What the Bible says about Cup as Metaphor of Suffering
(From Forerunner Commentary)
"Cup" usually implies trial. David is showing God on both sides here, in blessings and in trials. God is our inheritance, but He is also with him in these trials.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Resurrection From the Dead
If we, as the elect of God, believe in “Christ crucified” and all that it entails (I Corinthians 1:23), then we must recognize the need for suffering and trial—to drink of the cup that God has prepared for each of us just as He did for our Savior. The apostle Peter encourages us that, if we partake in Christ's sufferings, it will be well worth the effort at His return (I Peter 4:12-13).
We should also realize that in comparison to what was required of Christ, our cup of burden will pale in magnitude; we will only be drinking from the cup He had to empty (Matthew 11:30; Romans 12:1). While these two verses should not be taken to mean that our burdens will be undemanding, we should always keep our personal sufferings in perspective by remaining aware and appreciative of the staggering effort required for our Creator and Savior to make the sacrifices He made.
Martin G. Collins
The Miracles of Jesus Christ: Healing Malchus' Ear (Part Two)
Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, just a short while after urging His disciples to drink of His cup. As He prayed fervently and emotionally to His Father in heaven, the symbol of the cup was fresh in His mind. Just as He had given His disciples a cup from which to drink, so had the Father placed a cup before Him! Notice Matthew 26:39: "He went a little farther and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, 'O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.'"
In the Old Testament, the cup is also a metaphor for the divine punishment of sin. Hence, Jesus' death would involve far more than just physical torture and death. Christ would become the target of untold divine wrath, as every sin that had ever been committed would be heaped on this one sinless Being! He who had sought always to do the will of His Father perfectly, He who had heard His loving Father exclaim, "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased," would now experience His Father's overflowing wrath for all sin, including all the worst sins! Some of what He suffered was for our sins—yours and mine.
Jesus knew that death and incurring God's wrath for sin comprised the climax of His mission on earth as the Messiah. But now, as that hour approached, His awareness of God's wrath against sin became even more intense! The Bible explains this in detail in Romans 1:18—3:20. To Jesus, it was an unimaginable horror!
The second and third times He prays in the Garden, He changes His words slightly, as He realizes He definitely has to drink of that cup: "O My Father, if this cup cannot pass away from Me unless I drink it, Your will be done" (Matthew 26:42, 44). He now fully accepts the fact that the only way to get past this ordeal is to go through it.
The cup is still on Jesus' mind even after the soldiers from the High Priest come to capture Him. When Peter tries to defend Him physically with a sword and misses Malchus' head, cutting off his ear instead, Jesus says to Peter: "Put your sword into the sheath. Shall I not drink the cup which My Father has given Me?" (John 18:11). Indeed! And shall we not drink the cup which our King has given us?
Staff
Are You Drinking of the Master's Cup?Related Topics: Cup as Metaphor | Cup as Metaphor of Divine Punishment | Cup as Metaphor of Suffering | Suffering
What was this "cup" that Jesus asked might pass from Him if it were His Father's will? Was He, in a moment of weakness, asking His Father to prevent Him from going through the coming hours of physical torture? This is doubtful considering that Jesus, with the fullest knowledge and foresight of all the horrible details, had spent His entire human lifetime, and millennia prior to it, in preparation for this day.
A brief word study on these verses may prove helpful here. The word "cup" is translated from the Greek noun poterion, which can mean the vessel's liquid contents as well as the vessel itself. It is obvious, of course, that Jesus drank the contents, not the vessel. Poterion derives from pino, "to drink."
The word "pass" is translated from the Greek verb parerchomai, which can refer to the passage of time. From this, we can deduce that Jesus may have been asking His Father to make the time it would take to complete this awful "drink" pass as quickly as possible, but even then, only if it fit in with His Father's perfect will.
