Eyes Wide Open: 40-Day Lenten Devotional Sample

It Is Finished

“When He had received the drink, Jesus said, ‘It is finished.’ With that, He bowed His head and gave up His spirit.” – John 19:30

“It is finished!” The verb is in thePerfect tense (tetelestai). Finished…literally translated ‘and still finished.’ Done…nothing more need be done…ever.

As Jesus hung nailed to the cross, he made this audacious declaration. Then, after bowing his head and giving up his spirit, John tells us that the Sabbath was about to begin. Why bother with this detail?

The Sabbath was the day that there was to be no work. Yet, throughout Scripture, we read numerous accounts of Jesus ‘working’ on the Sabbath. In John 5, after healing a crippled man on the Sabbath, Jesus says, “My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working.” Jesus reveals that both He and the Father are at work making human beings whole.

“It is finished...” The phrase alludes to Genesis 2, “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished…And by the seventh day, God finishedHis work which He had done; and He rested on the seventh day…” 

“What God had begun by the Word in the day of Creation, God finished by the Word in the day of Redemption” (Ethelbert Stauffer, Jesus and His Story).

On the cross, the final Passover Lamb was offered up by the Lamb himself and there was no need for any more sacrifices for sin. Jesus fulfilled his greatest passion—to reveal the Father’s self-giving, self-sacrificing, self-emptying love, for all the world to see. This was the start of the new and final exodus, which continues today, where all people are invited to be freed from the bondage of sin and death, and live in a new world—the Kingdom of God.

We’re reminded today that this finished work by Jesus Christ is the good news that so many people long for and need to hear—the good news that we are given the privilege to share with a lost, lonely, and broken world.

Prayer: Lord Jesus, thank you that because who you are and all that you’ve done, we can rest in knowing that “It is finished!” Help us this day to live deeper and more fully in the reality of your self-giving, self-sacrificing, self-emptying love and in doing so, let your love and light pour out of our lives and into the places and people you bring us. Amen.

- Written by Abraham Han