Then he said to them, my soul is exceedingly sorrowful even to death. Stay here and watch. He went a little farther and fell on the ground and prayed that if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Take this cup away from me. Nevertheless, not what I will, but what you will. Then he came and found them sleeping and said to Peter, Simon, are you sleeping? Could you not watch one hour? Watch and pray lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. Again, he went away and prayed and spoke the same words. And when he returned, he found them asleep again for their eyes were heavy and they did not know what to answer him. Then he came the third time and said to them, are you still sleeping and resting? It is enough. The hour has come. Behold, the son of man is being betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand. And then jump over to chapter 15, where Jesus is now hanging on a cross. I just want to read one verse here, Mark 15, 34, what's known as the cry of dereliction. At the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, which is translated, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And I want to read one more passage from Hebrews chapter 5, just a verse, 5, 7. In the days of his flesh, when he offered up prayers and supplications with vehement cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death and was heard because of his godly fear. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. All right, so this is by far the most complicated, deep, and theologically technical talk that I'm going to give. You might wonder, why then did I save it for the last night? Well, so in case you don't like it, I'm leaving town early this morning. So if you think I say something heretical now, it's safe because I'm out of here. I'm going to talk about what I will call the passion of the impassable God, which if that title sounds contradictory, just wait until you hear what I have to say about this topic. And quite seriously, if you do have questions, you want to talk about this further, you want to pursue this conversation. I'm happy to talk about it with you. You can always call me on the phone or email me or make a personal visit to Birmingham, whatever you would like to do. I'm game for it. The passage, well, all of these passages we read, but particularly the Garden of Gethsemane passage, which is where I'm really going to focus, these are among the most mysterious and profound passages in all of scripture. Here's how I want to approach this. I've really got two questions in mind. First, what is the cup Jesus prays would be taken from him? And then second, was his prayer answered? And then third, we can ask, what are the practical ramifications of this for our lives? Jesus enters into the Garden of Gethsemane knowing he is facing death, and a sudden change comes over Jesus. It's very unmistakable. Up to this point, Jesus has been a model of composure. No matter how difficult things are, Jesus has been unflappable. Even when talking about his coming death, he seems to be very calm and collected about it. But not now. When he begins to pray in the Garden of Gethsemane, When he begins to pour his soul out in prayer before his father, he agonizes over the prospect of his death. He is clearly in agony. He's deeply troubled. How many of you are familiar with Foxe's Book of Martyrs? You ever read any of the accounts of martyrdom in that book? The Christians who are put to death for their faith, how do they die? How would you describe them as they are facing death? Serene, peaceful, calm, cool, and collected, brave, and bold. Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane is none of those things. It seems that Jesus is coming unraveled, like he's falling apart, like he is losing his composure. Frankly, those martyrs in Frank and Fox's Book of Martyrs look more composed and together on the eve of death or the verge of death than Jesus does in the Garden of Gethsemane. Why is that? Why would disciples of Jesus face death with more composure than Jesus himself? Well, it's because Jesus isn't just facing death, he's facing the cup. Now, what cup is this? Well, if you go back to the Old Testament prophets, you discover what the cup is. In prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel, the cup is the cup of God's fury and the cup of God's wrath and the cup of God's judgment. Jesus knows when he's going to the cross, this is not just death he's going to face, he's going to face the wrath of God. He's going to drink the cup of God's fury against our sin. Right now he knows his father is mixing that cup of sin and wrath together. for him to drink. The cup is the cross. It's the curse. It's the curse of death on the cross. And it's not just the physical torment that will go on when he suffers on the cross. It's what you could call the spiritual