Matthew 27:50

Matthew 27:50

(with John 19:30)

I. The words "It is finished" are an expression of relief. Who can rightly conceive what a relief to Jesus, in His perfect human nature, it was to have passed through all His appointed sufferings? How much was finished when His course of suffering came to an end! (1) There was all the pain which His holy soul endured from the nearness of the world's corruption, and from the virulence of the world's hatred. (2) The words express His sense of relief from the assaults of the powers of darkness. (3) They express His sense of relief from all He suffered in His experience of the wrath of God.

II. These words express an anticipation of satisfying rest. Between Him and the actual enjoyment in human nature of the rest awaiting Him in the Father's house there was yet the act of dying. But His eye looked, as to something very near, to the "joy set before Him." On that very day His soul was to be in Paradise, and in continuation of this there stretched eternally before His view what awaited Him as "the Lamb who was slain," in the rest, the blessedness, and the glory of a place "in the midst of the throne of God." In an anticipation of this, so near, there was present rest to His human soul. There was rest to Him also in the results of the work which He finished on the cross.

III. These words are a shout of triumph. The very finishing of the work of Christ, apart from its design and results, was a victory. (1) "Through death He destroyed him that had the power of death, that is the devil." (2) He in His death triumphed over sin. (3) He won a triumph over the world. (4) He knew that in the moment when His spirit was gone out of His body, to it death should be for ever past, and that His death should be the death of the death of all His people. (5) He could bear to think of His body being laid in the grave, after His soul had passed into Paradise; for such was His view of His victory over the grave that He could not in the near prospect of it but raise a shout of triumph.

IV. These words are a "joyful sound." (1) They convey the joyful news that the great work of redemption is completed. (2) They tell us that the everlasting covenant is sealed, and that if we come to Christ we shall obtain, on the ground of His finished work, a right to all its blessings. (3) They tell us that you can find in Christ a right to victory over every enemy.

J. Kennedy, Sermons,No. 29.