Forsaken For Us Life Swap
3/12/2021 1 Samuel 19:1-10 Matthew 26:36-45
We are in part 2 of our series Life-Swap in which we are acknowledging that Jesus voluntarily took our place and had things happen to him that rightfully should have happened to us. There four messages are Betrayed For Me, Forsaken For Me, Accused for Me, Punished For Me, and Alive in Me.
Suppose you were on trial facing a death sentence for a murder you did not commit. The one person who could prove your innocence was a childhood best friend. You had helped your friend out many times over the years. The two of you swore a bond to always be there for each other in a time of need.
As a matter of fact on the day of the murder, the two of you had been together fishing on the lake twenty miles away from where the murder occurred. But before you were arrested your friend had left the country. So your sole alibi was gone.
The trial is going on and the evidence against you is mounting up. You fit the description of the prosecutor’s only witness. Your lack of being able to find your friend only makes you seem more likely to be guilty.
You are praying for a miracle. Then your lawyer locates your friend, and comes back to you with the news that he’s made contact. You get all excited, and then you lawyer says, “your friend refuses to testify on your behalf. He said if I put him on the stand, he will deny that you were there with him.”
How are you feeling inside at this point when you think of all the times you were there for your friend? Betrayed, Forsaken, Alone. What about when you hear the verdict guilty as charged.
Would you voluntarily choose to endure and accept these feelings knowing that it was going to cost you’re your life.
Sometimes, being forsaken by someone we have invested in can be one of the most painful experiences we have to endure. There are parents who feel forsaken by their children. Now that they have grown older and can’t do for themselves, their adult children don’t want to be bothered with them.
There are spouses who feel forsaken by the other person. After all they did, the other person either left, or has so beaten them down in the relationship that though they are still married and are together they are feeling forsaken. There are children who know, their parent’s drug habits or boyfriend or girlfriend mean far more than they do. They are forsaken in their own homes.
There are plenty of reasons to feel forsaken. Investing 25 years of our lives in a job only to be let go because the company was sold. Staying in a bad relationship for years hoping to one day get married, only to hear the other person say I found somebody new. Being found guilty of a crime you didn’t do only to have friends believe you did it.
Investing in people in the church only to have them turn and walk away from the faith. Thinking someone truly was your friend or truly cared about you only to discover they were using you for their own purposes. As a child of God, one of the things that will happen more than once in your life, is that you will be in a spot where you feel forsaken. You will feel as though you are all by yourself.
In our Old Testament reading, David had done everything that he could to help King Saul. He risked his life going into battle again and again to strengthen Saul’s kingdom. King Saul would sometimes have an evil spirit come upon him, and the only way to relieve his suffering was to have some beautiful music played on the harp. David was a gifted musician, and this mighty warrior humbled himself to just play the harp to help King Saul refresh himself.
David was basically surrendering his life for Saul, and yet one day while he was playing the harp, Saul took a spear and tried to kill David with it. He charged at David with the spear, and David moved in time so that the spear went into the wall. David escaped with his life.
He didn’t know where to run or to whom to turn. He had to have felt forsaken. He had been praying for years that God would touch Saul’s heart, and see that David had no bad intentions. Yet God had been silent on answering His prayer. As a matter of fact, the more David prayed, the worse Saul seemed to have gotten in his anger and hatred toward him.
We do not voluntarily enter into a situation in which we know we are going to be forsaken. As a matter of fact, if most of us knew what was going to happen before hand, we would have chosen to do things differently.
What makes Jesus so different from us, is that Jesus knows what terrible things are going to happen to him, because of the investment he is making in us. Yet Jesus chooses to go ahead and make the investment anyways.
When Jesus tells husbands to love your wives and not be harsh with them, and yet we don’t do it, we think it’s no big deal. When God’s word tells us to submit to each other and we don’t, it’s no big deal. When we intentionally choose to do our own thing, knowing our behaviors and attitudes are contrary to the will of God, we again think very little of it.
We call these things mistakes, bad habits, little white lies, errors in judgments, and other nice names. God calls them rebellion and sin. He calls it grieving the Holy Spirit.
We try to get by with it with an all inclusive prayer, “Lord forgive me for any sins that I might have done today, amen.” If we do not acknowledge our rebellion against God as sin, we will not appreciate what Jesus does for us in going to the Garden of Gethsamane.
It was in the Garden of Eden that the first battle for our allegiance to God took place. Adam and Eve had to choose would they follow the will of God for their lives and believe that God was good, or would they do their own thing and prove they could be equal to God.
If you look at your life, does it indicate you believe your will is superior to God’s will for your life? Does it show that you believe you are wiser than God? Are you telling God, that God is wrong and you are right?
Jesus goes with his disciples at night into this place called Gethsamane. For Jesus this garden is anything but peaceful. He realizes he is getting ready to go into a spiritual battle which will determine if we will have any hope of being saved.
We do not recognize the weight and the power of our sin, compared to the strength our good works upon which many people are depending for their salvation. Imagine with me for a moment, that you were a spider at a bowling alley.
You are to build a spider web across a bowling lane. Your web is to catch all the little sins you have committed. You may feel pretty good until you realize, your little sins are not like little bugs that you can easily capture and do away with. Instead they are like a bowling ball coming at your web at full speed.
What chance is there of spider’s web stopping the onslaught of that bowling ball. It would be foolish to put your eternal salvation is something as flimsy as a spider’s web of good works.
Jesus knew the power of sin and the price that would have to be paid to stop it’s devastating consequences. Judas is off in the darkness of the night getting the soldiers and a mob together to come and arrest Jesus. Jesus knows all this is taking place, but its not his main concern.
He goes into the garden with 11 of the disciples. They stop for a moment. He then tells Peter, James and John to follow him deeper into the garden. That’s nothing unusual because he has called those three to go with Him, on special occasions.
