Day 4058 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

John 19:30 NIV

“It is finished”

And by it He meant all of it. Every bit of the Old Testament and every prophecy spoken within it. Every ounce of the waiting and worry won within the hearts and hopes of those who’d lived it. Every moment in which mercy was needed but never given. Every time that love was offered a chance to come to life but was elsewise rejected. Every word spoken that had no business being uttered. Every action ever undertaken that caused only the sort of suffering that He had now completed. Every life that had been lived in an enemy’s enmity as thrown in the face of the God who had now come to help us see what we had become.

It was over.

This is in every possible way one of the easiest ideas to contemplate and yet arguably the most difficult to even begin thinking about. For in this life we’ve all been given the ability to have met many things, thoughts, theories that have long since met their conclusion. We know the gravity of something ending. And, well, we know that some endings are indeed sweet whereas others doth bring about a great sorrow. And perhaps it’s this strange blending of the both, sadness and hope, that has found for us a fragility, a frustration, a failure in many ways to truly grasp what happened upon that day.

That Good Friday.

Truly, even the name given this day seems something of a confusion in that those aware of the cross and thus the act of crucifixion easily struggle to see much good inside of it. Rather it’s incredibly gruesome, horribly brutal, impossibly graphic and yet somehow supposed to be perfect? So much so that He who endured it spoke whilst within it a word which we read here, “It is finished”?

For it seems from our perspective, impressively shortsighted as ever, that the only thing which found its end back then was but Christ’s life. Because within this world such is the overall estimation of every life: that it dies. This is in fact now such a common fear that we all go to some rather amazing extremes as far as doing, buying, believing things that we seem to honestly think might help us to avoid it in some way, or at least for as long as we possibly can.

But in the end we can’t.

Rather around here all life is promised to end, something itself a promise given in the prophecies He’s now completed. Indeed, way back in Genesis we read of God’s having grown burdened by our very existence thanks to His seeing from Heaven into the heart of man and realizing that within there was only evil all the time. Not at all what He’d created us to be nor then in any way delighted for us to stay. Rather He created us to be His children, placed us in His Garden, surrounded us there with His provision and what was a promise that we needed nothing.

It wasn’t enough.

Yes, those very first of us determined for the rest of us this ongoing idea that God isn’t enough. That while He might be good and His promises then forever better than anything other, we’re still here surrounded by what is all this other that we see our every sister and every brother enjoying to the tune of lives being lived as if He isn’t. And it’s within this constant refusal to delight in our Father that we’ve come to find this way of life in which we all deserve to die.

Why?

Because the thoughts and attitudes of our hearts still remain evil all the time.

And one could actually argue that things have gotten worse as within His Word we read that the days of a man shall never again extend beyond 120 years.

Anymore our best hope is 70-80.

Running out of patience maybe. Him, not us. No, no we’ve long been of this staunch ability to show Him daily that we’re more than willing to continue on ahead always still waiting to turn back to Him and embrace the prodigal’s walk that Jesus and that cross was meant to mean. Indeed, we are nearly perfect in our record of refusing His call to repentance, continuing instead to stack up around us all these self-perceived treasures as preferred over His promise.

Simply because they cost less I guess.

And indeed, this much seems the case as we do know the cost. All of us know the price we owe, the debt that is our death, one earned thanks to how we’ve lived and all that we’ve gotten wrong within. Problem then is that we know we’ve each but one life to give and that, well, thanks to how we’ve lived it, truth is it ain’t worth much.

No, I stop every now and then and think of all I have to show for my life. And of all the accolades and accomplishments that I may have achieved or accomplished, I find still entirely too much shame and regret mixed in the batter to ever come near baking a cake worth eating.

Rather I see mostly only a life lived by a failure who deserved that beating that He took on my behalf.

And there are many days in which I struggle with that.

Not the fact that I deserve what He endured as that part makes sense a little more every time I look back across my life and all I’ve done with it, done in it, done to it mostly. No, rather I struggle with understanding why He’d do it. I don’t often find I’ve the ability to comprehend it as I know without question that I’m wholly unworthy of His still calling me to be holy.

Been everything but entirely too many times and thus for entirely too long.

