After Jesus and His disciples spent the early evening celebrating Passover inside a room in Jerusalem, He needed to be alone to pray to God. Three of His disciples accompanied Jesus to the garden of Gethsemane before He was taken by Judas and Roman soldiers to the Pharisees. According to the 26th Book of Mathew verse 37, Jesus “began to be sorrowful and very heavy.” He told His disciples, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” Later, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” (Mathew 26:38-39).
At Gethsemane, Jesus seemed uncharacteristically fearful. Throughout the Gospels, He is always courageous, strong and poised. He is the Christ who created heaven and earth. As the Son of God, He never showed any kind of fear. But in the garden He was not only apprehensive about His fate, He trembled, stammered, and walked back and forth frantically between God and his disciples. He asked God if there was another way, but he received no answer. He fell facedown, too weak to even stand on His feet (Matthew 26:39). Luke states He was so distressed that His forehead sweat blood.
Many Christians have the misconception that Jesus agonized only about the physical pain he would endure the next day, which included being scourged, struck by Roman guards and placed a helmet of long, sharp thorns on his head, and finally, the crucifixion. But Jesus appeared more consumed about the “cup.”
Why did Jesus ask the Father if He could take the “cup” away? It was the cup of wrath that contained all of the sins of mankind and He would bear them on the Cross. All sins are taken out on the individual who does not accept Jesus’ sacrifice when death comes; the sinner goes to hell where torment is violently inflicted every second for eternity.
God probably gave Jesus a glance at the horrors of hell to show and prepare Him for all of the inflictions He would experience on the Cross. What Jesus felt was hell itself, already creeping around His soul, while visions of hell horrified Him to His soul’s core. For a while, Satan probably tempted Jesus. If He took the cup, He would pay for the sins of everyone living on Earth. To be saved from going to hell and enjoy eternal life in heaven, the soul must believe in Jesus and His sacrifice on the cross.
To get an idea of what hell is like for every sinner that goes there, we must ask those who went there after they died and soon came back to life. Ronald Whitaker was a “hardcore” atheist and sinner. Many years ago, he became extremely ill with acute hemorrhagic necrotic pancreatitis and he knew death was moving swiftly toward him. That night as he lay in a hospital bed, his body slipped many times into “darkness” which frightened him so that he called it “untold terror.” Many testimonies of other unrepentant sinners who claimed to have traveled to hell after temporarily dying, woke up “screaming”, “terrified” and “frightened” after witnessing many other people being tortured by huge, fierce demons whose bodies they were tearing apart. Some claim they saw souls on fire whose bodies repeatedly disintegrated, then became whole again.
We cannot begin to fathom what God’s only Son went through at Gethsemane. All we have are the Biblical Scriptures of Mathew and Luke who record what Jesus told them. We know that before the mob that came to arrest Him, He had received the strength and joy that prepared Him to endure physical torture and to drink the spiritual cup of God’s wrath so that believing souls could go to heaven and enjoy eternal life.
