02.01. Part 1

John 19:30 "When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar He said, ‘It is finished’ and He bowed His head and gave up the ghost."

I said last week that I’d attempt to talk to you on the three most important words, I believe, in history - IT IS FINISHED. This is one of the seven sayings, as we say, of the Lord Jesus on the cross. Just three words - IT IS FINISHED. The Greatest Words Ever Uttered By the Greatest Man That Ever Lived. In these three words I see the consummation of all the Old Testament truth and the germination of all New Testament truth.

I don’t believe that ever in history, · · anywhere, at any time, by anybody, were three words more pregnant with meaning than these three words given by one Man at the end of His life - It is finished. It is finished.

Now supposing that you were here and I was where you are - How would you start to handle a text like this?

I feel as though I am trying to catch the wind in my arm.

I am trying to pick up the Atlantic Ocean up in a sieve.

How do you deal with it?

· · Its magnitude staggers me, · · Its mystery staggers me, · · Its majesty staggers me.

It seems to me that here is a terminus in the life of the Lord Jesus: all the prophesies, all the law, all the prophets, terminate in this saying of the Lord Jesus Christ. And everything from here blossoms out because this is the beginning of it all. Three simple words - it is finished.

I suggest to you in all reverence that these three words terrified hell. IT IS FINISHED!

You see, this English phrase of ours, this little sentence, is not in the Greek at all. And I don’t know much about Greek, but I did discover that in the Greek it is just one word: FINISHED!

Matthew 27:1-66 says that Jesus cried with a loud voice: "FINISHED!"…And I am sure all hell shook!

You see, this is an arena into which Jesus is moving. You can say the life of Jesus was a three act drama. You get the first years of His life, 30 years in preparation for 3 years.

· · The first chapter has been written, The second chapter is now coming to a climax on the cross, The third chapter is yet to come in all His resurrection splendor.

There is nothing to equal it anywhere.

I get indignant when I hear people say, "What we need to do is study comparative religion." Well, I say again with some heat and some feeling in my spirit, Christianity is not a comparative religion, it’s a SUPERLATIVE religion! Because this one saying of Jesus Christ explodes every other religion on God’s earth! They are all fakes. They are all useless. This momentous event…

· I can see demons peeping out from hell as they see Jesus has gone to the cross.

I can see angels looking over the parapets of heaven, I can see the Jews and the Romans and the Greeks. They are all at the cross! The Cross of Jesus…we sing the hymn · · "Beneath the cross of Jesus I fain would take my stand, The shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land, A home within the wilderness, a rest upon the way."

Look, if you put the cross on Palestine, like that, and let the arms go round, you can scoop them round the whole world, because geographically, the cross is almost the center of the world. It is the center of time. When we shot a rocket, did we change the calendar? When we invented the atom bomb, did we change the calendar?

Isn’t it amazing a little Baby came into the world and He divided time? - He divided men - He divided nations.

People say, "If we have revival we’ll all be one." No! If we have revival we will be more divided than ever!

· The first thing Jesus did before He could walk or talk was divide men. "Herod was troubled and all Jerusalem with him." The last thing He did on the cross was divide men. In His lifetime He divided men. He went into the Synagogue and there was a division because of Him. Wherever Jesus goes there is division. And those demons were looking down in terror. Come on, come on, you’ve forgotten. Think again about the majesty of this event. You know how great it was? One of His other sayings was, "My God, my God why hast Thou forsaken Me?" In a tongue He knew so well, He says, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani." Which we can hardly interpret except: "My God, I am deserted." Everybody deserted Him.

You see, there at that moment when Jesus said: "It is finished," Mercy and Truth met together, Righteousness and Peace kissed each other… and hell went into panic. How do I know? Because the earth was shattered. The whole earth rocked on it’s axis. The earth trembled under the impact of the sin that He bore for us. Heaven trembled… I’ve been to art galleries around the world, you’ve been in many I guess, you saw some beautiful pictures. But you know, there never was a photo of the cross; it’s representations are all imagination. That event was so sacred that, as it were, God took His coat off and hung it over the sun. And there was darkness for three hours. He would not let anybody see His Son become corruption.

Jesus Christ, in the mystery of God’s divine grace, was, as Wesley says, God "contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man," in the incarnation. The heaven of heavens cannot contain Him. Yet He clothed Himself in flesh and blood and crept into a woman’s womb. How God became man I do not know, but less, less, less do I know HOW DID HE BECOME SIN?

You know the answer? No, you don’t. Neither does any living person. Every man who’s honest - take Spurgeon or anybody - the more honest the man is he, more he says, "I am baffled." As I get older I see more and more that, "great is the mystery of Godliness." I said to a brother today, "I feel that in spiritual matters, after 55 years walking with God, I don’t have my feet wet, not even the sole underneath, never mind water to the ankles, or the knees, of the loins."

God has opened His treasure house to us. As I’ve used the phrase so often before: Do we really explore the possibilities of God?

What’s the most exciting thing in your life? Don’t answer me, answer straight up to God. Tell Him what is the most exciting thing. That you become more knowledgeable, make more money, become more fit?

What is the most exciting thing to you? Is it that day by day you slip in to Him and worship and adore Him?

