This is, for us, a cup of blessing. We rejoice here, and we give thanks here, as the Scriptures teach us to. At the same time, we must remember that the cup that the Lord drank—and at a basic level, it is the same cup—was a cup of agony. Just before the Lord asked for the cup to be withheld from Him, He said, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death” (Matt, 26:38).
When the Lord described something with a word like exceeding, we know that He was facing a formidable challenge. Jesus said that His soul was so overwhelmed with sorrow that He was at the point of dying, without Judas, or Pilate, or the soldiers.
Now this cup that Jesus prayed to avoid, this cup that He nevertheless received as the will of His Father, this cup that He drank obediently, down to the dregs, this cup of woe is for us a cup of blessing, of thanksgiving, of joy. How is this possible?
This is the direction God works. We by our sin made a ruin out of the world. Jesus came as God’s own priest for us, stepping into this wretched world. He then gathered up all the sin of all His people, and the wrath that was resting upon that sin, put it in a cup, and drank it down. He swallowed all of it, and death was swallowed up by victory.
But note the nature of the victory. It is not the kind of “victory” that carnal men would have anticipated. The cruciform shape of Christ’s triumph would not lead us to anticipate, unless our eyes have been opened by the Spirit of God, the resurrection that followed. God’s way of victory is death, and there is no shortcut or detour around that death. There is no going straight to resurrection.
Jesus drank this cup for the joy that was set before Him, which He saw by faith. We participate in what He did, also by faith, and we do so with the glad willingness to identify with Him in every aspect of His obedience—death and resurrection both.