Lyrics
To see the King of heaven fall
In anguish to His knees,
The Light and Hope of all the world
Now overwhelmed with grief.
What nameless horrors must He see,
To cry out in the garden:
‘Oh, take this cup away from me!
Yet not my will but Yours
Yet not my will but Yours.’
To know each friend will fall away,
And heaven’s voice be still,
For hell to have its vengeful day
Upon Golgotha’s hill.
No words describe the Saviour’s plight
To be by God forsaken
Till wrath and love are satisfied,
And every sin is paid,
And every sin is paid.
What took Him to this wretched place,
What kept Him on this road?
His love for Adam’s curséd race,
For every broken soul.
No sin too slight to overlook,
No crime too great to carry,
All mingled in this poisoned cup,
And yet He drank it all
The Saviour drank it all,
The Saviour drank it all.
The agony of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane
This is another of the story songs that Keith and I have been writing, that tracks the story of Christ’s final hours before the cross. He had written the melody some time before, and I remember deciding on the theme, having heard an amazing sermon from C J Mahaney some time before that on the theme of Jesus in the Garden.
The gospels give us an amazing and quite disturbing glimpse of the Son of God in those hours. This confident, powerful man in these hours seems to be reduced to a quivering wreck, someone so overwhelmed with the prospect of what he’s going to go through that he feels it’s almost going to crush him to death.
And what is he going to go through? He knows he’s going to die – but is that it? I believe at the heart if it is the heart of the meaning of the cross. He knows in those moments on the cross he is going to take the weight, the curse, the punishment of every sin that has ever been committed – and it is going to do to him what sin ultimately does – it is going to separate him from his Father. Imagine – the Son of God, who has known eternal intimate fellowship with His Father and the Spirit, is going to experience something that no person (by the grace of God) has ever had to experience – the horror of total and complete separation from God the Father.
We sometimes talk about hell on earth – situations where people have to suffer the horrific consequences of rampant evil – Christ went to the darkest, most horrific place possible for our sake.
