John 19:28-30
After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst.” A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
And so here it ends. All the work of Jesus is done and He gives up His spirit. To say that it’s finished is a tremendous thing in this context precisely because it’s this moment that’s the summation of all Old Testament writing. Christ has come to defeat sin and release those in bondage to it and so He does. But it isn’t just this that concerns us. When Jesus says that it’s finished He is saying more than just that His earthly ministry is at an end.
As He gives up His spirit, we can give up our striving for righteousness because He is the end of the law. There’s nothing that any of us can add to this work. It’s finished and that’s a glorious thing, indeed. If it wasn’t then there is no rest for us and we are still to be busy with sacrifices and rituals and days and festivals. If Christ isn’t the end of the law for righteousness, if He isn’t our righteousness and if His death isn’t ours, then we’re still under sin and there is work to be done. If when He died, that death didn’t satisfy the just demands of God’s holy wrath against our sin, then we must be busy, frantically busy, doing something – anything – to earn God’s forgiveness.
This is what Paul meant when he wrote that we preach Christ crucified and that we aren’t to be ashamed of the cross, for in it the righteousness of God is revealed. This is the object of saving faith: the atoning death of Jesus as our representative. And this is what separates the way of Christ – Christianity – from other religious pretenders. Everything else is a works-based system. Don’t eat this, pray like this, dress like this, go here, go there…all in vain attempts to meet the demands of heaven. But don’t you see that this makes God less than holy? If God admits us into His holy, perfect, unstained presence due to our imperfect works, He has lowered the standard and He is not holy anymore. This is how it is that the Scripture declares that Jesus’ death on the cross reveals God’s righteousness. He won’t accept anything less than the perfect life. Jesus provided it for us and His righteousness is then placed in our account – imputed to us – in the same way that a very rich man might place his fortunes in our name. Yes, we are so very poor, yet in Jesus we have everything. This is what it means when Jesus said blessed are the poor and blessed are those that mourn. When we repent of our sin it is then that we recognize our poverty of spirit and mourn our desultory spiritual state and know that we justly deserve wrath. Yes, blessed are we then. This is the way of faith and it is how His righteousness will be counted to us, hence our blessing.
This is certainly the great stumbling stone for the religious types who believe there is something about their own efforts and exertions that warrant them God’s favor. I know of many that search the Scriptures looking for unique ways to be religious. But this is a fatal error. The righteous will live by faith and nothing else. The love of God in Jesus compels us and beats back our sin, vanquishes it by making us more like Him – more loving and evermore faithful. And in light of this love and correct doctrine, we will keep His commandments more and more. When we lose sight of the centrality of the cross, though, we are led astray and start trying to work our way into heaven. But it’s finished. God was the worker and we are now left to present our bodies as a living sacrifice to Him – that’s our reasonable response in faith.
False righteousness isn’t just a stain on legalists and false religions. It also infects the atheists too. Notice the busybodies in politics. Watch how modern America is awash in a tidal wave of secular religion, known as PC-culture. The political Left is ruthless in their application of works based righteousness, demanding people be fired from their jobs if they hold a dissenting view and routinely shouting down speakers who dare challenge their ideas. Claiming the throne of tolerance, the Left is astonishingly conformist. Not knowing the true and living God, they busy themselves with a veritable false religion, replete with blasphemy laws (don’t dare say the wrong thing) and orthodoxy tests. This is no accident. History shows us again and again that those who don’t know the freedom from sin in Christ alone, through faith alone, will not leave their neighbors alone.
There is one other thing on this point, though. For those that think God’s love will excuse sin and that they can therefore live in sin still, and reside in an unchanged state despite naming Christ as their Savior – they have not understood what it was that happened here. For God has done what couldn’t be done by man – by sending His own Son in the flesh, for sin, God defeated sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fulfilled in us. And now we walk in the Spirit, not according to the flesh; we walk in faith and we hate those works of the flesh of which we have repented. The works of the flesh – sexual immorality, hatred, lying, gossip, stealing…these are renounced and they recede from us in that tide of grace that overwhelms us when we come to God in Jesus Christ. We are not saved through our good works but saved to them.
The gospel is lost the moment we say in our hearts, “I will do this to show my righteousness.” It’s understood when we say, “I have no righteousness of my own, but because God has loved me so much, I will follow Him.” When Christ breathed His last it was for our sake. If He hadn’t died like this, for us and for our sin, we would never have rest. This is why the sinner is never at peace, why they never have enough, why there’s always a new cause or scheme. Guilt haunts the mass of humanity and they do all they can to repress it with false ideas and works. Nothing will satisfy that hunger, though, except for this. We need righteousness and the forgiveness of sin – that’s the great need of humanity, all of it, every race, nation and tribe.
That’s what is finished and it should lift the spirits of anyone who rightly sees their spiritual poverty and realizes they haven’t the money to pay heaven’s toll. Christ has paid. It’s done. Rest, Christian and sleep in the shade of the peace of Christ. He covers you. Your failures are gone, nailed there on the cross with Him. This is what it means to have no fear.
Christ is our sabbath rest now and any work toward the goal of fixing mankind that doesn’t glorify Him is a false gospel. The fact that there are so many false paths out there is testimony not to the lack of clarity of the gospel but the intensity in which man hates the truth of his sin. “It is finished” should be on the lips of every Christian whenever the temptations of legalism and/or false religion or philosophy comes. They are the spirit of the anti-Christ. Whatever says, “it is finished…but…” is not of God. There’s nothing to add to Christ. Zip. Nada. To think there is is to call Him a liar and say that Scripture is broken. The true Christian rests on this proclamation, though. Jesus endured the cross and tasted the bitter wine for us. It’s over. We live now in the peace with God that this affords.
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