Category Archives: The Gospel

It is finished!

Posted on by
Reply

John 19: 28 After this, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst.” 29 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. 30 When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

Three words in English. One word in Greek: ?????????? (tetelestai).

What did Jesus mean when (on the cross) He declared, “It is finished!”? The answer is both multi-faceted and spectacular.

Total Substitution

Posted on by
Reply

sub2The message of the Gospel is so different from every man made attempt at religion that it is hard for even Christians to fully grasp its truth. Even for those who read their Bibles diligently there is a tendency to receive the inspired, inerrant, God breathed information through man centered filters, which means that we often fail to see the pristine beauty of a God who rescues us by His work alone. We tend to think ‘there must be something God demands us to bring to the table of redemption.’

Here’s what we know. There is a God and neither you nor I are Him. We therefore need to acknowledge Him as God, the way He has revealed Himself, both through nature and in Scripture, and approach Him on His terms. To act in any other way means that we create an idol and engage in idolatry.

The Bible makes it abundantly clear that God is holy. In fact, saying these words is wholly inadequate. Accessing the immediate presence of God, the angelic host proclaim day and night without ceasing, He is “holy, holy, holy” (Isa 6). Not just “holy” but “holy, holy, holy.”

God is perfect in holiness and therefore His standards are likewise perfectly holy. He demands perfection. Christ said, “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matt 5:48)

What God demands from you is:

1. Perfect obedience to His law – Getting close is just not good enough. No best efforts are allowed.
2. Perfect repentance.
3. Perfect faith.

Do you see the problem here? No man is capable of any of this. Jesus said “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt 5:20) This statement should rock our religious world to its very foundation. Jesus, the kind and Good Shepherd affirms the fact that just as a country’s leader might not negotiate with terrorists, God will never negotiate with sinners. The requirement for entry into God’s presence is perfect righteousness. His standards are perfect and He will never lower them. God is just and He will not violate His character in order to allow a sinful man into His presence.

The sinner’s dilemma is therefore massive and distressing. Every sin we have committed is an act of high treason against God, fully deserving His just and eternal punishment. It is precisely at this point where we recognize our desperate need for a righteousness we do not possess, that the Gospel of Jesus Christ begins to make sense. We hear it and say, “I must have Christ. He alone can save me.”

Greg Francis makes the point very well: “God demands 100% faultless perfect obedience, and if you can’t do that, you better find Someone who can do it for you.” That Someone is the Lord Jesus Christ.

When I say that no man is capable of perfect obedience, repentance and faith, there is one exception to this rule. The Lord Jesus Christ lived a perfectly righteous life – fully pleasing His Father always. There was not a single stain or blemish of sin in His life. And here is where this affects us and is the very essence of the Gospel. Christ did all that He did in obedience to His Father and as our Substitute. What God demands FROM us, Christ provides FOR us. Christ lived for us and He died for us. He lived the life we should have lived, fulfilling all the demands of God in His holy law. He loved God with all His heart, soul, mind and strength. Then He died for us. All the sins of all of those who would ever believe in Him were laid on Him at the cross and He absorbed the full punishment we deserved (Isa 53:4-6; 1 Pet 2:24).

God is holy and He is also love. Once again, what God demanded, Christ has provided. It was love for the world that motivated the Father to send His Son to live and die for us. John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

Knowing that we could never repent, believe or obey Him perfectly, the Father has given gifts from His heart to all of His people:
1. The perfect obedience of Jesus is given to us (2 Cor 5:21).
2. Repentance is perfected in and through Jesus – remember Jesus was baptized by John with the Baptism of repentance (Matt 3:11).
3. The faith God requires is a gift from Him (Eph 2:8,9; Phil 1:29).

Christ saves His people from their sins (Matt 1:21). Salvation is not achieved by a combined effort of God and man working together. It is God’s work entirely. C. H. Spurgeon declared, “Substitution is the very marrow of the whole Bible, the soul of salvation, the essence of the gospel.” The Bible is therefore a revelation of His rescue plan – God’s work done for us through the means of Christ in total substitution. The Gospel is about Christ’s life for us, His death for us and includes His present day High Priestly ministry at the right hand of the Father where He always lives to make intercession for us (John 17:9: Heb 7:25).

