URGENT PRAYERS. Hebrews 5:7 The primary reference here is to the emotional pain our Lord Jesus Christ experienced when He was in the Garden of Gethsemane and later on the cross. His prayers and tears were directed to the Father, who had sent His Son to be the Savior of the world. He wasn’t trying to avoid the physical suffering and death He knew awaited Him, but the agony of a holy soul bearing the sin of all humanity was going to be His to carry. He was not trying to avoid doing the Father’s will.
The sacrifice Christ made to God was for us in His “strong crying and tears,” His prayers and supplications. He was obedient to the Father’s will during His life as a man among men, and “He became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” All He prayed was heard because of His “godly fear,” and He was saved from death through His resurrection.
God was not deaf to the cries of His Son when He knelt on the ground to pray. The Father was listening, love never ceasing, to all His Son had to say. But there was a task before Him only He could do; no one else was qualified. The terrible work of paying sin’s penalty lay just ahead, and that’s when He cried out in prayer. Words from deep in the depths of His soul: “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me.’
If that had happened, none of us would or could ever be freed from sin and its consequences. Even though in His humanity He was willing to go, He knew there was no other way — He had to drink that cup to the full, for the wages of sin to be paid. The Servant of God, an obedient Son, absolute perfection in manhood; yet not in the least, with never a wrong step, did He compromise His Deity. Grace so amazing that, though He was rich, for our sakes He became poor—He was not saved from death; He suffered and died—therefore, death no longer reigns.
There may be people alive, maybe even me, who will never taste death – by His strong crying and tears; His vicarious death has given us a place in heaven. Such an offering He made, not coerced when He gave – life by dying instead on our behalf. Now exalted on high, our High Priest is there, and on our behalf, He intercedes. Even in the extremity of strong crying and tears so intense that His sweat was as blood, He never turned aside from what He came to do. When He was sent until He ascended on high as our Great High Priest, He was the essence of perfect manliness, with compassion, tenderness, and humility. At the same time, He was strong in holiness and willing to become obedient to death, even the death of the cross.
In the years of His life on earth, “in the days of His flesh,” Jesus personally experienced the need for prayer, the power gained through fellowship with the Father, and the confidence that doing the Father’s will in times of suffering is right. Suffering and surrender go together, and the assurance of faith and salvation go together. He knew He would be saved from death by being raised out of it. We can trust in the same truths.
We will never experience the depths of suffering our Lord endured in life, particularly in Gethsemane and on the cross. But we can be confident that what God allows, even if it involves a life of suffering, serves a divine and holy purpose, and when we see Jesus, “it will be worth it all.” The proper attitude during the trials and suffering that God permits us to endure is one of “godly fear” or reverent obedience.
The Lord Jesus Christ, our Great High Priest, descended into human weakness, anguish, pain, and death so that He could experience everything we might need from Him in His heavenly priesthood. Whatever we might go through, He knows firsthand. He was sinless but understood weakness without sinning. He endured hunger, thirst, and tiredness without complaining or sinning in thought or word. He experienced rejection, loneliness, sorrow, and pain to the greatest extent possible, yet He never sinned. He learned through experience the cost of obeying God in a fallen, sinful world like ours.
The Lord Jesus Christ obeyed His Father’s will during His time on earth, facing circumstances similar to ours, but He endured even greater physical suffering and death. In our quest to understand and follow God's will, we need to pray with submission and reverence to our heavenly Father, being willing to obey and submit with a genuine heart to His divine guidance. This doesn't mean obeying grudgingly or passively, but with a willing spirit and a desire to please and serve Him acceptably. Our Lord was not forced to obey the Father’s will, even though it involved the -- greatest possible suffering.
He did not become morally perfect. He was, is, and always will be morally perfect. When He was here, through the suffering He experienced, He fully entered into our human experience. "Being made perfect" meant that by participating as a human in the human experience, our Lord Jesus is able to be our acceptable substitute completely. He knew what it was like to live here, to go through the sufferings of humanity, and to die an excruciatingly painful death. He understands all about our human situations because He has "been there and done that."