When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.
When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said - or, as in all the first three Gospels, " He cried with a loud voice" --
Sixth Saying:
"IT IS FINISHED." [Tetelestai (G5055 )] In this one astonishing word believers will find the foundation of all their safety and bliss throughout eternal ages. The "loud voice" does not imply, as some able interpreters contend, that our Lord's strength was so far from being exhausted that He needed not to die then, and surrendered up His life sooner than nature required, merely because it was the appointed time. It was indeed the appointed time, but time that He should be crucified through weakness (2 Corinthians 13:4), and nature was now reaching its utmost exhaustion. But just as even His own dying saints, particularly the martyrs of Jesus, have sometimes had such gleams of coming glory immediately before breathing their last as to impart to them a strength to utter their feelings which has amazed the by-standers, so this mighty voice of the expiring Redeemer was nothing else but the exultant spirit of the Dying Victor, perceiving the fruit of His travail just about to be embraced, and nerving the organs of utterance to an ecstatic expression of its sublime feelings in the one word, "It is finished." What is finished? The Law is fulfilled as never before, and never since, in His obedience unto death, even the death of the cross. Messianic prophecy is accomplished; Redemption is completed: "He hath finished the transgression, and made an end of sin, and made reconciliation for iniquity, and brought in everlasting righteousness, and sealed up the vision and prophecy, and anointed a holy of holies.' The scaffolding of the ancient economy is taken down: He has inaugurated the kingdom of God, and given birth to a new world.
JESUS, HAVING UTTERED THE LAST OF HIS SEVEN SAYINGS ON THE CROSS, EXPIRES
This Saying is given only by the third Evangelist.
Luke 23:46: "And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, He said (Psalms 31:5) -
Seventh Saying:
"FATHER, INTO THY HANDS I COMMEND MY SPIRIT."
Yes, the darkness is past, and the true light now shineth. His soul has emerged from its mysterious horrors; "My God is heard no more, but in unclouded light He yields sublime into His Father's hands the infinitely precious spirit-using here also, with His last breath, the words of those Psalms which were ever on His lips.
And - "having said this" (Luke 23:46 ), he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.
Remarks:
(1) When we read that Jesus "bearing His cross, went forth," and thus "suffered without the gate," can we wonder at the apostle's call to his fellow-believers of the house of Israel, "Let us go forth therefore unto Him without the camp"? (Hebrews 13:13). For what was city, temple, or camp, after THE LORD of it had been judicially rejected, contemptuously led forth from it, and without the gate, as one accursed, put to the death of the cross? Behold, their house was left unto them desolate: the Glory was departed: and now, as never before, might be heard, by those who still came to tread those once hallowed courts a Voice saying unto them, "Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them.
And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you; yes, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood" (Isaiah 1:13-15). Judaism had virtually ceased to exist, and all the grace and glory which it contained-all that "Salvation" which "was of the Jews" - had taken up its abode with the handful of disciples, from whom, as soon as the Holy Spirit should descend upon them at Pentecost, was to emerge the one living Church and Kingdom of God upon earth. Severe, doubtless, would be the wrench to many a Jew which severed him forever from ecclesiastical connection with that fondly loved, time-honoured temple, and all its beautiful solemnities. One consideration only could reconcile him to it, but that one to the believer would be irresistible: his Lord was not there, and, what was worse, all that he saw there was associated with the dishonour and the death of his Lord; while in the assemblies of the disciples with whom he had now cast in his lot-all mean to the outward eye, and small in numbers, though they might be-Jesus Himself, now in glory, made His presence felt, Whom having not seen, all loved, in Whom, though now they saw Him not, yet believing, they rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory, receiving the end of their faith, even the salvation of their souls.
And has not the Lord been judicially cast out and "crucified" afresh "in the street of" another "great city" (Revelation 11:8), regarding which the word is, "Come out of her my people"? (Revelation 18:4). Trying to flesh and blood once was that wrench too, and others similar which the faithful witnesses for the truth have been called to suffer. But as where Jesus is not, the most gorgeous temples are but splendid desolation to the soul that lives and is ready to die for Him, so the rudest barns are beautiful temples when irradiated with the glory of His presence and perfumed with the incense of His grace.
