Glorification

By Nathaniel Dandridge Pendleton
1941

Part V
THE LAST STATES

V. GETHSEMANE

"And He took with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful and very heavy.  Then saith He unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me.  And He went a little farther, and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou." (Matthew 26: 37 - 39)

Jesus said to the sons of Zebedee, "Ye know not what ye ask.  Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of?" (Matt. 20: 22; Mark 10: 38)  Also He said to Peter, "The cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?" (John 18: 11)

A cup, for its meaning, depends upon its content. This may be living water, or a death draught; the wine of a marriage feast, or a mockery.  In the text, it signifies a state of temptation - the Lord's temptation at Gethsemane, which, according to the Writings, was "from inmosts."  More could hardly be said to indicate its vital character.  It was an issue with death.  According to the text, He was "sorrowful and very heavy."  His soul was "sorrowful, even unto death."  Every temptation is a death temptation; but that at Gethsemane was far advanced.  It involved all that had gone before.  It was the summation of His every past suffering, and more than this, in that it pointed to the end as immediate.  In its process, it was from inmosts to ultimates.  His body became "very heavy," in sign of an unequal contest between life and death.  As life lessens its hold, the weight of the body increases, and it leans to its fall.  Death was near, and He prayed that the temptation might pass from Him.

Many have pondered the meaning of the temptation at Gethsemane.  All know that it looked to the cross; that it foreshadowed His death, as imminent.  But why should He pray for its removal?  His fear and His dread must have been more than the ordinary human fear of death. This fear is peculiar to man -  to all men; yet this will hardly account for His state.  Many of His followers, in after days, and in His name, advanced joyfully to meet their death, so great was their confidence, and their desire for a martyr's crown.  Their state was beyond normal.  The fear of death is implanted in life.  It cannot be otherwise.  The higher the life, the more sensitive is its fear, since death is an extinction of life - of life as it was circumstanced before death overtook it.

The Lord, as a man, was susceptible to this more than any other.  The extremity of His temptation at Gethsemane is known from the fact that it was premonitory.  Its inner quality may be divined from the Lord's last words on the cross, when He said, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?"  This is the point - He was forsaken of God, and this in the extreme, at the last moment of His life as a man in the world.  No Christian questions this; but an understanding of it depends upon the underlying doctrine, in the light of which the words are understood, namely, the doctrine as to what was accomplished by His death.  If His death was a sacrifice to the vindictive justice of God, then, in His suffering on the cross, He indeed drank of the wrath of Mighty God; then also, at Gethsemane He encountered the "frown of God;" and if so, then may He well have prayed that the cup might pass from Him, for the "frown of God" could only foretell His abandonment to the curse that rested upon all men for their disobedience.

All temptations, in general, are alike.  There is death in them all.  His temptations, from the first, carried the sign of the cross.  While they exceeded our measure, yet we have the likeness of His suffering in our human experiences; and from these we may gain a comparative idea, sufficient for our understanding and our faith.  We may understand and have faith in that which was accomplished in Him.

The old Christian doctrine tells of His vicarious suffering - His suffering the wrath of God.  The new doctrine reveals the ordeal of His death as brought on by a unified assault of evil, seeking supremacy in His death.  Both doctrines agree that in the final crisis He seemed to Himself to be forsaken of God the Father; but they do not agree as to the cause of this.  The older doctrine teaches that by His sacrifice the wrath of God was diverted from men and centered upon Himself; a wrath which could find no appeasement until its indignation discovered a victim in the Only-begotten Son; a willing victim, offered by mutual Divine consent, to the end that men might be forgiven.  The new doctrine shows His death -  temptation as a conclusive victory over evil whereby man was liberated from a self-imposed evil bondage.  The new doctrine shows the result of His final temptation as the completion of the Lord's glorification for the sake of man's liberation.  The new doctrine sees His glorification as progressive, and, in this, not unlike man's regeneration.  It could not be otherwise, for He was born a man, and the subject of human frailties, the afflictions of the flesh, and every evil temptation.  Unless He had been reborn into God, He could not, in the end, have presented Himself as the glorified Man-God, the Savior of the race.  To this end, and in this sense, He bore our iniquities.

