In the year 2001 I was a freshman in college. That was the year that I discovered I was really good at first person shooter video games. At least compared to my college buddies.
These were the early days of network multiplayer, and we had discovered that you could plug your Xbox into the school’s ethernet and play with anyone else on campus. Needless to say, gaming got its hooks in me pretty deep.
It started with just a few unwise choices. I’d be sitting down to start working on a paper, when my room phone would ring. “Halo?” “Oh yeah. I can work on that paper tomorrow.”
Before long I’d find myself staying up till 1 or 2 am playing with the guys, which of course made me exhausted and bleary-eyed for class the next day, which caused my grades to suffer further.
To give you just a sense of how bad it got, in high school I was first chair French horn in our symphonic wind ensemble. I sang in show choir. I was in musicals and I was a straight A student. Freshmen year of college, however, I got a D+ in Intro to Music.
I was stuck an all-consuming addiction to video games. Combined with the other stuff I was going through - deep cynicism, faith deconstruction, anger at the world - I was a shadow of my former self.
You would not recognize the Barry of my college years. Neither did my parents. They watched helplessly and grieved as their son spiraled into self-destruction. There was nothing they could do as I made choice after choice to destroy my life.
Now, obviously I made it out of that dark time. I’ll tell you the story of how another time. But I bring up my Freshmen year because what happened to me happens to all of us in one way or another. Our selfish, sinful choices inevitably spiral out of our control.
Maybe it’s a few little white lies which turn into a lifestyle of deception. More and more falsehoods until now lying is as easy as breathing.
Perhaps it’s greed, which started out as ambition and drive, but turned into an all consuming obsession with wealth. You always need more.
Maybe it’s lust. A few photos online, some harmless glances at that coworker’s body… And now you’re objectifying everyone you see. Mentally undressing people without even thinking about it.
I could go on and on. Gossip, rage, substance abuse, violence, hate… It always starts small, but it spirals. It seems to be a part of the human condition to find ourselves trapped in the darkness of our own making.
Thankfully that doesn’t have to be the end of our story. Today we’re going to talk about how Jesus offers us a way out of our addiction to sin.
Welcome back to “Follow Me,” our mega series all about the gospel of Matthew. We are nearing the finale of the series on Easter Sunday.
To help us prepare our hearts in the four weeks leading up to Easter, we are exploring four threads or ideas in Matthew which all culminate in the cross.
Our first thread was all about the kingship of Jesus. How he hoodwinked the powers of this world to save us all, and how his crucifixion was actually Christ’s enthronement all along.
Last week, Milton helped us explore how the disciples like Peter abandoned Jesus at his trial because they failed to understand the “upside-down” nature of Christ’s kingdom.
Today, we’re zeroing in on what Jesus’ death accomplished for you and me.
We’re going to start in Matthew 26:36-39, While you’re turning there, I’ll pray for us.
GETHSEMANE
Just a bit of context. What we’re about to read takes place on the night before Jesus was crucified. The last supper with the disciples is over, and now Jesus is going to the garden where he will be betrayed by Judas, captured by an armed gang, and taken away to be killed.
He’s going there to pray because he knows exactly what’s coming next.
Matthew 26:36-39
Jesus went with them to the olive grove called Gethsemane, and he said, “Sit here while I go over there to pray.” He took Peter and Zebedee’s two sons, James and John, and he became anguished and distressed. He told them, “My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” He went on a little farther and bowed with his face to the ground, praying, “My Father! If it is possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine.”
Let’s stop there. I don’t want to be melodramatic, but I believe that this sentence being spoken by Jesus in verse 39 could very well be the most significant moment in all of human history.
Ok, that does sound pretty melodramatic. But I think it’s true. And I’ll explain why in a moment.
First we have to understand what Jesus is actually saying here. What is this “cup of suffering” that he is asking his Father to take away? Literally in the Greek he just says, “this cup.” potērion.
He mentions it again in verse 42.
Matthew 26:42
“My Father! If this cup cannot be taken away unless I drink it, your will be done.”
So what is this cup that Jesus has to drink?
Well, we’ve talked many times in this series about the fact that Matthew’s gospel is a story of fulfillment. It fulfills the words and promises of the Old Testament, and that’s exactly what’s going on here.
THE CUP OF GOD’S WRATH
Let me show you what I mean. Throughout the Hebrew Bible we see passage after passage which uses the image of a cup to describe the judgment of God. Which can be a rather intense topic, I know. But we’ll talk about it. Here’s one example:
Psalm 75:8
The LORD holds a cup in his hand
that is full of foaming wine mixed with spices.
