Nobody Ever Told You What Was Finished

The wipers were on the slow setting and Curtis had been meaning to replace them since March.

Thursday evening, twenty past six, rain that could not make up its mind. Nate was in the passenger seat with his kit bag between his feet, fifteen years old and thumbing at his phone, and the heater was doing that thing where it only warms one shin.

Then, without looking up: "Dad. What do you actually have to do to be right with God?"

Curtis answered before the light changed.

Read your Bible. Pray properly, not just in the truck. Be there on Sundays, and not only when it suits you. Do not lie, not even the small ones. Watch what you let in through your eyes. Serve somebody who cannot pay you back. Forgive people and keep short accounts. Be generous with what you have. And mean all of it, every day.

Nine things. He counted them afterward. Nine things between the school gate and the second set of lights, and he had not needed a second to think, because every one of them had been loaded in him for nineteen years.

Nate said okay. Then he put his head against the window and watched the wet town go past.

Curtis dropped him at the sports hall and pulled into the far corner of the lot and did not switch the engine off for a while.

Here is what he could not shake. Nobody had hidden the cross from him. He knew the cross. He could have drawn it on the back of the church bulletin, three nails and all. But somewhere along the way it had become the reason the list was possible instead of the news the list was answering, and in nineteen years of Sunday mornings and small groups and men's breakfasts in a room that smelled of coffee, he could not remember one hour spent on what had already been done.

He had been given the response. Nobody had walked him through the announcement.

And now his boy had asked him the biggest question a boy can ask, and Curtis had handed him nine things to carry, fast and fluent, like a man passing on a weight he had never put down himself.

He sat there with the wipers going and the parking lot lights coming on orange one by one.

If somebody handed you a list like that, and you passed it along because it was the only thing anybody ever put in your hands, sit in the truck with me a minute. I want to tell you what was finished.

Four things were already done, and nobody asked you to help

Start in Egypt, because that is where God starts it.

A whole people are in a house on the last night, and death is moving through the country, and God gives them one instruction that has nothing to do with their conduct. Kill a lamb. Take the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel. Stay inside.

Not one word about their record. Not a syllable about whether they had been better this year than last. The house was safe because of what was on the doorframe, and the doorframe was the only thing anybody was looking at.

And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you.Exodus 12:13

When I see the blood. Not when I see you. And Paul, writing to a church that was making a mess of nearly everything, says it in five words: Christ our passover is sacrificed for us. That is 1 Corinthians 5:7, and it means the lamb in that doorway had a name all along. You are inside a house marked with blood you did not shed, and what is written on that doorframe is not your effort, and the Spirit of God moves that from a fact you know to a floor you can stand on.

Second thing. The offering.

For fifteen centuries after that night, the offerings never stopped. Morning and evening, day after day, priests standing at an altar doing the same work again because the work never held. And Hebrews puts its finger exactly on the tell.

And every priest standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins: But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God.Hebrews 10:11-12

Read the posture. Standing, standing, standing, for fifteen hundred years, because there was always more to do. And then one Man offers one sacrifice and sits down. Sitting is not a detail, it is the announcement. Nobody sits down in the middle of a job. You were included in a work that was completed before you were born, and Hebrews 10:12 says the sitting down happened, and it is the Holy Spirit, not my preaching, who makes a sentence like that go quiet inside a person.

Third thing, and it is the loudest quiet sentence in the Bible.

When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.John 19:30

It is finished. In the Greek that is one word, and it means completed, carried through to its end, nothing outstanding. Matthew says He cried it with a loud voice. It was not a dying man giving up. It was a shout, and a shout is what you do when you want the people at the back to hear it.

Curtis knew that verse. He had heard it read every spring. What he had never been told was that it was said about him, in the past tense, before he was ever asked for anything at all. It is already finished in you, and John 19:30 is where the word sits in black and white, and the same Spirit who carried that shout down to us has not gone quiet about it since.

Fourth, and here is where a person finds out whether any of it was accepted.

Because a man can say a thing is finished and be wrong. What settles it is not the claim from the cross, it is the Father's answer to it. And on the third morning some women came to the tomb with spices, in the dark, expecting to do the last sad job that was left to do.

He is not here, but is risen.Luke 24:6

That is the Father's verdict on His Son, spoken in an empty tomb rather than in words. He had said it out loud once before, over a river, when the heavens opened and the voice came: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Then He said it again by raising Him. Paul puts the two halves together in one line: delivered for our offenses, and raised again for our justification, in Romans 4:25.

Raised for our justification. The resurrection is the receipt. It is the Father saying yes to the offering, in public, with the stone rolled away so that people could look inside and see that the job was done.

And that verdict is the one now spoken over you. You have been accepted in the Beloved, which is what Ephesians 1:6 actually says, and it is His Spirit who takes the Father's word about His Son and speaks it over a man sitting in a parking lot with the engine still running.