middle of the road, jump out and go tackle the guy. But instead my dad kept driving. He turned the corner, wrote down the license plate number of what appeared to be the getaway car at the edge of the woods, and he radioed it in to the police department. My dad circled the block a few times, and watched them put the TV and several other items in the trunk of the car, and drive off. He followed from a distance, communicating back and forth via the radio in cop-language I didn’t understand. We watched the car pull into a driveway about a block away from Smith Reynolds Airport. Once he watched them unload the stuff, he radioed back in and in no time the house was surrounded by police cruisers, and the officers brought out a young man from the home. I watched from a safe distance in the car as my dad walked over to the man, and hugged him tightly. My dad, with tears in his eyes, came back to the car, and told me that he had coached that young man in youth football. But he did what he what he had to do. He positively identified this young man as the one we saw carrying the TV from the home. I said, “Dad, why didn’t you jump the guy when he came out of the woods?” He said, “Son, when you go after someone for a serious crime, you have to be very careful that you get the right guy.”

There are many ways in which that story has nothing to do with our text of Scripture today. Then there are some ways in which the story is sort of a polar opposite of our biblical narrative. Then there are still other ways in which they are very similar. We are walking with Christ through Easter during these weeks, and today we are with Christ on the scene of the arrest. A plot has been concocted between Judas Iscariot and the religious leaders in Jerusalem to apprehend Jesus and destroy Him. Mark 14:2-3 says that they were seeking how to seize Him by stealth because they were afraid that an uprising would occur. So, they devised a plan to overtake Him at night, with Judas there to give the positive identification. When you go after someone like this, you have to be very careful that you get the right guy. And the Gospel narratives make it clear that the crowd got the One they sought. There was a positive identification.

Now, sometimes people ask why we have four Gospels in the New Testament, and why they differ from one another. The accounts of Jesus’ arrest provide us with a good case study of this. Each Gospel contains an account of the arrest. Each of them records different information, but it is not contradictory. Rather, the accounts are complimentary. By examining each one, we learn different details that give us a fuller picture of the episode. Each one provides us with details about the positive identity of the One that Judas led the crowd to apprehend. So we will look at all four Gospels this morning and see the positive identification of Jesus, here at the scene of the arrest.

I. Jesus is positively identified by His betrayer (Mark 14:43-46)

John’s Gospel tells us that Judas knew where to find Him. Jesus had met often with the disciples there in the Garden on the Mount of Olives. John also tells us that the crowd of people, which included a cohort, that is a detachment of Roman soldiers that may have numbered 600 men or more, brought lanterns and torches with them. This tells us that the garden was very dark. They were looking for a guy with a beard, in a robe and sandals. That described almost every Jewish male in Jerusalem, so they had to make sure they got the right guy. So the signal Judas arranged was that he would kiss Jesus, and when they saw him kiss Jesus, they would know that this was their man.

Now, if you travel outside of the United States today, you will likely encounter cultures where kisses are still exchanged as demonstrations of greeting, respect, and honor. It is an ancient custom, and it was the norm for Jesus’ culture in that day. Slaves would kiss the feet of their masters; disciples would kiss the hem of their teacher’s garments; a person may kiss the hand of another to show respect and honor for them. And, at times, a person may kiss someone on the side of the face, embracing them to indicate deep friendship and affection. Jesus called His disciples “friends” and they had undoubtedly greeted one another like this often in their three years together.

The Greek word for kiss here is intensified, and it can mean “to kiss earnestly, intensively, or repeatedly.” It is the same word used by Luke when he described a sinful woman who came before Jesus with tears in her eyes and poured perfume on His feet and wiped it with her hair, kissing his feet repeatedly. It was an extravagant kiss like this that Judas used as a signal to betray the Lord. To those who were unaware, it would appear to be an affectionate display of great respect and honor, but to those who knew the signal, it was a positive identification of the one they were to “seize and lead away under guard” (v44). This was the teacher, the Rabbi, whose teachings had upset the religious leaders so greatly and threatened the power they held over the people of Israel. Judas had made the positive identification with his hypocritical kiss. But the scene does not end there. There is more to understand about the identity of Jesus, and we find it by turning to John 18.

II. Jesus is positively identified by His proclamation (John 18:1-6)

It is interesting that John makes no mention of the kiss of Judas in his Gospel. This is likely because John was the last Gospel written, and the hideous story of Judas’ hypocritical kiss was well known, having been already told in three other Gospels. John provided details throughout his Gospel that the others had omitted. Presumably after the kiss, but before they seized Jesus, John says that asked the crowd, “Whom do you seek?” And their response is, “Jesus of Nazareth.”

If the present generation of American children will be remembered for the uniqueness of their names, the opposite is true of Jesus’ generation. In our day, it is not uncommon to hear of a celebrity naming their child something original like Apple or Rocket, but in that day there were only a handful of names that parents gave their children. You find many men named Joseph, Judah, Jesus, James, Simon, and Levi, and many women named Mary. “Last names” were not in use at that time, so people were typically identified either by their father’s names or their hometowns. So you have, for instance, Simon Bar Jonah (Simon, son of Jonah), Mary Magdalene (Mary of Magdala), Simon of Cyrene, and Jesus of Nazareth. In stating that they were looking for “Jesus of Nazareth,” the crowd is positively identifying Jesus as a human being. Nazareth was the village where he had spent much of his life. He was born in Bethlehem, and He lived for a few years in Egypt, but no one ever referred to Him as Jesus of Bethlehem or Jesus of Egypt. He was known as a man from Nazareth. It was there that He matured to adulthood, learning the trade of His carpenter foster-father Joseph.

By calling Him “Jesus of Nazareth,” we are reminded that Jesus was fully human. That is perfectly accurate to say. But it is NOT perfectly accurate to say that Jesus was merely human. He was fully human. But He was also fully God. A foundational doctrine of the Christian faith is the incarnation of Jesus. That is, He was, and is, fully God, but He became fully human. And so when we speak of Jesus we are speaking of someone who has a divine nature and a human nature. And His response to the call for Jesus of Nazareth is somewhat indicative of His unique dual-nature.

In our Bibles, we read the response of Jesus in John 18:5 as, “I am He.” Now if you are using the NASB, you will notice that the word He is in italics. Some of the other English versions have italics here as well, but some, unfortunately do not. When we find italicized words in these translations, it indicates that the translators have supplied a word that is not found in the original language. If you don’t have italics, hopefully you have a translator’s note in the footnotes or margin or something to indicate that Jesus did not actually say, “I am He.” In Greek, He said two simple words: ego eimi. Translated, He said, “I am.” And notice in verse 6 that when He said this, the crowd “drew back and fell to the ground.” What is it about these two little words that caused such a dramatic reaction?

In Exodus 3, when God appeared to Moses at the burning bush, He identified Himself to Moses as, “I AM WHO I AM” (Ex 3:14). From that time forward, the name “I AM” became a special name used by Jewish people to refer exclusively to the one true God. When Jesus said, “I am,” He was making a bold statement, that the Jesus of Nazareth whom they sought was also the Great I Am, the God of the universe. This was not the first time Jesus had used this divine name to refer to Himself. Earlier in John 8:58, Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I AM.” And don’t think for a minute that the people didn’t understand what He meant when He said that. John 8:59 says that the Jewish crowd around Him had picked up stones to throw at Him when He said that. This was the prescribed punishment for blasphemy. They understood that when Jesus said, “I AM,” He was claiming to be God. And here, in the garden at the scene of the arrest, He said it again. And they were knocked to the ground by the awesome power of God that this holy name carries.

