"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 Satan. This is your hour and 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, receives 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 of the enemy; and He can say, in perfect calm, of others, This is your hour and the power of darkness,' and present 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 stood forward in the gap-and so ever, and when needed for Peter-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 God. At the Cross. I apprehend, it was another thing. He was forsaken of God. He had immediately to do with God and just wrath against sin. It was not Satan. It was justice, holiness, arrayed against sin, and He, in that place, so that he could have no refuge for His soul. And here, too, He is perfect."