He pours out the wine in judgment,
and all the wicked must drink it,
draining it to the dregs.
In other places, it’s referred to specifically as “The cup of God’s wrath” or “anger.”
Jeremiah 25:15-16
This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, said to me: “Take from my hand this cup filled to the brim with my anger, and make all the nations to whom I send you drink from it. When they drink from it, they will stagger, crazed by the warfare I will send against them.”
The basic idea behind the metaphor is that when humanity sins, we are drinking from a cup filled with delicious and irresistible wine. We take a sip, and then another. And then another.
It seems great… at first. Sin always does. But before long, we’re getting drunk on this wine and suddenly we can’t stop ourselves from drinking more. We drink it to the dregs. It’s that spiral of sin that I talked about earlier.
In these passages, the cup is being drunk by “the nations.” But this cup wasn’t just for Israel’s enemies. It was also for the people of God themselves. Here’s how the prophet Ezekiel uses the metaphor:
Ezekiel 23:30-34
You brought all this on yourself by prostituting yourself to other nations, defiling yourself with all their idols. Because you have followed in your sister’s footsteps, I will force you to drink the same cup of terror she drank…
Drunkenness and anguish will fill you, for your cup is filled to the brim with distress and desolation, the same cup your sister Samaria drank. You will drain that cup of terror to the very bottom.
Bottom line: When you choose to drink from the cup of God’s wrath, he makes you drink it all.
Now, here’s where things get uncomfortable for us. Because this stuff about God’s anger - about him forcing people to drink the cup of his judgment - it doesn’t really sound like a God of love and mercy, does it?
It kind of echoes the fire and brimstone preaching of Jonathan Edwards in the 1700s.
“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire.”
-Jonathan Edwards (1741)
Yikes. That’s the kind of vibe you might be getting from these passages at first glance.
However, I think much of our discomfort with the idea of “God’s wrath” comes from a misunderstanding of how the biblical authors understood the nature of sin.
THE CUP OF CONSEQUENCES
Let me explain. It’s easy for us to think of sin as us breaking a list of God rules. Right? God is this angry task-master up in the sky with his arms crossed and his brow furrowed, and he’s looking out for anyone who doesn’t do exactly as he says so he can zap them.
But in Scripture, the story is actually very different than that. Yes, there are passages like the ones we just read where the prophets get really in our face to try and scare us straight, just like Jonathan Edwards was trying to do.
But when you take a step back and look at the big picture of Scripture, you realize that the central image of God’s judgment is not fire and brimstone; it’s Eden.
Stay with me here. The biblical authors describe a God of unfailing love who creates a beautiful world for us to inhabit. A world of justice and life and abundance where we can live face to face with our Creator in the garden. Where his deepest desire is to be in rich, loving relationship with us.
But you can’t have a relationship without free will. God didn’t make us into robots who have to do everything exactly as programmed. No. He gave us a choice: to accept the good world he created for us or to reject it and try and make our own. His will, or our will?
You know as well as I the one we so often choose.
God’s will - God’s desire - is for us to live in peace. But we want power, so we choose violence. God desires justice, but we want more, so we take from others and hoard our wealth - and injustice spreads.
We reject God’s love and fill our hearts with hate. We reject God’s beautiful community and fill our world with lies and gossip and lust. And, as we’ve already covered, those choices have a way of consuming us.
That’s what sin is. Sin is a rejection of the good life God desires for us. It’s a rejection of God’s will and a pursuit of our own. It’s a spiral of self which ultimately leads to our own destruction. When we drink from that cup, it always leads to death and separation from our Creator.
And here’s where God’s judgement and “wrath” come in. I don’t think God is wrathful towards us, his children. He doesn’t “abhor” us. He loves us. But I do think he is very wrathful towards the choices we’re making because they are destroying us!
When I was in my self-destructive spiral in college my parents were in despair. Confused and even angry that their son - that I was transforming into this bitter and lazy shadow of my former self.
Their “wrath,” if you want to call it that, wasn’t at me. It was at the choices I was making. They didn’t hate me. They loved me! It was their love for me that caused them so much turmoil in the first place.
But there was only so much they could do to help, because I was an adult, and I had to make my own choices. In their love they let me choose my own path, even though they could see exactly what it was doing to me.
In a similar way we are God’s children and he hates what we’re doing to ourselves in our sin. Addiction, abuse, lust, violence, self-absorption…
This was never his desire for those that he loves so dearly. He wanted to walk with us in the garden. And yet it is precisely because of his love that he allows us to make our own choices.