Now, I want to point out here that Jesus just identified Himself as God, and divine power knocked them off their feet, and what did they do? They arrested Him anyway. The sinfulness of humanity is so intensely radical that even once Jesus revealed His true identity to the crowd, they still wanted to kill Him. This is relevant to us today in a particular way. You know some unbelievers, and you have probably tried to witness to them and pray for them to be saved. And you might have even prayed that God would “prove Himself” to them in order to convince them to believe. But when we see the events of this scene unfold, we see that even presented with incontrovertible evidence, these people were still hard of heart, and their hatred for Jesus was not overcome. So, it may be that your lost friend does not need more evidence. I say that both as someone who is a former atheist and also someone who has a Master’s degree in Christian apologetics. Evidence and argumentation are useful and necessary. But sometimes, even with abundant evidence, a person only hardens his or her heart even more in unwillingness to believe. In Romans 1, Paul does not say that people are lost because they don’t have access to truth. They are lost because they have suppressed the truth in unrighteousness. It may be that a person is fully convinced of the truth of who Jesus is in their minds, but they refuse to submit their will and their heart to Him as Lord and Savior. And more evidence is not going to change that. It didn’t when Jesus revealed Himself to this crowd.

And so here in John 18:1-6, we have the positive identification of Jesus as the man from Nazareth and the God of the universe, the Great I AM. His own proclamation provides positive identification. Now, turning over to Matthew 26, we find more details that further identify Jesus here at the scene of His arrest.

III. Jesus is positively identified by His mission (Matt 26:52-56)

The crowd that came out against Jesus in the garden was sizeable enough to conduct a small military campaign. A cohort, as John describes it, might include 600 or more men. This is the size of a medium-sized battalion in the U.S. Army or Marine Corps. And they were armed to the teeth with swords and clubs. They were powerful enough to encounter a small army … and they were coming to arrest Jesus. He said in Matthew 26:55, “Have you come out with swords and clubs to arrest Me as you would against a robber?” The word He uses here for robber can also mean a revolutionary. That may better reflect the sense of it. Jesus is saying, “Look, I have been with you in the temple every day, teaching people the truth about God, and you didn’t arrest Me there, but you come out here like you are going to squash a rebellion!”

Was this overkill? In one sense perhaps. In another, maybe not. They had already tried to sieze Him at least three times and each time He got away. And Mark tells us that they were afraid that Jesus’ popularity would cause the people would riot. This was the guy that they welcomed into the city less than a week earlier with a royal parade! And it was no stretch of the imagination to assume that they might meet with violent resistance when they try to seize Him. Jesus’ followers were a rag-tag band that included roughneck fishermen and political zealots. They had inside intel through Judas Iscariot, and he knew that at least two of the men were carrying swords. So, they didn’t know what to expect, but they came prepared for the worst.

Now, when they identified Jesus, both by the Judas-kiss and the proclamation of Jesus Himself, they seized Him by force. Now Luke says that some of the disciples asked Jesus, “Lord, shall we strike with the sword?” But before Jesus could even answer, one of the disciples had already drawn his sword and started swinging it. Now, who do you think that was? John is the only one who names him—it was Peter. He drew his sword and struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his ear. John also tells us the name of the slave – Malchus. Luke, the doctor, takes special interest in the fact that it was his right ear. Now, I think it is safe to assume that Peter was not trying to give Malchus a haircut or a shave or a new body piercing. He was either trying to cut off his head or smash his skull. Peter was trying to kill him. But Malchus instinctively flinched and caused Peter to miss the jugular and sever the ear instead.

What does all of this swordplay have to do with the identity of Jesus? Well, we see in Jesus’ response to this turn of events a clear, threefold statement concerning His mission that serves to give further insight into who He is and what He came to do. In His first statement we see Jesus’ concern for humanity in general and for His followers in particular. He said, “Put your sword back into its place; for all those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword.” Obviously, this kind of activity is not good for human welfare – it certainly isn’t good for Malchus, and Jesus says it isn’t good for Peter. If you live this way, you will die this way. You will either fall on the bloody battlefield or else you will be recompensed life for life by the authorities. But more important than this general public service announcement, Jesus is specifying to Peter and all the rest that His kingdom will not be advanced by violence and bloodshed. The Bible speaks about Christians being engaged in an ongoing war, but it is clear to specify that our weapons are not physical but spiritual, and our enemy is not humanity but Satan. Some well-intentioned Christians, and some not-so-well-intentioned folks who have hypocritically claimed to be Christians, have either misunderstood, forgotten, or ignored these truths. As Philip Ryken has written, “Few things have done more damage to the cause of Christ than misguided attempts to advance his kingdom with the sword.”[1] One thing I can think of that has been more damaging is when evil men have sought to advance their own empires using the banner of Christ to mask their hidden agendas. History has provided many examples of crusades and inquisitions in which both were the case. And both have brought dishonor to Christ. The Kingdom of Christ advances as His people proclaim the gospel and live gospel-transformed lives before a watching world. Though Jesus warned His followers that they could expect to be the recipients of violence, they must not be the perpetrators of it. Anytime violence is being waged, we can be sure that the Prince of Peace is neither pleased nor honored by it.

Secondly, in Jesus’ rebuke we see also that His mission is being carried out by the sovereign plan of His Father. He doesn’t need a military defense to protect Him. He says, “Do you think I cannot appeal to My Father and He will at once put at my disposal more than 12 legions of angels?” In other words, if the betrayal, arrest, and ultimate death of Jesus is not within the sovereign purpose of God, He could supernaturally stop it in an instant. A “legion” referred to a military unit of some 6,000 soldiers. Jesus said He could summon 12 of them from His Father. That is 72,000 angelic warriors that stand at the ready to come to His aid if necessary. To give you an idea of the devastating power at His disposal, in 2 Kings 19:35, one angel was said to slay 185,000 of Sennacherib’s Assyrian army in one night. Multiply that by 72,000 to see the potential of the forces that could deliver Jesus from the hands of Judas and a crowd of 600. So you must not see Jesus as an unsuspecting victim of corruption and collusion here. The situation fell completely within the control of His Father, who could have, but did not deliver Him from the scene of the arrest because it was part of His purpose and plan, and part of the mission of Christ.

This brings us to the third statement Jesus makes in verse 54: “How then will the Scriptures be fulfilled which say that it must happen this way?” In other words, “Peter, if you could fight off this angry mob so that we all run away to safety, you would actually be undermining what God has already decreed and declared to be necessary.” If we resist what is about to happen here, we undo every promise that God has made concerning the redemption of His people. In verse 56 Jesus said that “all this has taken place to fulfill the Scriptures of the prophets.” Isaiah wrote about this very thing when he spoke of the suffering that would come upon the Messiah for the salvation of humanity. Every other prophet in some way or another wrote of the atonement that God would make for His people through the sacrifice of the Redeemer. Jesus said that all the Law, and the Prophets, and the Psalms (in other words, the entire Old Testament) pointed to Him and the salvation that His life, death, and resurrection would accomplish. This was His mission. Who is Peter, or anyone else for that matter, to step in and try to stop it. In ways that Peter did not yet fully understand, he needs Jesus to go to the cross. You and I need Jesus to go to the cross. It is horrific, it is tragic, it is sorrowful, but it is our only hope. Our sin is horrific, our sin is tragic, our sin is sorrowful. And it cries out to God for justice and for mercy. And the cross of Jesus Christ is the only way that sin gets both justice and mercy. It gets justice because the innocent sacrifice is offered as a substitute, and it gets mercy because the guilty sinner finds forgiveness there under the shed blood of Jesus.

Now, before we conclude, we need to consider one final note about this scene that is recorded only by Luke. Being a physician, Luke is keenly interested in a fact that the other Gospel writers omit. In Luke 22:51, Luke says that Jesus touched Malchus’s ear and healed him. What an incredible picture of the grace of Jesus Christ. Not only does He forbid His followers from fighting to defend Him, He actually heals one of His oppressors who is wounded by His followers. There are so many points of application in this profound statement, but we will just specify a few. First, we must realize that each of us is like Malchus in that at some point in our lives, we have been the enemy of Christ. We are sinners by nature and by choice and from birth our actions and attitudes demonstrate that we are opposed to God. Like the angry mob, we find that Jesus brings a terrible inconvenience to our lives because He threatens to undermine the pursuit of our own agendas and pleasures. And so we suppress the truth in unrighteousness and persist in unbelief and spiritual rebellion. But Jesus has come to heal even the likes of Malchus, and you and me. Also, like Malchus, some today perhaps in this very room have been injured in life by the followers of Jesus. Rather than showing you Christ’s grace and love, some Christian has brandished a sword and cut you. And the pain of that wound has caused you to run away from Jesus. Do not do that! Jesus is the only one who can heal you, even when some of your deepest wounds have come at the hands of those who claim to follow Him. You must come to Jesus, and when you do, He can heal you. And He can even transform the life of the one who wounded you. He will radically transform the life of Peter from the foolish path we see him so often taking in the Gospels, and He can do the same for His hardheaded followers who do so much harm in His name. But finally, and don’t miss this, Malchus will become a lasting reminder to everyone who knows him of the power of Jesus Christ. Malchus is the slave of the chief priest, the very man who will take part in condemning Jesus to death. But every time the chief priest speaks to his servant, the very fact that the servant can hear his words is a testimony to Jesus. Every time he looks at Malchus, he sees a man who could have perished if it were not for Jesus. And if Christ has touched you and saved you, then your transformed life is a witness to everyone you know. They can condemn Christ and renounce and reject Him, but they will have to do it ignoring the evidence of your testimony for Him. And indeed, everyone who rejects Him finds themselves surrounded in life by one testimony after another that Jesus Christ is mighty to save. Your lost friend, family member, neighbor, coworker, or whoever, is surrounded by Malchus’s ears, including your life and witness.

In the midst of our society that says that there are no absolutes, no exclusive claims, many paths to God, many roads to lasting joy, we cry aloud that Jesus, and He alone, can save. We claim without hesitation that He alone is the only hope for sinful humanity to be made right before a holy God. That is a strong accusation to make, and whenever you make that strong of accusation about someone, you better be able to make a positive identification. And Jesus is positively identified by Judas’ kiss, by His own claims to be the God-man, by His mission to go to the cross and save the world, and by the testimony of millions of Malchus’s who have been healed and saved by Him.

He is who He says He is, and He has done what He promised to do. And He did it for you, that you might be saved. He died to receive in Himself the wrath of God that our sins deserve. He lives to cover you in the righteousness of His own life. Do you know Him? Have you placed your faith in Him to save you from sin? If so, then you are His witnesses, advancing His cause in the world, not by the power of the sword, but by the power of His Word, proclaimed through your lips and demonstrated through your life. And if you don’t know Him, this very day you can give your life to Him as Lord and Savior. If you will confess to God that you are a sinner in need of a Savior, and place your trust completely in Jesus, He will save you and you will find in Him a righteousness you can never produce on your own, a life that will be eternal, and a joy that endures forever. All of this is yours because of His life, His death, and His resurrection.

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[1] James Montgomery Boice and Philip Graham Ryken, Jesus on Trial (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2002), p51.

With Christ in the Garden

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C. S. Lewis wrote over 50 books on a wide variety of topics. Thanks to the labor of some of his friends, we have today several volumes of letters, essays, and poems in addition to his many books. There is seldom a subject I am researching on which I can’t find a great quote by Lewis. He always wanted to write a book on prayer, because he saw the great need for a better one than was available. So, he set out to write that book, but quickly abandoned the effort for some unknown reason. Ten years later, he published a different book, a collection of letters written in a fictitious dialogue between two friends on several issues, a good bit of it centering on the subject of prayer. So, he entitled the book, Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer. In that exchange, Lewis hints at perhaps why the earlier book was abandoned. He says, “however badly needed a good book on prayer is, I shall never try to write it. Two people on the foothills comparing notes in private are all very well. But in a book one would inevitably seem to be attempting, not discussion, but instruction. And for me to offer the world instruction about prayer would be impudence.” So, in Letters to Malcolm, Lewis can offer his ideas on prayer, not as instruction, but as if his reader were eavesdropping on a friendly conversation. Near the end of the book, he confesses, “by talking at this length about prayer at all, we seem to give it a much bigger place in our lives than, I’m afraid, it has.” Think for a moment about Lewis’s statement. Isn’t that the case with most of us? We talk more about prayer than we actually pray? We tend to make it seem like it has a bigger part of our lives than it actually does.  So he goes on to say, “Well, let’s now at any rate come clean. Prayer is irksome. An excuse to omit it is never unwelcome. When it is over, this casts a feeling of relief and holiday over the rest of the day. We are reluctant to begin. We are delighted to finish. While we are at prayer, but not while we are reading a novel or solving a cross-word puzzle, any trifle is enough to distract us.” Do you find that this is the case?

In our passage today, we find Jesus Christ on His knees with His Father agonizing in prayer in the face of death. Let the reality of this sink in. Jesus Christ was God in the flesh, fully divine and fully human. Skeptics and critics of the Christian faith who mock the doctrine of the Trinity often turn to this very passage to ask if Jesus was schizophrenic, just talking to the voices in His head in the garden? The relationships between the persons of the Trinity are mysterious. God is One, and He exists in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Not three Gods, but three distinct persons in one Triune Godhead. That’s a nearly unexplainable complexity, but we accept this reality about God because He has revealed it about Himself to us. And these three persons have perfect fellowship among themselves within the singular Godhead. The Father, Son, and Spirit are not different in nature as if one was greater than the other, but each is different in function. The theologians call this Intertrinitarian Functional Subordination. There is a willful submission on the part of the Son to the Father, and on the part of the Spirit to the Son. And God the Son, in the darkest hour of His earthly existence, is driven to prayer with God the Father.

Consider what the circumstance of this prayer is. In mere moments of time, Jesus will be betrayed by one of His own disciples, abandoned by the rest, unjustly condemned, physically tortured, and ultimately murdered in the most “cruel and unusual” form of capital punishment humanity has ever contrived. He is in the grove at the foot of the Mount of Olives known as Gethsemane. That word is Hebrew, and means “olive press,” the device by which olives were crushed by massive stones to produce olive oil. It is fitting that Jesus is in this place at this time, when He is consciously aware of the crushing weight under which He is being afflicted – the weight of the sins of humanity—the weight of my sin; the weight of your sin; the weight of every human sin ever committed by every human being who ever lived. And in the intensity of this moment, in the very face of death, God the Son is driven to prayer with God the Father.