suffering. It's God's wrath due to our sin. That's the cup Jesus is facing. Now, I think the Garden of Gethsemane is really necessary to understand what happens at Golgotha. Mark does not give us a worked out atonement theology. in his account of Jesus' death. As he tells the story of Jesus' death, he doesn't tell us its meaning in any kind of explicit way. We've got to go look at other passages of his gospel and we want to understand why Jesus is dying and what his death is going to accomplish. It's there in Mark's gospel, you just have to look more broadly. I think Gethsemane is key to all of that. If you want to understand Golgotha, you've got to look at Gethsemane. In Gethsemane, Jesus begins to experience a foretaste of what Golgotha will be all about. He begins, you could say, even to sip from the cup he will drain to the dregs later on. The hour of the cross is beginning to dawn here in Gethsemane. He is entering into his passion. Now look at his prayer. He says, Abba, Father. This term, ah, may not mean daddy. Some people have criticized that kind of interpretation of the term, like it's overly sentimentalized. But it's definitely a term of intimacy. It's the closest term of intimacy possible to describe that father-son relationship. It's a term of endearment. And it's really crucial to note that he uses this term of intimacy. We'll see why in a few minutes. In his prayer, he says, all things are possible for you. So he confesses his father's omnipotence, his father's sovereignty. He knows his father is free and sovereign over all. And then you come to his request, take this cup from me, nevertheless, not my will, but your will. Now what I'm most interested in here is the interaction between the Father and the Son. We have to understand this in Trinitarian terms. We're going to see, we have to understand the cross in Trinitarian terms. But also contrast what happens here with what happens in other places where the Father and Son engage with one another. At Jesus' baptism, heaven opens and the Father speaks saying, this is my beloved Son. Here in the garden when the father prays, heaven is closed, the father is silent. When Jesus prays, heaven is closed and the father is silent. The son asked the father to take the cup, but if the cup is the cross, if that's the right understanding, the father refuses to do so. This would be the one and only time, it seems, that Jesus offers a prayer that goes unanswered, or at least it looks that way. What begins here in the garden comes to a culmination in Jesus' cry of dereliction on the cross, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Now, I want to give you a couple caveats here, a couple qualifications, just to make something clear before I get into what's happening in Gethsemane, what happens on Golgotha. These are key points to keep in mind. When we interpret what happens with Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane, and when we interpret what happens with the cry of dereliction in Golgotha, there are two mistakes we must not make. First, we must not divide the incarnate Christ. You can never separate the deity from the humanity of Jesus. So, for example, you cannot say his humanity suffered on the cross while his deity was placidly looking on. That just won't do because of the unity of his person. Jesus is the God-man, fully divine, fully human, two natures in one person. All that Jesus does and says and experiences, he does and says and experiences as the God-man. All that Jesus does, all that Jesus does. That's the rule of Orthodox Christology. So the Divine Son experiences human life. So he experiences hunger and sleepiness. He experiences human life. He experiences life as a man. in some admittedly mysterious way. This means the Divine Son experiences human death. The impassable God, that is the God who cannot suffer, suffers in the passion of Jesus Christ. Now, that's a mouthful and that's a huge theological issue that You know, we could spend all night and then some just trying to scratch the surface. But, you know, whenever you're teaching and you want to get through something quickly that's really deep and complicated, you know what you do, you appeal to outside authority. You quote somebody smarter than yourself and say, look, you got a problem, take it up with him. And that's especially helpful if the person's dead that you're quoting from. So I want to read to you. It's from T.F. Torrance, okay? And you may not know that name. T.F. Torrance may not be a household name. And I wouldn't agree with everything Torrance says on every subject. But on this particular topic, on the Trinity and on the passion of Jesus, I think he's remarkably profound. And this is what he says about passability and impassability. He says, there is certainly a sense in which we must think of God as impassable, for he is not subject to the passions