The LORD is the Strength of My Life

The attitude of every believer ought to be that expressed in Psalm 27:1 by King David about 1000 BC. The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? When evildoers assail me to eat up my flesh, my adversaries and foes, it is they who stumble and fall (Psalms 27:1-2 ESV).

As David sought refuge in the God of Israel, so also Jesus, in the days of his flesh, placed his full faith and trust in God his Father. On the evening of the last Passover that he would spend on earth with his disciples Jesus put his full faith and trust in the Father’s will. As he would explain a few days later, God’s will was his substitutionary death prophesied in the holy scriptures. Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem (Luke 24:46-47 ESV).

Psalm 27 prophesied how that the soldiers who arrived in the garden of prayer to arrest him would stumble and fall backward as he identified himself to them (John 18:6).

In the 27th Psalm David wrote, the Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? To be certain, Jesus appeared to show no fear when he preached the truth, confessed God as his Father (John 10:30), or confronted threats to his life by political dignitaries (Luke 13:32).

How is it then when he comes to the garden that he becomes so overwrought with emotion? And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground (Luke 22:44 ESV). What was the root of it?

It is the attempt to find a cause for his agony that has opened the door to so much debate about that time of prayer in the garden before the arrest of Jesus. The fact of the spiritual agitation of Jesus is clear enough, but the cause is not well understood. Assigning a cause to a critical event in Jesus’s life is the opportunity for many divergent opinions by many commentators. Some of the most prevailing opinions of the past 500 years have led to grievous misunderstandings. I will deal with those errors specifically at another time.

All four Gospel books recorded that Jesus was present in a garden area when he was arrested. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, recorded the agony of prayer that Jesus experienced there. John wrote his Gospel later, and he omitted any mention of the prayer of agony. Rather, he put on paper the amazing concluding prayer of the Last Supper. Apparently, he thought the synoptic coverage sufficient and he made no comment on the garden agony.

An agonizing time of prayer was mentioned in Hebrews 5:7. In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence.

The only account that correlates to this agitated state of Jesus was the prayer time mentioned in the Gospels. The author of Hebrews (i.e. Paul, I believe) had already ascribed to Jesus two important character strengths before he mentions his agony in prayer. Firstly, Jesus sympathized with our weaknesses. Secondly, he encountered every temptation commonly experienced by us and responded with sinless behavior (Hebrews 4:14, 15). In Hebrews 5, after the mention of Jesus’s agony in prayer, he noted that Jesus “learned obedience in his suffering,” and that he was “made perfect.”

A biblically unsupported assumption is that the divinity of Jesus (i.e. his divine nature) made his humanity less of a burden to overcome than our humanity is to us. This is not the argument of Paul in Hebrews. When Paul wrote, “And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation,” there was never any thought of Jesus progressing from sin to sinlessness. So when Paul wrote that Jesus was made perfect, the context referred to an experience of Jesus that was not related to sin.

Paul already had written that Jesus never sinned (Hebrews 4:15). Jesus was the only man who “knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus pointed to his sinlessness as a critical marker of his divine sonship (John 8:46).

Still, apart from sin, Paul referred to a process of experience in the life of Jesus. Although he was a son (i.e. had a divine nature), he learned obedience through what he suffered (he experienced living under the authority required of every person under God). Note that I wrote that Jesus “experienced” human life and was not merely “incarnated” into human form, so that he never agonized under the weight of costly choices.

As the ancient creeds have testified, Jesus was “true man” and “true God.” He was not the true God who dressed up like a man. His experiences of temptation were real. Paul wrote, For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted (Hebrews 2:18 ESV). For Paul an essential characteristic of the true Savior was the reality of his experiences, yet without sin.

How does this help us? Jesus shows us the value in bearing up under the burden of suffering that sometimes arises when we do the right thing in an evil world, but always arises when living our lives in God’s love towards others. Read 1 Corinthians chapter 13 and list the ways love suffers. A Christian bears up under the burden of suffering because he has faith in a better outcome beyond the suffering.

As Paul wrote later in Hebrews 12:1 and 2: Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God (Hebrews 12:1-2 ESV).

How can Jesus be “the founder and perfecter of our faith”? He is the founder because he, like any “founder,”  started the ball rolling. He lived a truly human existence by faith in God, sinlessly. Having lived his life perfectly (John 8:29), he perfected faith by accepting the death of the cross as the perfect will of the Father in heaven.

This is the key to the agony in the garden. If I may quote from my book The End of Death (Xulon Press, 2024), it will shed light on the cause of Jesus’s agony. 

Where there is a failure to understand that death is the result of sin, then the death of Jesus Christ will be misunderstood. The death of Jesus is viewed by most people as a normal death, when in fact it was the most unjust outcome in God’s creation for a man who lived a perfect life. It was utterly impossible in a just universe for God to let that happen. If He was so concerned with the punishment of sin that He gave the death sentence to Adam, then He must be equally zealous (in accord with his righteousness) to reward a perfect life. In truth the death of Jesus Christ was a sacrifice made possible only when Jesus willingly offered himself, and only when God his Father received it as a substitutionary offering for others in love.

The agony of Jesus arose from the conjunction of two great rivers of life. The first was his true human revulsion to his imminent mocking, physical pains, crucifixion, and death. The second was the spiritual incongruity that his sinless life should experience death at all.

How could God his Father ever allow this unjust atrocity? If the holiness of God would require the rocks to shout the praises of Jesus if the people did not, how much more would the nails have refused to pierce his hands, and the wood of the cross have turned to sawdust and refused to bear his weight?

The agony of Jesus in the garden was the submission of Jesus’s natural human will to his eternal mission to bear the experience of death on behalf of sinners. This came not by compulsion by a greater power, nor by the necessity of paying for his own sin, but by a gift of substitution, his death for ours, by his free choice.

The death of Jesus came not by compulsion but by compassion. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:6-8 ESV).

Jesus clearly explained his mission when he said, the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many (Matthew 20:28).

The value of the physical life of Jesus was that it purchased the forgiveness of all sin though our personal faith. We cannot boast of our faith, because Paul wrote that even that is through God's grace (Ephesians 2:8).

As Einstein reduced the complexity of the cosmos to E = M x C squared, Paul summarized the purchase of our eternal life with God to these simple words: For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3-4 ESV).

Amen and Amen.

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