And that brings us back to the cup of God’s wrath. When we choose to drink from it, God doesn’t rip it out of our hands. We’re not robots. As much as it breaks his heart,
God allows his children to drink from the cup of our own consequences.
It’s like he’s saying, “If this is really what you want, my child, then I’m not going to stop you. Drink up. But know that you’re breaking my heart with every swallow.”
NOT MY WILL
That’s the cup of God’s wrath in the biblical imagination. Humanity choosing “our will,” not God’s, and drinking ourselves into the grave.
But that raises an important question. I said that the primary depiction of God in the Bible is one of unfailing love.
So, if God couldn’t make us choose his good desires for us - his will, then what else could he do? Give up? Walk away? Start over with Earth #2 while we drown in our own sin?
No. Our God was not done yet. In fact, he was just getting started. In his overwhelming love for us, God became one of us. He became a human and walked among us - Jesus of Nazareth. Fully God and fully man.
While he walked among us, Jesus demonstrated what a life lived perfectly in line with God’s desires - God’s will - could look like. Love, joy, peace, patience, justice, life! He set his own selfish desires aside, and Eden sprung up everywhere he went because of it.
Jesus is who we were created to be: a child of God living in the freedom of our Father’s good designs.
And yet, God knew full well that even with his own Son in our midst as a gleaming example, humanity would never be free from the staggering drunkenness of our sin unless something radical were to change.
The cup of sin’s consequences has to be drunk and God won’t force us to obey. So what can he do? Well, he can drink our cup for us.
Which brings us back to the Garden of Gethsemane, and to what I referred to as the most significant moment in history.
Matthew tells us that Jesus is anguished and distressed. And for good reason. Because although he is fully God, Jesus is also fully human. And he knows the ultimate consequence of drinking from the cup of God’s wrath: death. Not just physical death, but separation from the Father.
Jesus had a choice to make. Would he willingly cut himself off from the source of life in his love for you and me? Would he drink from the cup that he never deserved? Let’s read again what he prays.
Matthew 26:39
“My Father! If it is possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine.”
Jesus doesn’t want to drink the cup of God’s wrath. He’s afraid. He’s grieved. And yet he submits himself to the will of his Father and goes willingly to the cross that we deserve. While he is hanging there dying, Matthew tells us this:
Matthew 27:45-46
At noon, darkness fell across the whole land until three o’clock. At about three o’clock, Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” which means “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
Moments later, Jesus died. He willingly accepted the full consequences of our sinful choices and entered the realm of the dead. He took the cup of God’s wrath out of our hands and drank it to the dregs so that we wouldn’t have to anymore.
Again, Matthew is a story of fulfillment because this is exactly what the Old Testament prophet Isaiah envisioned.
Isaiah 51:21-23
But now listen to this, you afflicted ones
who sit in a drunken stupor,
though not from drinking wine.
This is what the Sovereign LORD,
your God and Defender, says:
“See, I have taken the terrible cup from your hands.
You will drink no more of my fury.”
A couple of chapters later:
Isaiah 53:4-6
It was our weaknesses he carried; it was our sorrows that weighed him down. And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God, a punishment for his own sins! But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins. He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed. All of us, like sheep, have strayed away. We have left God’s paths to follow our own. Yet the LORD laid on him the sins of us all.
With that moment of anguish in the garden of Gethsemane - with those fateful words: “I want your will to be done, not mine.” - Jesus changed our world forever.
That’s why I say it’s the most significant moment in history. Because had Jesus chosen to prioritize his will over God’s will, as we always do, we’d be lost.
Thank God he was willing to drink the cup on our behalf.
But this is when the really good news begins. Because three days later the Spirit of Life raised Jesus from that grave and began to inhabit every one of his followers. Through Christ’s death we can now all find new life.
And because his Spirit now resides within us, we can start to do something we could never do before: We can leave the cup of God’s wrath on the table behind us. We don’t have to keep drinking it anymore.
We can start echoing the words of our Savior with sober minds: “I want your will to be done, not mine.”
With the Spirit of Jesus within us, we don’t have to be enslaved by our sin anymore! We can live free and join Jesus in his work of turning this dark, broken world into a paradise.
——
In a moment we’re going to take communion together. Before we do, I want to create just a bit of space for you to reflect on what the sacrifice of Jesus accomplished for you.
Jesus took the cup of sin’s consequences out of your swaying hands and drank it to the dregs on your behalf. What we celebrate on Easter is not just a happy ending. It’s also a brand new beginning.
The beginning of your new life lived in the center of God’s good desires. “I want your will to be done, not mine.”
The gates of Eden are open again, and your loving Father is inviting you to come home and walk with him in the garden.