But then I reread these words, those three right there in the middle, and I find this hope that’s somehow not so impossible.

For what if that which was finished was too all that He knew I’d do? What if what He’d finished was completing the forgiveness for all of my still-to-come failures? What if He finished my nearly life-long rebellion? What if He ended by living as if His enemy? What if He saw in me, sees in me still something that He wasn’t as willing to give up on as I always have been?

Is that not what the cross says?

That He was willing to die in order to help us see the death we’ve made of life? That we’d so mistaken this vocation we call living that it needed something so drastic as His demise to open our eyes to possibly see what all had become of you and me? That we had become so very lost in our every chosen enmity that we’d even become enemies of life, of love, of the One who embodied the both as He came down from up above in order to help us come back to our being who we were at first created to be but had instead sadly never become?

I tell you, all these thoughts and the questions they ask almost leave you numb in between what feels a sea of shame and one poured of thanksgiving.

Yet another strange blending!

But perhaps that’s what He too was ending, that way of life in which all of life had descended to the point in which there was nothing good without it being a little bad, nothing right that wasn’t a little wrong, nothing wrong that we’d not determined was right and no amount of light had yet proven able to shine through to the truth of who we were here inside what remains for many a way of life in which everything is so blurred and betrayed that nothing makes sense from one day to the next.

Yes, perhaps He came to restore some sense of order in what somehow remains a world rife with chaos and confusion as determined inside every human delusion that we still delight enduring.

Why?

Why do we go on like this what with all the hatred and the heaviness that we all but enforce upon one another in what remains a life in which we live as if nobody else really matters?

Can this not happen only if we continue to miss the message?

What message?

That, “It is finished”?

Indeed, why are we still not done with so much of what He died to overcome? Why must we continue doing these things that we ourselves don’t even enjoy doing? Why have we continued to allow for a way of life in which we anymore don’t even think about what we do, what we say, rather we just live as if we’re here only to prove our loyalty to those who are so obviously only loyal to death?

Yes, why are we not finished dancing with what He rendered powerless?

Why do we continue to do things that give death back its sting?

Why do we still speak words that only speak emptiness unto those who hear them?

Why do we still fashion for ourselves all these false gods of glitter and glory when it’s so clear that the way we’ve lived this story is what led to that Friday so gory?

Why do we still invite shame and sorrow to our table? Why do we reserve a place inside our minds for regret? Why is guilt still given a chance to return whenever he wants?

Are we not yet finished with it?

Sadly no, many here seem clearly not to know their end with sin nor the despair it brings. Many here seem still entirely unaware of where this walk will go. Many here still seem eternally ready to go nowhere near eternity simply because of the cost of the ride and it being our way of life.

Yes, many here still live as if our way of life will somehow, someday, arrive us at something that is worth more than His promises.

Yet we won’t die for our plans. We won’t endure suffering to see our expectations met. We won’t welcome misery even if it means that we end up winning whatever it was that we wanted. No, we are indeed a people who give up well before the going even gets going, let alone before it gets tough.

Which is oddly enough why we know what it is to finish something. All of us have in fact finished with a great deal of things thus far. I can’t even begin to recall let alone recount all the times in my life in which I walked away from what I was finished with. Most of it left entirely uncompleted.

Thankfully He didn’t stop so short as I apparently enjoy to.

No, instead He saw His promises through not only to the end but both through everything endured along the way and even onward after that.

After all, the grave is empty because His promises had no plans on staying.

And yet that’s a part of what He finished too. It was the promise that if this life we’ll lose, we’ll too find our share of His as is now lived forever. Yes, He took up the cross to carry the cost of our having all lived lost so as to help us find the only Way to eternal life. This is what is meant by where it says that He has now overcome death. Indeed, even the greatest enemy of life is now rendered powerless in Christ.

Why do we keep giving death its power back?

And, well, why is it that we never really ask ourselves questions like that? Is it not because we’re not as finished as He is? That we’re still dabbling in all that He died to undo? That we’re still lost here in what remains a life spent in between hoping for something better and finding more often only the ease of settling again for everything lesser?