that characterize human and creaturely existence. Indeed, God is intrinsically impassable, for in his own divine nature, he is not moved or swayed by anything other than himself or outside of himself. God is actually opposed to all suffering and pain. Suffering is alien to God, and yet, okay, here's the big and yet, and yet in his free love, so there's nothing necessary about this, but in his free love, God takes our suffering to himself and makes it part of his own nature and experience. Torrance says, what Christ felt, did, and suffered in himself, in his body, and soul for our forgiveness was felt, done, and suffered by God in his innermost being for our sake. We cannot think of the sufferings of Christ as external to the person of the Logos, that's the divine word. It is the very same person who suffered and who saved us, not just man, but the Lord as man. Okay, now I realize that's tough maybe to swallow that that quickly, but that's a nice handy summary of what it means to speak of the passion of the God-man. Okay, so that's the first caveat I have here is we must not divide Christ. We have to maintain the unity of Christ. We cannot divide the incarnate Christ. The second caveat I have here, and this one's gonna be a lot trickier as you'll see, we must not divide the Trinity. We must not set father and son against each other at the cross as if, you know, sometimes the gospels presented this way, as if you had an angry father being placated by a loving and compassionate son. Jesus does not die on the cross in order to make it possible for the Father to begin to love us. He does not die on the cross to persuade the Father to love us. Rather, Jesus is set forth on the cross by His Father precisely because the Father already loves us. Think about the most famous Bible verse of all, John 3.16. God, that's the Father, so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. The Son doesn't make the Father love us using the cross as some kind of leverage. The Father gives the Son as a sacrifice for the sin of the world out of love. Romans 8 makes the same kind of point. If God the Father did not spare his beloved son, surely he's going to give us everything else we need. He already loves us. That's why he gives us Jesus to begin with. So you can't pit the Father against the Son in this kind of way. That's not the right way to read the prayer in Gethsemane or the cry of dereliction in Golgotha. There is an unbroken and indeed unbreakable unity between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so even when the son hangs on the cross, forsaken by his father, somehow even in that forsakenness the father and son are one, even as the father is abandoning his son. And you're going to see in just a minute there is a real abandonment. But even as there is this abandonment taking place, there's still, and this is obviously a mystery, but there is still a oneness between father and son. The father is present with the Son even when He is absent. He is united with the Son even when He is forsaking Him. He is pleased with His Son even when it is His pleasure to bruise His Son. He is delighting in His Son even when He is judging His Son and striking His Son and bruising His Son for our sins. Likewise, we cannot use Gethsemane to say that the Son is somehow an unwilling victim of the Father's justice or vengeance. This is a much less common of explaining things, but we shouldn't go this way either. The son does indeed pray, not my will, but your will be done. He prays for the cup to be taken, but after praying the cup to be taken, he says, not my will, but yours. So even though he's wrestling through this and suffering and agonizing over the prospect of the cup he must drink, in the end, he clearly submits himself to his father's will. In the end, he agrees with his father's plan of salvation. The will of the father and the will of the son are one. He obeys the father. Philippians 2, the Christ hymn in Philippians 2 celebrates this, that he was obedient to his father even to the point of death, even the death of the cross. So there is a unity of will and purpose between the Father and the Son. Indeed, the cross is an inter-Trinitarian transaction that involves Father, Son, and Spirit, each working with the other persons of the Trinity, playing a vital role in our salvation. So I said with Christology, the rule is all of Jesus does, all that Jesus does. The rule here is all of God does, all that God does. That's the rule of Trinitarian orthodoxy. All of God is involved in all of God's external works. So how does this work on the cross? What's happening on the cross? Well, on the cross, the Father sets Jesus forth as a sacrifice. He strikes the Son. He bruises the Son. He makes Him to be a sin offering and a propitiation. And the Son willingly lays down His life before His Father, bearing God's wrath for