***

Question 60. How are you righteous before God?
“Only by true faith in Jesus Christ; that is, although my conscience accuse me, that I have grievously sinned against all the commandments of God, and have never kept any of them, and am still prone always to all evil; yet God without any merit of mine, of mere grace, grants and imputes to me the perfect satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness of Christ, as if I had never committed nor had any sin, and had myself accomplished all the obedience which Christ has fulfilled for me; if only I accept such benefit with a believing heart.” – Heidelberg Catechism

It is finished: A reflection on John 19:30

Posted on by
Reply

cross01Matthew Barrett (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is Assistant Professor of Christian Studies at California Baptist University, as well as the founder and executive editor of Credo Magazine. Barrett is also Senior Pastor of Fellowship Baptist Church. He is the author and editor of several books, including Salvation by Grace: The Case for Effectual Calling and Regeneration. You can read about Barrett’s other publications at matthewmbarrett.com. He writes:

Looking back upon the first half of the twentieth century, H. Richard Niebuhr famously described liberal Christianity’s understanding of the gospel like this: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” Sadly, such a view is alive and well today in the twenty-first century. The reason we cannot begin to fathom a God who is holy and just, and the reason we are so hostile to a God who executives his wrath and judgment is because we do not truly understand two things: (1) Just how holy God is, and (2) just how sinful we are.

Bad news

Because we do not understand how desperately wicked and depraved we are, nor how offensive and hideous our sin is to a righteous Judge, a God who pours out his wrath through a cross is offensive, foolish, detestable, and sour to our taste buds.

cross-of-christ-0105Unfortunately, many Christians today make the situation much worse. We simply approach the unbeliever and say, “Believe in Jesus and you will be saved.” But for the unbeliever who has absorbed this view, our words make little sense. Be saved? From what? In other words, because they do not first understand the gravity of their sin, they see no need for a Savior who dies for the forgiveness of sins. We often view salvation as receiving eternal life (and rightly so). But we cannot forget that we are saved from something as well, and that is the wrath of God and eternal condemnation.

The entire storyline of Scripture is one that presents us with a massive problem: we are sinners and the judgment of God is coming. As Paul says in his letter to the church at Ephesus, prior to Christ each one of us is “dead” in our “trespasses” and “by nature” we are “children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (2:1-2). We have a sin problem. Not only does our sin separate us from God, but we deserve the wrath of God to be brought down upon us for all eternity. The punishment for sin is death (Rom. 3:23). Adam discovered this in the garden, and as children of Adam, all of mankind is by nature under the wrath of God. This is the bad news.

Good news

But what makes Christianity Christianity is that this bad news is not the end of the story. While God would have been perfectly just to leave us in our sin and condemnation, he lovingly and graciously gave his only Son, Christ Jesus, so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16).

What does John mean when he says God gave his only Son? This act of giving takes us back to Isaiah 53. Isaiah, prophesying about the Suffering Servant, the Messiah to come, says, “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (53:4-6). Isaiah goes on to say that this suffering servant is like a “lamb that is led to the slaughter” (53:7).

When we come to the cross and we see the enormous amount of suffering Jesus underwent, we tend to focus solely on his physical suffering: the crown of thorns, the nails, and the crucifix. But as important as all of this is, we cannot miss the main thing: the most excruciating thing about the suffering servant’s cross is that he bore the very wrath of God that was ours. The Lord laid upon Christ our iniquities and Christ took the due penalty for those iniquities. We see this and we hear it when Christ cries out, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” (Mark 15:34). And then come three beautiful words, “It is finished” (John 19:30).

What is finished? Christ, as he says in the garden of Gethsamani, has drunk the cup of God’s wrath in full (Matt. 26:39), and by doing so, as Hebrews 1:3 reminds us, Christ “made purification for sins.” As our high priest Christ “entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption” (Heb. 9:11-12; cf. 9:13, 25-26).

Indeed, this is good news.