#463 - Kyle Thompson // The Crushing of Jesus

Joby Martin (0:01)

Welcome to The Daily Blade. The Word of God is described as the sword of the spirit, the primary spiritual weapon in the Christian's armor against the forces of evil. Your hosts are Joby Martin and Kyle Thompson, and they stand ready to equip men for the fight.

Let's sharpen up.

Kyle Thompson (0:20)

Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane, and He said to His disciples, Sit here while I go over there and pray. And taking with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, He began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then He said to them, My soul is very sorrowful, even to death. Remain here and watch with Me. And going a little farther, He fell on His faith and prayed, saying, My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will. And He came to the disciples and found them sleeping, and He said to Peter, So could you not watch with Me one hour? Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The Spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. Again, for a second time, He went away and prayed, My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done. And again He came to them and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy. So leaving them again, He went away and prayed for a third time, saying the same words again. Then He came to the disciples and said to them, Sleep and take your rest later on. See, the hour is at hand and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.

So in this passage, the Apostle Matthew describes true and ultimate crushing. All week this week, I've repeated this quote from Chuck Swindoll, who was quoting Alan Redpath, When God wants to do an impossible task, He takes an impossible person and crushes him. Leave room in your life for the crushings, because that's part of the curriculum that very few people will tell you about. And the reason I've been focusing on that all week is because I know you all know what crushing feels like. I myself know what crushing feels like. For some of you, someone very important to you died. For others, you got a bad diagnosis from a doctor. For others, your children have gone prodigal, they've rejected you. For others, someone very close to you betrayed you and hurt you in a way that you didn't think was possible. For others, as it pertains to earthly riches, you've lost everything. But listen to me, you have to know this. Your crushing has a purpose.

And I promise you, I'm not saying it's easy to go through, and I'm certainly not claiming that it is pleasant, but it is purposeful. So let's actually go back to the Garden of Gethsemane. Many of you are familiar with what happened there, and what many of you likely remember is that Jesus was in such a place of distress that he was actually sweating drops of blood. So Luke 22, 44, records, And being in agony, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground. So my buddy Titus Kennedy, who is a Christian archaeologist, he actually said this, The condition Jesus experienced has a precise medical name, and that's hematidrosis. So this is derived from two Greek words. It's haematos, which means blood, and hydros, or hedros, meaning sweat. And this is how TW. Hunt describes it, When a person experiences trauma, the capillaries in the sweat glands just under the skin's surface dilate, and if stress is intense enough, the blood vessels pressing against the sweat glands burst, causing blood to exit through the sweat glands rather than remaining contained. So it's almost as if Jesus was being crushed by his own anguish. And it was manifesting as drops of blood coming straight out of his forehead, which gets us back to the word Gethsemane. It actually comes from two Hebrew words, one being Gat, which means a place for pressing oil or wine, and Shamanim, which means oils. So Gethsemane literally means an olive press, and I've heard Bible scholars describe the definition of Gethsemane as the place of crushing. And in Jesus' day, the olives that were designated for the production of oil were placed into a large crushing basin where the olives would be crushed into pulp. So there would be these large stones or these large pillars that would be placed on top of the pulp, and this would gradually squeeze the oil into a pit or a vat that was sitting just below. And hopefully you can see the clear spiritual symbolism here. Jesus wasn't just under the weight of his circumstances and his forthcoming betrayal. He was agonizing under the weight of our sin.