(2) The case of Simon the Cyrenian, won to Jesus by being "compelled" to bear His cross, has had its bright parallels in not a few who have been made to take part in the last suffer ings of His martyrs. In one of the Homilies. for example, of the Greek Father, Basil the Great (316 AD - 379 AD), preached at the anniversary of the erection of the 'church of the Thirty Martyrs' at Cesarea, he tells us that when thirty of the noblest youths of the Roman army were to suffer for confessing Christ, by being condemned to freeze to death standing naked in cold lake in the depth of winter, and one of them, after mortification had begun, had been tempted by the offer of hot baths to as many of them as would deny their Lord, and had plunged into a bath-only thereby to hasten his death-while the rest were mourning the breach in their number, one of the lictors, won by what he saw and heard from those servants of Jesus, gave away his badge of office, and exclaimed, "I am a Christian," stripped himself naked, and taking his place beside the rest, said, 'Now are your ranks filled up,' and nobly died with them for the name of Jesus. Analogous cases of various kinds will readily occur to those to whom such victories of the cross are a study; nor is such a bearing in the followers of Christ as Simon the Cyrenian beheld in Him who went as a Lamb to the slaughter perhaps ever in vain.
(3) Even natural sympathy, in those who are strangers to what is peculiarly Christian, is beautiful, and to the Christian sufferer grateful. The blessed One was touched by the tears of the daughters of Jerusalem. To the Redeemer's heart they were a grateful contrast to the savage cruelty of the rulers and the rudeness of the unfeeling crowd, and they drew from Him a tender though sad reply. Christians do wrong when they think so exclusively of the absence of grace in any as to overlook or depreciate in them those natural excellences which attracted the love even of the Lord Jesus. (See the note at Luke 18:21, and Remark 3 at the close of that section.)
(4) The four quarters whence proceeded the mockeries of Jesus, as He hung on the accursed tree, seem designed to represent the contempt of all the classes into which men can be divided with reference to religion. As the "passers-by" cover the whole region of religious indifference, so "the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders" fitly represent religious hypocrisy: and while in "the soldiers" we recognize the mere underlings of secular authority, whose religion lies all in slavish obedience to their superiors, the "malefactors" represent the notoriously wicked. From all these quarters, in quick succession, the Lord of glory experienced bitter revilings. But "when reviled, He reviled not again." When He did break silence, it was in blessing, and from His Lips salvation flowed. (5) There is something very striking, surely, in the fact that cur Lord uttered on the cross precisely Seven Sayings-that number which all Scripture teaches us to regard as sacred and complete; and when we observe that of the Four Evangelists no one reports them all, while each gives some of them, we cannot but look upon them-with Bengel-as four voices which together make up one grand Symphony. 'The suffering Lord,' says Stier very beautifully, 'hanging upon the cross, broke the silence and opened His lips seven times: these words are to us as the bright lights of heaven shining at intervals through the darkness, or as the loud thunder-tones from above and from within, which interpret the cross, and in which it receives, so to speak, another collective superscription.' Observe now the varied notes of this grand seven-toned symphony. The first, as a prayer for the forgiveness of those who were nailing Him to the tree, proclaims at the very outset the object of His whole mission, the essential character of His work: The second opens the kingdom of heaven even to the vilest true penitent that believes in Him: The third assures His desolate ones of all needful care and provision here below: The mouth, revealing to us the depths of penal darkness to which the Redeemer descended, assures us both that He was made a curse for us and that in our seasons of deepest spiritual darkness we have One who is experimentally acquainted with it, and is able to disperse it: The fifth, completing the circle of all previous fulfillments of Scripture in the intense sensation of thirst, and showing thereby that the fevered frame was almost at the extremity of its power of endurance, assures His acutely suffering people of the precious sympathy of Him:
`Who not in vain Experienced every human pain:'
The sixth is the briefest, brightest, richest proclamation of the glad tidings of great joy for all time, stretching into eternity itself: The seventh and last is an exalted Directory for dying believers of every age and in all circumstances-not only providing them with the language of serene assurance in the rendering up of the departing spirit into their Father's hands, but impregnating it with the strength and perfuming it with the odour of "the Firstborn among many brethren." Thus are we "complete in Him."
These remarkable circumstances are recorded by our Evangelist alone.