Matthew 26:39: He went a little farther and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.
It was there in the garden, where so often He had resorted with His disciples, and where so frequently He had enjoyed uninterrupted communion with His Father, that He now enters His final agony as He contemplates the reality of being made sin on our behalf (2 Corinthians 5:21). John 12 pictures the agony as Jesus asks to be saved from this hour, but then states that it was for this hour that He came.
Look also at Psalm 102. This has been designated "The Gethsemane Psalm."Looking at that Psalm, we can sense the loneliness of the One that would be forsaken of God and despised by the very men whom He came to save. This was the cup from which His holy, human nature shrank. That He, the perfect One, in whom the Father had ever found His delight, should be treated as an outcast, because taking the sinner's place, was unspeakably horrible and appalling.
He had come for that purpose, but as the hour drew near when He was actually to undergo the baptism of divine judgment against sin, He would not have been the Holy One whom He was if He had not shrunk from so terrible an ordeal. It was at Golgotha, on the cross of shame, that our sins were laid upon Him, and He endured the full penalty that should have been ours, if God had not intervened in grace and sent His Son to be the propititation for our sins.
Despite all the foreboding of the assignment to which He had come to the earth, Jesus willingly resigns to the Father's will. I believe that Christ at that moment was pleading for some other means that salvation might be procured for sinners. If only that possible alternative could be revealed. It was not, and Christ accepted the will of the Father. For sinners such as you and I there was no other way to have our sins forgiven.
Hallelujah, What a Savior! thank Him today for His marvelous Grace towards us.
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