Tetelestai (“it is finished”)
Hello my friends!
This morning, as I was downstairs in my apartment complex gym, I was hanging from the chin-up bar after doing some rowing. I hung for a while, as I have lower back compression, and hanging there provides a good stretch and separates the components of the lower spine. When you are hanging like that, it is hard to breathe, quite restricted and uncomfortable really. I thought to myself, this is the tiniest amount of extreme pain and discomfort I’m experiencing right now compared to what our beautiful Jesus experienced and suffered, hanging on that cross for me, for us, for humanity.
The Greek word “τετέλεσται” (tetelestai) is used in the Gospel of John as Jesus' last words (“it is finished”) before He gave up His spirit on the cross. “Tetelestai” comes from the Greek root word “teleō,” meaning to bring to an end, finish, or complete.
So, what was His work? And how did He complete it?
I see the work Jesus did here on earth, the Father's work given to Him to complete in this way: to show us who the Father is and provide a path to redemptive reconnection with the Father. When we were born, we were born a natural birth, and unfortunately, spiritually speaking, we were born dead with no reciprocal connection to the Father. Essentially born of Adam, cloaked, and covered in sin.
But Jesus came to the rescue! He took all that sin, for you, for me, for every human being, and He made Himself sin for us and went to the cross as His final outworking of His Father’s will and work and put that sin to death, for everyone, the whole world. The caveat here is that unless you believe in the One who died for our sins, that precious blood that was spilt doesn’t wash and regenerate you; you essentially stay on the other side of the cross.
The good news is that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, His death, and His resurrection three days later, was the very vehicle our Father God intended to use for all who call on His name, to make safe a passage for us from the realm of death to the realm of life. The crucifix was a tortuous death and punishment for criminals. Jesus became a criminal for us; He took every act of sin, every criminal occurrence ever to be perpetrated in history as well as the future, upon Himself. Imagine the weight of all humanity thrust into you, into the very members of your body, your sinless body, your human body, as Jesus was fully God and fully human at the same time. Imagine feeling the horror of the extreme depravity of the world in your own body, but yet be so forgiving, and what is so beautiful here, is that the very essence of that suffering and forgiveness was an absolute delight for Jesus to accomplish.
We can't add anything to His finished work; Jesus accomplished everything needed for us to know who the Father is, for it says in John 14:9, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father,” and our salvation is complete in Him; it's finished, it's done, as we read in Ephesians 2:8-9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.”
We all have so often encountered religion and legalism. The mainstay of these are that your redemption isn't complete, and you need to work toward it or behave your way into it. When you think about it, although His grace covers all who call Him Lord, I presume the Holy Spirit is grieved when we, as sons and daughters, infer that in some way we need to finish His finished work; we need to put on the final touches because when He let out His last breath declaring “it is finished,” somehow it wasn't finished, His work wasn’t completed. But the truth is that our redemption is complete; we have been buried and resurrected with Christ; we have been glorified with Him.
We have been grafted into a family that is headed by our Heavenly Father, and that position we have in that family is secure; no one can take it from you, you can't mess it up, and He will never cast you out. It would go against all His promises; He would have to become a liar in order to do so. And He won't because He is Holy and Righteous, and He, through imputation via Jesus, has included us in His Holiness and Righteousness. We are called His righteousness, for it says in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”
We are new wineskins filled with new wine, and that wine is continually refreshed, morning by morning, as we have grace upon grace, day upon day, and it's brilliant and abundant and amazing to live in that truth, in that reality, that we are just so secure and just so loved by the creator of all things. Our God just doesn't see a blob of believers scattered throughout the earth, as He glances here and there momentarily, seeing a glimpse of you. No, He is the God of the one; He is your personal God, your personal Savior, your personal best friend, Jesus. When He looks at you, there aren't any distractions for Him; He is intently just looking straight at you with the utmost love and desire in His heart. He will move heaven and earth for you, and in fact, in the end, He does; He builds new ones for you to live on and in. Just like He built you a new, new creation spirit, born of God, He will build you a new glorified body to house that new spiritual person that you are. This glorified body will reside in eternity when you come home to the Father one day.
So be blessed today, my friends; it truly is finished. His work is finished; you don't need to labour in it or strive for it. Salvation was given to you as a gift that was made manifest and ushered in by one brutal but glorious act on the cross, not to mention the brutality that preceded it. You are loved; you are special to the Father; He made you just for Him, just for the kingdom of Heaven, and all this according to His good pleasure that you live in His wonderful blessings. Let all humanity praise Him, for He is GOOD!
Phil