the sake of God's people. And to make this fully Trinitarian, we can bring the Holy Spirit into the picture. The Son offers Himself to the Father. through the eternal Holy Spirit according to Hebrews chapter 9. Indeed, it's very interesting to me. Elsewhere in the New Testament, you've got Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane praying and crying out, Abba, Father. In Galatians 4 and Romans 8, those same words, Abba, Father, are put on the lips of Christians. We cry out, Abba, Father. But what's interesting is in Galatians 4 and in Romans 8, where Paul makes this point that this is how we pray, he emphasizes it is the spirit that makes this cry arise in our hearts. It's through the spirit that we cry out, Abba, Father, the spirit of sonship. Well, I think we can trace that back to the Garden of Gethsemane. It's through the spirit and by the spirit that the son is crying out to his father, Abba. And now because we share in that same spirit, we share in the son's prayer life and we share in his position. So now we can join our prayers and our cries of Abba Father to his. So this is what you've got to keep in mind. We've got the Orthodox Christology, the unity of Christ, Orthodox Trinitarian theology, the unity of the Trinity. Keep those things in mind as we go. Whatever I say is not intending to undo that, even if it complicates things. Because, see, really, particularly that second point about the Trinitarian unity is not the whole story. The reality is there is a real refusal and a real abandonment that takes place between the father and the son, a real refusal and a real forsakenness. Now this means there are mysteries, there are paradoxes in Gethsemane and on Golgotha that we can't solve, but that we certainly need to wrestle with. Again, think about what happens in Gethsemane. Jesus uses this most intimate language possible, this Abba language, as he is speaking to his father. And yet at that very moment, he's using this language of great intimacy. His father refuses to answer him. The father and the son are one. They have this infinite closeness as they indwell one another as father and son. And yet the father really does refuse the son's prayer. He really does tell the son no. Think about Golgotha. Even as Jesus expresses how he has been forsaken by God and abandoned by God, he cries out, my God, my God, using the language of the covenant. It's covenantal language, my God, my God, the language of possession and belonging. He uses this language of intense intimacy at the very moment there seems to be an infinite distance between the father and the son. See, our sin, it's as if it's a wedge driven between the Father and the Son. The Father and the Son are one, and yet somehow there is a real forsaking of the Son on the cross. A real forsaking of the Son by the Father as he is numbered with the transgressors, as he is bearing God's wrath. What is God's wrath other than God turning his back on his Son and forsaking his Son? That's what the Father is doing. Now that language in the cry of dereliction, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? You know where that comes from? Anybody remember? Comes from Psalm 22. And I think in a lot of ways, Psalm 22 is really the key to this whole thing. So if you take Psalm 22 and you look not just at that first verse, but the whole of the Psalm, it helps us understand what's happening here. I didn't read Psalm 22 just for the sake of time. But what I want to do is walk you through Psalm 22 and show you how It really is the cry of Christ from the cross. So verse one, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me? Okay, understand here, Jesus on the cross is not just reciting a psalm, like let's recite some psalms while I'm hanging here, you know, nailed to a tree. No, he's actually enduring what the words describe. He has fallen into the abyss, the black hole of sin and wrath. He's not just feeling forsaken. He is truly forsaken by his father. Verse two, he says, I cry out to you, but you do not answer. That's Gethsemane. He cried out to the father and the father refused him. The father did not answer him. Heaven was silent. Verse 6, he says, I'm a worm and not a man, scorned by mankind. Jesus experiences rejection by men as well as rejection by God. There is complete aloneness. All his disciples, of course, as we know throughout the night, scatter. They abandon him, and then his father abandons him. He is left utterly alone. There's utter and complete aloneness for Jesus. Verse 7 and following records, Others mocking the psalmist slash Jesus. The words of the psalm are really the words of Jesus, so we'll just say. Others mocking Jesus. Of course, we know from the gospel accounts, Mark 15, Jesus experienced mockery as he hung on the cross. But then you've got a reference in verses 9 and 10 to his ongoing trust in the Lord. So