It Is Finished

And we're gonna read from there, a few verses, and we're gonna focus on one verse, even one line of Jesus in verse 30 as we go. So John 19:28. After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said to fulfil 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 that's the statement we're gonna have a look at: "It is finished." And he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. Since it was the day of preparation, and so that the bodies would 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. So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who had been crucified with him.

But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water. He who saw it has borne witness. His testimony is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth, that you also may believe. For these things took place that the scripture might be fulfilled.

"Not one of his bones will be broken." And then again, another scripture says, "They will look on him whom they have pierced." Now we're gonna read from there. I wonder if we could just pray quickly first. Our Father, thank you for Easter.

Thank you that we can gather here together today and hear about your son, his purposes in coming, what he did, and what that means for us. We pray as we listen and as we think through these issues, Lord, that you'd be with us, that you'd send your spirit amongst us to help us understand, and that you, Lord, would touch our hearts, that you would interrupt us and speak to us and cause us to love you more. I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, I really like stories.

I don't know about you guys. Does anyone else like stories? No one likes stories? I like stories. A good story can really put a smile on your face, no matter what your mood is.

Stories with kids in them have often a little bit of a surprise in them somewhere, as kids do what kids do best. I heard a story a few years ago that I'm gonna try and relate to you about a Sunday school class where the teacher wanted to embark on maybe a more major project over several weeks and get the kids to build their own little worlds and explore them. So the first week, she brought in some little animal moulds and some plaster. Have you ever done that with plaster, filling up animal moulds, making little animals? And the kids made, you know, little rhinos and birds and horses and ducks and cats and dogs all out of plaster, and they had a great time doing it.

And then, well, probably sent home some very frustrated parents getting all the plaster out of hair and clothes and all the rest. And the next week, they thought they'd paint all the animals that they'd made in all their favourite colours, full creative control. You can imagine what that looked like. And the following week, they got out a big round table, and they started making a place for the animals to live.

They put in plants and trees that they collected from outside, and the ground was all sand. And they put a pond in the centre and brought in a big bucket of water, and they filled up the pond with water and put decorations all around. And on the final week, the kids got to play with their animals in the world that they had made, and you know the rhino had a little tea party, no doubt, with the birds, and the ducks rode the horses around the edge, and the cats probably were chased by the dogs. And at the end of it all, the teacher asked the kids, "Well, now that you're done, are there any rules that you think the animals should have throughout the week while we're gone?" And the kids thought about it and they said, "Well, animals shouldn't steal each other's food.

That's not a good idea. We shouldn't steal each other's food. Maybe there shouldn't be any pushing and shoving, and no name calling." So, you know, rules like that is what they came up with. And the teacher asked, "Well, should there be any others?"

Because we've got this pond at the centre and the kids had noticed that if any of the plaster animals went in the pond, they sort of just melted away and became nothing. And so there was a new rule: no swimming in the pond. Teacher asked, "What should happen if the rhino broke the rules and pushed the horse into the water?" And little Johnny—it's always little Johnny, isn't it?—somewhat violently said, "Well, I'll stomp him to bits on the floor."

And we see there, I think, a really interesting reality. Johnny's angry at his own rhino because the rhino is harming the world that Johnny loves, the world that Johnny and the others carefully built and invested themselves in. Johnny wants justice for his world. He wants justice for the horse that got melted and for himself, the designer, the creator, the invested lover of his world. Now I'm telling you this story with the very obvious parallel: this is how God describes his world and what's happened in it.

It's a world that God has built and invested in and loves and cares for, and it's a world in which we have broken things. It's a world that God describes as desperately in need of a rescue. And the idea of Easter is that God has come up with a rescue plan. Good news. Easter is good news.

We're gonna have three things we're gonna look at today, and the first is that God's rescue plan is needed because people are deeply broken. We'll go through this now. And honestly, it's a hard concept to wrestle with, the idea that people are deeply broken. I struggle to see this, and I suspect you do too. Thirty, maybe forty years ago or longer, Christians and preachers like me didn't used to use the word "broken."

