So, what was meant by our dying Savior when He cried out from the cross, “It is finished”? What was finished? Stay tuned.

I was raised in a major religious denomination that absolutely drove me crazy with its innumerable “Ifs” about whether (or not) I was going to Heaven … “if you don’t commit a serious sin(s),” “if you go to church every Sunday,” “if you are baptized,” “if you believe everything exactly as we do,” “if you accept our doctrines and traditions,” “if,” “if,” “if,” “if,” “if,”ad infinitum.

I thought, Yikes! I’m such a moral flake, how could I possibly fulfill all those conditions? For the rest of my life? And it’s all up to me?

Forget about it. And off I went, never to return. Well, that is, until …

Years later, after countless ups and downs in my life, some Christian friends acquainted me with the rest of that story about Jesus’ death on the cross.

Two criminals were also being crucified that day right next to Jesus, and one of them took Jesus’ claim to be Israel’s Messiah seriously.

As told in Luke 23:42-43, “And he (the thief) was saying, ‘Jesus, remember me when You come into Your kingdom! And He said to him, ‘Truly I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.’”

As far as we know, this guy never darkened the door of a church or uttered a prayer in his whole life. Yet he made it to Heaven that day, no strings attached.

There he was, running out of time, teetering on the brink of Hell, nailed there alone with his brand-new Friend next to him.

What he couldn’t have known was that His Friend was literally God incarnate who was in the process of dying for that thief’s sins along with the sins of the rest of us who were willing to place our faith and trust in Him down through the ages.

Why knowing this matters.

Theologian L.S. Chafer wrote: 

“There is no spiritual progress to be made until one is convinced that something final was accomplished at the cross in regard to sin … Something has been done concerning every sin that ever has been committed, or that will yet be committed by man, and consequently, every person has been vitally affected by the cross.

“It does not baffle our God to deal with sins before they are committed. Had He not done this there could now be no grounds of salvation for any sinner in this age. So complete has been the sacrificial work of the Son of God that the Spirit has testified: ‘Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world’; ‘He tasted death for every man’; ‘He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world’; ‘He died for all.’”

The greater picture …

Jesus came to earth on a mission — a mission to set right what Adam had gotten wrong when he rebelled against God in the Garden of Eden, turning our world upside down in the process.

The challenges Adam created were way above his lowly “pay grade” and that is why the “Last Adam,” Jesus, came down from Heaven to earth to confront the mighty spiritual powers that were keeping humanity in bondage to sin.

It was a cosmic job that required Divine power:

• Sin had to be put away.
• The evil serpent needed to be killed.
• God’s claims for righteousness had to be met.
• Death had to be abolished.
• Righteous authority needed to be re-established over the earth.
• Man’s conscience needed to be cleansed once and for all.

In a Divine mystery, our sinless Substitute, Jesus obliterated the above problems all at once through His death, burial, and resurrection — all as prophesied in the Old Testament and revealed in the New Testament, in 1 Peter 3:18:

For Christ also suffered for sins once for all time, the just (Him) for the unjust (me), so that He might bring us to God …”

That is why I could finally give up living by all those “ifs,” get out of that exhausting squirrel cage of “working my way” to Heaven, and rest safely in the arms of Christ’s FINISHED work on the cross, by grace through faith.

How About You?

Bible commentator William Newell boiled it down to this:

But the works method and the grace method are mutually exclusive. Each shuts out the other. Men must cease even seeking; they must cease all works — weeping, confessing, repenting, even earnest praying, and simply believe God laid their sins, their very own sins, all of them (past, present and future) on Christ at the cross. There comes a moment when a man ceases from his own works, hearing that Christ finished the work, paid the ransom at the cross. Then he rests! Such a soul believes, knowing himself to be a sinner and ungodly, but he believes on God, just as he is, and knows he is welcome!

Get it?