Now, this being so, it is reasonable to make draw some preliminary conclusions. First, if Jesus Christ, who is the divine Son of God, a coequal, coeternal person of the Triune Godhead, needs to pray to His Father, then surely you and I need to all the more. And secondly, the circumstances in which Jesus turns to the Father in prayer are infinitely more severe than any circumstance ever faced by any other person. Therefore, in the midst of our own hardships, we must surely turn to God in prayer as well.

Mark describes Jesus in v33 as being very distressed and troubled. The Greek words used here are rare in the New Testament, and rightly so. The experience of Jesus at this moment is unprecedented and unsurpassed in human existence. Jesus said at this moment in v34, “My soul is deeply grieved to the point of death.” Notice here that the “death” of which He speaks is not His death on the cross. He speaks of the burden of His present grief as being nearly fatal. So great is the intensity of the pressure of this present hour, that it threatens to crush His very life. The reality of bearing the weight of the sins of humanity and being cut off from His Father as He bears the wrath of God on our behalf is a soul-crushing agony.

Have you ever found yourself in the midst of a great difficulty, distressed, troubled, grieved with an intensity that we deem it inescapable and fatal? My point here is not to draw parallels between Jesus’ experience and our so-called Gethsemanes. You and I will never face a Gethsemane. Jesus faced it for us. Our miseries and calamities in life, regardless of their severity, will always pale in comparison to this one. Though we deserve to be pressed to death in a thousand Gethsemanes, by God’s grace, Jesus has been pressed in Gethsemane for us. My point is rather to set forth the example of Jesus in His response to this hour. The greatest man, indeed the God-man, faced the greatest horror of history, and responded to it with prayer to His Father. Therefore, we, the lesser-beings that we are, can face our lesser-trials, in the same way. How shall we pray in the midst of life’s darkest hours? We find several patterns of prayer in this horrific episode from the life of the Lord Jesus that serve as a model for us as we pray through our own lives’ devastations. There are six of these patterns seen here.

I. In the midst of life’s darkest hours, we can pray with intensity (v35)

In most of the artwork I have seen depicting Jesus at prayer in Gethsemane, He is clothed in sparkling white linens, kneeling before a rock with His hands folded as He looks upward to God. This is not the picture I see in the description here in this text. Jesus proceeded a little beyond His disciples (Luke tells us, about a stone’s throw).  And there He “fell to the ground and began to pray.” His concern was not for decorum or posture. The weight of the burden on His soul buckled His knees and He collapsed upon the dirt of that garden. Matthew tells us that He fell on His face! And laying in the dirt, He began to cry out to the Father. Luke tells us in his Gospel that, due to the agony of the circumstances, “He was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground.” Now one may say that this is impossible to sweat blood, but remember two things. First, Luke is a physician, and he knows what is and is not medically possible; secondly, he says that His sweat became “like” drops of blood. NT Scholar Darrell Bock writes that this is a depiction “of Jesus’ emotional state as so intense that He perspired profusely as a result. The sweat beads multiplied on His body and fell like flowing clumps of blood and dropped to the earth.”

We often picture ourselves at prayer the way artists have pictured Jesus in Gethsemane. We envision that we must come before the Lord in clean clothes, in a comfortable posture, and reverently whisper our concerns to Him in a calm state. I believe that it is owing to this false notion of what prayer must involve that we do not more often carry our concerns to God. We feel like we have to clean ourselves up and calm ourselves down before we can talk to the Father. We don’t learn that from Jesus. What we see here is that there comes a time when all we can do is collapse before Him on our face in agony and cry out with sweat drops precipitating off of our bodies like clots of blood as we beseech the Father in intensity. In life’s darkest hour, we can pray in this way and know that God is not offended by our posture or our perspiration. He welcomes us to pray with intensity.

II. In the midst of life’s darkest hours, we can pray with intimacy (v36)

As Jesus cries out in prayer, He calls upon “Abba! Father!” It is nearly unprecedented in all religious literature to address God in such terms. Until Jesus came and began to speak of God as Father, rarely would anyone presume to address God this way. But Jesus not only spoke to His Father this way, He even instructed His disciples to address God this way in prayer. What are the first words of what we commonly call “The Lord’s Prayer”? “OUR FATHER.” But here, even more intimately, Jesus calls Him Abba. This is more intimate still. At the end of a long day, there is one word I long to hear more than any other. Almost without fail, the sound of my key sliding across the tumblers of the door lock at hour home is accompanied by two little voices calling out, “DADDY!” Whatever I have been through in the day fades as I drive home knowing that this will be the first sound I hear. That is what the word Abba is like.

Biology can make a man a father. It is intimacy that makes him a daddy. And this is the kind of relationship Jesus has with His Father, and it this kind of relationship which He has made possible for us. Through the suffering of Jesus and His resurrection, those who receive Him are made to be the children of God. And Paul says in Romans 8 that we have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!” In the darkest hour of life, Jesus is not praying to an impersonal force beyond the galaxies. He is talking to His Dad. And His Dad is the Daddy of all who have come to Him by faith in the Son. So you and I need never feel as if we have no one or nowhere to turn in the darkest hours of our lives. We can call out to God as a Daddy who loves us and is there for us at all times.

The Christian life is lived in the context of a spiritual family. We do not live it alone. We have a Father, a Daddy, who loves us. And we have brothers and sisters in this family. But sometimes those brothers and sisters fail us. Sometimes when we need them most, they aren’t there for us. Jesus understands that. He knows that the whole world is out to get Him, and as He goes to pray, He tells His disciples in v32, “Sit here until I have prayed.” He says in v34, “Remain here and keep watch.” But three times, He returns to find that they have fallen asleep at the very moment it seems that He needs them most. Like Peter, James, and John, our brothers and sisters will let us down. I will let you down. But Daddy never fails. In the darkest hour of our lives, though brothers and sisters fail us, our hope is not in them, it is in this Father who welcomes us to come before Him and cry out to Him intimately as our Daddy! We will not find Him asleep when we need Him most. We are never abandoned, never orphaned, never alone. Father is there for you, and you can come running into His arms crying out “Daddy!” in the darkest hour of your life just as Jesus did!

III. In the midst of life’s darkest hours, we can pray with confidence (v36)

As Jesus prays, notice His words: “All things are possible for You.” He is confident that there is no situation which is out of God’s control, and there is nothing His Father cannot do. He is not ashamed to state the concerns of His heart to His Father, because He knows that God is able to do something about it. There is no question whether God can. The answer to any question that begins, “Can God …” is, “Yes!” God can. Unless it is sin, or something utterly ridiculous (like, creating a rock too big for Himself to lift), anytime the question is “Can God …?” the answer is “God can …!” All things are possible for Him.

