All Scriptures quoted are from The New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise quoted.

It is finished. When was the last time you were able to say those words? About anything?

Maybe that’s one thing about sports that so appeals to us. We get to watch the unscripted drama of competition play out before our eyes. The one thing that gives the game its real intrigue is the clock. Once it starts, we know that it will finish its work and the game will be over. All of the tension and all of the excitement are built around the seconds ticking down to when, “It is finished.” We can even bear sitting through a boring and overpriced movie because we know it will be finished, even though we’ll have traded two, unredeemable hours of our lives to fill our minds with nonsense and our laps with extremely overly-trans-fatted popcorn and have to wear the stains for everyone to see. Sin can be like that. We can’t take it back and there’s always a stain.

But, when was the last time you were able to say of the most meaningful things you do, “It is finished.” Is your work finished just because this day is fast coming to a close? Is your love for your wife or husband or children finished, or just begun, no matter how long ago you started? Is your love for God a finished work you can set up on the shelf or, is your love for God more like a raw, unfinished sculpture, the complete shape of which has yet to be discovered?

Most of what Jesus said on the cross, I can’t imagine ever saying. “Father, forgive them for what they did to me, for they are dumber than the donkeys they rode in here on.” “Friend, take care of my mother; I have to go away.” “God, have you abandoned me? Where are you? Have you left me, for real?” Most of all, I can’t imagine ever having a job where I could come to a point in time and say, “It is finished.”

It wasn’t a pretty finish. It was a flesh-ripping, gut-busting, bone-breaking R-rated finish. It was the kind of finish people like to bury and forget about, like all of the things we’ve done because we didn’t know better, or worse, knew better and did anyway. And, they did.

They buried it. Then everyone went home to finish their Sabbath. There must have been some Baptist blood in that crowd. Who else could see all of that and still belly up to a religious buffet? It’s really amazing how quickly we can rush to worship after finishing our last sin, without giving it a thought. They did and we would have, too, because with God, all time is present before him. The sins we committed years ago or just this afternoon or the sins that are on tomorrow’s moral docket were all there that day, as though that were today or any day and we had just committed them. We cried “Crucify him!” We helped push the stone over the tomb.

It is finished, Jesus said. It’s done. His life was done. His work was done. He died. And, the world was without Jesus for three whole days. Can you imagine what that was like?

There are only two times in the Bible that kind of finality is announced. One is recorded in Genesis 2:2. By the seventh day God completed the work which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done (NASV). God’s initial work of creation was done. But, his work was not finished.

The next day, he got to work on re-creation. That day on the cross, Jesus was saying that all that had to be done to bring us back to the God from whom we had run in sin was finished. Humanity, after the garden, wasn’t just a fixer-upper. It was a do-over project. From that day on, God in Christ was remaking what he had first made. God always finishes what he starts. There is a beginning and there is an “it is finished” quality to all of his creation and re-creation.

So that, because of God’s work and the pronouncement of our Lord, we can know what it means when the writer of Hebrews said, we have been saved (re-created) through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (Hebrews 10:10, NASV). Even the one who betrayed Jesus three times wrote a manuscript that made the final cut for biblical publication. The one who said three times, “I don’t know this guy,” later wrote of him, Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that he might bring us to God (1 Peter 3:18, NASV). One death for three betrayals? Not a bad bargain!

A friend of mine was in a bad car wreck some thirty years ago when we were in college. There were several people in the car when the driver over-corrected and rolled it in the median. No one was hurt. But, as they got out of the car and surveyed the damage, the young man who’d been driving and wrecked what was, in fact, his father’s car started crying. Right there, in front of all of his friends, in the middle of a highway, he started weeping. Fred asked him, “What’s wrong? We’re all OK!” Looking at the wreck that used to be his father’s car, the young man said, “My dad is going to kill me.” He was so afraid of what his father was going to do with what he’d done, he lost control and started weeping. “My dad is going to kill me.”

Jesus said, It is finished. That means that, “My sin, oh the bliss of this glorious thought, my sin, not in part but the whole, is nailed to the tree and I bear it no more. Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, O my soul” (Horatio Spafford, It is Well With My Soul, 1873)! That means, having surveyed my sin, my father is not going to kill me, or you. He is going to redeem us, every last one of us. That’s because, of that which God started, Jesus declared, It is finished!