“It is finished.” –John 19:30
“This is the mystery of the life and death of Jesus, the holy Son of God, in the room and place of guilty sinners, that Holy One working out for them a righteousness for their acceptance with their God.
Under the law, this is our place as men. Under the broken law, and therefore under its curse, this is our place as sinners.
Let the incarnate Son of God take our place. His must be, as man, a holy, spotless, obedient life. His must be, as the imputed Sin-bearer, a suffering, accursed death!
The purity of that holy life no hand can paint! The bitterness in His cup of sorrow, as a sufferer bearing imputed sin, no tongue can tell!
We can only say, and rejoice that heaven bids us say it, that this is the divine plan of redeeming love, to put another in our room, and that other one the Father’s own beloved Son, to obey for us the law, and exhaust for us the curse!
It is done! It is finished! What a shout of victory.
What tidings of great joy for a lost world! What fullness of salvation must be here!
The plan was Heaven-appointed!
The Saviour is the Eternal Son!
The very place He takes is ours!
The work He undertakes to do, and the suffering He consents to bear, are the work and suffering which alone provide for us a righteousness in which to appear before the Holy God.
It is done! It is finished!
Then, glorious conclusion for me, a sinner, I may be saved, and saved at once! Saved through the faith which reckons that it is Christ for me!
Christ for me!
Oh, how a word like this strikes at the root of all self-righteousness, and all man’s fancied ways of getting mercy of the Lord!
And how it opens up before the anxious trembling soul a path of light and life, which otherwise would be closed and dark!”
–Robert Ireland, Light From Calvary: The Seven Last Words of Jesus (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1873/2024), 81-82.
Leave a Reply