e bitter
anguish which had immediately preceded the arrest, our Lord had
repeatedly referred to His cup. "If this cup," He said, "may not pass
from Me, except I drink it, Thy will be done." The cup evidently
referred to all the anguish caused to His holy nature in being numbered
among the transgressors, and having to bear the sin of the world.
Whether it was the anguish of the body, beneath which He feared He
would succumb, as some think; or the dread of being made a
sin-offering, a scape-goat laden with sin, as others, or the chill of
the approaching eclipse, which extorted the cry of forsakenness, as
seems to me the more likely--is not pertinent to our present
consideration. It is enough to know that, whilst there was much that
cried, "Back!" there was more that cried, "On!"--and that He chose from
the profoundest depths of His nature, to do the Father's will, to
execute His part in the compact into which they had entered before the
worlds were made, and to drink to the dregs the cup which His Father
had placed in His hands.

But here we note that to all appearances the cup was mingled, prepared,
and presented by the malignity and hate of man. The High Priests had
long resolved to put Him to death, because His success with the people,
His fresh and living comments on the law, His opposition to their
hypocrisies and pretensions had exasperated them to madness. Judas
also seemed to have had a conspicuous share in his discovery and
arrest. Had we been left to our unaided reasonings we might have
supposed that the most bitter ingredients of His cup had been supplied
by the ingratitude of His own, the implacable rancor of the priests,
and the treachery of Judas; but, see, He recognizes none but the
Father--it is always _the Father_, always the cup which the Father had
given.

There had been times in our lives when we may have been tempted to
distinguish between God's appointments and permissions, and to speak of
the former as being manifestly His will for us, whilst we suspended our
judgment about the latter, and questioned if we were authorized in
accounting them as being equally from Heaven. But such distinctions
are fatal to peace. Our souls were kept in constant perturbation, as
we accounted ourselves the shuttlecock of rival powers, now God's, now
man's. And we ended in ruling God out of more than half our life, and
regarding ourselves as the hapless prey of strong and malicious forces
to which we were sol