As I was growing up, I had a grandfatherly figure in my life that I affectionately called “Daddy Harrison.” He called me “J. R.” Daddy Harrison was a retired truck driver, a hard but tender hearted man. Daddy Harrison built every house he ever lived in, rebuilt every car he ever owned, grew or killed everything he ever ate, and fixed everything that was ever broken. No formal education, but he was the most brilliant man I ever knew. I spent the first half of my life in awe of him. He used to let me mess around with stuff in his shop and tinker along side of him. And one day, we were working on something, and I broke it. But I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. I just said, “Daddy Harrison, I need you to fix this.” It was the first time (and the only time) I saw him scratch his head and say, “J. R., I don’t think I can fix that.” In my mind, I had thought that everything was possible for Daddy Harrison, but on that disappointing day, I saw that there were some things even he couldn’t fix.

Sometimes, when we face the dark hours of life, we forget that our Heavenly Father has never said, “I don’t think I can fix that.” He has never scratched His head wondering what to do about something. He has never seen an impossibility. And so just as Jesus did, when He was facing a much darker hour than we will ever know, we too can say to our Father, “All things are possible for You!” We can pray in confidence knowing that our circumstances have not taken by surprise or exceeded His ability to intervene. Some of you this very moment are facing intense darkness in your lives. Can God do anything about it? He can. We can pray with confidence in the darkest hour of our lives.

IV. In the midst of life’s darkest hours, we can pray with boldness (v36)

Sometimes, I think in genuine humility and piety, we mask our concerns in prayer and resort to vague expressions of reluctant indifference. We say things like, “Oh Lord, here’s the situation, and we just want your will to be done, whatever that is,” and never come right out with our own request. I am not criticizing that; I think the motive is good. But you will notice in our text that Jesus did not pray this way. In v35, we read that He was praying that if it were possible, the hour might pass by Him. He knew the hour was coming. He had foretold the disciples repeatedly that this hour was coming, and now it was upon them. And in His humanity, Jesus asks the Father if there may be any other way, so that the hour may pass by Him. As He cried out to the Father in the darkest hour of His life, He said, “Remove this cup from Me!”

What is this cup of which Jesus speaks? It is a recurring image in the OT prophets which depicts the judgment of God. That cup, which all of us deserve to drink for our sins, has been taken from our hands and handed to Jesus to drink on our behalf. It is this cup of which Jesus spoke when He rebuked the presumption of James and John, saying, “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink?” Indeed they are not. No man can bear his own sins, much less the sins of all humanity. But Jesus will, and in the hours prior to drinking that cup, He boldly says to the Father, “Remove this cup from Me!”

You and I will not, cannot, drink that cup, but Christ has taken it for us. And in His darkest hour as He utters this bold prayer, we learn from His example that we can make any request we desire to God. It does not always mean that God will answer in the way that we want Him to, but there is no request that we cannot bring before Him. He wants us to bear our hearts desires in His presence. And so in the darkest hours of our lives, we can pray with boldness as we make our requests known to Him.

V. In the midst of life’s darkest hours, we can pray in surrender (v36)

As Jesus asks the Father to take the cup away, He also expresses His humble submission to the primacy of the Father’s will. “Yet not what I will, but what You will.” He has made His request, and now accepts that the Father’s will may not involve the removal of the cup, but the drinking of it to the dregs. But Christ’s surrender is not a stoic acceptance of fate, it is a willing embrace of the Father’s will. Jesus’ will to obey the Father is greater and stronger than His will to avoid suffering.

Though this hour of Jesus’ life was far darker than any hour that you and I will ever face, we can pray through our seasons of darkness in the same way. As Sinclair Ferguson writes, “It is not necessarily wrong to ask for something which God does not intend to do, so long as our hearts are prepared to submit to His will.” With boldness we make our requests known, but in surrender we acknowledge that the Father’s will is superior to our own. There is no such thing as an unanswered prayer, but we must acknowledge that sometimes the answer is “No.” And just as every earthly parent realizes that it may be destructive to grant every wish of our children, so the Father must sometimes say No to His children for their own good, for the good of others, and for His own glory to be made manifest. And so we pray in surrender to His will, knowing that this is the sweetest surrender we could ever make. In the world’s eyes, surrender equals defeat. But in God’s eyes, our surrender is our victory, for as we embrace His will we do so in confidence that His will serves a far greater purpose than our own.

By embracing the Father’s will, Jesus foregoes His own comforts and accepts the suffering that must come in order to provide salvation for the world, and to be crowned with the glory of the resurrection. We can all rejoice that the Father did not let this cup pass from Jesus. Because Jesus embraced the suffering of the cross on our behalf, we have the promise of redemption, restoration, and resurrection. As we pray in surrender to the Father’s will, our finite understanding may not be able to fathom His purposes. But we embrace His will knowing that He is good and that He loves us. He doesn’t give His children serpents when they ask for fish; He doesn’t give stones when we ask for bread. If He gives something different than what we’ve asked for, then what He gives is better. And if His will involves a season of suffering, we know that in the end, He is working all things together for the good of them who love Him and are called according to His purposes, and that He is bringing glory to Himself through our circumstances. What we want may be good, but what God wills is best. So even as God welcomes us to come boldly to the throne of grace, and to clearly state our petitions before Him, we can pray in surrender and say as Jesus said, “Yet not what I will, but what You will.”

VI. In the midst of life’s darkest hours, we can pray with persistence (v39)

As Jesus returned to prayer after finding His disciples asleep on the job, it is intriguing to me that that the text says He was “saying the same words.” Repeatedly, the Lord Jesus spoke to the Father about letting the hour pass and removing the cup. This was not just vain repetition of meaningless words, like Jesus warned against in Matthew 6 when He instructed His disciples how to pray. There Jesus had said, “When you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words. So do not be like them; for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.” There are some who have memorized certain forms of prayer and repeat them over and over again, but without any conscious reflection at each moment of what they are saying. And immediately after Jesus said this about meaningless repetition, He taught the disciples a model of how to pray in the words that we commonly call “The Lord’s Prayer.” And the ironic thing is that many have allowed that prayer to become a “meaningless repetition,” praying it while giving no thought to the words they are expressing. No, Jesus wasn’t just repeating a canned formulaic prayer in His persistent prayer here, even though He was “saying the same words.” Rather, He was praying as one who understood that God is sometimes moved by faithful persistence and perseverance in prayer.

In Luke 18:1-8, we read a parable that Jesus told to His followers in order to show that at all times they ought to pray and not to lose heart. In that parable, He tells of a judge who did not fear God and did not respect man.  And in the same city, there was a widow who needed the protection of the law from an oppressor. And Jesus says that this widow kept coming to the judge, saying, “Give me legal protection from my opponent.” For a while the judge was unwilling to respond to her requests, but after a while, he finally gave in. He said, “Even though I do not fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow bothers me, I will give her legal protection, otherwise by continually coming she will wear me out.” Now the point of that parable is that if this unrighteous judge will respond to this widow in this way, Jesus says, “will not God bring about justice for His elect who cry to Him day and night, and will He delay long over them?” But then He says, “when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?" In other words, will He find that people had enough faith to be that persistent in their prayers?

Jesus demonstrates persistence in prayer as He returns to solitude with His Father and prays, “saying the same thing.” Are we persistent in our prayers? Are we afraid to be persistent, thinking, “Well, I prayed about it once, so I guess I am done with that”? If Jesus taught us to be persistent in prayer, and demonstrated persistence in prayer in the midst of life’s dark hours, then we need not fear God turning a deaf ear to our persistent pleas. It may well be that God’s delay in answering is a test of our faith and our willingness to persist. Whatever the case, there is no shame in bringing the same request to the Lord in prayer time and time again until He makes His answer clear. In fact, there may be shame in not doing so. We can pray with persistence as we face the dark hours of life. Jesus did, and we can follow in His example.

