Jesus in Gethsemane, Is There No Other Way?

If God is the great and all-powerful God of the universe then why did He make His only Son suffer and die? That wasn't very nice! Couldn't there have been an easier and better way to save us?

Matthew 26:36-46,1:27
Hebrews 4:15-16,2:17,1:3,10:4
Romans 8:7,1:18,3:24-26
1 Timothy 2:5-6
Acts 4:12
Isaiah 64:6
Colossians 2:23
1 John 4:10
John 13:31-32,6:40

Sermon discussion topics for parents to use with their children:

• Describe Jesus' circumstances in the text.
• Explain why He would ask, Is there no other way?
• The Father said no to the Son for several reasons. What is the Bible's teaching in Hebrews 2:14-18,4:14-16 about why the Father said no?
• In His garden brokenness, what does Jesus reveal to us about the Father?
• What parties were at war in the garden of Gethsemane?
• Who brought an end to the war, and how did He accomplish it?
• Why couldn't we drink the cup of God's wrath for ourselves?
• Why could only Jesus drink it, and what did His drinking it accomplish?
• What was the cosmic contradiction that needed to be set right?
• How did God set it right?
• What is the ultimate reason the Father said no?

Scott Graubard
Crossroads Christian Fellowship Church
Greenville, PA

God and Man in One Person

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Luke 1:26-38
Hebrews 4:14-16,5:7-9,2:10,2:14-18
John 1:1
Colossians 2:9

It was not because the Son of God needed to experience it to become accustomed to the emotion of mercy, but because He could not persuade us that He is kind and ready to help us, unless He had been tested by our misfortunes: and this like other things He has given us. Whenever, therefore, all kinds of evils press upon us, let this be our immediate consolation, that nothing befalls us which the Son of God has not experienced Himself, so that He can sympathize with us; and let us not doubt that He is in it with us as if He were distresses along with us. John Calvin

Sympathy with the sinner in his trial does not depend on the experience of sin but on the experience of the strength of temptation to sin which only the sinless can know in it's full intensity. He who falls yields before the last strain. B. F. Westcott

Pastor Todd Jaussen
Crossroads Christian Fellowship Church
Greenville, PA