Tip of the Day, July 27
July 27 – John 18:11; “Then said Jesus unto Peter, Put up thy sword into the sheath: the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?”
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All evidence in the Bible contradicts what the Mormon Church claims about the atonement of Jesus. There isn’t anything in the Bible that remotely suggests the payment for sin took place in the Garden of Gethsemane yet here we have a bold teaching claiming otherwise.
Ask your Mormon friend what they think about John 18:11.
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Howard W. Hunter, His Final Hours, Ensign Magazine, May 1974, pg. 1; “Christ’s agony in the garden is unfathomable by the finite mind, both as to intensity and cause. … In that hour of anguish Christ met and overcame all the horrors that Satan … could inflict. …In some manner, actual and terribly real though to man incomprehensible, the Savior took upon Himself the burden of the sins of mankind from Adam to the end of the world.” (James E. Talmage, Jesus the Christ, Deseret Book Co., 1962, p. 613.)”
We were just discussing the Garden of Gethsemane last night in our men’s Bible study…
I brought up the point that Jesus knew He was about to endure the cross and that Him sweating blood was not because He was taking on the whole of humanity’s sin. He knew that for the first time in all of eternity He would be seperated from God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. He wasn’t “stressed out” knowing that He would be beaten beyond recognition, scourged until His ribs were visible, pierced with spikes in His hands and feet, and die on that cross. He was sweating blood because His human body was reacting to His thoughts and feelings of the impending seperation from the Trinity.
If He had taken on the sin of mankind while in the Garden, He would have been seperated right then and there. Could He have re-attached the ear of the servant if He was full of man’s sin and seperated?