I was much struck lately with the way in which Christ was answered and overcame in Gethsemane and on the cross. I apprehend, while looking forward to the dreadful cup, the proper and immediate trial of Gethsemane was the power of darkness; the great point was to get between His soul and the Father (as before, by desirable things for life). But he could not. Christ hence pleading with His Father, receiving nothing from Satan or man in the cup, received it from his father in perfect and blessed obedience. “Thou hast brought me into the dust of death.”
Hence His soul is entirely out of the darkness in respect to His enemy, and He can say in peaceful hour calm of others, “this is your and the power of darkness,” and presents Himself willingly that His disciples might go free. How blessed the perfectness which, at His own cost, always kept them free. For in their position Satan would have caught them in his hour, had not the Lord 81 God forward in the gap; and so ever. When needed for Peter, He can allow just so much as was good to sift, but stay the proud billows for him, which were to go clean over His own soul. He was thus, I judge, entirely out of the whole conflict with darkness before it came in fact. He passed through it with God—His Father.
At the cross, I apprehend, there was another thing. He was forsaken of God. He had immediately to do with God, and just wrath against sin, and He in that place, so that love could have no refuge for His soul; and here too He is perfect. And having accomplished this ineffable work, His soul having drunk the cup unmixed, atonement having been made, He comes forth as heard, and the act of death is just His own giving up His spirit to His Father. In the time of peace He had said so, but He was to pass through death in His soul, and did as an offering for sin. But, then, what was death? It was One who had overcome death, undergoing it in its infinite atoning efficacy, and gives up His soul more than pure, which has put away sin, into the hands of God His Father. What is death here, if the overcoming of Satan made it obedience? The bearing of wrath gave title to give up life into the merited reception of infinite favor. Death was His. It was not yet power in resurrection, but His soul given up to His Father. It was death; but death the closing of an accomplished life of obedience in woe, and the introduction into that infinite favor in life beyond all relationship of promise down here, which the work in which He had glorified the Father placed Him in.
And so through Him is death to us. It ceases to be a closing life. We have a title through Him to give up our souls in it into His hands, as we see in Stephen. It is the closing of conflict to be in the life, in the power of which we live to Him, absent from the body and present with the Lord. He gave Himself up—it was power, though in reference to the Father, into whose hands He commends His spirit—that His resurrection might be by the glory of the Father. For in this even He did not take glory Himself. Death, or what is called death, is thus a totally new thing. It is having done with all, as a redeemed soul, to enter into another world.
But I speak now of Christ. He had emerged from all this, and a far more dreadful hour, and could tell the thief be should come with Him into Paradise—speak in peace to John of His mother. His hour was come for this: and knowing that all was accomplished, after saying “I thirst,” He gave up His soul into His Father’s hands. These two considerations have deeply affected me, seen in some details of which I never traced the general bearing and importance.