God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21)
We are continuing to meditate on the cup that Jesus had to drink in the Garden of Gethsemane (See yesterday's thoughts below). The second thing symbolized as a cup that Christ had to drink was more than humiliation at the hands of evil men and more than being crucified, it was to put on and be fully clothed in our sin as God’s sacrificial lamb.
We struggle to be holy when our natural tendency, our default nature, is toward sin. It was entirely different, though, for our Lord Jesus. He had never known sin. He has always been Holy. He was born of a virgin and by the Holy Spirit. Christ was not conceived in the usual way, and, therefore, did not have a sinful flesh nature. He remained free from sin all His life so that he would die as an innocent Lamb for us and as us. The apostle Peter had been around Him for more than three years, yet he said about Christ: “He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth” (1 Peter 2:22). As a Holy being, Christ's struggle that day in the garden was to put on sin and be the living embodiment of sin. His striving was not against sin, but to be clothed in sin when every fiber of His Holy being cried out against sin. “Your eyes are too pure to approve evil, And You cannot look on wickedness with favor” (Habakkuk 1:13). His default nature, every impulse of His divine being, was to repulse sin, and yet He had to put on sin to make us holy. How wonderful is His love! “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The temptation He faced was to abandon His holiness and embrace sin, and not just sin, but all sin, of all time, and for the whole human race.
Perhaps one would say that Jesus wasn’t tempted for He was holy, but in fact, He was tempted much worse than us in order that He might be able to feel what we feel when we are tempted: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are--yet he did not sin” (Hebrews 4:15).
What was distinctly different was that Christ would be separated from His Father for a time. When Christ hung on the cross, the sins of the world were laid upon Him, and the Father, who cannot look upon sin, left Christ for a time. Sins of the blackest sort would stain the perfect character of Christ, every sin that you and I have ever committed were laid on Him. Not only sins committed in the present but also those of the past and future. That is why He cried out from the cross; “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). Those that believe that there are many ways to God do not have an answer as to why the Father refused to take any other option other than His Son must drink the dregs of the cup. There was no other way. If there had been another way, God would have taken it, rather than see His Son suffer for the sins of man.
There was a spiritual battle going on in the unseen realm against Jesus. If we could have seen into the spiritual realm in the Garden of Gethsemane, perhaps we would have seen the forces of evil; powerful evil demonic beings seeking to dissuade Christ from obedience to the Father's will. Jesus had a choice to make; would He lay down His own will so that the Father's will could be accomplished? The way of the cross invites all of us to lay down our will and relinquish it to God. Some say that Satan was trying to stop Christ going to the cross, while others say that the fight in the garden was to try to get Jesus to say no to the Father's will. Satan didn't understand, though, what would be accomplished by Christ being crucified; otherwise He would have stopped his minions from bringing it about. Paul, the apostle, wrote about this, saying, “None of the rulers of this age understood it. For if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8). Keith Thomas
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