Jesus’ Life of Obedience: The Expression of Love

The Lord’s entire life can be summed up with the word love. None loved God with all his being and none loved his neighbors, friends, and foes as Jesus Christ, the Son of Man. The best definition of His love is captured in one word—obedience. Both are combined in the words Jesus spoke shortly before entering His final stretch of the race His Father called Him to run: Arise, let us go hence. The final battlefield ahead included the horrors of Gethsemane, Gabbatha, and Golgotha.

Jesus’ obedience predates time as Psalm 40:7-8 reveals: “Then said I, Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of Me, I delight to do Thy will, O my God: yea, Thy law is within My heart.” Even though the Father’s will included exchanging His heavenly delights and comfort with the hellish horrors and pain on behalf of His people, it was His delight to obey His Father’s will.

The heart of Jesus’ ministry was to “destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). This is fully in line with God’s declaration of war against Satan and his seed in Genesis 3:15. The final act of the Seed of the Woman would be to bruise Satan’s head. That bruising of his head did not mean the annihilation of Satan’s being but the cancellation of his headship over this world. The only way to accomplish this was by obedience. Paul stated this link in Philippians 2:8b-10, “…and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth.”

Satan relentlessly tempted the second Adam. If he could make Him disobey, Mansoul and the world would remain his dominion. Satan understood that if he could succeed in preventing the cross, it would not only affect the Son of Man—it would prevent Jesus from becoming the Door to everlasting life for all God’s people. Only through His obedience, both actively to keep the Law of God and passively in taking the curse of the Law of God, could Jesus be the Door from a well-deserved banishment to God, to the pasture of communion with God (John 10:9). Satan suffered defeat upon defeat as the Son of Man obeyed His Father’s will. Now the last hours of this battle were coming.

The hardest part of Jesus’ battle was to obey His Father’s will in taking the full curse of the Law on behalf of His chosen people. From the onset of Jesus’ public ministry, Satan concentrated his efforts to dissuade the Lord Jesus from His priestly sacrifice of laying down His life (John 10:17). How subtle was his false offer: “All these things will I give Thee, if Thou wilt fall down and worship me” (Matthew 4:9). The Lord adamantly refused Satan’s request. The only way to the throne of glory was the way through the cross. “Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory?” (Luke 24:26).

The words of our text were spoken in the Upper Room. They followed Jesus’ revelation that the prince of this world was coming (verse 30). It would be His most intense hour of tribulation. John never forgot how deeply troubled in spirit his Master was as the battle drew near though, at that time, John understood little about the deepest reason (John 13:21). Yet he never forgot the resoluteness with which His Master stood up from the Upper Room table and said: “But that the world may know that I love the Father; and as the Father gave me commandment, even so I do. Arise, let us go hence.”

Arise, let us go hence. The words are commonly used in military context. Their intent is therefore clear: “Let us go to face the final battle.” His act was the deepest expression of love to His Father. No greater love to the Father has ever been witnessed than when the second Adam obeyed the Father’s command to drink the cup of condemnation. In contrast with the first Adam, who was commanded to not eat, Jesus heard the command, “Drink this and Thou shall live.”

No command has been so costly as this one. Never will we be able to describe the horror of what the Lord Jesus saw when He heard the commandment of God to drink the remaining part, the hardest part, of the cup of the curse Now comes the test, the final test. Will He drink it to the bottom? His whole soul trembled in fear as He felt the horror of the imputation of all the sins of God’s elect and the resulting total abandonment of His Person by God. Though He initially took the cup at His incarnation, now He needed to drink the last and most bitter part of it—to be condemned as a transgressor of God’s holy Law. His soul shrank back from this reality, but He did drink it. Arise, let us go hence. Why? It was because He loved His Father more than His own life, His own name, His own comfort.

The story of Jesus’ suffering and death is the story of His devotional love or obedience to His Father and His people. Through this travail of love, He satisfied God’s righteous demand in order to pardon sin and receive His prodigals back. These redemptive acts of the Saviour we will trace again in the weeks to come as we follow Jesus in His pathway of suffering. May God’s Spirit lead us into the heart of the gospel message of this priestly obedience of the Saviour of sinners. Nothing less than His obedience can secure us from God’s right eous wrath. Nothing dishonors God’s holy Being more than when we seek to recommend ourselves to Him on basis of our faulty obedience. Nothing will bring distance and darkness in the life of communion than looking to self as a door of access to God. Oh, how we all need to learn with Paul to forget and abandon all our doings or feelings. Not the labors of our hands can bring us peace with God. Not our sacrifices of obedience and love can secure our standing before God. Besides Jesus’ obedience to the Law both in life and death, everything else is sinking sand. To learn this dying to every effort of self-justification is not a comfortable journey but leads to solid comfort. Let us pray, therefore, that God’s Spirit not only enable us to behold the glory of Christ’s and death but also open our hearts obedience in His life and death but also open our hearts to embrace these sufferings as the only ground of hope and comfort.

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