It is Finished

Turn with me in your Bibles to the Gospel of John, chapter 19, and we read from verse 28 to 37. John 19, verse 28, After this Jesus, knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, said, I thirst. Now a vessel full of sour wine was sitting there, and they filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on Hesop, and put it to his mouth. So when Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, It is finished. Bowing his head, he gave up his spirit. Therefore, because it was the preparation day, that the body should not remain on the cross on the Sabbath, for that Sabbath was a high day, the Jews asked Pilate that their legs might be broken and that they might be taken away. Then the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who was crucified with him. But when they came to Jesus they saw that he was already dead. They did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out. And he who has seen has testified, and his testimony is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth, so that you may believe. For these things were done that the scripture should be fulfilled, not one of his bones shall be broken. And again another scripture says, they shall look on him whom they pierced. The Lord bless to us the reading of his inspired word. Our communion meditation this morning is taken from John 19 and verse 30. So when Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, it is finished. And bowing his head, he gave up his spirit. The other three gospels tell us that at this point Jesus cried with a loud voice and gave or breathed his last. But they do not tell us what he actually said. It's John alone who records that he said, it is finished. For John was at the cross, the only apostle at the cross, and he heard for himself this great cry of triumph. In the original Greek, the text is one word, the Greek word tetelestai. And it is in the perfect tense in order to convey the truth that what has been accomplished has benefits that continue forever. No wonder it was proclaimed with a loud voice. It was the cry of a victor, not a victim. It was a vigorous shout of triumph, loud enough to set all heaven ringing. loud enough for demons to hear and shudder, loud enough for men throughout the ages to hear and be filled with hope. But what precisely had been finished? The single Greek verb stands out in grand simplicity. No explanatory comment is added to it. It is left to speak for itself. Because in truth, No one meaning can exhaust the content of these words. It is left to us to draw from scripture the things that Jesus had completed and finished by his death on the cross. Here are some of them. In the first place, the prophecies and types of his first coming were fulfilled. We must be careful not to separate verse 30, our text, from verse 28, where the same Greek word, tetelestai, is found. Jesus, knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, said, I thirst. What John is saying is that our Lord knew that the prophecies concerning his final moments on earth were now being fulfilled. It's a fact that John points us to again and again. Verse 36, for these things were done that the scripture should be fulfilled, not one of his bones shall be broken. And again, verse 37, and another scripture says, they shall look on him whom they pierced. In amazing detail, the birth, life and death of Jesus were predicted hundreds of years before in the Old Testament. As I had spoken of the Virgin, who shall conceive and bear a son. And that prophecy, as you know, was fulfilled when Jesus was miraculously conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Ghost. Micah foretold that he would be born in Bethlehem. Jeremiah warned of the suffering that would accompany Messiah's birth, of Rachel weeping for her children. That prophecy was fulfilled when Herod, learning of the birth of the Messiah, gave orders for every child in Bethlehem under the age of two to be murdered, hoping to get rid of Jesus. But warned by the angel, Joseph and Mary fled to Egypt. And so the prophecy was fulfilled, Out of Egypt shall I call my son. When Jesus began his public ministry, his forerunner was John the Baptist, as God had predicted through Malachi, saying, Behold, I send my messenger before to prepare the way for me. Moreover, scripture predicted that when Messiah came, he would be despised and rejected by men, betrayed by his own familiar friend, and sold for 30 pieces of silver. Regarding his death, Isaiah spoke of his silence before his judges, his being wounded for our transgressions, his prayer for these tormentors, and his burial in a rich man's tomb. David in the Psalms foretold the piercing of his hands and feet, the casting of lots for his garments, his cry of dereliction, the offering of gall and vinegar to drink, the commitment of his spirit into the hands of God, who would not let his soul suffer or his body suffer corruption in the grave, a reference to his resurrection. So I say, the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy in the life, death and resurrection of Christ is one of the things Jesus had in mind when he cried, it is finished. Everything he came to do in his first coming was now done. But not only had the prophecies in the Old Testament been fulfilled, but also all the types that were a prefiguring of His first coming. For there were many events, ceremonies, and people in the Old Testament who were presented as foreshadowings of the coming of Christ and the work He was going to do. So when Noah found shelter in the ark from the judgment of God upon the world, it was an event that pointed to Christ, who would shelter the people of God from the final judgment at the end of the world. When Abraham was commanded to sacrifice his only son Isaac, God intervened by