All that’s good
The eve of his death on the cross, Jesus went to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray.
In the Garden, he started to pray and as he prayed, shock— why? It’s not a shrinking of prospect of physical suffering but rather the horror of one who lived holy for the Father and came to be with the Father for an interlude but found Hell rather than Heaven open to him in his spiritual consciousness.
Jesus knew some of his disciples would be terribly tortured in His name, but that that was nothing compared to what He was going to experience: rejection by God. That’s what Hell is. Your soul was built for Him.
And to be cut off from God is far worse than physical torture. Jesus knew perfect fellowship with the Father more than any person, as he had already experienced it in its fullest, face-to-face. (“Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.” - John 17:5)
And because Jesus’s relationship with God was infinitely greater than ours, then his Hell would be infinitely worse than all of ours put together, and it was. And he staggered and he tore his breasts. He turned to the Father and instead Hell opened up.
Jonathan Edwards says, ‘The agony was called by a vivid, bright, immediate view of the wrath of God. Jesus turned to the Father in prayer but began instead to experience the exclusion of God.’ Up to this point, nothing surprised Jesus. But now he’s astonished and shocked— to the point he was sweating blood. In the Garden he was getting a foretaste of what he’d get on the cross. Why is it happening now? Because he has more time to realize the pain and more time to escape! It was radically voluntary, so it enhances everything he does. It was not proper that he plunge himself into the furnace not knowing how dreadful that furnace would be. Therefore, God brought him and set him at the mouth of the furnace that he might look in and stand and view its fierce and raging flames and might voluntarily enter into it. infinitely perfect. If that was just a foretaste in the Garden, what might the actual thing of the cross been like?
That’s the type of love you’ve been looking for your entire life and when you see that you’ll be able to trust the Father in your suffering and it’ll make you into something great. If Jesus didn’t abandon you under these circumstances, why would he abandon you now? Fall down at his feet, adore him for what he did, and when you get up you’ll be like him.
Hebrews 12:2 says the joy set before him allowed him to endure the cross, and that the joy was us! He lost everything and yet he thought it was worth it for the result, which was us. The only thing that Christ didn’t have before he suffered that he had after he suffered was you and me. Therefore you were his living hope, that’s what got him through it!
- Tim Keller