But why was it that, at the point of His final victory over evil, He should be, or appear to be, forsaken of God?  The answer is, that in some degree this is the illusion of every temptation.  But this illusion was most profound in the last, the final, crisis.  In every temptation man seems to himself to be forsaken, and this for a most weighty purpose.  The vital need is that man should resist as of himself, as if there was no aid save in himself.  This is vital to man, for in it lies his freedom - his freedom of action, and his freedom of life.  Only so can spiritual freedom be appropriated by man.  It is in action, as of self, that man draws down and appropriates that high freedom which is the inner gift of God.  This is why man is said to be in greater freedom in temptations than at other times.  Then is his great opportunity.  He seems to himself to have little or no freedom when he is beset by evils, but if he will only resist, as of himself, then true freedom is born in his natural And there confirmed.

The teaching is that in temptations man's freedom is more interior.  It is there held in reserve and increased, pending its descent, in case the man resists as of himself.  Man resists as of self when he acknowledges that the power of his resistance is God-given.  Then he exercises the God-given power as his own.  He acknowledges that his resistance does not, in truth, arise from his proprial life, although it so appears.  The phrase, "as of self," is a clear definition.  While pointing to the true origin of power, yet it implies the confession that man must not await a miraculous strength apart from any effort of his own.

The Lord's temptations were in kind, in aspect, not unlike those of every regenerating man.  But they differed in two ways.  In their severity, His temptations were incomparably more intense.  This was so because of the need that He should eradicate all inherited evil from His maternal human.  No man is capable of this; even with the help of the Lord.  The other difference lies in the fact that the Lord never resisted any evil as of Himself.  Such resistance would neither have eradicated evil nor glorified His Human.

He alone, of all men, resisted evil of and from Himself, that is, from the Divine in Himself; and moreover, not directly from His Divine Soul, in its high and separate degree, but from this Divine in its derivations.  His resistance to, and eradication of, evil was therefore not by an immediate action of His Soul, which, from the beginning, was one with the Father, but it was from the Truth Divine inbound in His Human Manhood.  He resisted and overcame evil from the Divine made His Own, as a man in the world, and through successive temptation combats which resulted in His glorification.  This being so, what may be said of His suffering at Gethsemane and of His final words on the cross: "Why hast Thou forsaken me?"

With every man, the Divine appears to be removed in states of temptation, and this, as we have seen, in order that the man may be induced to resist, as of himself.  Of the Lord it may be said that, in His last temptation, He was forsaken of the Father, in order that His resistance to the final assault of evil might be from Himself in His Human, but also that it might be there in its Divine totality, to the end that there might no longer be the appearance as of a God above Him, as apart from Him, but Himself as one Sole and Supreme God.  To say, therefore, that the Father forsook Him, is to say that the Father entered into union with Him in all its fullness.  It is only by an apparent contradiction of terms that the truth here involved may be expressed.  In other words, by His death, which was impending at Gethsemane and which was accomplished on the cross, He must needs, on the occasion, exercise all power in and from Himself; and this He did, as if in response to the abandonment of Him by His Father above.

By this exercise of Divine power, the Mary human forever passed away, and as a result of this deepest and most inclusive of all temptations.  That which passed away was never to be resumed, never restored.  The state in question was granted no resurrection, namely, the apparent state of separation between the Father and the Son.  This was, indeed, forsaken, but not without a temptation so grave that the Lord, as yet in some part born of Mary, and because of the deep illusion pertaining to that state, prayed that the temptation might pass from Him.  That temptation was, indeed, fundamentally grounded in the fear of death, in the and forever, of His life as a man born of woman.  His words gave voice to the last cry of the Mary human.  Therefore also He said, "It is finished."