providing a ram instead. And it was a foreshadowing of the day that God would give his own son as a sacrifice for our sins rather than that we should die for our own sins. And then when the Israelites sinned in the wilderness and were dying because they had been bitten by fiery serpents, God healed them when he told Moses to put a bronze snake on a pole and lift it up for the Israelites to see. And all who saw it were healed. It was an event in Old Testament history that pointed to Christ, who himself said, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. When the Passover lamb was slain, the Jews were commanded for each household to paint the blood on the top and on the bottom and on the sides of the threshold or the mantle of each door. And if you drew a line from top to bottom and from side to side, it made a cross foreshadowing the shedding of Christ's blood, our Passover Lamb. which would redeem us and deliver us from a greater slavery of sin and hell. And so we could go on to the book of Leviticus and the whole system of priesthood and the temple and ceremonies and sacrifices. They all pointed to the coming of Jesus as the great high priest. who by his single perfect sacrifice of himself on the cross would eliminate forever all further sacrifices and bring about the destruction of the temple itself. Accordingly, when our Lord gave up his spirit, Matthew says, Behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom, and the earth shook, and the rocks were split. The massive curtain in the temple which prevented men from going into the holiest of all and into the very presence of the Almighty God was ripped in half from the top to the bottom to show if man had done it, they'd have to have gone from the bottom up. But God did it. It showed that God had done it because it was torn from the top down to the bottom. And it was an indication that the way was now open for all to come to God through the merits of the shed blood of Jesus Christ. It signified the end of all Old Testament worship. For Jesus had offered himself upon the cross as a full and a final atonement for sin, and everyone who believes in Jesus Christ as their Saviour has direct access to God the Father through Jesus as their Great High Priest. The Old Testament sacrifices were merely a foreshadowing of His great sacrifice on the cross. They had no intrinsic value to forgive sin, none. For as Hebrews 10 says, it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins. But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God because his work was finished. Well, that's the first meaning of these words. With our Lord's death, all the prophecies and all the types concerning His first coming as the Messiah to provide salvation for His people were now fulfilled. But something else was finished that memorable day. The sufferings of his earthly life were over. So there was a throb of relief when he cried, it is finished. For it brought to an end the life of one whom Isaiah had described as a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, literally with suffering. And what suffering it had been, you and I cannot begin to imagine. the suffering Jesus had to endure. For not only did He know it was coming, and none of us really know when our death is coming, but not only did He know the precise moment it was going to come, but that it would culminate in damnation, in God-forsakenness. Our Lord anticipated His death right from the very beginning. The shadow of the cross hung over the entire life of Jesus Christ. In a painting entitled, The Shadow of the Cross, Holman Hunt depicts the inside of the carpenter's shop in Nazareth. And stripped to his waist, Jesus stands beside a wooden trestle. He has been working hard all day He lifts his eyes toward heaven with a look of pain on his face and stretches out both arms above his head to relieve his muscles. And as he does so, the light of dusk streaming through the open door casts a dark shadow in the form of a cross on the wall behind him. The tool rack on that wall looks like the beam on which his hands had been nailed, and in the left foreground his mother is kneeling in the wood chippings. She looks startled at her son's cross-like shadow on the wall, for she had been warned that he would bring sorrow to her life by coming to die for the sins of the world. And the scene, of course, is historically fictitious, but Holman Hunt was theologically correct. When Jesus left that shop one day and stepped down into the water of the River Jordan to be baptized by John, it was a committal of himself to a greater baptism in blood upon the cross. And in Luke 12, he actually speaks of this baptism of suffering, saying, I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how distressed I am until it is accomplished. At Caesarea Philippi, when Peter confessed him to be the son of the living God, Jesus plainly told his disciples for the first time that he must suffer many things from the elders and the chief priests and be killed. On their way to Jerusalem, Jesus said to them again, the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and they will condemn him to death and deliver him to the Gentiles to mock and to scourge and to crucify. On Palm Sunday, five days before the cross, he said, The hour has come that the Son of Man should be glorified. Now my soul is troubled. And what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour? No. It was for this purpose I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name. Our Lord accepted his suffering on the cross all through his life. He anticipated it. And now the dreadful moment had come. He had been cruelly betrayed by Jesus with a kiss, denied by the Apostle Peter with oaths and swearing, forsaken by the cowardice of his disciples and rejected by his nation with