Saturday, September 17, 2016

Stephen King and Walt Disney; Gethsemane and Eden

Some notes from my study of Hebrews 5:1-10 So here we are after a discussion of what it means for Jesus to have fulfilled His obedience to the Father. He obviously had some decisions to make in the Garden of Gethsemane. He prayed for the Lord to allow the cup of suffering to pass from Him, yet he followed through with His mission on the cross. At some point, Jesus really didn’t want the cross. He didn’t WANT to feel the agony that he KNEW was coming. He didn’t want to feel the exhaustion. He didn’t want to pass out who knows how many times in the course of the day on which He took His beating. He didn’t want to feel the nausea and dry heaving the probably came from dehydration. He didn’t WANT the sting of blood and sweat in His eyes, which were probably nearly swollen shut, all day long. He didn’t want the stabbing pain of a hundred thorns pressing into His scalp that probably turned into a pounding headache, magnified by the dehydration He was already experiencing. He didn’t want to have to walk on feet that were bare and blistered carrying a hundred and fifty pounds on His already flayed back. He didn’t want to walk through a crowd of people spitting on His wide-open and flowing wounds. He didn’t want to be paraded through town, a disheveled mass of quivering flesh. In the hours before His death, how many times did He silently pray for death to come early? “Just end it NOW, Father! Why not NOW? Let Me die NOW! My friends are gone…I can’t walk…I can barely stand…I’m so thirsty, Lord…I’m so tired…my entire body aches…this hurts SO much…PLEASE bring me home…” BUT… He did it anyway. Jesus made a decision. He decided to submit. He decided to relinquish His will to that of the Father. He moved beyond the limitation of human emotion and desire. He said “yes” to the Lord and “no” to his own wants and needs. That night in the Garden of Gethsemane, He knew what was coming. He just didn’t care enough about the agony and humiliation to leave humanity hanging over an endlessly deep and dark precipice with no hope of salvation. He knew that WE needed Him…so He decided…in one moment He decided that God’s will was right. He decided that God would see Him through it all and that the Christ would be just that. He would become the slain Lamb who makes all things new. Jesus willed to go to a horrible end for us. The question I have is “To what length would I go for Him?” How far would I go to display the type of obedience, the iron will, that Jesus displayed in Gethsemane when He decided that He would do all of that for me? I want to say that I would do anything for Him. I really think I would, too! I just want to be the type of man who, when Jesus calls and says He needs me to go somewhere, just says “yes” to His will. I want to be the kind of man who lets go of my emotions and just wills myself to obey the Christ. The problem I have is that I don’t want the Garden of Gethsemane as much as I want the Garden of Eden. If I’m being honest, what I really want is just to walk through some sort of Walt Disney fantasy land where cute little birds light on my shoulder and a variety of smiling, happy rodents run at my feet as I stroll carelessly along, singing about what a beautiful day it is all while on my way to sit at the center of the garden and wait on God to come to me to have a cozy picnic all so that HE can enjoy MY presence! I want the ease of Eden and not the decision of Gethsemane. Gethsemane comes with an infinite number of crossroads. Gethsemane represents the choices I have to make. Eden is just the presence of God. There aren’t any decisions to make in Eden except for which tree I want to eat from. There isn’t any real will to be exercised in Eden. In Gethsemane, real life crashes in on us. My Gethsemane is more like a Stephen King novel than a Disney movie. It’s dark there. It’s twisted there. It’s foggy and confusing. People are dying, children get sick, jobs get lost. Betrayal, murder, and lies happen in Gethsemane and I have to decide in my own personal Gethsemane how I will react to the Lord. Will I bend to His will or will I cut and run? Will I decide that it’s all worth it in the end if I just say “yes” to the Father? Will I let go of emotions and even logic and decide that His will and His way are worth my allegiance? H. A. Hodges writes, “By our steady adherence to God when the affections [i.e., emotions] are dried up, and nothing is left but the naked will clinging blindly to him, the soul is purged of self-regard and trained in pure love.” May I be trained in this way.

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