Reflective Bible Study

Following the meal Jesus eats with His disciples, the eleven remaining disciples have a little bit of time alone with Jesus while Judas Iscariot is off getting the soldiers and mob to arrest Jesus. While John’s gospel describes in detail what Jesus shares with the disciples during their trip to the garden, the remaining gospels focus on what Jesus does after they have arrived at Gethsemane.

Let’s read our passage and discover what we can learn from what Luke tells us happened. Our passage is found in Luke’s gospel, chapter 22, and we will read from the Good News Translation. Starting in verse 39, Luke tells us that:

³⁹ Jesus left the city and went, as he usually did, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples went with him. ⁴⁰ When he arrived at the place, he said to them, “Pray that you will not fall into temptation.”

⁴¹ Then he went off from them about the distance of a stone’s throw and knelt down and prayed. ⁴² “Father,” he said, “if you will, take this cup of suffering away from me. Not my will, however, but your will be done.” ⁴³ An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. ⁴⁴ In great anguish he prayed even more fervently; his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.

⁴⁵ Rising from his prayer, he went back to the disciples and found them asleep, worn out by their grief. ⁴⁶ He said to them, “Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you will not fall into temptation.”

As we read this passage from Luke, several things jumped out at me. The first thing is how passionately and fervently Jesus prayed. Verse 44 describes Jesus’ sweat was “like drops of blood falling to the ground.” Some people point to this detail and say Jesus was literally sweating blood or that blood was mixing with His sweat. While this sounds crazy, this is actually something that is possible and has been documented on a number of occasions. I don’t remember what this is called, but if I did, I doubt I’d be able to pronounce the word correctly.

Another way I can understand this description of Jesus’ sweat that only Luke includes is that Jesus was sweating so profusely that it was dripping off Him like blood might drip out of a wound.

However, whichever way we want to view this small detail that sounds crazy, this detail isn’t very significant in the big picture of this passage.

Another big detail that I see in this passage reflects a big theme we looked at last week about persisting within God’s will. Looking closely at Jesus’ prayer reveals the powerful truth that Jesus was willing to follow God’s will even through what is likely the worst abuse and death imaginable. Jesus prayed in verse 42, “Father, if you will, take this cup of suffering away from me. Not my will, however, but your will be done.”

Jesus’ prayer to God reflects how we are challenged to pray. When we come before God in prayer, it is worthwhile to bring our requests to Him. However, we also are challenged to frame our requests as being less important or significant that His will. While we might try to push forward in our own strength what we believe to be God’s will, our timing and our perception doesn’t always mirror God’s.

Jesus prayed a prayer with a request for help, but He also prayed that He would remain firmly within God’s will for His life – even if that meant that He would face the cross the following day. Jesus’ prayer here in the garden is a powerful example for us when we decide to go before God in prayer. Jesus’ prayer teaches us how to bring our requests to God while also praying that we stay within God’s will for our own lives.

Speaking of prayer, this leads us to what might be the biggest truth and challenge I see tucked within this event. In verse 40, prior to Jesus walking away from the group to be alone to pray, He tells the group of disciples to “Pray that you will not fall into temptation.”

This is powerful when we look closely at it. Of all the nights these disciples would face, and of all the nights in the history of the world, this night was likely one of the darkest. While the following night would appear to be a victory for Satan with Jesus in the tomb, the night before the cross was filled with more temptation directed towards Jesus and all those closest to Him than we likely could imagine.

Leading into this night filled with temptation, Jesus challenges His closest disciples to pray for strength to avoid temptation. While it is difficult to know whether all His followers heeded His words or not, we do know that the two big predictions Jesus made about that night came true. Peter ultimately denied Jesus even though he strongly denied Jesus’ suggestion about what would happen. Also, all the disciples scatter and leave Jesus to be arrested as the scripture predicted would happen.

Aside from these two fulfilled predictions, I suspect that these disciples did ultimately pray for strength to avoid temptation and they received help as an answer to their prayers. None of the disciples aside from Judas Iscariot the betrayer was ultimately lost from this group, and Judas Iscariot was only truly lost because he took his own life. I suspect that Judas Iscariot could have been forgiven if he had first forgiven himself, humbly repented before God in prayer, and not taken such drastic measures as he did. Suicide is sometimes referred to as the permanent solution to a temporary problem, and if given enough time, the problem faced is always less than the solution suicide provides.