We used to use the word "sinful." We used to say people were deeply sinful. But now that's too strong a word to use, isn't it? We're uncomfortable with the idea of sin. It conjures up unpleasant descriptions of who we are.

I mean, surely it can't be right, can it? Sin? I mean, I recognise maybe times of sin when I've taken something too far, even by our culture's measure. I recognise times when I've done something or been discovered doing something wrong that someone I love hates. I can see times when I've hurt people.

And as I look at those, maybe big things, it's easy to see that I'm at least occasionally bad. But I find it hard to believe that I'm truly a sinful person, rebellious through and through, in need of rescue. And so I need scripture. I need the Holy Spirit to remind me that sin runs deeper than I remember. The idea is that every time I sin, what I'm actually doing is I'm challenging and defying God's right to reign.

Challenging God's right to impose obligations on me. I tell God when I disobey Him that He has no right to restrain my behaviour. "God, You have no right to restrain my behaviour," I'm saying. It turns out maybe if that's the case, if that's what's happening, that sin maybe is too weak a word. Because that kind of statement, those kinds of actions aren't just sin, but treason against our creator God.

And it's only because our consciences are worn out and corrupted that we are able to even think that sin is not serious, that we're not so bad and so broken. And I'm conscious even as I go through that, that's still a hard concept to come to grips with in our hearts. So I just want to open it up just a little bit more. Some examples.

When you look at an infant, I'm not sure if there's any like real little babies around here today or recently, there's one around somewhere. But when you look at an infant, I don't know if you've done this, but you see the beautiful intricacies of the eyes and the nose and the ears and the mouth. You can get the tiny fingers and the toes, they're there, whole fingers. It's not even just half a finger and the rest has got to grow. The whole finger's there.

There's joints and nails and even little tiny hairs on a tiny little baby. There's a mind in there, isn't there, that's gonna grow and one day be able to reason and discern and discover and act and even one day produce a child of their own. And the point is, if you can look at that, if you can see all of that and not turn your mind and your heart to God and admire and glorify Him for what He has made and the wonder and the intricacy of it, then you, in that moment, rob God of His glory. You take from Him what He deserves. You challenge His right to receive that glory, and it's an act of treason.

When you lie, it's not some trivial thing that we've forgotten in a moment and has no impact. You deny actually the truth. You deny the God of truth, the God of all knowledge, and you challenge His call on you to reflect truth to the world. You tell Him, "Lord, You might find truth important and beautiful, but my desire to save face or to get what I want is more important than Your right to restrain my sinful lies."

You're saying, "God, You have no right to reign over truth in my life. You cannot reign over my words." It's an act of treason. When God calls us to love others, and we all agree, don't we? What a wonderful thing to be called to do, to love others.

Who's gonna say no to that? When He calls us to love others sacrificially, generously, and in spite of their faults, and we choose instead to love ourselves by sacrificing little, loving out of what we have to spare, we are saying, "God, You have no right to impose obligations on me. Or at the very least, Your obligations on me to love sacrificially are conditional on my desire to carry them out. I am God over Your call on me." It's an act of treason.

This is what theologians call "totally depraved." Depraved is just an old word that means morally corrupt, wicked. Now "totally depraved" doesn't mean that we can't do anything good, because we do do good. It doesn't mean that everything is bad and that we're nothing but miserable wretches. But it does mean that every part of our life is corrupt to some extent.

Not just the big stuff, it's all through our lives. And the point of Easter is that we need to be rescued from it. It's all through us. We can't rescue ourselves. A drowning man who's fallen off a cruise ship cannot rescue himself.

Did you hear of that woman, maybe it's a few months ago now, who fell off a cruise ship at night in the dark? It took five minutes for the ship to even turn off the engines in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Gone. She can't rescue herself. She can't catch up to a cruise ship by swimming.

It's in the middle of the ocean. You can't go to land. And the water is at one degree, and the swell is three metres high. She needed someone to throw her a line, someone to pull her in. We can't pay for all this sin.

We don't have enough cash. And even if we did, our money, the Bible says, is dirty. Our money is no good here. It's corrupted too. We need to be rescued.

