John 13-21 For You by Josh Moody

Author:Josh Moody
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784982478
Publisher: The Good Book Company

Through the Valley

Jesus then finished praying (18:1). There is a time to pray, but there is also a time to act. The time to act had come, and Jesus finished praying. So “Jesus left with his disciples.” Even on these steps to his coming arrest, Jesus was not yet bereft of companions. The time would come when they would leave him, but for now he was still with them and they with him. Together, they “crossed the Kidron Valley.” The Kidron Valley is symbolic in the Bible of various matters: it was the place where David fled after he had been betrayed by Absalom (2 Samuel 15:23). The “Valley of Jehoshaphat” (Joel 3:2, 12) was thought by some to be the same as the Kidron Valley, where God’s final judgment would take place (see Jeremiah 31:38-40), which was combined with a view that the Messiah would appear there (Zechariah 14:4). Jesus himself apparently often went through there (John 18:2; see 8:1), walking across the valley to the Garden of Gethsemane (18:1; see Matthew 26:36; Mark 14:32) to gather with his disciples.

Judas knew this place well (John 18:2), and so Jesus’ choice of this location for his mini-retreat with his disciples was surely deliberate. He went where he knew that Judas could find him. Jesus did not run from being betrayed; for our sakes he embraced it, waited for it, and pursued it. He was betrayed so that you might be eternally “accepted in the beloved” (Ephesians 1:6, AV). If you have been betrayed by people, remember that he was betrayed for you that you might be accepted by him.

Judas arrives at the head of a detachment of soldiers and some religious officials (John 18:3). It is an unholy alliance; the religious authorities get their information from a traitor and use the power of the military to advance their evil plan. They come up with torches and weapons—a lynch mob racing up to do its worst. Human power rails against divine power, as if weapons were any match to the power of the Son of God. But here in the garden we see not so much divine omnipotence as divine omniscience: Jesus stood there, “knowing all that was going to happen to him” (v 4). Nothing happens outside of God’s knowledge of everything. You cannot be hidden from his sight, nor fall from his care—not even in your gardens of Gethsemane. What is comforting in our suffering is not just that God knows about it but that he has also planned it for some good end that is as yet invisible to us.

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