Friends, I know we can’t but if only we could see all that He sees I do think we’d all instantly agree to ourselves be finished too. Finished looking to the world to tell us what to do, who to be. Finished looking through the world for all these things we think we need. Finished looking like the world as we’d finally understand the danger defined of where we stand. Finished with taking our stance against He who took our cross.

Yes, I think we’d finally let go of a life lived lost if we could just allow ourselves to let go of what we’ve long tried to hold and see that all it was was our holding a grudge against the very Author of a love unlike any other. For among us the greatest form of love is that someone would lay down their life for another who is considered a friend.

He laid down His life for His enemies.

Indeed, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

And this seems to beg the question if He will do that for us while we were living as His enemies, what all might He do if we gave up our enmity, our hatred, our hostility as shown inside every moment in which we still put Him last in life?

Don’t know but it seems a question like that only makes Heaven seem more real.

Because maybe the changes we’ve all met and the growths we’ve all experienced, maybe they’re all evidence that the only thing He isn’t finished with is us.

After all, that hill has long since been abandoned. The grave in which He was laid is now so forgotten that nobody knows where it is. The Bible itself has been finished for centuries, nothing being added to it nor taken away. The path then through this life as was drawn within that Word He’s breathed has been plain to see for longer than any of us have been around. Thus too even Heaven is all finished up as He’s promised us that He was leaving to prepare a place for those who stayed behind to get ready to go.

Truly, it seems as though the only thing that He’s still waiting on is us to get ready.

And indeed, I do believe that that’s the only reason that this life isn’t finished. It’s because we still have work to do, both in our lives and that so that we can have a truth for which to testify that might aid in the opening of other blinded eyes.

Not that He needs us to help Him finish His work as, well, He’s already said His part was finished.

No, just that He gives us the opportunity to play a role in the rolling away of the stone from in front of those around us who are still clearly living the death that’s lost inside what is a life that’s all but locked inside a grave that this world’s lack of change proves nobody can really realize.

Yes, we’re here to open eyes to He who is the Christ via our living as if cities upon hills who used to be sinners leant toward hell.

His work was to clear away all that was in our way of both coming home and too telling everyone we know and everyone we don’t all about the joy that’s awaiting us once we get there.

Do you know that joy? Do you have that hope? If so, are you doing anything with it?

Because the reality of this Good Friday is that it is finished. The promise of Heaven is ready and waiting for any and all who turn and seek for it. The salvation of Christ offered unto all of us is just that, offered unto all of us. What then are we waiting for?

Friends, this Easter weekend is obviously one of the biggest in the Christian faith as it marks the moment in which Christ died as an atoning sacrifice that washed away the sins of all those who are willing to confess they have them. And too it culminates in the inexpressible joy we know to be waiting when that grave is once more emptied as He too leads us not merely to it but through it.

This is what He finished:

Our loss of life.

Indeed, all that remains is our loss of the flesh that’s long gotten only in the way. And thankfully He who is the Way made the way for our to do just that!

Problem is that we have to finish with sin ourselves and, well, the Bible defines that being done only when we struggle in the flesh. This is too what we see Him finish upon that day. He too endured a flesh that struggled because of sin, enduring every blow, knowing every tear, hearing every crack of the whip and feeling every swing of the hammer. He was beaten, bloodied, brutalized for our betterment. For God laid upon Him the punishment of us all, deserved because of all we’ve done.

He died that we might stop doing it because, well, the cross now stands in perpetuity as evidence that there is no life to be found in our continuing to live as if God’s enemies.

And honestly, why would we want to anymore? For again, if Jesus would do all that for us while we were still sinners, what more will He do when we’re called rather the saved?

Friends, this is a Good Friday because it marks the day that He took our sins away. He came to this place to finish what we couldn’t so that all we’d have to worry about from then on is finishing what we could with His help.

Let us ourselves be then finished with sin. Both because we now know the death it deserves but too the life He gives to those who embrace His call to take up our crosses and follow.

It was never meant to be easy. Rather it was meant to be freeing. And, well, if we still can’t see the difference then we are by no means finished.

The point is that He’s now made the way that we can be. And while that way demands our death, we’ve the promise that He knows how to overcome it.

So again I ask, what are we waiting for?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold