28 After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst.” 29 A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to His mouth. 30 When Jesus had received the sour wine, He said, “It is finished,” and He bowed His head and gave up His spirit.
The theologian John Stott wrote, “The person and work of Christ are the rock upon which the Christian religion is built. If He is not who He said He was, and if He did not do what He said He had come to do, the foundation is undermined and the whole superstructure will collapse. Take Christ from Christianity, and you disembowel it; there is practically nothing left. Christ is the centre of Christianity; all else is circumference.”
The person of Jesus Christ is Himself the substance of Christian faith and life, which centres on His sin-atoning death.
Throughout his account of Jesus’ arrest, trial and crucifixion, John has emphasised Jesus’ sovereign control over these events, and there are a few things we can see in Jesus’ cry of thirst and the response of the soldiers to Him which point to this reality. The first thing to notice is the irony of the thirst of the Saviour Himself, the fountain of life.
He said to the Samaritan woman at the well in chapter 4, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:13-14) But now, on the cross, He thirsts.
In Luke 16, Jesus told the parable of the rich man who died and went to hell, where he was burning with thirst, while a beggar named Lazarus who also died, went to heaven. The rich man begged for Lazarus to dip his finger in water and place just one drop on his tongue, because, “I am in anguish in this flame.” (Luke 16:24)
His request was denied because Jesus was speaking about the gulf between heaven and hell which cannot be crossed. Jesus, while He suffered and died for our sins on the cross, experienced that same thirst so that we would be spared from it. Charles Spurgeon wrote: “If Jesus had not thirsted, every one of us would have thirsted for ever afar off from God, with an impassable gulf between us and heaven. Our sinful tongues, blistered by the fever of passion, must have burned for ever had not His tongue been tormented with thirst in our stead.”
Psalm 22:15 described the torment of thirst that Jesus suffered as the penalty for our sin. “My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death.”
And then, in the mocking response of the Roman soldiers to Jesus’ torment, which represents all of fallen humanity, we are given a picture of the depth of the depravity of sinful hearts.
One of the greatest lies Satan has foisted on us is that we are basically good. The vast majority of people have believed that lie, which is proven by how offended they are at the Bible’s message of sin and the righteous wrath and judgment of God at our sin. About a thousand years ago, Anselm, the archbishop of Canterbury wrote “You have not yet considered the heavy weight sin is.”
Jesus, tormented by thirst as He hung on the cross, was not given water to drink, but was offered sour wine or vinegar. Psalm 69:20-21 gives us a prophecy of this event. “I looked for pity, but there was none, and for comforters, but I found none. They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me sour wine to drink.” Verses 27 and 28 go on to give a chilling warning to those who continue to mock and blaspheme the name of Jesus, just as the Roman soldiers did: “Add to them punishment upon punishment; may they have no acquittal from you. Let them be blotted out of the book of the living; let them not be enrolled among the righteous.”
John tells us in verse 29 that the soldiers put the sponge of sour wine on a hyssop branch as they held it up to His mouth. This is an important detail, because the Old Testament priests would take hyssop branches and bunch them together to form something similar to a paint brush, which they’d use to sprinkle blood from the atoning sacrifices in the temple.
David, in his psalm of confession, wrote, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” (Psalm 51:7)
The first time hyssop is mentioned in the Bible is in Exodus 12. “Go and select lambs for yourselves according to your clans, and kill the Passover lamb. Take a bunch of hyssop and dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and touch the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin.” (Exodus 12:21-22)
And now, on the cross, the blood of the true Passover Lamb is shed on the cross, and that same hyssop branch is used to mock and blaspheme the Son of God as He dies for the sins of mankind.
Nevertheless, even here we see the sovereign hand of God at work. When the hyssop was raised to Jesus’ mouth, it was not to sprinkle blood for His cleansing, but for His blood to fall on the hyssop, which provides the blood of atonement which David pleaded for in Psalm 51.
Jesus’ sacrificial and substitutionary death achieves and secures the salvation of all who put their faith in Him, but what does this actually mean? We’re familiar with the words sacrifice and substitute, but for us to understand the real purpose of Jesus’ death, we need to know how to apply these terms to our own lives.
It all begins with the penalty of death which is over us all, because we have broken the law of God. Romans 3:10 says, “None is righteous, no, not one,” so we are under the just condemnation of death. Paul wrote in Romans 5:12, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.”
And it was because of His great love for us that God sent His Son as a sacrificial substitute to die on our behalf. It was to save us from eternal death that the God of grace sent His Son to die in the place of His people. We deserve death as the consequence of our sins, but Jesus substituted Himself in our place on the cross and offered Himself as a sacrifice to satisfy the debt we owe.
