Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night of His betrayal and arrest. He had less than a day left to live. It was late at night. He wanted to pray. He took Peter, James, and John with Him for a certain amount of companionship. He was in utter agony, knowing what He was about to endure.
Did I mention it was late at night?
As Jesus prayed, His three friends, totally oblivious to what was going on, fell asleep. Jesus uttered the immortal words which every Christian struggles with daily: “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41).
In their minds, Peter, James, and John were certainly willing to help Jesus—as far as they knew what He was doing, something of which they had no clue. But they were tired. Their sleepy flesh conquered their weak, willing spirit, and they could not watch with Jesus for even an hour. In one sense, it didn’t matter. What HAD to happen DID happen and it is the only hope of mankind.
Why were the apostles so weak? Well, it wasn’t only because of the nature of human “flesh,” it also involved the Jewish worldview, their “zeitgeist,” in the first century. The Jews—and that included the apostles—grew up expecting an all-conquering King to come save them from their enemies and exalt them to worldly power and grandeur. They didn’t expect, or teach, a suffering Savior who would die an ignominious death on a cross. The “zeitgeist.” The apostles believed it. It was the world they grew up in. It was how they had been educated. It is what all their teachers taught them. They couldn’t see any other way.
And it was 100% wrong.
Jesus had told them, repeatedly, that He was to die and be raised again. It didn’t click with them. They didn’t get it. It was totally contrary to their worldview. So, they had no idea what Jesus was facing on that night in Gethsemane. As a result, they slept.
The first century A.D. Jewish “zeitgeist” was wrong. They were totally in error about their Messiah coming to establish an earthly kingdom. He is indeed, right now, King of kings, and Lord of lords (I Timothy 3:15), but the church is His kingdom (Colossians 1:13, 18). It is a spiritual kingdom, was always intended to be, and not an earthly, physical kingdom where Jesus would reign on an earthly throne from an earthly Jerusalem. The latter—the earthly reign—was what the Jews craved. It’s what they still want. It’s still their “zeitgeist.” It was wrong in the first century, it is wrong today.
Beware of “zeitgeists.” They are of human origin and thus, more often than not, are erroneous. Our current “zeitgeist” in Western Civilization and much of the world is based on Darwinian theory, which in all its logical implications, produces naturalism, materialism, and atheism—all of which are wrong. True science demonstrates more holes in Darwin’s theory than in a ton of Swiss cheese. There are varieties among species, of course; no one denies this, or ever has, before or after Darwin. But varieties among species is not Darwinism; transmutation across species boundaries, transformation by a finely graduated organic chain, across species, is Darwinism. And neither biology, geology, and certainly not history, show anything of the sort. Occasionally, evolutionists will even admit it. Stephen J. Gould, one of the leading evolutionists of the last century, wrote in his book, The Panda’s Thumb, “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches. The rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms. Transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt.” Again, Gould was no “creationist,” he was simply being honest. The proof for Darwinism doesn’t exist. If it did, the fossil record, the history of the planet would show it. It doesn’t. But, shhhh. It’s a “trade secret” that evolutionists don’t want you to know.
But, in all its wrongness, Darwin’s theory dominates our modern “zeitgeist.” It is as wrong as the apostles were in the first century. It takes a strong spirit, not a weak flesh, to rise above one’s zeitgeist and accept the truth. The apostles and the greatest, most educated Jewish leaders of the first century couldn’t do it in their time. And very few can do it today.
And, of course, sometimes the spirit isn’t even willing. That may be an even bigger problem than the weakness of the flesh.