Jesus is trusting God even as he is forsaken by God. He's trusting God even as he is abandoned by God. So at the cross you have both abandonment and trust going on at the same moment. Verses 12 and following go on to describe the weakness of Jesus, the weakness of the psalmist. He's poured out like water. His heart is melting like wax. He's surrounded by beasts, and the beasts include dogs and bulls. So both Gentile and Jewish enemies who are taunting him, attacking him in this way. Verse 18, he says, they divide my garment. So they have stripped him naked. So he's bearing shame. And of course, the gospels record them. and even use this verse to talk about the soldiers who took his garments and divided the garments among themselves. And then verse 19, but you, O Lord, do not be far off. come quickly to my aid." So another plea for rescue. Now I'm going to stop there and come back to the end of the psalm in a few minutes. But you see how this fits, how Psalm 22 and the experience of Jesus on the cross go together. Psalm 22 gives us language to describe what Jesus is experiencing on the cross. It really gives us language to describe what Jesus endures from Gethsemane through Golgotha. Psalm 22 describes what it meant for Jesus to drink the cup. It spells out what drinking the cup means. Psalm 22 is Christ's cross prayer, the prayer of the one who is bearing the curse, the prayer of the one who is experiencing God-forsakenness. Now, we've already talked about this a little bit, but I want to focus on this aspect of it, too. Why does Jesus have to drink this cup, and why is there no other way? Why can't the cup pass from him? Why can't this hour pass from him? Why does he have to drink the cup? We've seen it's the cup of wrath. What does it mean? How does the cup help us understand what Jesus accomplishes on the cross? Well, clearly Jesus is an innocent sufferer. He doesn't deserve any of those things. In fact, some of the sweetest words in all of scripture are those words, for us. Jesus suffers for us, not for his own sin, but for our sin. The key term we use here a lot of times is that word substitution. Jesus is a substitutionary sacrifice. He drinks the cup of wrath for us in our place, taking what we deserve. And as he drinks that cup, he satisfies the wrath of God against our sin. His death is the wages of our sin. He receives that payment, that punishment. Now, that language of satisfaction, of course, has a long history. in the church, but it really comes into its own with Anselm, the great medieval theologian, and of course it was picked up and developed further by the reformers. And Anselm's understanding of the cross as satisfaction is really set over and against a couple other approaches to what happened on the cross. There have been some who have said that the death of Christ is really a transaction between God and man, and what Jesus is doing on the cross is giving us a great example of sacrificial love, to inspire us to follow that example in our lives. So it's a dramatic, you know, it's all for dramatic effect, okay, and the transactions between God and man as it's an example for us. That's obviously inadequate. Others have seen the cross transaction. what's happening at the cross as a transaction between God and Satan. This is sometimes called the ransom view, as if Satan had ownership over fallen humanity and then Jesus frees us with the price of his blood paid to Satan. That's obviously very inadequate also. We'll go into all the reasons why, but it just doesn't work. Satan doesn't have that kind of ownership and couldn't receive that kind of payment for us. So Amsalm said no to both of those kinds of views. The exemplary view that sees it as a transaction between God and man, and the ransom view that sees it as a transaction between God and Satan. Anselm said, no, the cross is a Trinitarian transaction, an inner Trinitarian transaction, a transaction between the Father and the Son. What happens on the cross takes place within the Trinity, within the life of God. The Father, in love, puts the Son forth as a propitiation, as a sin offering, and the Son, in love, offers Himself to the Father as our substitute. And so the cross must be understood as an event within the life of the triune God, an event between Father and Son and through the Holy Spirit. This is how God saves us. The cross is a work within and among the persons of the Trinity, a work within and among the persons of the Godhead. The cross is inescapably Trinitarian. You cannot have a true and orthodox understanding of the cross without an orthodox understanding of the Trinity. The cross only makes sense if God is a Trinity of persons, a communion of persons existing in an eternal fellowship of love. It's the only way you can make sense of what happens on the cross. Who could make God the Son drink the cup but God the