oul is
troubled--Father, save me from this hour, but for this cause came I to
this hour." He looked on towards the cross. And why that agony in the
garden? Why was His sweat as it were great drops of blood? Why the
repeated prayer, "Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me?"
How many dishonoring explanations have been written of the Gethsemane
suffering, as if He was afraid to die or that the devil tried to kill
Him there to prevent his death on the cross, and that He feared the
devil. But what was it? He suffered in Himself. His holy soul shrank
from that which a holy God must hate, that which He hated--SIN. He was
about to be made sin and He knew no sin. What suffering this produced in
the Holy One of God to take all upon Himself and to stand in the
sinner's place before a holy sin-hating God, our poor finite minds
cannot realize.

2. He suffered from men. This he had foretold. When man, guilty man,
cast Himself upon the willing victim, all the wickedness and vileness
and cruelty man is capable of committing was brought out and spent upon
the blessed Son of God. The scourging, the buffeting, the mocking, the
spitting and the shame connected with it, the shame of the cross, He
despised. How that sensitive body must have quivered under it all!

3. He suffered from the devil. He had tempted him. Nothing was left
undone, what this wonderful Being could do. All His cunning and powers
were brought into use, with the one purpose to keep Him from going to
the cross and dying in the sinner's place. And when at last he could not
keep Him from going to the cross, then he cast himself upon the victim
and heaped all his hatred and malice upon Him. He used man in all this
awful work and no doubt the legions of demons. And in all this the Son
of God was as a lamb, which is dumb before the shearers. He opened not
His mouth.

4. But the greatest of all, He suffered from God. With hushed breath, we
must speak of this. It is the Holy of Holies of the great work on the
cross, the impenetrable mystery of the atoning work of the Son of God.
From the darkness which enshrouded the cross and the blessed sufferer on
the accursed tree, there came the mournful cry: "My God, My God, why
hast Thou forsaken me?" It made known the awful suffering, which the
Lamb of God, the substitute of sinners, endured from the hand of a holy
God. He was smitten and afflicted of God. Have you noticed that in the
xxii Psalm this cry of the sufferer o