Our Lord's Prayer for Resurrection

FREQUENTLY the fine shades of meaning in the Greek bring out wonderful truth. In Hebrews 5:7 our Lord is referred to as the One "who in the days of his flesh when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong cryings and tears unto him that was able to save him from death." The preposition "from" in the Greek is the key to the understanding of this passage. 

There are two prepositions which mean "from," one, "from the edge of," the other, "out from within." The first one could be used when one goes from the building, having stood outside against its wall. The other would be used when one is inside of a building and goes out from it. The second is used here.

Our Lord prayed to be saved from the Cross if there was such a possibility and it was within the will of God. Not that He was unwilling to suffer for lost sinners, but His holy soul shrank very properly and naturally from the terrible ordeal of being made sin and of having His Father turn away His face. It was the revulsion of His holy soul from that awful thing called sin, and the natural yearning of His heart for unbroken fellowship with the Father that wrung from His lips that prayer. There in Gethsemane He prayed to be saved from all of this. The first Greek preposition could be used in this case.

But the second one appears in the Greek text. This reference is not to the Gethsemane prayer. Here He prayed to be saved not from the edge of death, but out of death.

Here He expected to die, and He prayed to be saved out from under the dominion of death. That meant that He prayed to be raised from the dead. We find His prayer recorded in Psalm 22, a Messianic Psalm which many believe our Lord uttered in its entirety while on the Cross.

"But be not thou far from me, O God. O my strength, haste thee to help me. Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog. Save me from the lion's mouth." This is His prayer for resurrection.

He praises God for answered prayer in the words, "for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns. I will declare thy name unto my brethren." Our Lord's earthly life was saturated with prayer. As the Man Christ Jesus, He prayed His way through His ministry even to the very end. What a lesson to us. Let us live prayer-saturated lives.

(Wuest Greek NT Studies Volume 3)