Spiritual Gifts part 60: The most bitter cup and the most sweet name

Pastor-Teacher
John Farley
Thursday,
December 9, 2010

Spiritual Gifts Part 60: That most bitter cup and that most sweet name.

Biblical adoption is that grand design of God by which He confers or bestows upon us the status or the standing of adult sons and daughters.

Biblical adoption shows up in connection with the moment of salvation, yet it also shows up in God’s thoughts in eternity past, and then again at the Rapture.

GAL 4:6
Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!"

In both passages we also have the same Greek verb, krazo, which is "to cry out“.

MAT 27:50
And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit.

If you desire to glorify your Father as an adopted son, you must follow the lead of your older Brother Christ and learn how to handle suffering for the cause of Christ.

Before he receives the inheritance, he must pass through periods of suffering.

This points to the anxieties, tensions, and persecutions that result from being followers of the One who was rejected by the world.

The abundance of our entrance into Christ’s kingdom is to a great extent determined by our endurance in following Christ in spite of the problems, difficulties and persecutions, 2PE 1:11.

As Christ suffered and entered into His glory (1PE 1:11), so fellow heirs with Christ are called to suffer during this present time (1PE 2:21, PHI 1:29) as we prepare to join Christ in glory.

1PE 2:21
For you have been called for this purpose, since Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in His steps,

Consider the sufferings that Christ endured as He went about on a daily basis submitting to His Father’s will for His life.

LUK 9:22
saying, " The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed and be raised up on the third day."

Luke 9:23
And He was saying to them all, " If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me.

The word here for Son is huios :
the fully mature, adult son.

“learned” is the aorist active indicative of
manthano;
“learn by use and practice, to acquire the habit of, be accustomed to,"

“obedience” is the Greek noun
?hupakoe
It has the connotation of hearing a command (ie the word of God) and executing it.

He came to understand through experience what it meant for a human being to constantly be obedient to the Father’s will, and that it meant dying daily.

He experienced all our grief, all our sorrows, all our disappointments, all our sadness, and out of that in His humanity He learned things.

That is why today He is the perfect, most wonderful, High Priest who constantly pleads our cause before the Father, HEB 7:25.

He experienced just how difficult it is at times for human beings to submit to the will of the Father.

Son by nature (deity) though He was, He learned from the things He suffered—obedience!"

The sound of the words in the Greek adds another layer of meaning.

The words are near in sound but seemed far apart in meaning.

The suffering servant passage in Isaiah is another example. ISA 52:13-53:12.
It describes unparalleled suffering, so it uses parallelism to do it.

Christ had been THE SON of God for all eternity.
He was sinless.
And yet even for Him, suffering had its unique purpose in His human life.

Only a human being who has suffered in the same way can truly understand what the other person is experiencing.