“Shall I Not Drink the Cup?”: God’s Wrath and His Will

What was Jesus referring to when He asked Peter in the garden of Gethsemane, “Shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given me?” We might be prone to think that the “cup” He mentioned symbolized the physical suffering Christ would meet on the cross—but, as Alistair Begg points out in his sermon “Shall I Not Drink the Cup?,” He probably had something even more momentous in mind:

In the agony of the garden, you remember, Jesus says, “Father, if you are willing, let this cup pass from me.” Now, the cup to which he refers is a symbol of God’s judgment. It is the cup of his wrath. You would need to just take your concordance and work on this on your own to build up a picture of this from the Old Testament. Let me cross-reference just two places—one, straightforwardly, in Psalm 75. And in the midst of that psalm, in verse 8, the psalmist says,

For in the hand of the Lord there is a cup

 with foaming wine, well mixed

and he pours out from it,

 and all the wicked of the earth

 shall drain it down to [its] dregs

—that God, in exercising his judgment on wickedness, will pour out the cup of his wrath.

You have it elsewhere, but let me just give one other, and that would be in Isaiah and in chapter 51. And the prophet says,

Wake yourself, wake yourself,

 stand up, O Jerusalem,

you who have drunk from the hand of the Lord

 the cup of his wrath,

who have drunk to the dregs

 the bowl, the cup of staggering.

There is none to guide her

 among all the sons she has borne;

there is none to take her by the hand

 among all the sons she has brought up.

These two things have happened to you—

 who will console you?—

devastation and destruction, famine and sword;

 who will comfort you?

Your sons have fainted;

 they lie at the head of every street

 like an antelope in a net;

they are full of the wrath of the Lord,

 the rebuke of your God.¹

So the cup that is being referenced here by Jesus is that cup. It is the cup of God’s wrath. So when we think about Jesus in the garden saying, “Father, if it is possible for this cup to pass from me,” we’ve immediately gone wrong if we think what he is saying is simply “I don’t want to have to face the ignominy of this” or “I don’t like the idea of my friends and myself being separated from me” and so on—“I am afraid of the physicality of it,” if you like. All of that may be true, but that is not the issue. Because the cup that he doesn’t want to drink is the cup poured out by the Father on all the wickedness and ungodliness of humanity. Jesus didn’t want to drink that cup. If you said, “What is Jesus’ will?” Jesus’ will was “I don’t want to drink that cup.” How do we know that? Because he said it. He said it.

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