In this event, we discover that at the darkest points in history, our prayers should be for help to avoid temptation. At the darkest parts of our lives, we are the most prone to falling into temptation and we should focus more intently on prayer for God’s help and guidance. I believe that when we come before God asking for help to stay away from sin and for help withstanding temptation, He is more than happy to double, triple, or in some other way multiply our own power to resist temptation.

I doubt God puts forth much effort to help us resist sin if we are only half-hearted in our request. However, if we are sincerely committed to resisting sin, I believe God is more than happy to step in and help when we ask Him for help and to fill in any gaps in our strength that might exist. With God’s help, we can have a willpower that is stronger than we might expect or realize!

When our lives are hard and when times are dark, lean into God and ask Him for help resisting temptation! I know that when we claim this prayer, God is more than happy to step in and walk with us along the path He has called us to walk!

As we come to the end of another podcast episode, here are the challenges I will leave you with:

As I always challenge you to do, continue to seek God first in your heart, in your mind, and in your life. When things get tough and times are challenging, lean into God asking for strength to keep moving forward with Him!

Also, continue praying and studying the Bible for yourself to grow a strong personal foundation. While praying and studying with others is beneficial, don’t neglect your personal prayer and study life. Through personal prayer and study, discover God’s truth for your life and open your heart to Him!

And as I end every set of challenges by saying in one way or another, never stop short of, back away from, chicken out of, or deviate away from where God wants to lead you to in your life with Him!

Near the end of our last podcast episode, we briefly looked at the last two verses in Mark’s longer conclusion, and saw tucked within it, a reference to where Jesus would go in Heaven after His ascension. However, since the conclusion of Mark’s gospel has some controversy surrounding it, I thought it would make sense to focus one episode on the specific idea of Jesus being seated at God’s right hand, since this idea has both a connection point in the Old Testament, and it is referenced numerous times in the New Testament.

To remind us of the passage we concluded our last episode with, instead of starting with the Old Testament passage like we have typically done so far this year, let’s instead start briefly in Jesus’ ministry before looking back on the passage that serves as the foundation for this idea.

In our last episode, the last passage we looked at was in Mark, chapter 16, and we read it from the New American Standard Bible translation. Starting in verse 19, the author of this conclusion wrote:

¹⁹ So then, when the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, He was received up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. ²⁰ And they went out and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them, and confirmed the word by the signs that followed.

In this conclusion, when Jesus is received into heaven, He takes the favored position of being at God’s right hand. While some people might understand why this would be, other people, including many religious leaders living in the first century, could not comprehend this thought.

However, we are in luck because during Jesus’ ministry, He has an opportunity to draw this topic into the open, and He does so in a way that silences the religious leaders’ vocal opposition.

Part way through the week leading up to the cross, several groups of religious leaders approach Jesus with challenges for Him to solve. The first group to bring a challenge to Jesus were some Pharisees who had temporarily allied with a group known as the Herodians and they came to Jesus with a seemingly unsolvable dilemma related to paying taxes.

Next, a group of Sadducees came to Jesus with a logical and very difficult challenge focused on the validity of the resurrection framed within a dilemma focused on marriage and remarriage.

After Jesus had answered the Sadducees, a religious expert appears to throw Jesus an easy question about what the greatest commandment was, but before this full challenge had finished, it appeared as though Jesus derailed His challengers with a question of His own.

In Jesus’ question to all the religious leaders present, He quotes from the following psalm. Reading from Psalm, number 110, starting in verse 1, we discover that:

¹ The Lord says to my Lord:
“Sit at My right hand
Until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet.”
² The Lord will stretch forth Your strong scepter from Zion, saying,
“Rule in the midst of Your enemies.”
³ Your people will volunteer freely in the day of Your power;
In holy array, from the womb of the dawn,
Your youth are to You as the dew.