contempt. He had given his back to be scourged, his head to be pierced with a crown of jagged thorns, his hands and feet to be nailed to a cross like a criminal. He had been stripped of all his clothes and left to die slowly in naked ignominy, an object for the cold stare of callous eyes and the rude taunts. of a scornful mob. If you be the son of God, save yourself. But the greatest suffering of all was the anguish of God-forsakenness he had to endure in those three hours of darkness over the whole earth. When God the Father laid your sin and mine and its punishment on his dear son. It was suffering, says Isaiah, which appalled the onlookers. For his appearance, says Isaiah, was disfigured. It was marred that he seemed no longer to be human. But now it is finished. The storm has passed. The suffering is over. The darkness is gone. The light of God of God's face shines once again upon him, and with a sense of release his voice rings out with this triumphant cry. Alexander McLaren, an English expositor and contemporary of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, puts it vividly in this way, having drained the cup He held it up inverted and cried, it is finished. And not a drop trickled down the edge. He drank it all that we might never have to drink it. Thirdly, when Jesus cried, it is finished, he also meant that the ransom for our redemption had been paid. This Greek word, tetelestai, was used in commerce to show that a bill had been paid in full. And when a bill is paid in full, we can never be asked to pay it again. Now, the bill of sin is death. The penalty for breaking God's law is external or eternal exclusion from his presence when we are cast into hell. And sinners can only be redeemed when that penalty is paid. Well, Jesus paid it. He died on the cross, the scripture says, to give his life a ransom for many. A ransom that was paid, not to the devil, but to the law of God, which you and I had broken. And Paul says, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us. In those dreadful hours on the cross, He bore both the physical and the spiritual punishment that our sins deserved. He paid our debt in full. He suffered the God-forsakenness of hell and of damnation for us. By dying physically and spiritually on the cross, he satisfied every demand of God's broken law. There is now no further payment to be made, no further penalty to be borne. Now, how do we know that Jesus had paid it all? And the answer is the resurrection. Because if he hadn't paid it all, he would have remained dead. But our Lord rose from the dead precisely because the whole debt of His people's sin had been paid. And God's broken law, listen, could make no further demands on Him. Instead of the fire of God's wrath coming down upon the sacrifice and consuming it as it often did in the Old Testament, Rather, the fire of God upon our sin came down upon His Son, and He swallowed it up for us all. The wrath of God for our sin was fully exhausted in the infinite being of His eternal Son. All the demands of God's law were now fully satisfied. when those three hours of darkness were over. As the hymn says, Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe. But I must hurry on. The words, it is finished, signify in the fourth place that the righteousness that God requires of his people was completed. You see, sinners need not only pardon and forgiveness for their sins, but they need acceptance and righteousness before God. But how can a pardoned sinner obtain perfect righteousness? Perfect righteousness surely means a life of perfect obedience to the law of God. Its standard is impossible for any fallen sinful human being to attain. However, Paul says in Philippians 3 that there is a righteousness which comes from God through faith in Christ. For when we come to Jesus in faith, He gives us His perfect righteousness in exchange for our sin. And so part of our Lord's mission when he came to the earth was to render perfect obedience to the law and to the will of God. And that's what he accomplished by his sinless life. He never faltered in his obedience to God. It began in heaven. when he laid aside the insignia of his majesty and left the glory of heaven to come down to earth. It was obedience that kept the Ten Commandments in thought, word and deed all through his life. It was obedience that took him to the manger, and then to Gethsemane, and then to Calvary. Paul says, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Though he was a son, says Hebrews, he learned obedience by the things he suffered. He was obedient to the point of every suffering that God's Lord demanded. And so as the great law keeper hangs on the cross and is about to die, he says, it is finished. No further act of obedience is required by the law of God. The righteous one has demonstrated what it means to perfectly keep God's law, and now His perfect righteousness is credited to all who put their trust in Him for salvation. And so Paul can say in 2 Corinthians 5, God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. Friends, how matchless is this love of God. He dealt with Jesus on the basis of what we in our sinfulness deserve. But he deals with us on the basis of what Jesus in his righteousness deserves. By the perfect sacrifice of Christ, our sins have been paid for and forgiven. By the perfect obedience of Jesus Christ, our acceptance with God is permanently, positively guaranteed. Now is that all? No, I think there's one other thing that can be added. It is finished. heralded the fact that the tyranny of Satan over men had ended. Because back in the Garden of Eden, the moment they sinned, God gave the promise to Adam and Eve and all their forebears that the seed of the woman would crush, kill, destroy the serpent's head. But in doing so, he would bruise