“Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?”

                 This is one description that surely doesn’t separate the men from the boys; it separates the creatures from the Creator.  To begin demonstrating this, let’s start with an example from one of those inane and boring daytime TV game shows.  I’m thinking of the one that has a phrase with a blank in it that a contestant must fill in.  Then they match that answer to the consensus of an audience polled at an earlier date.  If the answers match, the contestant wins some money or other prize.  So for today, our example is:  “cup of _________.”  Undoubtedly the first answer would be “coffee,” the second, “tea.”  The answers would probably be reversed in England and other tea-drinking societies.  One answer I don’t think would ever show up is cup of “wrath” or “fury.”  Drink a cup of wrath?  Do they go together?  Yes, in one case.

For context, let’s go to Psalm 75 (all verses NKJV), where God says, “When I choose the proper time, I will judge uprightly…For in the hand of the Lord there is a cup, and the wine is red; it is fully mixed, and he pours it out; surely its dregs shall all the wicked of the earth drain and drink down” (vs. 2,8).  So what’s with the red wine in the cup?  Well, the writer Asaph connects it to judgment.  Isaiah adds more: “Awake, awake!  Stand up, O Jerusalem, you who have drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of his fury; you have drunk the dregs of the cup of trembling, and drained it out” (51:17).  So the fury or wrath of God is represented by the red wine.

Jeremiah expands on the analogy: “For thus says the Lord God of Israel to me: ‘Take this wine cup of fury from my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send you, to drink it.  And they will drink and stagger and go mad because of the sword that I will send among them’” (25:15-16).  Further, he immediately identifies which nations he’s talking about: “Jerusalem and Judah…Egypt…Uz…Philistines… Edom…Moab…Ammon…Tyre…Sidon…the coastlands…Dedan…Tema…Buz…the farthest corners… Arabia…all the kings in the desert…Zimri…Elam…Medes…kings of the north, far and near…and all the kingdoms of the world which are on the face of the earth” (vs. 18-26).  Get the picture?  It is a circular house of mirrors.  No one escapes this cup.  It is meant for everybody.

Have you ever trembled in total, paralyzing fear?  When you realize that worse than your worst nightmare is about to befall you?  That’s what the cup represents: the absolute unyielding penalty for your sins.  Unbelievers must drink it all.  In judgment, God will have nothing to do with our sins.  He will expose them, reject them and judge them, and us too in the process.  Here is the effect of the cup’s contents: to smell it would scald out nostrils; to see it would melt our eyes; to taste it would violently wrench our stomach; to touch it would eat away our skin.  A peek will scar us for life.  It is our complete undoing, and God says each one must drink it to the last drop.

Enter Jesus onto the world stage.  He knows each person faces his or her own cup because they are stubborn, willful, defiant and in denial.  They are full of themselves, proud, arrogant and boastful.  Yet they can do nothing to change their cup or the outcome of drinking it.  So between Father and Son, they enact a plan conceived from all eternity: they take the contents of everyone’s cup, an incalculable number of them, and pour it all into one cup.  Multiple billions of lifetimes of sin and judgments that span the ages, all poured into a single cup: his own.  And he drinks it all, yours and mine, down to the last drop.

Notice two things.  First, the Father gave this cup to the Son.  Both were involved.  Of the entire plan of God worked out before he came, Jesus asked his Father to reconsider only one thing: “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me” (Matthew 26:39).  He asked this three times in the Garden of Gethsemane, which means oil press.  The squeeze was on Jesus as the fullness of this cup stared at him.

Second, only an omnipotent God could handle such unfathomable evil and horrific judgment. He also could neither then nor ever be personally corrupted by the cup’s contents.  His purity, righteous character, holy disposition and divine person came through unscathed.  This is our God at work!

Aren’t you glad someone else drank your cup dry?  How many of your friends will drink theirs?