It Is Finished (Holy Week Devotional)

“When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.”

 - John 19:30

So many things had led to this moment. Creation. The Fall. The Covenant. The Exodus. The Law. The Promised Land. The Monarchy. The Temple. The Exile. The Prophets. Thousands of years, millions of people, and countless acts of God culminated in the humble birth of a baby boy in Bethlehem. That child grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and men, and when the day finally came for him to leave his home and begin fulfilling his purpose, he started his journey in the same waters that his ancestors had once crossed to enter the Promised Land. Where the waters of the Jordan had parted for them, for Jesus the heavens themselves opened, as the Holy Spirit descended like a dove and a voice from heaven proclaimed, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Jesus’s ministry would prove to be a whirlwind of activity—teaching his disciples one moment, consorting with disreputable sinners the next, always extending a healing touch to the throngs of sick and disabled people who came to him. With a word, the impossible suddenly became reality—storms calmed, demons cast out, the dead raised. The longer all this went on, the more people came to believe what Simon Peter had once declared to his master, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

 But those who stood ready to crown Jesus on Sunday proved fickle. When it became apparent that he had no intention of leading the military revolution they craved, Jerusalem’s mood turned from jubilation to rage. One of Jesus’s own disciples turned him over to jealous rivals. The crowd, given the choice between executing Jesus or a dangerous insurrectionist named Barabbas, chose Barabbas. So it was that, after a week of preparation, after three years of signs and sermons, after thousands upon thousands of years of God reaching out to His people, those people now eagerly watched His Son die.

In Christ’s final moments, the mob could not know that this execution had been predestined, that they were fulfilling a plan set in motion millennia before they were born. For them, the story of the crucifixion had begun Thursday night with an arrest in a garden. It was the news of the moment; Jesus was just another false messiah whose name they would struggle to remember in a month.

But we remember the crucifixion still today because we know what they did not—that when Jesus said, “It is finished,” he was talking about not just the end of a moment, but of an age. Christ’s dying breath marked the completion of a plan which began not in Gethsemane, but Eden. The cross brought an end not just to a mortal life, but to the dominion of sin over God’s people.

So many things led to the death of Christ, that turning point of history. So many lives were changed forever, so many people were touched, all so that Christ could serve as an atoning sacrifice for your sins, all so that you could have eternal life with God. This Good Friday, as you mourn the death of the Lord and offer thanks for his love, may you also draw inspiration from the magnitude of the plan that the crucifixion finished. Do not be as near-sighted as the crowd, only seeing today as the end of the week, but understand it like Christ himself did in his last moments—as the ultimate fulfillment of God’s will.