We need someone else to pay the judge's penalty, and the penalty for treason against our creator is death. God's rescue plan is needed because people are deeply broken. Which brings us finally to our verse. We got there in the end.

Even just the one statement, the single line of Jesus: "It is finished." The second thing we wanna look at is that the thing that is finished, the what that is finished, is the plan of God to rescue people in love. That's what's finished. The thing that is finished is the plan of God to rescue.

When Jesus says "It is finished," I mean, He dies immediately afterwards, so you might start to think that the thing that is finished is His life or maybe His suffering or His dying process. But no, Jesus is talking here about a plan. His plan to pay for the sin and the brokenness of this world. His plan of rescue. A plan for Jesus to die.

And this is a plan that's been going on for thousands of years. It started all the way back in Genesis 3:15, if you remember that passage. That's the first glimpse of it. After the fall, the first thing God says—He's speaking to Adam and Eve, but also in this passage He's talking to the snake—and He says, "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers. He will crush your head, and you will strike His heel."

God foreshadows here thousands of years ago a time when the snake, the great enemy, Satan, will strike a blow against someone who represents all of humankind, but that representative will crush the snake completely. We get to Isaiah 53, which Joanne just read. Four hundred years before Jesus comes, God says through poetry, "Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush Him. He has been put to grief. When His soul makes an offering for guilt.

Out of the anguish of His soul, He shall see light and be satisfied. Out of the anguish of His soul, He shall make many to be accounted righteous, and He shall bear their iniquities. He poured out His soul to death and was numbered with the transgressions. Yet He bore the sin of many and makes intercession for the transgressors." Ephesians 1 goes further.

It says that this plan was thought out before the foundation of the world. And it goes on to say that this plan was once a mystery, but now that Jesus has come, we see what it is. A plan, Ephesians 1, verse 9 says, "for the fullness of time to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and on earth." A little bit later it says, "according to the eternal purpose, He is realised in Christ Jesus our Lord." We call this plan—we've got a title for it because we love putting names to things—we call this plan the covenant of redemption.

A covenant or agreement between not us and God, but between God the Father and God the Son. A covenant, a commitment to rescue His creation by the death of the Son. Jesus' death was planned. It was agreed upon before the foundation of the world by both the Father and the Son. We can't look at Jesus' death as accidental.

We can't say that things went horribly wrong for Jesus and, whoops, He died. Now God's gotta do something about it. We can't even say, as Richard Dawkins does, that this is cosmic child abuse, because Jesus planned it with the Father. Now I know about your plans. The more important the goal, the further ahead your plan.

Right? I mean, I plan on going home and having a relaxing afternoon with the family. Maybe we'll go home, we'll have some lunch. I don't know what we're gonna have—some lunch, just some cold chicken in the fridge, maybe we'll have that. Maybe a game or something. Probably not, we're a bit competitive, we shouldn't do that as a family.

Maybe we'll watch a movie together, have something for dinner, head off to bed. It's not a bad plan, but all of which we have absolutely no details for, because it's not important. Who knows what we'll have for lunch, what game we'll play or won't, what movie we'll watch, because it doesn't matter. But if you want maybe to do something more adventurous, like build a building like this one, you plan years in advance. You gain the funding.

You anticipate the needs of the community. You plan every detail of the design. The number of car parks, the rooms, the amount of people using it will determine how big your air cons need to be. You get quotes, you order materials, so on and so forth, because it's important. Jesus' words, "It is finished," mark the endpoint, the final moment, the pinnacle of God's eternal plan to rescue people who are the pinnacle of His creation.

Everything has come together at this moment. These words are the culmination of Jesus' work in this world. He came for the purpose of dying. He entered this world so He might be unjustly slaughtered. He took on a body so that He might experience death. The word "finished" in Greek is telos.

It means the endpoint. We have this word in our language all the time. That's why I raise it, because we have a telephone, a telos phone. We have a television. The phone, the sound, has come to its endpoint.

It's telos. It's come all the way from the other person on the other side of the world up to a satellite, around to another satellite, down through some wires, and it's come to its endpoint: your head, your ear. Its endpoint. It's telos. The vision in a television is the picture landing on your screen at the goal, at the final endpoint of its creator's intention.

