In my last Gethsemane post, I stated that only when we see that Jesus walked as a man with his own emotions and volition may we appreciate the true drama of Gethsemane. Before encountering Jesus that night in the Garden, we must “set the stage” about how revealed spiritual realities may affect a man’s emotions.
Many Christians today believe that their Christian walk should be pretty much an emotionless experience. They are fearful that if they express any emotions at all, they have left the field of proper Christian doctrine and become “one of those people.” Jesus’s own walk wasn’t that way and ours shouldn’t be either.
The first thing to consider about what we might call “spiritually induced emotions” is the fact of revelation knowledge. Revelation knowledge involves the receipt of spiritual knowledge or facts without the aid of “flesh and blood” or other men. We see a dramatic example of this in Matthew 16:17:
And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. (RV).
In the context of this verse, we understand that Peter was given revelation knowledge of Jesus’s true identity, a spiritual reality, and that knowledge was not given to any of the other disciples. We also see this in Galatians where Paul wrote that God revealed the mystery of the Gospel to him by revelation knowledge without the aid of “flesh and blood.” (See Galatians 1:16). In these two instances, emotions do not appear to be too involved, but they do show us how men received revelation knowledge and acted on it.
In the story of Lazarus, we see Jesus’s emotional reaction to revelation knowledge.
In John 11, Jesus is told that Lazarus was about to die and that His help was needed. Jesus responded to Mary and Martha by saying,
This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified thereby.
While many have preached the source of Lazarus’s sickness inaccurately, there is no dispute that Jesus spoke to Martha and Mary about the end result of the incident. In light of Jesus’s statement, one would come away with the idea that He traipsed down to Lazarus’s tomb (Lazarus had since died) with a smile on His face because He knew that He was going to raise him from the dead and that would be His greatest miracle before the Cross. But He didn’t act that way at all. In John 11:33, 35, we read:
When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit and was troubled … Jesus burst into tears. (Literal)
If we didn’t know about the existence of revelation knowledge, the revealed knowledge of spiritual realities, then we might think that Jesus burst into tears just because of the scene. That is not the case. The Word explicitly says that He “groaned in the spirit and was troubled (in the spirit).” His tears were not those of human sympathy, but were of the kind of spiritual intercession that is more clearly delineated in Romans 8:26 - “groanings that cannot be uttered in articulate speech.” The revelation knowledge given to him involved an intercessory burden for Lazarus. He experienced a dramatic emotional reaction due to that spiritual knowledge and it caused Him to burst into tears.
Paul’s statements that he “travailed” in prayer with many tears demonstrate a similar spiritual/emotional interaction. (2 Cor. 2:4; Gal. 4:19).
As I stated in the last post, Jesus did not walk the earth as an automaton. He was fully human and experienced all the kinds of emotions that we all do. In the Lazarus story, we see that He experienced spiritually-induced emotions that were quite dramatic. With this knowledge, we can better understand Gethsemane.
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