As we conclude, let me say a few final thoughts. First, none of us will ever face an hour in life as dark as Gethsemane. But, we will all face dark hours of varying severity. It may well be that you are just coming out of a dark season, or that you are in the midst of one, or that you are about to enter one. But when the darkness falls in our lives, how will we respond? My friends, if Jesus Christ, the divine Son of God, needed to pray through His own season of darkness, then may I suggest to us today that there is no other way for us to face ours. We have the words of the sleepy eyed witness, the Apostle Peter, in 1 Peter 2:21, as he says, “Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in His steps.” And Peter says that Christ’s example includes this, that while suffering, He kept entrusting Himself to Him who judges righteously. In the midst of the darkest hours of our lives, we can fall on our faces before a Father who loves us and pray intensely, intimately, confidently, boldly, surrenderedly, and persistently and trust that if He does not change the circumstance, He will change us in the midst of the circumstance, and bring good to us, blessings through us, and glory to Himself as a result.

Oh what peace we often forfeit; Oh what needless pain we bear. All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer!

With Christ at the Table (Matthew 26:20-30)

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Matthew 26:20-30
With Christ at the Table

I was talking to a friend the other night and he was asking me what I was currently preaching on, and I told him that I was going to spend the next six weeks moving from the Last Supper to the Empty Tomb as a spiritual preparation for Easter. He said, “You know if you weren’t Baptist, you would call that Lent.” To which I said, “But I am Baptist, so ‘lent’ only describes that stuff that forms in your pockets and collects in your dryer.” But in the larger Christian world, the 40 days prior to Easter, beginning on Ash Wednesday (which was March 9), make up the season of Lent, a time of introspection and repentance, preparing oneself for the celebration of the death and resurrection of Christ. Usually this is accompanied by fasting, which is why you hear people speak of “giving something up for Lent.” Following the Reformation tradition, most Baptists have just given up Lent. But you can call this season Lent if you want to, or you can call it “the weeks before Easter.” The point is that over the next few weeks we are going to be looking at the events leading up to the Cross and the Resurrection and considering the great gift of salvation that has come to us through Jesus Christ. I am calling this series, “With Christ Through Easter.”

We begin today by looking at the final Passover meal that Jesus shared with His disciples. Each of the four Gospels sheds light on different aspects of the final meal, but here in Matthew, the narrative revolves around two startling announcements made by the Lord Jesus. These announcements serve to frame in the minds of the disciples the events they will witness over the coming hours and days. Without the information that Jesus imparts to them at the table, everything that unfolds in the hours and days ahead would seem to the disciples to be a grand cosmic accident. It would seem as if God had fallen asleep at the wheel of the universe and rammed the whole thing into wall. But Jesus is careful to tell them that what they are about to witness is all part of God’s perfect plan to redeem humanity.

I. At the table, Jesus announces history’s most spectacular sin (vv20-25)

What is the worst sin ever committed in this history of humanity? I imagine that question could strip up a rousing discussion around the table at the coffee shop, don’t you? When we consider the many heinous atrocities that have been committed in history, it might be hard to single one out. After all, if we understand the whole of Scripture, balancing the Old Testament Law with the Sermon on the Mount and other expressions of New Testament ethics, wouldn’t we be inclined to say that sin is sin? If lust is tantamount to adultery and hatred is murder committed in one’s heart, then the sins I have committed are as foul as anyone else’s. When we fully grasp the holiness of God, we can’t escape the conclusion that all human sin is equally worthy of divine wrath. Yet it does seem that one sin in history stands above the rest. As John Piper has written: “The most spectacular sin that has ever been committed in the history of the world is the brutal murder of Jesus Christ, the morally perfect, infinitely worthy, divine Son of God.” Jesus Christ came into the world to save humanity from sin. And how did humanity respond? We killed Him. Jesus was God in the flesh, and we murdered Him. And the murder of Jesus Christ was the culmination of many evil acts, but as Piper writes, “probably the most despicable act in the process of this murder was the betrayal of Jesus by one of his closest friends, Judas Iscariot.”[1]

On a mission trip some years ago, I was introduced to playing dominos. I had owned a set of dominos for most of my life, but I never knew anyone actually played a game with them. I thought the only thing you could do with dominos was stand them up in a line, and flick the first one over and watch them all fall down in a chain reaction. Many events in the world occur like those dominos falling down. What causes the last domino to fall? The next-to-last domino falls into it. But the whole chain of events starts with the flicking of the first domino. And many events occurred leading up to the death of Jesus, like a long line of dominos falling into one another. But only one of those events is said in Scripture to be the direct result of Satan’s influence. And that is the betrayal of Jesus by Judas.

Judas was hand-picked by Jesus as one of His disciples. They didn’t volunteer, they were chosen. When Jesus chose the twelve, it wasn’t a lottery or random selection. The Bible tells us that He spent the night in prayer over it (Luke 6:12-13). Over the next three years, Judas would spend nearly every moment of his life together in close, intimate fellowship with Jesus. He would witness the miracles and hear the teaching. He was even entrusted by Jesus with a significant position among the disciples. He was the keeper of the money, the treasurer if you will. At this last supper Judas was seated so close to Jesus that they could have their hands in the same bowl at the same time. And it was there at the table that Jesus announced, “One of you will betray me.”

Now the most remarkable thing, to me, about this passage is the reaction of the disciples. Notice, not a one of them says, “I bet He’s talking about Judas.” Verse 22 says that they were deeply grieved, and they each one began to say to Him, “Surely not I, Lord?” These men had a long way to go in their understanding of spiritual matters, but one thing they knew for certain was that the capacity for unthinkable evil was present in each of their own hearts. Are you aware of this about yourself? If I were to say, “Later today, someone in this room will commit an unthinkable sin.” What would your reaction be? Would you begin to look around suspiciously trying to figure out who it might be? Or would you say to yourself, “It would not be beyond me to do such a thing in a moment of weakness. I pray that it will not be me.” I can remember in 1995 being in a preaching class with about eight other men, and the professor said, “Men, look at the man on your left and look at the man on your right. If statistics hold true, then in ten years only one of you will still be in the ministry.” To the man, each of us considered it a very strong possibility that he could be speaking directly to us. And time has proven it true. Out of that group of about nine men, I am one of maybe only three who are presently still in the ministry. Not all of those who have gone another way have been disqualified by egregious sin, but some have. And the lessons I have learned from the fall of some of my brothers in ministry is this: if you think you stand, take heed lest you fall. “Lord, is it me?” is a question that anyone who understands the wickedness present in every human heart must be willing to ask.

