Why did Jesus say, "Not my will, but yours be done" (Luke 22:42)?

Now their hour was come, and the power of darkness. Before this they could not lay hands upon Him; but now, the active work done, and Himself definitively refused, Jesus accepts all humiliation, shame, and suffering. But He does not see man merely. He does not look at the devil, or Jews, or Gentiles. He feels all man did and said, and owns His Father. He knew full well that His Father could have hindered every pang had He been so pleased — could have turned Israel's heart — could have broken the nations. But now the Jew is left to abhor Him, the Gentile to despise and crucify Him. Against the holy servant Jesus whom God had anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, were gathering together; but was it not to do whatsoever God's hand and God's counsel determined before to be done? He saw God His Father above and behind all the secondary instruments, and bowed and blessed, even while He prayed with blood-sweat. He would erect no barricade of miracles to shelter Himself. To weigh before God such circumstances as then surrounded Jesus, to anticipate in His presence what was coming, did not lessen, but rather increased the depth of all; and so we find Him praying earnestly to His Father that, if it were possible, the cup should pass away from Him. But it was not possible; and so He adds, "Nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done." Both were perfect. It would have been hardness, not love, had the cup been treated as a light thing: but this could never be with Jesus. It was part of the very perfection of Jesus that he felt and deprecated the awful cup. For what was in that cup? The wrath of God. How could He wish for the wrath of God? It was right to deprecate it: it was like Jesus, notwithstanding, to say, "Thy will be done." Both the deprecation and the acceptance were thoroughly perfect — both equally in their due place and season. Who fails to see it, or would harbour a doubt, that knows who Jesus was, and what the glory of His person? It is not a question, however, of His merely being God; and you destroy the value of the suffering if you do not give full place to His humanity. Not that His Godhead ever made His suffering less; else the result would have been some nondescript estate which was neither Godhead nor manhood, but somewhat made up of both. It was an early error to suppose an impassible Christ. There is no worse invention against the truth, unless it be the lie which denies Him to be God the Son. An unsuffering impassible Christ is of Satan, not the true God and eternal life. It is a false chimera of the enemy. Be assured, that if the suffering be so real and precious to God, it is a dangerous thing to pare down, fritter away, or deny any part of it. For us it is the question of what God tells us in His word of the sufferings of Christ — not whether we understand all He says about them. Be assured that we know but in part, and have much to learn, especially of that which does not touch our own immediate necessities; but there is one thing we are always responsible for and that is, to submit to God, to believe Him, even though we enter very little into the depths of all that He has written for us of Jesus.

He went on to be alone there with His Father about that which He could only enter into with Him, and which must be altogether with Him. He was perfect in referring it to His Father, and referring it to Him alone. There the solemn question must have its solution. There alone it could, and there alone His perfectness could bring it. He fell on His face and prayed, saying, "O my Father," in supplicating earnestness, "if it be possible, let this cup pass from me." He should feel it fully, and He did; submission would not have been perfect else, but then His obedience and submission were perfect - "Nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt." In the perfect sense of the cup to be drunk, and the holy desire to avoid it, the piety of soul which desired it (for it was all the repulsion of sin from God, and what our wretched souls had fallen into - what man was as departed from God, which He must take upon His soul if indeed He had to drink it, if He undertook our cause, and it was a holy desire to shrink from such a judgment and being made sin, even as bearing it before God), yet with perfect submission and obedience to His Father, whatever His will was; and to His Father He brings it there where it ought to be brought, alike perfect in desiring not to drink it and in obediently submitting to drink it, if it was His Father's will; and this was His second utterance, "If this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, Thy will be done." The no reply to His demand leaves His soul in the unclouded perfectness of the second and third, for He was with His Father in the full and solemn sense of what it was, but with Him - He is occupied with it. How could it be otherwise? It ought to have been so. The disciples sleep, leaving Him alone with God. Where else could He have been with such a work, such a cup, before Him?

Withdrawing a distance from them, He prayed alone. With what holy, reverent awe and adoration we should view that sight. Even this sorrow of His in Gethsemane we cannot rightly enter into; and far less that of the cross.

While the Lord Jesus prayed for the removal of the cup of the anguish of being made a curse by God (and it was perfectly right that He should have a will desirous of avoiding this), yet He added, "not my will, but Yours, be done." Here is precious, perfect manhood, having and expressing His own Human will, yet fully submitting Himself rather to the will of the Father.

Only Luke mentions an angel from heaven strengthening Him. The intensity of His distress had a weakening physical effect, and this specially is noted in the Gospel that deals with His true manhood. The angel ministered physical strength, not spiritual. Even in His saints it is the Spirit of God Himself who ministers spiritual strength (Eph.3:16). But as His deep agony increased the earnestness of His prayer, He was bodily afflicted with His sweat becoming like great drops of blood falling down to the ground. How truly and fully He is Man, with all the limitations of dependent weakness that this implies, but totally apart from sin and always doing the Father's will.

In contrast to His anguish, His disciples, unaware of the imminent accomplishment of the most dreadful yet wonderful event of all history, were asleep. The Lord had told them what lay before, but the sorrow of it was only sufficient to make them heavy with sleep, rather than earnestly concerned (v.45). They had slept in the presence of His glory (Lk.9:32), and now also in the presence of His agony. How sadly we resemble them! We too might take to heart His serious admonition to rise and pray lest we enter into temptation rather than resisting it.