Father? Who could God the Son offer himself to as a sacrifice but God the Father? Only God can give God an adequate sacrifice and only God can receive a sacrifice from God. At the cross, God satisfies himself. God judges himself. God forsakes himself. God expresses his love for us, not by putting another in our place, but by putting himself in our place. There is no third party who could step in between God and humanity to make satisfaction for our sin. God must do it. The Savior must be one who is fully God and fully human. Think about this, this tells you really the magnitude of sin, the great terror and horror of sin. Sin is so great and awful, the only solution to sin is the death of God. The only way to deal with sin is the death of God in his Son. The only way to deal with sin is the death of God in his Son in human form, in human flesh. On the cross, God affects all that is necessary to achieve our salvation. Only God can pour out the cup of divine wrath. Only God can drink the cup of divine wrath. God does not punish someone else for man's sin. God takes the punishment himself. And that's why on the cross you have both intimacy and distance. You have Father and Son and Spirit working together even as sin is driven like a wedge between them. This is what happens. You've got Jesus crying out, Abba, this term of intimacy and endearment, and he gets no answer. You've got intimacy and distance. On the cross, he cries out, my God, my God, there's the closeness and the oneness. Why have you forsaken me? There's the abandonment and the distance. It's both. At the very moment the father forsakes the son, The very moment he abandons his son, they're also working together, indeed suffering together to accomplish our salvation. The son suffers abandonment by his father and the father suffers loving grief over the death of his son. Don't leave that out of it. The Father suffers at the cross as well. Donald MacLeod, who's very good dealing with this whole issue, he puts it this way. He says, the cost of our redemption was borne not only by God the Son, but by God the Father. Think about Abraham and Isaac. Who was more nervous walking up that hill to Mount Moriah when God had said, go sacrifice your son, your beloved son, your only son? Isaac willingly goes. But it's a tough thing for Abraham to do as well. There's grief in Abraham's heart, you can be assured of that. Now once again, one of these points we want to rely on outside authorities to make the point and make the point hopefully quickly, clearly, and helpfully. This is from Tim Chester. He says, there's no human person except the God-man who could step forward to make atonement. Only an infinite God could carry the full penalty of eternal damnation of all who believe. But it's not enough that God dies. God must be forsaken and God must forsake. God must be judged and God must judge. God has died for us and God is satisfied. This could not be true apart from the Trinity. Only the Trinity makes it possible to understand the cross as atonement for our sins. In his account of the final days of Jesus' life, Mark describes how Jesus is forsaken by humanity. He's betrayed by a kiss, deserted by his friends, disowned by Peter. He's judged, tortured, and killed by humanity. But now Mark reveals an even greater mystery. And at the ninth hour, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani, which means, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? We will never grasp the full import of these words. The abandonment of Jesus by humanity is eclipsed by his abandonment by God. Jesus is forsaken by God. The Son is abandoned by his Father to death. In the moment of the Son's greatest need and greatest pain, God is not there. The Son cries and is not heard. The God who was always there, the God who was needed, Now, as he had never been needed before, was nowhere to be seen, there was no answer to the son's cry, there was no comfort, Jesus was left godless. He was left with no sense of God's love, no sense of God's purpose, there was nothing but that why. On the cross, he had to be dealt with not as son, but as sin. The father and the son love one another with a perfect love throughout eternity. To see Jesus is to know the father. But now they are torn apart. The divine community is broken. The father and the son, who mutually indwell one another, are separated. The father experiences the loss of his son. The son endures the judicial abandonment of his father. Jesus dies bearing the full effects of sin and the full force of God's wrath. He is alone and abandoned. The distinction of the divine persons is expressed in the most extreme way. God is divided from God. You have to hold that intention with what I said earlier about the unity of the Trinity, even on the cross. But I think what Chester says there is right. Let me read from McLeod. The forsaking