Jesus identified the betrayer in verse 23, saying, “He who dipped his hand with Me in the bowl is the one who will betray Me.” Judas Iscariot is the betrayer, and Jesus knows it. Now, we might ask, “Why did Judas do what he did?” There are layers in the answer that the Bible offers. There are primary and secondary causes. But Luke’s Gospel tells us that “Satan entered into Judas” (22:3). Does that give you pause? Do you wonder, as you contemplate that statement, if you could be going about your business in life, loving Jesus and serving God with right motives and sincere integrity, and find yourself suddenly and unwittingly the pawn of Satan for the purpose of evil? I would say that the answer to that question is likely, “No.” But when it comes to Judas, we aren’t talking about someone who is loving Jesus and serving God with right motives and sincere integrity. Judas had given Satan some raw material to work with in the scheme to destroy Jesus. John 12:6 says that he was a thief. As the keeper of the money box for the disciples, Judas used to pilfer the money for himself. And as Jesus began to disclose to His disciples that the Father’s plan was not for Christ to establish a political reign in Jerusalem, but rather to suffer and die to redeem humanity from sin, Judas suddenly realized that he was not about to become the Secretary of the Treasury of the next great world empire. Because Judas loved money more than he loved Jesus, Satan put it into his heart to strike a deal with the Pharisees and scribes. Betraying Jesus offered more financial profit for Judas than following Him did. And for thirty pieces of silver, the equivalent to about four-months’ salary for an average worker of that day, he arranged to be the agent of betrayal. So, there is no “devil made me do it” excuse that can relieve us of responsibility for our moral actions. The devil can make someone do unthinkable evil, but only when the seed of evil is already present in the desires of an individual’s heart. This is exactly what James 1:14 says: “Each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust.” Satan entered into Judas and used him to commit history’s most spectacular sin. But he entered in through the open door of Judas’s own evil desires.

Now, two theological questions emerge as we think about humanity’s most spectacular sin. First, why would Satan desire for Jesus to go to the cross? The death of Jesus and His resurrection are the fatal blow to Satan’s head that was prophesied in the first preaching of the gospel in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:15). And Scripture seems to be clear that Satan knew this. Satan’s temptations of Jesus recorded in Matthew 4, Mark 1, and Luke 4 seem to be aimed at diverting Jesus from the cross. When Jesus began to teach His disciples that He must go to the cross, Peter rebuked the Lord and said that this must not happen. But you recall that in that moment (Matt 16:21-23), Jesus said to Peter, “Get behind Me, Satan.” It is not in Peter’s best interest for Jesus to avoid the cross, but it is in Satan’s best interest. All talk of Jesus escaping the cross originates in the heart of Satan. So, why would he want this betrayal to happen? Hear what Piper says here:

Satan saw that his efforts to divert Jesus from the cross had failed. Time after time Jesus kept the course. His face was set like flint to die (Luke 9:51, 53), and Satan concluded that there was no stopping him. Therefore, he resolved that if he couldn’t stop it, he would at least make it as ugly and painful and as heartbreaking as possible. Not just death, but death by betrayal. Death by abandonment. Death by denial (Luke 22:31-34). Death by torture. If could not stop it, he would drag others into it and do as much damage as he could.[2]

So, that is one very compelling answer to the theological question of why Satan prompted Judas to commit history’s most spectacular sin. But there’s another important theological question:
Did Jesus know that Judas would do this? And of course He did. Each of the four Gospels records that Jesus announced the betrayal beforehand at the table. So, why did He choose Judas anyway? Why did He not stop Judas somehow? And to answer that question, we move to look at the second announcement at the table.

II. At the table, Jesus announced humanity’s most spectacular salvation (vv26-30)

The first announcement set the stage for humanity’s most spectacular sin. The events that will take place within the next few hours, as Judas comes into the garden with an entourage of armed soldiers, and betrays Jesus with a kiss, must not be seen as a surprise or accident. But rather, these events are furthering a divine plan to save humanity from sin that originated in the heart of God from the beginning. In God’s instructions to Adam in the Garden of Eden, there was a penalty for sin spelled out. You remember what it was? Do not eat from the fruit of this tree, “for in the day that you eat from it, you will surely die” (Gen 2:17). So, though Paul says, “the wages of sin is death” in Romans 6:23, it was not Paul who came up with the idea that the wages of sin is death. That idea comes from God. Now, when Adam and Eve sinned, did death occur? I agree with those who carefully articulate that at that very moment, the spiritual death of humanity occurred in Adam and in Eve, but what about physical death? Was there a physical death “in the day” that they ate “thereof”? After all, we are told in Genesis 5:5 that Adam lived a total of 930 years. But on the day that they sinned, did physical death occur? And the answer is “yes.” In Genesis 3:21, we read that the Lord God made garments to cover Adam and Eve. What were they made of? Fig leaves? No! The Bible says that the Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. Now, where did that skin come from? It seems very obvious that there was a sacrifice made, and the skin of that animal that was offered as a sacrifice became their covering. So from the beginning, from the very first sin, we see the Lord enacting this principle that a sacrificial substitute can be offered as an atonement for sin. And we have good reason to believe that Adam and Eve got it! They understood this, because apparently they taught their children this. We see Abel in Genesis 4 bringing an offering of the firstlings of his flock to God as an offering, and God was pleased with that offering.

Generations later, the people of God find themselves enslaved in Egypt for four hundred years. When Moses confronted Pharaoh with the demand to “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, let my people go,” Pharaoh increasingly hardened his heart against the Israelites. Therefore, in order to shatter his hardened heart, God sent a series of ten plagues upon the land of Egypt, each one increasing in severity. In the tenth and final plague, God declared that He was going to take the life of every firstborn male child in every household of Egypt. But Israel would be spared this judgment, so long as they kept God’s instructions to sacrifice a lamb. The meat of that lamb would be eaten with unleavened bread in a last supper before they fled Egypt. And the lamb’s blood was to be smeared on their doorposts. And the Lord promised, “'The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live; and when I see the blood I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.” This is the origin the name Passover. And it happened just as the Lord said it would. And in the Law, the Lord instructed His people to have an annual meal commemorating this event to continually remind them of what He had done for them. And the Law set forth other seasons and circumstances of sacrifice, in which blood was shed, death was doled out, to provide redemption, to provide atonement, to provide a covering for sin.

Jesus and His followers observed three Passover meals together. But it was in this final one that Jesus completely redefines the significance of the Passover meal. Henceforth, for those who believe in Him, it will be a reminder, not of the deliverance of the nation from Egypt, which was sealed by the blood of a lamb, but of the deliverance of humanity from sin, which was sealed by the blood Christ. At this table, Jesus would make it clear to His followers just what John the Baptist meant when he pointed to Jesus and said, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

He takes the bread, and He blesses it, and He breaks it, and He gives it to the disciples and says, “Take, eat; this is My body.” And then He takes the cup, with its deep red fruit of the vine, and He says, “Drink from it, all of you; for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins.” These two visible symbols, the bread and the cup, accompany and illustrate the announcement that all of those sacrifices and all of that blood was pointing forward to what was going to happen just hours later as Jesus died on the cross.

