Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 97:385 (Jan 1940)
Article: Our Lord’s Prayer in the Garden
Author: Archibald Eugene Thomson

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Our Lord’s Prayer in the Garden

A. Eugene Thomson

[Editor’s Note: There are several views concerning the immediate cause of the Lord’s agony in the garden. The following is an interesting study giving the view of one who has been a constant reader of this Quarterly for fifty-five years.]

“It is the glory of God to conceal a thing but the honour of kings is to search out a matter” (Prov 25:2).

“Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, our Saviour” (Isa 45:15).

I. The deep meaning of the word of God does not always lie on the surface; but earnest, prayerful study, and comparison of Scripture with Scripture will reveal it.

The prayer of our Lord in the garden has been a puzzle and trouble to many earnest souls. How could He have shrunk back from that tragedy which, by His own declaration, was an integral part of His divine mission, and, if His prayer was not granted, what confident expectation have we in our own prayers? The head of a Theological Seminary, on being asked his interpretation of this record, replied that he thought the simplest interpretation the best; that is, that Christ shrank from the terror of the cross. But that is not always a safe rule for understanding the Scriptures. Our Lord put much of His teaching into parabolic form with the avowed purpose of concealing the truth from careless hearers. One weighty evidence of the written word is that the entire Bible, focussed on the individual text, is often needed to make its meaning clear. Yet that simple rule of interpretation seems probably the one most infrequently used in the study of the passage in question.

II. Let us look back to the very beginning of the creation. There are no surprises with God. The Atonement must have been planned before the heavens and the earth were made, before finite moral beings were created. But for that foreknowledge the universe would not have come into being. God foreknew that, if such creation took place, certainly, though not of necessity, sin would come into existence, and

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have to be reckoned with. Such creation could not be justified unless some program could be formed by which the awful character of sin, striking at the very government and even the very being of God, the futility of every finite effort at atoning for or in any way healing the ravages of sin, and the utter, abject helplessness of the sinner before the justice of a holy God, as well as the necessity of such atoning work as should show the love of even an offended God and make it possible for Him to receive a penitent sinner witho...