But then, Jesus becomes sorrowful and troubled He then stops again, and tells the three something he has never said before. He told them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”
Think about it, there was a time when Jesus was sleeping in a boat about to sink in a raging sea, but it didn’t bother him. Early in his ministry, they had to tried throw him off a cliff in Nazareth, but it didn’t phase him. He was told to go away, because Herod wanted to kill him. It didn’t upset Jesus in the least bit.
But there was something in the Garde of Gethsemane that was a real problem for Jesus. He left Peter, James and John and went a little farther and simply collapsed to the ground so that his face is on the ground. And then he prays a prayer that he realizes for the first time, might take him outside the will of the Father. Up until this point, His will and the Father’s will had been one. Jesus had said, “I only do the things I see My Father doing. This prayer is different. This prayer has to do with our sin.
Even though we think so little of our sin, that’s not how God looks at our rebellion. Jesus knows that if He takes our place at the judgment, he has to take our sin upon himself. He knows something that so many people do not, and that is, God cannot look upon our sin without looking away from us.
If Jesus loves us enough to take the punishment for our sin, it means that he will have to be separated from the Father and endure God’s anger upon sin. Jesus is not afraid of the crucifixion. People were crucified all the time under Rome. Jesus is not afraid of death. Death had no authority over him, and he had made up his mind to voluntarily lay down his life.
Jesus is troubled over what should trouble us all, and that’s the judgment of God for sin our sin. He prays the prayer, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup bet taken away from me. Yet not as I will , but as you will.” Notice the closeness between the Father and the Son. We are taught to pray, “Our Father”. But there is a uniqueness between Jesus and the Father. He prays “My Father.”
The cup in the Old Testament is symbolic of the judgment of God when God pours out his justifiable anger and wrath upon those who are disobedient. Jesus knows the full extent of the power and wrath of God. He also knows that he did not have to go into that garden that night. But he went because he wanted to make it possible for human beings to be reunited with God once again.
Jesus knows that eternity is real. He knows the plans that the Father has for eternity. He knows the joy and the purpose God has for all who will choose to follow him.
He also knows the destruction ahead for Satan and his angels and for all of those who will not surrender their lives to Jesus. He knows the pain and the suffering he will have to endure to save us from falling under the judgement coming upon Satan.
He therefore prays, “Father if there is another way, by which people can be saved, spare me from this suffering and separation I will have to go through.
You know there are going to be times in our lives, when we can see what’s ahead and it doesn’t look good. We are going to want God to change the circumstances and come up with another plan, but like Jesus we are going to run into a brick wall.
No words are going to come in response to prayers. Can we pray like Jesus did, and insert at the end our prayers, “yet not as I will, but your will be done?” This is not a prayer of unbelief but a prayer that God might be doing something greater than we can understand at the moment.
After an hour of silence from God, Jesus felt that if he got more people praying with him something might change. So he went to the three he had invested so much in, but instead of them praying, they were sleeping. He woke them up and tired to encourage them to get up and pray. Not only did he need strength for the night they were going to need it too. Here he is in this great time of struggle, and they have forsaken him in order to get some sleep.
Jesus left them and went and prayed a second time. This time his prayer is a little clearer. He’s granting the Father permission. He says, “My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken way unless I drink it, may your will be done.” Jesus is acknowledging that a price for our sin is going to have to be paid. Jesus is also saying, “if there is another way that people can avoid the judgment of God without him, He’s willing to go that route.”
But the silence of the Father is an answer in itself. Jesus knows the Father loves Him. He knows the Father would not ask this of him, if it were not necessary for humanity to be saved. Something was happening in Jesus’s spirit between the first and second time he went to pray.
After the second time, he went to the disciples again. Again he found them sleeping. Here he was getting ready to start the process to pay for their sins, and they were sleeping.
He doesn’t even bother to wake them up them this time. He leaves them sleeping and goes back to pray one last time. But again something is happening on the inside of Him. We don’t get the image of him collapsing to the ground. We don’t see him feeling as though he needed support from the disciples. He does not come back the third time to the disciples feeling sorrowful and overwhelmed. His prayer to the Father was changing Him. Luke’s gospel said an angel appeared and strengthened him.
He returns the third time to the disciples, but he’s no longer sorrowful. He comes back the third time in charge. He wakes them up and says, “Are you still resting and sleeping. Look the hour is near and the Son of Man is delivered into the hands of sinners. Rise, let us Go. Here comes my betrayer.”
The disciples went into the same garden that Jesus went into that night. They saw a place to catch up on some rest and get some sleep. They missed what God was doing on the spiritual level. Some of us see coming to church the same way. We have no idea of what’s really taking place.
When Jesus went into the garden, Jesus saw a battleground that would determine the future hope of all humankind in their relationship to God for all of eternity. We miss out if we think, God just wants us in church just to be nicer and to help others out here and there. No God is about changing our lives today with the goal of preparing us for the lives we’re going to be living forever.
Jesus prayed three times in the Garden with no visible answer .The silence he felt from God in the Garden, was just a fore taste of how forsaken he would feel in about 9 hours, when he would cry out on the cross, “My God, My God why have you forsaken me.
Our sin untouched by the blood of Jesus will have us all crying out My God, My God why have you forsaken me. Jesus gladly swapped places with us, so that those words will never have to come from our lips when we die. Even when Jesus felt forsaken by God the Father in the Garden, the Father was equipping Jesus with a hidden strength to endure everything that was coming.
Jesus gave his life for us with an expectation that we would swap our lifestyle for his lifestyle we find in Hebrews 13:1-3 Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles.
And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, 2 fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
The joy that was set before him was the possibility that you would be in a right relationship with God both now and throughout eternity.
