Oh, sorrow might well break His heart; and I do not wonder that He says, as He goes away yonder to pray, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death” (Mt. 26:38). Think of that. Or, again, “Reproach has broken My heart, and I am full of heaviness” (Ps. 69:20).

But someone may inquire, “Was propitiation effected by all this?” No, propitiation, the meeting of the righteous claims of God, the glorifying Him about sin, the making of atonement in respect thereof, was not effected by the living agonies of Jesus, neither by the sorrows He tasted, nor by the tears He shed. In the garden you have our Lord calmly, quietly pondering everything, facing everything, looking at everything, weighing everything, and that is what produced this deep sorrow in His blessed soul; but Gethsemane was not Golgotha.

In Gethsemane, He looked at and measured everything. In the garden, He took the cup, if I might so say, and looked at its ingredients; on the cross, He drank its contents. He bowed before His Father’s will as He says, “not as I will, but as You will.” You have the perfection of Christ there, the absolute perfection of His soul as He shrinks from the cup, for having to do with sin was in it. He bows before God’s will, prepared to drink it.

Precious Savior! He sees what is coming, and since it is for God’s glory, He accepts it without a murmur. In that cup of which the Lord speaks, there was not lacking one single element of sorrow that either the hand of man or the hand of God could furnish. I do not doubt that Satan too, at that moment, drew near to the Lord, and put before Him what must be the consequence if He was determined to drink that cup.