15.1 God in Travail
© 2015 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
We cannot know what anything is until we see that thing operating fully inside its place inside of God and inside of the universe. May I suggest that Gethsemane is the biggest deal in the universe and in God. One could argue that the biggest event of the history of the universe was its creation: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Yet that very argument requires us to place Jesus’ prayer in John 17, spoken less than three hours before Gethsemane, as far, far bigger.
In John 17, Jesus spoke the new creation into existence.
In the Beginning
These things says the Amen, the Faithful and True Witness, the Beginning of the creation of God (Revelation 3:14). “Beginning” is NOT a time word; it is a source word. All creation proceeds out from Jesus, the All-speaking of God.
… so as to create in Himself one new man (Ephesians 2:15). God creates the new creation entirely inside of Christ. The new creation is a gazillion times bigger and more important than the first creation. John 17 is the speaking of Jesus by which the new creation begins.
Know the Father and know Jesus Sent.
The New Creation Begins
The new creation begins just past midnight on the fourteenth day of the first Jewish month of the year AD 29, during the seventh hour of the day that will end with Passover at 6 PM. The new creation begins, yet the old creation still exists in all of its ugliness, its vanity, and its hostility against God. The incredible mind-blowing realities of that new creation found in the words of Jesus’ prayer are another topic. Here we must know what happened less than three hours after Jesus spoke the universe-creating words of John 17.
Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane . . . and He began to be sorrowful and deeply distressed. Then He said to them, "My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death.”
Travail
The depths of agony and despair found in those strange and seemingly uncharacteristic words of Jesus are greater than anything else known in the human experience. What does this mean? – We MUST know what it means.
In order to know Gethsemane, we must go into the very depths of God, into His Heart, into His inner workings. To know Gethsemane, we must first know God. And we cannot know God without knowing the answer to the question: What is a God who groans in travail? To travail is to labor to bring forth a child out of the womb.
What is a God who labors to bring forth?
No Form
There is one God, the Father (1 Cor. 8:6 & 1 Timothy 2:5). This One God, the Father, is invisible Spirit without boundaries of any kind.
We must know what “no boundaries” means. It means God has no form. God cannot be measured. There is no place or time where anything of God starts or ends. All of God is all here now. Always. Everywhere. ALL!
If God could be seen at any time by anyone anywhere, then God would no longer be God, but rather a finite and limited Thing. God, the Father is and always must be INVISIBLE. Invisible means that God is undetectable by any part of creation in either heaven or earth.
The Travail of God
But here is the terrible thing about an infinite and eternal, that is all here and all now God, a God who must by His very Being be undetectable, that is, unknown, by any part of His creation.
God is Love. And Love must love and be loved.
God is Light. And Light must shine and be seen.
God is Life. And Life must bring forth life.
So how on earth can an undetectable God be Love and Light and Life inside His creation? We are speaking of no easy thing. We are speaking of the travail of God.
God Is a Person
In order for Love to love and to be loved, God, the Father, must change His form.
But there is something else we must know about the Being of this invisible God. God is a Person. The Father is very deeply, intimately, and privately Personal. And so, as God “changes” His form in order to be known by His creation, God the Father becomes other Persons. I have the word “changes” in quotation marks because we know that God is eternal, that means “all now.” We are not speaking of any event in time; we are looking at the very fabric of God’s Being.
Symmorphy
Thus, as the Father extends Himself out from Himself to be seen and known by His creation, He “becomes,” takes on the form of, shares the same form with, symmorphoses together with other Persons.
Symmorphy is the essence of God making Himself known. The Father, then is first known by His creation through two Persons, always together, never ever separate: the Son of God and the Spirit of God.
The Person of the Father, coming into union with the Person of the Son of God and the Person of the Spirit of God, always together, each one supplying what the other lacks, we know of, then, as Christ Jesus or Jesus Sent, Jesus and Spirit together.
The Form of God
Here is what Paul says about this incredible transformation of God as we look at the Greek words of Philippians 2:5-8. Christ Jesus, who, being in the “form - morphe” of God, and considering Himself equal with God, then, having taking on Himself the form of a bondservant, He called the no-boundary God out into visibility, coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself.
The key word is “ekenosen,” always wrongly translated as “made Himself of no reputation.” Kenos means “of no reputation,” that is, regarding the form of God, “not seen or known.” But Paul added ek to kenos. Ek means to call forth out from unknown-ness.
The Form of a Servant
Jesus makes God visible. The Father, symmorphosed together with the Person of Jesus, becomes seen and known by both heaven and earth.
The word we are really after here, however, in Philippians 2:7, is lambono, having taken on the form of a servant. God, in extending Himself out from invisibility, is seen and known by His creation FIRST as a servant.
- Lambánō (from the primitive root, lab-, meaning "actively lay hold of to take or receive,") – properly, to lay hold by aggressively (actively) accepting what is available (offered). lambánō ("accept with initiative") emphasizes the volition (assertiveness) of the receiver.
