A Man of Sorrows

Today’s Devotion is an Excerpt From Jesus, Day by Day

Today’s Through the Bible Reading: Mark 14:32-52; Matthew 26:36-56; Luke 22:39-65; John 18:1-12

My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death. Mark 14:34

Isaiah prophesied that the redeemer would be “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53:3). We read of many sorrowful moments in Jesus’s life: the death of His friend Lazarus (John 11), the sorrow He felt as the rich young ruler walked away (Mark 10:21–23), and the grief He showed as He wept over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41). But none of these compare to the grief He experienced as He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane.

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)

Jesus’s grief so encompassed Him that “it threatened His very life” (Mark 14:34). Yet this suffering was not a waste or an unnecessary trial. It was all part of God’s gracious redemptive plan.

In Jesus’s prayer it was “the cup” that He so agonized over and petitioned to have removed. I haven’t found a better explanation of this cup than that given by Dr. Harold Willmington:

The Scriptures plainly inform us that the Gethsemane cup was filled with the sins of all humanity! Our Lord looked deeply into the cesspool of human sin that dark night and groaned as he smelled its foul odor and viewed the rising poisonous fumes.

Indeed, Jesus knew sorrow and grief well, but it was on account of our actions. He willingly drank the cup of our sin and offered us the cup of His blood, which atoned, covered, and paid the price. Oh, the grace of Jesus!