I was thinking of this great hymn of Wesley today. He is talking about the cross and he says this, · · "Would Jesus have the sinner die?

Why hangs He then on yonder tree?

What means that strange expiring cry?

Sinner He prays for you and me, ‘Forgive them Father. O forgive.

They know not, that by Me they live.’

Thou loving all atoning Lamb Thee - by Thy painful agony, Thy blood, Thy sweat, Thy grief, Thy shame, Thy cross and passion on the tree, Thy precious death and life - I pray Take all, take all my sins away!" And then, in the rapture of that, Charles Wesley says this (and it’s so wonderful. I can see that woman crying at the feet of Jesus, and I can see John Wesley, scholarly, dignified, trailing his academic gown behind him in Oxford University.) · · "Oh, let me kiss Thy bleeding feet. And bathe and wash them with my tears, The story of Thy love repeat, In every drooping sinner’s ears, That all mankind with me may prove, Thy sovereign everlasting love.

Oh, let Thy love my heart constrain."

You see if He works it inward, it’s going to work outward somewhere. God only puts up with words so long. A brother said to me during this week, "You know brother, I think we die in areas of our life. We don’t die totally to God’s Spirit. We die in areas. God gives up on us, in certain areas. He does not tolerate anymore. We said so much, we made our vows, we won’t do it, God bypasses us in that area." Hold fast to that that thou hast that no man take thy crown! (Not demons, but that men take thy crown.) So Charles finishes his hymn by saying this:

· · "Oh, let Thy love my heart constrain, Thy Love for every sinner free, That every fallen soul of man May taste the grace that found out me, That all mankind with me may prove, Thy sovereign, everlasting love."

This, I say, was the most momentous moment in history. Hell had feared this moment for centuries, for millenniums!

· · Why do you think the devil greased the path of Jesus and tried to make Him take a short cut to conquer the world?

Why do you think he stirred up enmity among the religious people?

You see, there is one rotten canker that is in so many churches, as well as it was before.

What does it say about Joseph? His brothers sold him. For what? For envy.

What does it says about the Lord Jesus? The priests sold Him for envy. That festering thing in the heart of men and women. They sold Him because of envy. They sold Him because they hated Him. He was only a little baby, less than two years of age, when they had what history calls the Massacre of the Innocents.

I said to you before, I’ll say it to you again, whether you love me or hate me for it: If you’ve got children you ought to be up an hour before they go to school and cover hose children every day with the blood of Jesus and really lay hold of the promises. They live in a hell of a world in the day in which we live. If you don’t do it, I’ll do it for you. Remember, when Satan thinks there is something going to happen, he is going to dog that child. I prayed, and I still do, whether you know or not, I pray for some of our kids, if I am here or not, if Jesus tarries, they will become some of the leaders half a generation, a decade from now. God will make them missionaries and evangelists, and teachers, and apostles, in the last great awakening, (which men are trying to work right up now and you can’t do it.) But He is going to get youngsters and fill them with the Spirit, and teenagers in their early years.

Remember Moses. You know, people say if you are good you do as the government tells you. If you are good, you tell the government to go to hell if they want to go and you obey God. And the father and mother of Moses did not obey the government, they hid their baby when the government said it should be destroyed. He is going to be the law giver, he is going to be one of the greatest men in history, and Satan says NO! The same thing happened in the life of Jesus. Jesus is not two years old and "Herod is troubled and all Jerusalem with him," and they said, "destroy Him." I often think about king Herod - he had more faith than the disciples. Somebody said, "He is going to be a King," and he believed it. Somehow Satan said, "You better believe it, that little fellow is the Son of God with power and authority. He is going to dethrone you and wreck your kingdom." And so just as they tried to destroy Moses at two years of age or under, they tried to destroy Jesus. From the moment He was born to the last thing on the cross. As I’ve said so often, I still say to myself - I need to - that even if you’ve gone to the cross, even if you got on the cross, the old devil comes with subtlety and he says, "Listen, get down from the cross and save yourself. Nobody is living like you. They live it up. They can’t tell the difference, except they go to church on Sunday. Other than that, as for prayer and fasting and seeking God and travail… so… Why do you do it? Why don’t you get an easier job? Get ten times as much as you get - going round here or going to some fancy church or some other thing." He comes to you in some way. You’ve decided you were going to live according to the standard of the Lord Jesus and he says, "Well, why don’t you pinch it a little bit here, and reduce your convictions there, and not be so stiff right there, and do just a little compromise. Ha, everybody gets away with it." From His infancy to the cross, the last thing they did, I read in Matthew when He had gone to the cross, they passed by - the scum of the earth passed by - and they wagged their heads and reviled Him. It was nothing unusual to see a man go down the street carrying a cross. It’s as common as a boy carrying a baseball bat. "Hey look who is going, do you know who that is?" "So what, they put many a false prophet to death. Only He is a bit more brazen than the others, you know, He preached a sermon He said would shake the world, called the Sermon on the Mount. He has a bit more power but, you know why He does it? You know why He pushes devils around? Because He is the prince of devils, they have to obey Him." Here is the holiest, purest, most spotless man that ever lived. What does the world do?

Blister Him, · · Blast Him,

                · · Bruise Him.