Most of us have at some time had to drink some horrible-tasting medicine, and although we knew that it was beneficial for us to drink it, the procedure still seemed to take an eternity! By prior agreement with His Father, Jesus was at this time voluntarily draining an enormous cup of spiritual "drink," which was ultimately a healing medicine for mankind but at the same time was to Him a deadly poison.
This spiritual drink was a mixture of two ingredients that could not have been more repulsive to Them both. The first ingredient was the sin of the whole world. The second was Their separation from each other. Jesus' spiritual poison did not just taste horrible. It racked His body and His mind with stinging agony (I Corinthians 15:56; Luke 22:44). Perhaps, in agreeing to drink of this cup, He even accepted a taste of the fiery fate of those who would never repent, as foretold through the prophet Jeremiah that the poison was like fire that had been injected into His bones (Lamentations 1:13).
Staff
Jesus' Final Human Thoughts (Part Two)Related Topics: Cup as Metaphor | Cup as Metaphor of Suffering | Cup of the Lord | Cup, Master's | Spiritual Drink
When we observe the Passover each spring, we each drink from a cup of wine. The wine symbolizes the blood of Jesus Christ, shed on our behalf, which accomplishes a number of tremendous things that we cannot do for ourselves. We tend not to focus as much on the cup, but it, too, is a foundational part of Passover's meaning.
When the Bible speaks of "drinking of the cup," it indicates that a person is also sharing in the consequences of whatever the cup contains. "Drinking of the cup" goes beyond merely partaking of the liquid but implies accepting everything that happens as a result. Thus, when the mother of Zebedee's sons petition Jesus to grant her sons positions of honor, He asks James and John if they are able to "drink the cup" that He is about to drink (Matthew 20:20-23). He implies that if they desire to reign with Him in glory, they have to be willing to also share in His whole experience, not all of which would be glorious.
In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus asks the Father to let that cup pass from Him if it were possible (Matthew 26:39-42). The cup of which He speaks is the cup He had just drunk from at the Passover. At that meal, He had identified the cup as "the new covenant in My blood" (Luke 22:20; emphasis ours throughout). By drinking from that cup, He had agreed to make the New Covenant, which required a perfect blood sacrifice that only He could fulfill. When we drink from that cup at Passover, we, too, agree to share in whatever results from that covenant, assenting to pay whatever it costs to become fully unified with Jesus Christ.
On the one hand, priceless blessings and promises come from that cup. But on the other hand, a price must be paid in this life, which can perhaps best be summed up with the word "suffering." Suffering is not a concept that we like to think about, and our mind resists it, even as Christ prayed that, if possible, that cup would pass from Him. However, when we become united with Christ through partaking of His blood, our lives with Him will involve suffering, just as His did.
To evaluate the depth of our convictions and the maturity of our faith honestly, it is necessary to understand what the Bible has to say about suffering. Because of the weakness of our flesh, we eagerly anticipate the Messiah's crown of honor but shy away from identifying with the crown of thorns that was thrust upon His head. We look forward to the white robes of glory but turn from the scarlet robe of mockery and ridicule placed on Christ. As one commentator put it, most Christians "would desire to share the glories and triumphs of redemption but not its poverty, contempt, and persecution." If we are merely seeking that crown of glory, hoping to skirt the less enjoyable parts of Christ's experience, we must ask ourselves whether we really understand and accept the Passover cup.
Even a cursory reading of the epistles shows a clear sequence: First, there is suffering, then there is glory—and we cannot have the second without some measure of the first (see Luke 24:25-26; Romans 8:17; I Peter 1:10-11; 4:13; Revelation 2:10).