by God was only a moment in the long journey from crucifixion to death, yet it was the climactic moment and a moment of incredible density, and it was so precisely because its agony was so compacted, so infinite, as to be well nigh unsustainable. The whole weight of the world's sin was poured out on him in one horrific moment. MacLeod talks about how Jesus on the cross, as he cries out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me, experiences this loss of the sense of sonship. He says, corresponding to the loss of the sense of sonship, there was a real abandonment by God. As the eternal word, he had always been with God. As the incarnate son, the father had always been with him. They had gone up from Bethlehem to Calvary, like Abraham and Isaac, together. But now, in the hour of his greatest need, God is not there. He is damned and banished. He has made the scapegoat, and he is outside in the outer darkness. And then just for good measure, a couple short ones from some church fathers. Gregory Nanzianzen, who spoke freely of God crucified, such a beautiful expression. He talks about God crucified as a miracle. Gregory said we needed an incarnate God, a God put to death that we might live. We were put to death with him that we might be cleansed. Cyril of Alexandria puts it this way, if the word, and that's just another word for the eternal son, if the word did not suffer for us humanly, he did not accomplish our redemption divinely. If he who suffered for us was mere man, we are not in fact redeemed. Now go back to Psalm 22. Does it bother you at all that the father did not answer the son's prayer in Gethsemane? Does that bother you that the son could pray to the father and not have his prayer answered? That Jesus could cry out, take this cup and be refused? Well, obviously one thing we can say to that is if there had been another way, God would have taken it. But the father willed it. And the son wills what the father wills because they are one. They acted together to bring about our redemption. So the son had to at least momentarily experience unanswered prayer. He had to hear the father's no and experience the father's no. He had to experience the father's abandonment and God-forsakenness. If sin deserves God-forsakenness, if sin deserves wrath, if sin deserves God's abandonment, that's what Jesus has to endure on the cross. That's what substitutionary atonement means. That's what it's all about. See, the gospel running from Gethsemane to Golgotha, this is really what it's all about. God suffering in Christ is God reconciling the world to himself. The son has to experience that no, and he has to experience that abandonment. There's no other way. If there was another way, the father and the son together would have taken it. But now go back to Psalm 22 because obviously, That's not the end of the story. I left off at verse 19. You know, you've got these first 19 or so verses that describe in horrific terms this innocent sufferer and all he endures. Verse 20, the psalmist slash Jesus prays, deliver my soul. Verse 21, he says, you have rescued me. Finally, we get the rescue. This is the turning point in the psalm. He's now rescued. And then verse 22, he says, I will tell of your name to my brothers in the midst of the congregation. Now, Hebrews 2 picks up and takes that verse and puts it on the lips of Jesus, basically to tell us Jesus is our chief worship leader. Jesus is our high priest. He's the one who leads us in worship. And of course, Hebrews shows us he does so from the heavenly sanctuary. So now that he has been rescued, you know, now we're on the other side of the cross, he's been raised and even has ascended into heaven and now is leading the congregation in worship in the heavenlies. So when we ascend into the heavenlies, as we lift our hearts up to the Lord each Sunday, Jesus is the one conducting our worship and leading us into the presence of God. Psalm 22 says, it has Jesus saying this words, these words, I will tell of your name to my brothers in the midst of the congregation. It shows you there is a vindication and a victory. Verse 24, the psalmist Jesus says, he has not hidden his face from the afflicted. Well, he hid his face for a while, but now the father is showing his face again. The father answers his prayer after all. Verse 27, all the ends of the earth will turn to the Lord. And here we see this innocent sufferer is vindicated and victorious and the nations become his inheritance. His prayers are heard after all. In fact, there's another passage to consider here I read briefly out of Hebrews 5. I think Hebrews 5 is all about Gethsemane, perhaps also Golgotha, but especially Gethsemane. Hebrews 5 says, Jesus offered prayers with loud cries and tears. That's got to be Gethsemane. It may also be Golgotha, but certainly that's what you see in Gethsemane. Jesus offering