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The Cup
“And He was withdrawn from them about a stone’s cast, and kneeled down, and prayed, Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but Thine, be done” (Luke 22:41-42).
This cup that the Lord was referring to was the cup of suffering at the hand of God. It was that judgment against sin which came directly from God in those three hours of darkness when He “bare our sins in His own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). In Luke’s gospel, the Lord Jesus as a man, shrank from the awful reality of what was ahead, and prays in the Garden of Gethsemane asking the Father if there was any other way possible for His will to be accomplished.
However, in John’s gospel, where we have the Lord presented as the Son of God and the burnt offering, we do not get His agony in the garden. He has before Him the accomplishment of the Father’s will and simply says, “The cup which my Father hath given Me, shall I not drink it?(John 18:11). No, there was never a hesitation on His part. He came to do the will of the Father, and could cry at the end of those hours of darkness, “It is finished” (John 19:30).
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