The murder of Jesus is the final domino of a long line of events, a chain reaction that included Satan’s exploitation of Judas’ love of money, the plot of the religious leaders to rid the world of Jesus, the sins of humanity going all the way back to the Garden of Eden, and every animal sacrifice ever offered. But who flicked the first domino? What was the catalyst that caused the chain reaction that culminated in God-Incarnate being nailed to an instrument of torturous execution? The whole thing flows forth out of God’s infinite love and amazing grace, and His sovereign plan to rescue humanity from sin. Everything that took place leading up to and including the crucifixion of Jesus happened in explicit fulfillment of prophecies that God had revealed over centuries. Notice in verse 24 that Jesus says, “The Son of Man is to go, just as it is written of Him.” In the verse 31, Jesus quotes Zechariah 13:7 which speaks of the striking of the shepherd and the scattering of the flock. Psalm 118 is referenced in Matthew 21:42, saying that evil men would reject the Messiah. John 15:25 points to Psalm 35’s promise that He would be hated without cause. John 19:34-37 harkens back to Psalm 34:20 and Zechariah 12:10 which speak of Him being pierced and His bones being left unbroken. In John 13:18, Jesus cites Psalm 41:9 about the one who ate bread with Him lifting up his heel against him. In Matthew 27:9-10, there is reference to Jeremiah 19:1-13, which is also similar to Zechariah 11:12-13, and which speaks of thirty pieces of silver being the price of the blood money. And Jesus Himself announced to His disciples numerous times that when they came to Jerusalem, He would be delivered over to the chief priests and scribes, condemned to death, handed over to Gentiles, tortured and killed, and that He would rise from the dead (e.g, Mark 10:33-34). You see that God was spelling out the events that would take place at the pinnacle of human history as Jesus made His way to the cross. They were taking place in accordance with His sovereign will. Isaiah 53 had announced that it was the Lord who would lay upon the Messiah the iniquity of us all; that it was the will of the Lord for Him to be crushed and put to grief. And in Acts 2, as Peter preached the great sermon of Pentecost, he proclaimed that the people of Israel nailed Jesus to a cross by the hands of godless men (implicating Jew and Gentile alike in the murder of Jesus), but that Jesus had been delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God. In Acts 4, as the early church’s leaders prayed, they spoke to God saying, “in this city there were gathered together against Your holy servant Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever Your hand and Your purpose predestined to occur.”

So you see, when Jesus announced at the table that His body would be broken just like the bread, and His blood would flow like the juice of crushed grapes, He was announcing the culmination of redemptive history was at hand. God’s sovereign plan to redeem humanity from sin had reached its climax in the imminent death of Jesus on the cross. His was the final and full sacrifice for the sins of humanity. And with His announcement of these things also comes an invitation: “Take and eat,” “Drink from it, all of you.” You have been invited to participate in this glorious redemption, this spectacular salvation, and be rescued by the amazing grace of God from your state of sin.

Just as God ordered Israel to regularly observe the Passover as a reminder of their redemption from bondage in Egypt, so Christ has ordained for His Church to regularly reenact this covenant meal. As we take the bread and drink the cup, we remember that we have been redeemed from slavery to sin. And the New Testament instructs us to examine ourselves as come with Christ to the table. Is Christ the supreme love in your life? Have you committed yourself to Him by faith as Lord and Savior? Or are you just hanging around with Him and His people, not unlike Judas, while your heart remains far from Him? You will notice as you read the Gospels that it was not until Judas left the room that Christ shared these symbolic elements with His disciples. This is not a meal for everyone. The symbols are reserved for those who have participated in the reality. The reminder of His sacrifice is served to those who have received His salvation. So today, I would invite you to examine yourself, and if you have never personally received the gift of salvation that Christ has purchased for you with His own blood, then today you can. You can acknowledge to God that you are a sinner, and that you turn from that life of sin claiming Jesus as your Lord and your Savior.

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[1] John Piper, History’s Most Spectacular Sin (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2008), p5.
[2] Piper, p9.

Is it dead? Or is it just pining?

How do you know when something is dead? Seems a simple enough question, doesn't it? Just the very thought of asking a question like that causes me to think of the old Monty Python sketch about the dead (or is it just pining for the fjords?) parrot:

This came to mind recently when a dear brother and fellow pastor emailed me with a question: "How do you measure whether or not the Spirit is moving? What standard do you use to determine whether your church is alive or dying?" Below is my response to his question:

What is a dead church? I mean, not "dead" as defined sociologically or denominationally, but theologically, what does it mean for a church to be dead? I'm not sure we've seen many good descriptions of that. I would say that as we think toward what a dead church is, it would include some of these characteristics: loss of love for God and the brethren; absence of biblical authority; absence of the gospel; man-centered, rather than God-centered, worship (I am talking "substance" not "style"); lack of concern for the lostness of the community and the nations; lack of any involvement in fulfilling the Great Commission. I am sure that list is not exhaustive. But I do think that an exhaustive list could be compiled using Scripture as our guide. I think there would be a finite set of characteristics that would indicate that a church is DEAD.

So then, how do you know if your church is dying? Is it moving in a direction toward those things? If it is not, then it is not dying. If it is moving toward the direction of the antitheses of these marks, then I would say it is not only alive, but actually healthy and getting stronger.

The problem is that people are looking at the wrong guages. Numbers and emotionalism do not a healthy church make. In fact, using just the few characteristics I have outlined above, I know of some large (and ever growing) churches who have excellent music and mind-boggling programs, but which, by theological definitions, are dead. And on the flip side, I know of some where barely more than 12 gather, but those 12 love God, love one another, submit to His word, worship in Spirit and truth, and fervently attempt to share the Gospel with their community and the nations. The "experts" would say that church is dead because they don't have a praise band and they aren't baptizing new people every month. Theologically speaking, that church is NOT DEAD. Now, might that church be closed down because of finances or other reasons in the next 6 months? It might. Then can we say it died? Perhaps, but not in the tragic sense, rather in the glorious sense of martyrdom. That church went to its "grave" being faithful to its Gospel-centered convictions, and refused to compromise for the sake of institutional survival. In that case, we do not pity them in their "death," we celebrate their glory and mourn that such a faithful body is longer with us. Additionally, the "closing down" of an institution or facility does have to be the "death" of a church. Many churches are so institutionally minded that the loss of their property results in the disbanding of the church by default, but no one said that this had to happen or that a church had to own property or a building. They could continue on in another venue or under other circumstances.

Now, I can anticipate someone saying that if a church was that faithful, that committed to the gospel, that concerned about lostness, etc. then there is no way it should have ever had to shut its doors. I'm just not sure we can prove that. It seems that we have seen examples in history of missionaries who have faithfully labored for decades with no visible fruit in the field. And we celebrate those men and women and say, "What faithful servants to endure so much and see so little fruit from it!" Why could we not say the same about a church? After all, Jesus' promise is that THE church will endure forever, not necessarily any particular local manifestation of it.

After some further reflection, I added more to this conversation:

When it comes to determining the death of a church, who gets to decide? I remember sitting in Epistemology class in seminary discussing the concept of "Critical Realism," an epistemological framework that admits in surprising and humble honesty that there is no "bird's eye view" of reality. We can't examine a state of affairs with complete and total detached objectivity, because we are in it, and we are affected by it. I think that has a bearing on this discussion.

A church is a gathering of flawed people. Simul iustus et peccator. How do I evaluate that with complete detached objectivity? I am also simultaneously righteous and sinful. Depravity affects my own judgment. And it affects the judgment of all those who would define "dead church" for us. It seems to me that there is only One who can objectively evaluate the situation, and if we aren't using His criteria to measure our churches, then we are using broken guages. So our task is not primarily to evaluate the church, but to understand the Word, and then to allow the Word to evaluate the church. And when we do that, we are probably all in worse shape than we imagine! But, we see throughout the NT that God uses imperfect churches to carry out His perfect will. Good thing, because if He is going to use churches at all, imperfect ones are all He's got to work with!

So, what do you think? How do you know if a church is dead? Or dying? Or just pining for the fjords?