There is a misunderstanding that you often hear in some Christian circles - this idea that we are saved by the love of God. God’s love does not save us. It is because of His love that He sent Jesus to the cross for us. John 3:16 makes this very clear. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”
If God’s love was sufficient for our salvation, all would be saved, and the cross would not be necessary.
But it is necessary, because we are saved not by the love of God, but by the blood of Christ. God’s love was the motive, but Christ’s blood is the means of our salvation.
We looked at the animals that God sacrificed for Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 last week, as He made animal skins to hide the shame of their sin. The sinless animals died as a sacrifice to pay the debt of the sin of Adam and Eve. Now they were covered in the sinless skins of the sacrificed animals.
James Boice wrote, “‘So this is death!’ Adam and Eve must have cried in horror, yet even as they recoiled from the sacrifice, they must have marvelled as well, for what God was showing was that although they themselves deserved to die it was possible for another, in this case two animals, to die in their place.”
Although this was the first of countless animal sacrifices in the Old Testament, they could not fully atone for human sin. Instead, they were a constant reminder of sin and of the need for a sufficient sacrifice, because as Hebrews 10:4 says, “it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.”
In the opening pages of the New Testament, John the Baptist pointed to Jesus as the true and complete substitute for sinners and the true sacrifice for sin. “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” (John 1:29) Jesus died as both a substitute and sacrifice for those who confess their sins and look to Him in faith for salvation.
John 19:30 records the dying words of Jesus on the cross. “When Jesus had received the sour wine, He said, ‘It is finished,’ and He bowed His head and gave up His spirit.”
When He died, He did so not as the victim but as the victor over sin and the condemnation it brings. He cried, “It is finished,” having completed the sacrifice that pays the debt of our sin, and which satisfies the wrath of God at human sin.
For us to be saved, we must each personally take our own sins to the cross, confessing them to God, trusting that Jesus bears them on our behalf, and that as He cried, “It is finished,” we must believe that the payment of our sin is finished.
The apostle Peter spoke of the finished work of Jesus on the cross by writing, “He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree.” (1 Peter 2:24) Peter was referring here to Deuteronomy 21:23: “If a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God.”
To hang on a tree was to bear the curse of God, and Jesus died under this judgment because He “bore our sins.” Jesus bore our curse for us on the cross. Paul went so far as to describe as “of first importance” the teaching that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,” as he wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:3.
Another way for us to understand the purpose of Jesus’ death is to consider what He accomplished on the cross. Penal substitutionary atonement tells us what Jesus did - He died to pay the penalty for our sins. But when Jesus cried out, “It is finished,” what was the result and achievement of that payment?
The answer is found in three words or concepts that every Christian should know and understand: propitiation, redemption, and reconciliation. All of these are achieved by Jesus’ finished work on the cross.
Firstly, propitiation is a principle that comes from the temple and the Old Testament sacrificial system. The Bible teaches about God’s wrath against all sin, so in saving His people, Jesus died to satisfy God’s wrath against us. Romans 3:25 says “God put Jesus forward as a propitiation by His blood, to be received by faith.” This deals with the problem Paul outlines 2 verses earlier: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” So we are justified before God because He sent Jesus to the cross to satisfy His wrath at our sin.
The Greek word for propitiation is ilasterion, which is a translation of the Hebrew word for the mercy seat on the ark of the covenant. It was here each year where the high priest would sprinkle the blood of the sin offering on the Day of Atonement for the sins of the people. There was a tremendous amount of symbolism in this act.
On top of the ark was the mercy seat, while inside the ark itself were the stone tablets given to Moses. On these tablets were the law the people had broken, and it was on the mercy seat that the priest poured the blood of the sacrifice. The point was that God would not see the broken law, but the atoning blood on the mercy seat instead.
When we apply this principle to the Cross of Calvary, the blood of Christ was poured out on the cross, the mercy seat of Christ, so the wrath of God at our sin is satisfied. It is propitiated, meaning that God no longer sees our sin, but the blood of His Son instead.
The problem that sinful human beings have is that we cannot offer an acceptable sacrifice to propitiate or satisfy the wrath of God ourselves.
This is why the Christian faith does not teach that sinners must make a sacrifice to satisfy God’s wrath, but rather that God Himself provided the necessary sacrifice in Jesus Christ. God sent His Son, the God-man Jesus Christ, to surrender His infinitely precious life as the propitiation for our sins.
John writes in 1 John 4:10, “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
Secondly, on the cross Jesus accomplished our redemption.
Just as slaves were redeemed by their new owners in ancient slave markets, the redemption we receive through Jesus’ sacrificial death moves us from slavery to freedom. In the Old Testament, God redeemed His people as He freed them from slavery in Egypt.
Redemption, from a Biblical perspective, speaks about how God saves us from a situation that we could never get ourselves out of. We can do nothing to save ourselves from slavery to sin and the subsequent judgment we deserve. We need to be saved from that, so God, through His Son, redeems us. God has redeemed us from the bondage of slavery by the blood of Christ.
