“The Son of God has been made man. He has lived a life of perfect virtue and of total self-denial. He has been all that life long despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
His enemies have been legion; His friends have been few, and those few faithless. He is at last delivered over into the hands of them that hate Him.
He is arrested while in the act of prayer; He is arraigned before both the spiritual and temporal courts. He is robed in mockery, and then unrobed in shame. He is set upon his throne in scorn, and then tied to the pillar in cruelty.
He is declared innocent, and yet He is delivered up by the judge who ought to have preserved Him from His persecutors. He is dragged through the streets of that Jerusalem which had killed the prophets, and would now crimson itself with the blood of the prophets’ Master.
He is brought to the cross; He is nailed fast to the cruel wood. The sun burns him. His cruel wounds increase the fever. God forsakes Him.
‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ contains the concentrated anguish of the world. While He hangs there in mortal conflict with sin and Satan, His heart is broken, His limbs are dislocated.
Heaven fails Him, for the sun is veiled in darkness. Earth forsakes Him, for ‘His disciples forsook Him and fled.’ He looks everywhere, and there is none to help; He casts His eye around, and there is no man that can share His toil.
He treads the winepress alone; and of the people there is none with Him. On, on, He goes, steadily determined to drink the last dreg of that cup which must not pass from Him if His Father’s will be done.
At last He cries—’It is finished,’ and He gives up the ghost.
Hear it, Christians, hear this shout of triumph as it rings today with all the freshness and force which it had eighteen hundred years ago! Hear it from the Sacred Word, and from the Saviour’s lips, and may the Spirit of God open your ears that you may hear as the learned, and understand what you hear!”
–Charles H. Spurgeon, ‘It Is Finished,’ in Majesty in Misery, Volume 3: Calvary’s Mournful Mountain (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2005), 217-218. (MTPS, 7: 586)