⁴ The Lord has sworn and will not change His mind,
“You are a priest forever
According to the order of Melchizedek.”
⁵ The Lord is at Your right hand;
He will shatter kings in the day of His wrath.
⁶ He will judge among the nations,
He will fill them with corpses,
He will shatter the chief men over a broad country.
⁷ He will drink from the brook by the wayside;
Therefore He will lift up His head.

Here at the beginning of this psalm, David writes about the Messiah being seated at the right hand of God. Three of the four gospels include Jesus’ challenge to the religious leaders and the quotation He uses to stump them. Let’s read Matthew’s version of this event.

In Matthew, chapter 22, starting in verse 41, we read:

⁴¹ Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question: ⁴² “What do you think about the Christ, whose son is He?” They said to Him, “The son of David.” ⁴³ He said to them, “Then how does David in the Spirit call Him ‘Lord,’ saying,

⁴⁴ ‘The Lord said to my Lord,
“Sit at My right hand,
Until I put Your enemies beneath Your feet”’?

⁴⁵ If David then calls Him ‘Lord,’ how is He his son?” ⁴⁶ No one was able to answer Him a word, nor did anyone dare from that day on to ask Him another question.

In this event, Jesus sets up a seemingly impossible-to-reconcile situation where David is shown that one of his descendants had existed before Him. While someone who believes in reincarnation would not see this idea as being strange in any way, nothing in the gospels, or even in the Bible, points to this as a logical probability. While some verses have been pulled out of context to make the Bible appear to support this idea, as well as a lot of other fringe ideas, the fact that these religious leaders are stumped by this dilemma is evidence that reincarnation was not something they gave any weight to.

However, in a strange twist, the idea of Jesus being seated at God’s right hand, as this quotation from the Old Testament suggests, ends up being used as one major foundation for condemning Jesus, after Jesus has been betrayed, arrested, and condemned by the religious leaders. In a fascinating way, Jesus’ impossible to reconcile framing of this psalm with the other prophecies about Jesus being David’s descendant becomes the foundation for putting Jesus to death. While the religious leaders could not do anything publicly to answer Jesus’ challenge, they saved their hostility towards this challenge and frame until they clearly had the upper hand.

But these religious leaders could only reject this Old Testament psalm, and by rejecting Jesus, they not only discount David’s prophetic insight into the Godhead, they also subtly reject the other big prophetic idea present in this psalm, specifically that the Messiah would be a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek. While there are no shortage of ideas for what this means, I suspect that David wants to draw attention to God having priests and people worshiping Him in a world prior to the Jews being freed from Egypt, and that being a priest of God is something that is not necessarily part of one’s genealogy.

If we stop to think about this idea for a moment, we will realize that this is a great thing. God is more than able and willing to welcome people into His family who might not have any shared genetic or ancestral connection to God’s chosen people. Jesus being a priest in the order of Melchizedek, who lived hundreds of years before Moses and Aaron, and who was someone who had no recorded beginning or end draws our attention to Jesus being someone who can bring us into a future that may have a beginning, but one that clearly has no end. Jesus, our Priest, has done everything for us to prepare the way for our salvation, and His sacrifice on our behalf opens the way for God to forgive our sins while remaining just.

God promised to elevate the Messiah’s role to be at His right hand, and the Messiah, Jesus, the Son of God, was granted this status when He ascended to Heaven. While there is plenty to debate about in Mark’s conclusion that we don’t have time to cover, don’t for a moment question where Jesus ended up when He entered heaven, because that truth is amazingly clear.

However, following Jesus’ return to Heaven and Him being seated at God’s right hand, Jesus had promised the disciples He would do something for them, and this promise will be our focus for our next episode.

As we come to the end of another podcast episode, here are the challenges I will leave you with:

As I always open by challenging you in one way or another, intentionally seek God first in your life. Choose to accept Jesus as your High Priest and as your Redeemer, and let His sacrifice for you be everything you need to be saved for eternity.

Also, continue to pray and study the Bible for yourself to grow personally closer to Jesus each and every day. Choose to let Jesus lead and guide your life, mind, and heart, and intentionally step forward each and every day with Jesus as you move together towards eternity.

And as I end every set of challenges by saying in one way or another, never stop short of, back away from, chicken out of, or give up on where God wants to lead you to in your life with Him!