"He proclaimed, 'It is finished!' Then bowing His head, He gave up His spirit." – John 19:30
It is finished.
These words were the last of those spoken by Jesus before He let out His final breath on the cross. Suffering, tortured, anguished -- He was thinking of us. During Christ's final moments of life, He was thinking of us.
The structure and arrangement of these words are essential to our understanding of its significance. Grammatically, this phrase is written in the perfect passive indicative tense, signifying that an action has been completed in the past, yet the result is ongoing and in full effect. Christ mutters these words in an exhausted, yet passive voice; He emphasizes the verb of the phrase in place of emphasizing the subject. Get this. Christ emphasized "finished," as in "the work here is done."
As stated by all of the gospel books in the Bible, a nameplate hung above Jesus' head that read "Jesus, King of the Jews." This phrase was written in not one, but THREE different languages above Christ's bleeding head. It was written in Hebrew, the language of the Jews; Latin, the official language of the Roman Empire; and Greek, the language of the common people. This sign that read three different languages symbolized the importance of Jesus' death as a having a universal influence.
This phrase alone proclaimed the completion of His mission from the Father. In these few words, Jesus spoke the rest of eternity into existence.
He died a physical death for all mankind just so that we didn't have to die an eternal one.
So... what exactly did Jesus finish?
He finished what we could not.
Jesus came to perfectly fulfill the will of the Father. We are innate sinners who hold no possibility of reaching perfection on our own.
He came to teach about and bring glory to His Father in Heaven. He came to tell the world that He is one with the Father. He came as fully man and fully God to be the incarnation of the truths of God. "Jesus said to them, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.'" – John 14:6.
Jesus came as the light of the world; He was sent to bring light to a wretched place full of sin and darkness. He came to make propitiation for our record of sin against God. He came to make reconciliation between God and man possible. 1 Peter 3:18 states, "For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit."
Jesus came to purify us. He came to cleanse us. By His blood, by His wounds, by the surrendering of His own life, we are clean.
He came to glorify the Father through His life, His death, and His resurrection.
He died so that we could live.
Every whip, every thorn, every nail in his wrists and feet. It was for us. It was so that we can have life and have it abundantly. It was so that we can worship Him freely. It was so that we don't have to be perfect in order to know God.
"But He endured the suffering that should have been ours,
the pain that we should have borne." – Isaiah 53:4
Jesus Christ cared so much about us that He carried the weight of our eternal sin and shame and took it upon Himself to die. Just so we didn't have to.
It is finished because Christ has already won the victory. Jesus defeated death, He rolled the stone away from the grave, He tore the veil, and He declared the victory over the enemy because it is finished.
"But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." – Romans 5:8
The eternal debt owed for the sin of mankind is paid in full. Paid. In. Full. God looked down on His perfect, blameless son and thought of us -- sinners with filthy, detestable, sin-stained lives.
Because of Christ's death on that wooden cross, there is salvation that is bought for us by precious blood. The implications of Jesus' words on the cross are eternally positive for those who repent and receive Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, by the grace of God alone, through faith alone, and in Jesus Christ alone. It took the perfect Son of man to sacrifice in order for us to be with the Father.
But He thought that we were worth it. That, my friends, is true love.
"It was my sin that held Him there until it was accomplished. His dying breath has brought me life; I know that it is finished."
