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Agony
“And being in an agony He prayed more earnestly: and His sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44).
Only once does God use this word agony in all the Scriptures, and He reserves it to express the terrible suffering of His beloved Son in the garden of Gethsemane, as the Lord Jesus anticipated the horrors of being “made … sin for us” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The Lord faced the cross alone and as the time drew near when He would pass through those three hours of anguish, when forsaken of God, He would bear the punishment for sin, this terrible agony swept over His holy soul. Yet, wonder of wonders, that out of this agony Peter, James, and John heard Him pray, “Nevertheless not My will, but Thine, be done” (Luke 22:42).
Today, as we look back and remember the sufferings of Christ and the work of Calvary, we rejoice that all that agony is forever past, and the Lord Jesus will never experience the forsaking of God, or the anguish of being made sin again. At the end of the three hours of darkness He cried, “It is finished” (John 19:30). Hallelujah!
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