When Jesus says "This is finished," it is no simple statement. It's a declaration that the biggest, the longest running, the most important plan of all time has just reached its telos, its endpoint, the final goal. Jesus saying, "It's accomplished. It's done. My plan is complete. My people are rescued. I have just finished paying for them.

I've seen it through." This is perhaps the most significant statement that's ever been made, because God says His rescue plan is finished. God's rescue plan is needed because people are deeply broken. What is finished is the plan of God to rescue people. Lastly, God's rescue of the broken shows the world His love.

God's rescue of the broken shows the world His love. A few chapters before His death, Jesus says to His followers these statements. He knows what's coming. These are important statements. He says, "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down His life for His friends."

Also in the epistles of John, we read that "Love is from God. Amazing thing. The love that we have is from God. And whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love."

And in this, the love of God was made manifest amongst us, that God sent His only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. More than little Johnny ever did, God loves His world and everything in it. And we see it maybe most clearly in those last words of Jesus before He dies. It's not just a little bit of love. It's the blazing fire of God's love.

Can you see, I wonder, how God's plan for the death of the Son shows God's love? Can you see how this moment of death is a moment of victory? Millions, maybe billions of people are lovingly rescued through this moment of horror. Treason is dealt with. Sin is paid for.

The drowning man is hauled in. The plan to show the universe how much He loves by dying for what He created is revealed. What a time Easter is. There's a question that's often asked when you talk about this plan that began before the foundation of the world. Because if God made a plan before the world began to rescue us, that means He knew before the world began that we would need rescuing.

Right? And if He knew that, why didn't God just not create the world if He knew it was this messed up? Or why not create a world without the people who were gonna break it? Or why not create a world where people cannot rebel and sin and commit treason? Well, I mean, they're good questions.

And the answer is: because God is love, and He wants to show it. He wants to show it because there was no way to show this indescribable love without His plan. Any other demonstration would fail to show how deep and sacrificial His love is. God's plan was for Jesus to endure suffering, the wrath of God over the treason of the world, for your sake and for mine, in order to show His character of love to the universe. Jesus on the cross refused to call legions of angels, because this was the plan.

He refused myrrh to dull His senses, because this was the plan. He refused to not create the world so that He could show and express His love, and we could witness and receive it. I don't know if you've thought about this. He didn't just refuse to stop something. He created the tree and the timber that the cross would be harvested from.

He nurtured and grew the infants that would one day grow into the men who would condemn and crucify Him. He sustained the bodies of His mockers so that they could produce the saliva that would be spat at Him. All to show you His love as He rescues you and me from our depravity. So I've just got one question. Maybe you've been here for years.

Maybe it's your first day stepping into a church. Are you rescued, or are you still lost? Have your sins been nailed to that cross, or do you still wear them yourself? Are you a Christian, a follower of Jesus? So we celebrate Easter in Christian churches because Jesus in His love offers to rescue us from our treason and His penalty.

If you're not a Christian, you have on the horizon the penalty still of eternal death and the anger of God at your treason. And there is no escape outside of God for that treason. If you're not a Christian, all that can be changed today in the message of Easter. Easter's the grand finale of God's plan to show us His love in rescuing us, and He offers it to you. He offers you His love.

He offers you eternal life through His death. And if you'd like to take up that offer, can I invite you to have a chat with me after the service or someone else who's around? And maybe can I invite you to pray with me now? Father, we thank you for Easter. As horrible as the whole thing has been, we thank you for your plan begun eternity long ago, heralded from the very creation of the world, described and promised again and again through scripture, and now finally, in Jesus, finished and fulfilled.

We thank you that it is finished. We thank you that your plan is done. Thank you that because of that plan, we can have life in Jesus, that our sins are paid for, that our death has been died. Thank you for Jesus, and we pray particularly for anyone in here who might not know Him, who might not have been rescued by Him. Father, please, Lord, bring those people to you.

Save them. Rescue them. And may we all celebrate Easter together. I pray this in your Son's glorious name. Amen.