A great work finished

An Easter message                                                                    

Imagine a very important piece of work being entrusted to you. It is put into your hands to do. And what a task it proves! There are all kinds of difficulties to be overcome along the way. Some very powerful individuals are not friendly to the project and make no secret of their hostility. And at times it is not easy to keep going. But you do keep going until, at last, it is finished.

So it was with the Lord Jesus. He came into our world with a very important piece of work entrusted to him. Put into his hands, by God the Father, was the task of obtaining salvation for sinners; a salvation that would cover all their guilt, change their hearts, put them right with God, secure for them eternal life, and be freely offered to all. And what a task it proved! The difficulties were enormous. The opposition was fierce. It took him a whole life-time to accomplish it. And at the end there was tremendous suffering to be faced. But he didn’t give up. He kept on going until, on the cross, he cried out, “It is finished” (John 19.30). All that was necessary for him to do and suffer was at last fully done.

How he began it

Some people are able to start a particular work because they have become rich. Christ began his work by becoming poor: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Cor.8.9). We might sum it up like this: the Rich One became poor so that we poor ones might become rich. And we were poor! Our sin had taken from us the favour of God and made us objects of his wrath. It had taken our freedom away and made us slaves. It had taken God himself away and placed us in the power of Satan. It had taken from us the prospect of eternal life and set us on the road to destruction. And it had done this to all of us. We were – and are! – in dire spiritual poverty!

This is the dark background against which we are to view the mission of Christ. His task was to come into our world and to so live and so die that sinners might become rich – spiritually rich. And if we have taken him to be our Saviour we are rich. In material terms we may be desperately poor. But in spiritual terms we have become wonderfully wealthy. For in Christ we have been restored to the favour of God, freed from the guilt of our sin, delivered from the power of Satan, assured of eternal life, and through the ministry of the Holy Spirit are enjoying the first instalment of a glorious future inheritance. Rich indeed!

The cost to our Saviour, however, was enormous. For us to become rich it was necessary for him to become poor. Think of it in terms of the contrast between the place where he lived before his incarnation and the world into which he was born; between what he had enjoyed in heaven and the conditions amid which he would live on earth. It is why Bethlehem is such a humbling place to visit. The Jesus born there had come from heaven with its light, its love, its worship, and its freedom from all suffering and want. And now here he is in our very dark world, one of us, unknown and unrecognised, with such a difficult life ahead of him and, at the end, such a dreadful death to die.

How powerfully it speaks to those of us being called to give up something for him! To relinquish an affluent lifestyle, perhaps, and go and live and work for him in some desperately needy housing estate. Or to leave the family and friends in whom we are so rich and relocate to the other side of the world. Or to live and serve where it is dangerous to be a Christian. What will help us if we are wrestling with such a call on our lives? One thing that will help is the recollection of what it meant for Jesus to come and be our Saviour. The degree of self-impoverishment that entailed for him makes any sacrifice we may have to make a very small thing indeed.

How he took a lifetime to do it

We sometimes refer to someone’s work as their life’s work. And we say it without meaning it in a strictly literal sense, as if it occupied them from infancy to old age. We have in mind their adult life or their working life and how it was devoted to such and such a cause. In the case of Jesus, however, the accomplishing of the great task entrusted to him was, quite literally, a life-long matter. It took him no less than a lifetime to do it.

The three years of his public ministry were, of course, of immeasurable importance and especially at the end. There would be no redemption enjoyed by sinners were it not for these remarkable three years and the atoning death in which they reached their climax. But they were not the whole. Everything that went before them was just as important. A key verse in this connection is Romans 5:19: “For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous”. Two men are being contrasted here, Adam and Christ. Adam, on the one hand, disobeys God and with terrible results for the many whom he represents. They are all made sinners. Christ, on the other hand, obeys God. And what blessing comes of that! All who will receive him will be made righteous. To what obedience, however, is the apostle referring? Not just to the obedience of the final years with its culmination in his submission to death. The statement takes in the whole of his obedience. There is righteousness, justification, and life for all believers because as a child and as a youth Jesus as perfectly pleased the Father as he did in adult life.

How he went about finishing it

What did you do to finish the last piece of work you were doing? Jesus finished his work by dying. It is interesting in this connection to think about the different ways in which these two things, finishing and dying, go together. Sometimes dying prevents the finishing. Charles Dickens left an unfinished novel. So did Robert Louis Stevenson and Elizabeth Gaskell. Franz Schubert left an unfinished symphony. In General Eisenhower’s farm in Pennsylvania there is an unfinished painting of Culzean Castle in Ayrshire. At other times dying follows the finishing. The last great work of Dr. Thomas Chalmers was the planting of a church in a very deprived area of Edinburgh, the West Port. It was his great joy to sit down with its founding members at their first Communion; a few weeks later he was dead. There are cases, too, where dying helps others to finish something, a fact that could be endlessly illustrated from wartime.

And then we come to Christ. In him we have a combination of finishing and dying that is unique. He finished his work by dying. Dying was part of his work. It was indeed the climactic part. His work could not be completed apart from his death. Had he declined death it would have been the utter undoing of his work. It would have meant that everything that had gone before – his teaching, his miracles, his example, his obedience – was of no account whatsoever. Leave out the cross and there is no redemption for anyone. It is why these great words, “It is finished”, are spoken when they are – not before the cross; not even as he is being nailed to the cross; but right at the close, as he is about to breathe his last.

And what a death it was! Two others were crucified with him and at the level of the physical there was nothing that made Jesus’ death any different from theirs. But in other respects it was without parallel. We see it, for example, in his identity. This was the Son of God, the Lord of glory, the eternal Word who in the beginning was with God and was himself God. We see it, too, in the extraordinary union of sinlessness and guilt. Death is the wages of sin and Jesus was without sin. He had always done what pleased the Father. Yet his guilt was greater than that of any man who had ever lived. How could that be? Scripture tells us. The Lord had laid on him the iniquity of us all (Is.53.6). He was bearing our sins in his own body on the tree (1 Peter 2.24). He who knew no sin had been made sin for us (2 Cor.5.21). The guilt with which he was guilty was our guilt; the death that he was dying was the death that we deserved to die. And all so that we might not perish but have eternal life.

How welcome we are to the blessings of it

Back in the 1860s, when the Scotsman John G. Paton was a missionary on the island of Aniwa in the New Hebrides, there was no permanent supply of fresh water. The natives were dependent on the rain. So Paton decided to sink a well, much to the amusement and concern of the natives who had never heard of such a thing. Showers came from the sky, not out of the ground! But Paton pressed on, day after day, until, at a depth of thirty-two feet, water! In Paton’s own words, his well broke the back of heathenism on Aniwa. Jehovah had done what no other god had done; he had made rain come up from the earth.

But here’s the point of the story. When Paton’s well was finished the fresh water was made available to the whole island. Everyone needed it and everyone was welcome to it. And that is how it is with Jesus. Having finished the work the Father gave him to do a well of living water has been opened by Jesus for the world. All may come and drink. The blessings of Jesus’ finished work are both available to all and offered to all. Christians may say to all without exception, “there is a Saviour for you; a Saviour to whom you may come in your need as a sinner and with absolute confidence that he will never turn you away”.