his heel. And for centuries mankind had waited for this great day. The whole period of Old Testament history, with its sorry tale of human bondage to the devil, cried out for the coming of God's promised deliverer. Now in Jesus Christ he had come. And the devil, during Christ's earthly life, did all that he could to thwart and destroy him. As we've already said, he tried through Herod to kill him when he was a baby. Later in the wilderness, he tried to tempt Jesus to sin, offering him all the kingdoms of the world, if Jesus would only worship him. At Caesarea Philippi, the devil put words on the lips of Peter to try and persuade Jesus from going to the cross. But now on the cross, Satan's power has finally been destroyed by the conquering Son of God. True, at first his disciples didn't believe it. They fled in fear of their lives. And yet Jesus had told them just a little while earlier that the moment had come when Satan was going to be cast out of his sphere of dominion. Now, how was this going to happen? Well, by the death, by his death on the cross, Christ took away from the devil the only power he has over you and me, and that is the power of sin. Because by our sinning in obedience to the devil, we are doomed to be dragged down to hell with him. When Jesus died on the cross for the forgiveness of your sins and mine, he took that power out of the hands of the devil for Christ's people. So having paid the penalty for our sins, he now cries, it is finished. Satan's number is up. His power over my people is destroyed. He no longer has any hold over us. To quote Hebrews 2.14, Since the children God had given him have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity, so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death. that is the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery to the fear of death. We no longer have that fear because Christ has obtained the forgiveness of our sins. We can no longer be cast with the devil into hell. The cry, it is finished, was, I say, our Lord's announcement of the grand consummation of all the saving purposes for which the Father had sent him to the earth. He had completed the work God had given him to do. And so, bowing his head, says John, he gave up his spirit. That is to say, he handed back again to God the immortal part of his humanity, his spirit, to the God who had given it to him. When he knew that the work of redemption had been accomplished, that the punishment of the sins of all of his people had been borne, There was no need for him to suffer any longer. It was now time to voluntarily give up his earthly life. No one was going to take it from him. He laid it down of himself so that he might take it again on the third day. Jesus, I say, was in complete control of the situation. He was not the victim of death on the cross, but rather the triumphant victor over life and death. Well, I must conclude. We have been looking at what theologians call the finished work of Christ. Because there is nothing to be added to it, and there is nothing that is lacking in it. To try and improve on the finished work of Christ is a gross insult to the Son of God. It is like trying to improve Handel's Messiah, only infinitely, I say infinitely worse, If we could make ourselves acceptable to God by our own good works or do something to cancel out our guilt, Jesus Christ would not have had to go to Calvary and die for us. And you know, this truth was a great help in the conversion of Hudson Taylor, the founder of that great missionary society, the China Inland Mission in 1865. In spite of his religious upbringing by deeply devout Christian parents, he grew up, like some do, skeptical and inwardly rebellious. But at the age of 17, he had a day off from work, and with nothing to do, he idly looked through his father's library to see if there was something to read. And in the providence of God, he went to a basket that had some tracks, because he just wanted something small to read, and he took up one that caught his fancy, determining that he was going to put it down the moment it became too pointed. And here is what happened in his own words, I was struck with the phrase, the finished work of Christ. Immediately, The words, it is finished, suggested themselves to my mind. What was finished? At once I replied, a full and perfect atonement and satisfaction for sin. The debt was paid for our sins and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. Then came the further thought, if the whole work was finished and the whole debt paid, what is there left for me to do? And with this there dawned the joyful conviction, as light flashed into my soul from the Holy Spirit, that there was nothing in the world to do but to fall down on one's knees and accepting the Saviour and His salvation, to praise him forevermore. He'd gone to a little shed to read the tract and immediately he dropped on his knees and he received Christ as his Savior. Now that's all we have to do. The question is, have we done it? May God help each one of us to rest our souls on the finished work of Christ, which God was pleased to accept by raising him from the dead. And to say of a truth, upon a life I did not live, upon a death I did not die, another's life, another's death, I trust my whole eternity. Let us pray. Our gracious God and heavenly Father, we thank you for the finished work of Christ on the cross. There is nothing more for any of us to do but to penitently receive him by faith as our all-sufficient Savior. And Father, if we have already done so, Help us now to come humbly and gratefully to his table of remembrance, and through the visible signs of the broken bread and the poured out wine, grant that our faith in him and our love for him will be spiritually nourished. For Jesus' sake we ask it. Amen.