Doubtless Satan then suggested to Him to pause and not drink that cup, for it would cost Him His life, and the forsaking of God. He looked into the cup and measured its contents. It was all God's judgment against sin. If He drank it He must be forsaken of God, and be cast off, upon the cross. Not merely was it the physical suffering and sorrow that man could give Him, as they nailed Him to the tree, but the inevitable sense that God and He must part company. Hence as He looked at that cup, He said, "Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done." He knew that if He did not drink that cup of judgment upon the cross, you and I would have to drink it in eternity. If He did not drink the cup in our room and stead, there was no deliverance, no salvation, no pardon, no cleansing, possible for you and me. As He looked at that cup He shrank from it in all the perfect holiness of His being, and deprecated it with the utmost intensity. Then He took it, and drank it to the very dregs in the perfection of His love. Blessed Saviour! Well may each redeemed one cry, Hallelujah, I am saved; I am saved by His death. We are saved because He drank God's cup of wrath, to the very dregs, so that He, in tender love and divine righteousness, might put the cup of God's salvation into our hands, and press it to our lips. May we not joyfully say, "What has God wrought?"

But deeper depths lay before Him. That presence must be withdrawn from Him, when He who knew no sin had to be made sin for us. All other character of sorrow was distanced now. He was to be alone, as He never was before. This is what filled that dreadful cup, the last crucial test, that if it showed out on the one hand what man was in sin, on the other, brought out the absolute perfection of man in obedience and devotedness. He who only knew divine love as infinitely the object of it, was now to know the forsaking of God. In His very perfection He shrank from it, "Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me." In presenting the sorrow before the Father in communion, it only made more intolerable the thought of passing out of that communion into the experience of being abandoned of God. Yet He gives Himself to the full accomplishment of the divine will — "not my will, but thine be done."

Let us turn reverently to another scene in which we find Him whose name is "Wonderful" — to the awful scene of Gethsemane. Here the "cup" which He took upon the cross is causing Him agony in the anticipation of it. Three times He prays that, if it were possible, it might pass from Him; and to this He adds the words so familiar to us, "not My will, but Thine be done."

The cup could not pass. He needs must drink it. But when we realize it as that which, expressed outwardly by the three hours of darkness, has its inner meaning in the agonizing cry, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" we can understand that it was the very necessity of His holy nature that He shrank from it and could not take it as of His own will, but only as the divine will for Him. Here, surely, we have a perfect and therefore a real, human will. He is as true man as any man can be; and personally man, as such a will must prove Him. We are again beyond the limit of comprehension here, if we say, as we must say, "Yes, but He is none the less divine;" but we are not beyond the limit of enjoyment or of faith.

Subjection to God also marked the Son in His life of dependence. As a divine person He had ever commanded, the hosts of heaven obeying His word; but in Manhood He learned obedience by the things which He suffered (Heb. 5:8). Suffering was a new experience for a divine person, but was a necessary condition of the true Manhood the Son had taken. He was the only Man who had a right to His own will, yet the only man who never exercised His own will. For every other man the expression of his own will is sin, but Jesus said, ‘Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done’ (Luke 22:42). Nor was it irksome for the Son to be subject and obedient for He found pleasure in carrying out the will of His God and Father.

The Lord's dependence as man is then displayed in the most striking manner. The whole scene of Gethsemane and the cross, in Luke, is the perfect dependent man. He prays: He submits to His Father's will. An angel strengthens Him: this was their service to the Son of man. Afterwards, in deep conflict, He prays more earnestly: dependent man, He is perfect in His dependence. The deepness of the conflict deepens His intercourse with His Father. The disciples were overwhelmed by the shadow only of that which caused Jesus to pray. They take refuge in the forgetfulness of sleep. The Lord, with the patience of grace, repeats His warning, and the multitude arrive. Peter, confident when warned, sleeping at the approach of temptation when the Lord was praying, strikes when Jesus allows Himself to be led as a sheep to the slaughter, and then alas! denies when Jesus confesses the truth. But, submissive as the Lord was to His Father's will, He plainly shows that His power had not departed from Him. He heals the wound that Peter inflicted on the high priest's servant, and then permits Himself to be led away, with the remark that it was their hour and the power of darkness. Sad and terrible association!

What was the state of the disciples? They slept (v. 37). They had not enough affection for Him to watch one hour. Peter, who was willing to face prison or death, could not watch one hour. He had slept on the mountain during the transfiguration (Luke 9:23), and he sleeps in Gethsemane. This discloses, at the bottom of our hearts, the selfishness which is a stranger to the affections which make our hearts enter into the glory, as well as into the sufferings, of Jesus.

Verses 40-43. Was the love of Jesus disheartened or fatigued by all that? No; He must, He would, glorify His Father, and save His own, and He is not arrested by any difficulty. Impossible that we should be saved if He drink not the cup, and He takes it. His love is mightier than death. He presents all to God. And from the moment He found it impossible for this cup to pass without His drinking it, calm again possesses His soul, and He takes it.

There was an hour, the drinking of a cup, from which the blessed Lord sought if possible to be free, to be saved, the thought of which He went through in the deepest agony because it was sin-bearing, being made sin. Did this apply to His whole life? There He came in the divine freeness of His love. "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God." But divine willingness, and human agony, are not the same thing. Did He pray if possible to be spared being a man? He did that which He suffered at the cross. It is false in every aspect and feature of it.