Jesus Christ is the ultimate example of this sequence because only He has suffered and been glorified. Nevertheless, we can also look at the record of the heroes of faith, as well as the apostles and prophets, and realize that, throughout history, being chosen by God meant there would be some suffering involved. Just as day follows night, so our glory will not come until we have gone through darkness
David C. Grabbe
A Look at Christian Suffering (Part One)Related Topics: A Look at Christian Suffering | Bread and Wine as Symbols | Cup as Metaphor of Suffering | Cup as New Covenant | Fellowship of Christ's Sufferings | Glorifying God in our Suffering | Heroes of Faith | New Covenant | New Wine as Symbol of Christ's Blood | Passover Cup | Sharing Christ's Sufferings | Unity with Christ | Wine as a Symbol
Peter suggests that, since Christ suffered for us, we should put on this attitude as we would a piece of armor. This attitude or guiding principle has a couple of elements. One is that Jesus was so determined to do the Father's will that, after He drank of the cup, He suffered rather than turn back for the sake of self-preservation. Thus, in our own lives, we must also have the attitude that the Father's will is what matters the most. If doing His will leads to some sort of suffering, then we are sharing the fellowship of Christ's suffering.
A second element is the relationship between suffering and sin. In verse 2, Peter points out that suffering is a way for us to cease from sin. Just as our sins caused Jesus to suffer so we could have life, so our sins and those of others will lead to suffering in our lives and in those around us. Yet, if we approach that suffering with faith—that is, with belief, trust in God, and obedience—then our suffering can be used to a good end. The presence of suffering reveals that at some point God's royal law of liberty—His perfect law of love—has been transgressed, thus suffering can serve as a powerful teaching tool to increase our understanding of how God wants us to live.
Sometimes our suffering has little to do with what we believe, and it may not even be directly related to an action or failing on our part. It may be what we consider "undeserved." However, if we commit ourselves to Him who judges righteously, and He decides that we must drink from this cup, we can trust that the suffering will accomplish good somewhere, at some time, even as Christ's wholly undeserved suffering has accomplished an overwhelming amount of good.
Maybe it will teach us an aspect of God's way that we could not learn from simply reading about it. Perhaps it will allow us to identify more closely with our Savior. It may allow us to sympathize with another member of His Body in his suffering. It could be a means to test our trust in Him or even a way that He has decided to keep us humble and submissive to Him.
Whatever the reason—and we may never fully understand it in this life—if we approach it with faith, we can trust that God will strengthen us as we suffer and He will cause the circumstance to bear good fruit. Part of that fruit will be abhorrence of whatever sin caused the suffering, and in this way, part of God's law will be written indelibly on our hearts. Part of the New Covenant, which He signed with His own blood, is that He promises to write His law on our hearts (Hebrews 8:10; 10:16). Therefore, part of our keeping of the covenant is to allow Him to keep those terms and to trust Him as He faithfully carries out His work in us.
David C. Grabbe
A Look at Christian Suffering (Part Three)
The phrase "drinking of the cup" eventually symbolized sharing the consequences of what was in that cup. It also came to mean accepting what the king dealt out. The whole world drinks of Babylon's cup, full of the wine of her fornications and abominations. Since "drinking of the cup" means accepting whatever is appointed for one to experience—both good and bad, joyful or sorrowful—all who drink of Babylon's cup will share in her future.
In the Bible are numerous references to this cup of God's wrath and how Babylon and other nations will drink from it, symbolizing the divine punishments being inflicted (Revelation 14:10; 16:19; Psalm 11:6; Isaiah 51:17, etc.). Revelation 14:10, for example, speaks of drinking "of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out full strength into the cup of His indignation." Drinking of a cup means participating in whatever that cup contains.
Those whom God is calling out of Babylon are asked to drink of another cup. The psalmist writes, "I will take up the cup of salvation" (Psalm 116:13). This cup has far more positive ramifications for us than the curses boiling within God's cup of indignation! The cup of salvation contains all the blessings of God, especially those of eternal life and reward in His Kingdom.
Staff
Are You Drinking of the Master's Cup?Related Topics: Christ's Cup | Cup as Metaphor | Cup as Metaphor of Divine Punishment | Cup as Metaphor of Suffering | Drinking of the Cup | Master's Cup