Take From My Hand This Cup - The One Year Praying through the Bible for Your Kids

This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, said to me: “Take from my hand this cup filled to the brim with my anger, and make all the nations to whom I send you drink from it. When they drink from it, they will stagger, crazed by the warfare I will send against them.” Jeremiah 25:15-16

THE LORD GAVE his prophet Jeremiah a vision in which he handed Jeremiah a cup filled to the brim with his anger. Jeremiah took the cup first to Jerusalem —God’s own city —and then to all of the kingdoms of the world and made them drink from it. It is a picture of terrifying judgment against every kingdom that opposes God’s Kingdom and does evil. Yet it is also a picture of judgment that has been prepared for every sinner who rejects God and his Son, Jesus Christ.

When this cup, filled with God’s white-hot, punishing anger against everything evil, was set before Jesus, he prayed, “My Father! If it is possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine” (Matthew 26:39). Jesus agonized as he anticipated the anguish of drinking the cup of judgment and experiencing the resulting break in relationship with his Father. But he did drink it —every last drop.

We all deserve to drink from this cup. But the good news of the gospel is that God’s own Son consumed this cup of judgment so that all who put their faith in him do not have to drink it. Because he drank the cup of God’s wrath, we and our children have been handed another cup —one filled not with judgment but with salvation. “I will lift up the cup of salvation and praise the LORD’s name for saving me” (Psalm 116:13).

Lord, we deserve to drink from the bitter cup of your wrath, but Christ has emptied it in our stead. Now you hold out to us the cup of salvation. May ________ take this cup and drink deeply from it with great gratitude.