prayers with loud cries and tears to him who was able to save him. That's God the Father. And then the verse ends saying, and he was heard because of his obedience. His prayers were heard. He was rescued. He was delivered. But see, here's the problem. In Mark 14, it looks like he wasn't heard. Hebrews 5 says he was heard. How do you fit those two together? How do you make it work? How do you reconcile these two passages? Well, again, what did Jesus ask for? Jesus asked for the cup to be taken. The cup wasn't taken. He had to drink the cup at the cross. But then what happened? Once the cup was emptied, once the divine wrath was quenched, he was heard, he was saved, he was rescued, he was vindicated. Jesus drank the cup, but he didn't have to keep on drinking the cup. He did not have to drink the cup eternally. Somehow, in that cup, Jesus was able to take an eternal hell That's what sin deserves, right? An eternity in hell. He was able to take that eternity in hell and compress it into a small amount of time on the cross. And he drank that cup and he drained it to the dregs and then the cup was taken from him. He emptied the cup, drinking wrath on the cross, and then the empty cup was taken from him. Now that's good news, isn't it? That's good news. The cup is empty. The cup of wrath is empty. The resurrection really is the proof that the cup of wrath is empty. That the divine wrath has been quenched. That Father, Son, and Spirit together have won our salvation. That God has satisfied his own wrath in the death of his Son in human flesh. God has saved us from God. God has saved us from God's cup. God has saved us from God's wrath. And how has he done this? He has done it at the cross where God made our God-forsakenness his own. See, again, only God can bear the wrath of God, but God has done it. The cup is empty. God has experienced godlessness. God has experienced God-forsakenness in order to reconcile us, sinners though we are, to God. That was the price of your salvation. This is how the Trinity worked it out. This is how the Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit achieved your salvation. And you know what else is good news about this? Because Jesus was forsaken on the cross. You never will be because he was abandoned on the cross. You will never be abandoned. Even when you suffer, you're not being forsaken. You're not being abandoned. Oh, you might feel forsaken at times. And when you feel forsaken, you can reach for Psalm 22 and find comfort in it. But you are not ever going to be abandoned. You're not ever going to be forsaken, certainly not the way Jesus was forsaken. Why? Because Jesus was forsaken for you. Jesus was abandoned on your behalf. You may still have a cup of suffering to drink, I think we all do, but you don't have a cup of wrath. Jesus has drained the cup of wrath. Your cries of Abba Father will always be heard precisely because Jesus' cries of Abba Father were not. See, the good news of Gethsemane, the gospel in the Garden of Gethsemane is this, the cup of wrath is drained and the curse is exhausted. Now, go back to the original questions we started with. What is the cup? The cup is the cup of God's wrath. It's a cup Jesus must drink, taking what we deserve. Whatever sin deserves, that's what Jesus got on the cross. That's what substitutionary atonement means. Jesus drained that cup. Was his prayer in Gethsemane answered? That's the second question we started with. No, not at first, but then yes, afterwards. Jesus drank the cup, but he didn't have to drink the cup eternally. And once the cup was drained, the cup passed from him and he was saved from death in resurrection. And what's the practical import of all of this? It means no more wrath. The cup is empty. You're forgiven and you're freed. And more than that, it means you will never be alone in your suffering. You will never be left alone because Jesus was forsaken for you. You will never be forsaken. Jesus suffered alone, so you will never be alone in your suffering. All right, let me pray for us. Father, we do thank you for this time that we've had together this week. And I thank you for the saints of this church that have shown such wonderful hospitality to me. And I thank you for the friendship that we share and the fellowship that we have been able to share. And I pray for your blessings upon them all. Father, we thank you for giving us your son as our substitute. as a sacrifice, as a sin offering. We thank you that Jesus took what we deserve so now we can go free. We can be acquitted before you. We can be accepted by you. We're forgiven. We're free. Our cries of Abba Father are heard and we know that you will never leave or forsake us. What good news this is. May this good news inspire us and encourage us and strengthen us. Father, this is our prayer through Christ Jesus. Amen. All right. Thank you all