Gethsemane - 1
“Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, counted it not a prize to be on equality with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross.” Philippians 2:5-8
In the early 300s, a man named Arius created a controversy in the Church by postulating that Jesus was somewhat not co-equal with the Father. The early Church Fathers so vigorously defended the doctrine of the Trinity that Jesus’s earthly life became inconsequential to the Christian faith. While current theology recognizes Jesus’s humanity, it pays lip service to His human life except for Good Friday. This theology treats Jesus’s earth walk as one of an automaton. It holds that Jesus really couldn’t miss it or fall short of God’s Plan because that would somehow nullify the concept of the Trinity. That view is not scripturally accurate and it implicitly denies that Jesus was fully human. Only recent New Testament scholarship has caught on to the fact that Jesus’s human life of faith played a decisive role in the God’s Plan of Redemption. (See Hays’s “The Faith of Jesus Christ” and Wallis’s “The Faith of Jesus Christ” listed in my recommended reading).
In this verse in Philippians, the Word declares that Jesus emptied Himself of all of His pre-incarnate glory when He became man. How He did this we do not know, but we take it on faith that He did so because the Word says it. The ramifications of this verse are enormous. While ordinary Christian theology generally acknowledges that He became a man, we rarely stop to consider the breadth of that truth in the context of the Gospels and, ultimately, God’s Plan of Redemption.
Like any man, Jesus had total volitional control of his faculties (soul) and the destiny of his earth-walk. He had the choice of whether to live a life that ultimately required Him to die on a cross. His destiny was not automatic nor was it left to fate. He had to consciously choose each step in His life. For instance, when tempted by Satan in the desert, Jesus volitionally could have accepted Satan’s offer. We see the same in Matthew 26:53 when Jesus said to Pilate that He could call 12 legions of angels to protect Him if He wanted to. Fortunately, for us, He chose to continue His life of obedience/faith to the Father’s Plan. It is this, this volitional life of faith, that inherited the promise of salvation for all who are in Him.
Only when we see that Jesus walked as a man with his own emotions and volition may we appreciate the true drama of Gethsemane.