He paid the redemption price on our behalf, as Robert Walmsley’s hymn reminds us: “Jesus, the Saviour, this Gospel to tell, joyfully came; came with the helpless and hopeless to dwell, sharing their sorrow and shame; seeking the lost, saving, redeeming at measureless cost.”
Jesus said in John 8:34, “Everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin,” but the Gospel is the answer to that slavery. Paul writes in Ephesians 1:7, “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace.”
In Christ, and by placing our faith in Him, we are redeemed from our slavery to sin.
And thirdly, on the cross, Jesus accomplishes our reconciliation with God.
The good news of the cross is that God has reconciled us to Himself through the blood of Jesus. He has made peace with us, even though we were at war with Him. Colossians 1:19-22 says, “In Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross. And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, He has now reconciled in His body of flesh by His death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before Him.”
Michael Horton wrote, “The Bible clearly teaches our reconciliation to the Lord via the work of Christ that secures for us a new legal status of righteousness and its resulting peace with God, benefits that are received by faith alone and not due in any sense to our own works of obedience.”
Sin has destroyed our relationship with God, but as Jesus died on the cross, as He cried, “It is finished,” He propitiated God’s wrath against our sin, He redeemed us from our slavery to sin, and He reconciled us to God, all by His sacrificial and substitutionary death on our behalf.
The great question to us all is, will we, will you acknowledge the necessity of Jesus’ death for your salvation? Will you confess that the only way you can escape the holy justice of God is by putting your faith in the atoning death of Jesus Christ on your behalf?
This is something that so many resist. Some have bought into the lie that we’re essentially good, and so long as we try and live a good life, God will recognise that, and will accept us based on our own righteousness. The problem with that belief is clearly spelled out in the Bible. We have no righteousness of our own.
Isaiah 64:6 says, “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” The NIV translation says, “our righteous acts are like filthy rags.”
The Pharisees of Jesus’ day believed they could achieve their own salvation, but they were mistaken, because their righteous acts, just like ours, are like filthy rags.
The problem, as Anselm put it all those years ago, is that we have not considered the heavy weight sin is. Our sin is a personal affront to God’s holy name, and it must receive His personal, burning wrath. Sin is a rebellious transgression of God’s law, and it must be punished because God is perfectly holy and perfectly just.
The gravity of our sin is so great that we owe God a debt that we cannot repay, and at the same time we cannot be saved unless that debt is paid. The answer to this great dilemma is Jesus Christ. God’s gracious provision, His saving gift to you, is the atoning death of Christ, which He calls you to receive in faith, giving yourself to the Saviour who gave Himself for you. That is the only way to be saved.
Many others object to the Gospel message, and the teaching of Jesus that He is the only way to heaven. The world insists that all roads lead to God. The thing is, the world is right, in one sense. All roads do lead to God, but the great horror that so many will discover is that it is only through the atoning blood of Jesus Christ that we will receive the grace of God at the end of that road. All roads lead to God, but only one road leads to the grace of God, and that road has a name: Jesus Christ.
Those who reject Christ will come face to face with the righteous wrath of God, and will pay the price of their unbelief in Jesus Christ for all of eternity.
Paul wrote in Philippians 2:10-11, “At the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
Every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. It’s been said that there are no atheists in hell. Every person, whether in heaven or in hell, will know beyond any shadow of doubt that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that He is who He claimed to be - the Son of God, and that He came into our world to offer Himself as the sufficient sacrifice to reconcile us to the holy God who created us. Confess Him as Lord now, before it is too late. As He died, Jesus said, “It is finished.” The work of redemption is complete, and there is no other way for us to be saved.
Jesus died to propitiate God’s holy wrath, to redeem believers from the guilt and power of sin, and to reconcile all who come to Him with the Father.
Charles Spurgeon once said that his entire theology can be summarised in just 4 words: “Jesus died for me.”
My prayer for each of us is that we would confess that too.
Homegroup Study Notes
Read John 19:28-30
What was finished?
Read Exodus 12:21-22
Discuss the significance of the soldiers placing the sponge of wine on a hyssop branch.
Anselm, the archbishop of Canterbury wrote in the 11th century, “You have not yet considered the heavy weight sin is.” What did he mean by that, and how does the “heavy weight” of sin help us to understand the necessity of the cross?
What does the term “sacrificial, substitutionary” death of Jesus mean?
On Sunday we considered three key doctrines completed as Jesus died for our sins: Propitiation, Redemption and Reconciliation.
Discuss each of these. The following texts may help:
Romans 3:25, 1 John 4:10, John 8:34, Ephesians 1:7 and Colossians 1:19-22.