Another English word means the same thing as lambano in the specific context of Gethsemane: travail.
This Servant God is known in the Old Testament by one of the pieces of furniture in the Tabernacle of Moses, the Mercy Seat. The Mercy Seat is all of gold, representing the invisible nature and Being of the Person of God. But then this undefinable block of gold is beaten by hammers, beaten and beaten and beaten, until it takes on the form of the Mercy Seat.
The One who bears our griefs and carries our sorrows. – Love suffers long and is kind . . . Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. (1 Corinthians 13:4-8).
Faith
What does this have to do with a Man on His knees in agony?
God cannot sin. God cannot violate His creation. More than that, even though Jesus and the Father are One, even though in seeing Jesus we ARE seeing the Father, yet the Father cannot violate the integrity of Jesus’ Person. Jesus, in Himself, must be the willingness of all creation to receive the Father through travail into being seen and known.
God does not zap. God only brings forth. God brings forth all things by speaking first, yes. But speaking does not, in itself, create anything. The Word God speaks must first find faith. And there, inside of faith, that Word brings forth, becomes, all that it is.
A Seed Planted
The Word God speaks is a seed that MUST BE planted in the hearts, in the womb of His Beloved.
Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain (John 12:24). The Word God speaks must first be planted in the ground, and there it must “appear” to all as if it does not exist. Then the Word arises in an entirely different form, as the plant, looking nothing like its original self. Jesus becomes His church, Person inside of persons. And out from that church, Jesus brings forth many just like Himself.
The Woman
That is one picture God gives of becoming known by His creation, the picture of a grain of wheat. The other picture is a woman, the Church, clothed with the Lord Jesus, bringing forth all the Word God speaks through weakness in the face of all opposition.
She bore a male Child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron. And her Child was caught up to God and His throne (Revelation 12:5).
The bringing forth of Life, God revealed, inside the creation by the planting of a seed, either into the ground, or in the womb of a woman, the Church, IS the structure and fabric of the entire Bible, and the organization of every word or concept in it.
How Does the New Swallow up the Old?
Jesus spoke the new creation into existence during the early hours of what is to us April 14, AD 29. Look around you. Do you see it? All you and I can see is the old creation going on right on! Yet from the moment that Jesus spoke the new creation until the new creation has swallowed up all that is old and the old is no more, that transition unfolds over the span of 3000 years of human history.
The question before us, the question of Gethsemane is, how does the new swallow up the old? How do you and I pass from the dregs of hatred against God into the Joy filling the Heart of our Savior?
A Model of Gethsemane
Please study this diagram carefully.
Before the old creation can end upon the cross, Jesus must first draw it into Himself. BUT! If the old creation ceases only, then you and I vanish and God loses everything He desires. Inside of Jesus, in His Heart first, the old must be swallowed up by the new; Jesus must drink the Father’s Cup.
Describing the Model
Having spoken the New, Jesus is the New as Seed, but in Gethsemane, Jesus draws the old into Himself. The old ends by substance upon the cross. The new passes through the cross, and ascends to the Father in newness of life. Then, on the day of Pentecost, the new creation, Jesus as Seed, is planted into the earth. Jesus becomes us. But in Gethsemane, you and I are drawn out of the old to become the Joy of Jesus’ heart.
Appearance vs Substance
Jesus is the continuous source of all entities and substance in the old creation. To bring the old to an end, Jesus must agree to become all of it that all of it might cease upon the cross. For God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21).
The old creation does not exist by substance. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away (2 Corinthians 5:17). Yet in appearance the old remains the same. The new creation is the only thing that exists by substance. Behold, all things have become new. Now all things are of God (2 Corinthians 5:17-18). Yet the new appears as if it hardly exists at all.
Planted in the Earth
There is only one sacrifice for sins forever. But Gethsemane remains through the entire church age. Notice the arrow in the diagram coming down from the Resurrection on the Day of Pentecost, being planted in the earth. That arrow is Gethsemane continuing on for 3000 years.
Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain (John 12:24).
God is utterly Personal. And everything God does must be utterly Personal and through persons.
Jesus Sent
God cannot show Himself as His own Person, if He did He would cease to be God. God can show Himself only through persons, in the place that He has chosen – the hearts of His elect and only through faith. For God to be seen and known through us His body requires far more than a Savior. For God to become the Light and Life and Love of His creation, there must also be One who IS Salvation.
We have never known who Salvation is or what it is or what it means or how it happens. Yet our goal, age-abiding life, is to know Jesus Sent.
Gethsemane
Let’s apply all this, now, to Gethsemane. Gethsemane is NOT a solitary Man, on His own, trying His best to “obey God and not to disobey God.” Jesus and the Father are One. Jesus, through every step of the Atonement was the very Heart of Father God made visible.
Gethsemane is the travail of Father. Gethsemane is the Father causing Himself to become known. This travail, however, must take place inside the creation, inside of a very human Man, inside of the deepest personal willingness.
God can be revealed only through personal human faith.