"It is finished"

cavalier973

Well-Known Member

Sowen

Well-Known Member
There's support for "paid in full", but this is something for Bible trivia night, not something to build doctrine upon.

For more info, read the second entry for the term τελέω in the book, The vocabulary of the Greek Testament illustrated from the papyri and other non-literary sources by James Moulton and George Milligan. You can read it online for free here (bottom left).

The papyri references given by Moulton and Milligan are also available online for free here, here, and here. There's a search function for the papyri site which brings up a ton of other documents where the term in question and its various forms are used.

If you haven't already, run the following searches in Google, Google Books, and Google Scholar: τετέλεσται paid in full, tetelestai paid in full. That should yield a lot of info for you to research.

Great topic. It's very interesting.
 

Len

Well-Known Member
Jesus paid my debt in full on the cross at Calvary ....... what more do I need to know about "it is finished"? I am not a scholar by any stretch of the imagination and without any type of study into that topic, I like that interpretation it just fits well into the whole gospel story eh!..... ..... and I am sure that any other exergesis of the word of our Lord "it is finished" is just as powerful a message! Our God does all things well
 

antitox

Well-Known Member
My view on the statement is that it was a complete, full, and final payment. It was only one payment that covers EVERYTHING. So full and complete that it actually makes a human soul PURE. It is not some symbolic assertion, it was the real thing. Nothing in existence is more valuable than this offering. The only thing that will miss it will be those who do not recognize their need for His payment. Because humans were made in the image of God, they have the personal responsibility to receive this payment individually. There is no price that can be placed upon it.
 

mattfivefour

Well-Known Member
Yes, "it is finished" expresses exactly what you have said. God's work to restore humankind to Himself was completed on the Cross. At the beginning of His ministry Jesus said, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work." (John 4:34) And He did just that at Calvary. Everything following that exact moment in God's dealings with humankind flows from that finished work. It is merely its working out in the lives of individuals. Never again does God utter the words "It is finished." There is no need. And when in Revelation 21:6 God says, "It is done" He is referring to the fact that the working out of that finished work is now complete and, consequently, the old heavens and earth have passed away and the New Heavens and New Earth now exist for all eternity! And His plan for the restoration of human beings --and all creation with them-- to Himself in perfect union forever is complete. Hallelujah!!!

:yeah :yeah :yeah
 
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JDP

Member
I believe Psalm 22 ("My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?") was one of the dearest messianic Psalms to Jesus, one of several He quotes from the cross. Even His "I thirst" harkens to the line that "my tongue cleaveth to my jaws." The final line of the Psalm is "he has done it!" or "It is finished!" It's my firm belief that Jesus lived out Psalm 22 in its entirety while on the cross. Read through the Psalm and I think one will see that it reads like a script for Jesus' time on the cross. Psalm 22 is an amazing literal revelation.
 

ddo2013

New Member
yes, the phrase in Greek rendered in English as "it is finished" means the debt has been paid in full. Ezekiel 18:4 and 20 requires the death of a soul to pay for sin. Hebrews 9:22 tells us there is no atonement without the shedding of blood, We owed those debts but they were such a great price that we could not pay. God sent the Son who willingly sacrificed His life, one time for all sin, for all people and for all time. With His death, the debt we owed was paid in full. All that remains for us to do is accept God's free offer of salvation. It wasn't free for God, nor was it cheap, it cost God the Son His life and God the Father much sorrow and pain. That's part of the reason for the darkness over the land; the Father couldn't bear watching God the Son in such torment. The other reason was that the Father couldn't look upon the sin placed on the shoulders of Christ. The word of God tells us that not only did He bear the sins of the world but that He Himself became sin. Our sin was imputed to Him. The good news is that His righteousness was then imputed to us and the Father now views us as blameless and righteous because He sees us thru blood-colored lenses and the righteousness of Christ, It's not about what we can do but it's all about what He has done. I've been told that "it is finished" referred to salvation. However, we know that is false. The crucifixion happened in the dispensation of the law. The high priest was required to sprinkle the blood of the sacrificial lamb on the altar and mercy seat in order to satisfy the wrath of God against sin. Jesus played a unique role here, He was both the Sacrificial Lamb and the High Priest, so in order to satisfy the requirements of God, upon His resurrection He went into heaven and sprinkled His blood on the gateposts and then sprinkled His blood on the mercy seat in heaven. He forever satisfied the wrath of God on behalf of all who come to Him and place their faith and trust in Him. Furthermore, "it is finished" cannot refer to the salvation process because of what the requirements for salvation are. One of the requirements of salvation is to believe in the physical bodily resurrection of Christ. He obviously accomplished this by rising from the dead on the third day. The way was then made for us to be able to be saved and we are told that when we are saved He does so to the uttermost. There's one more benefit of Jesus' death. Because of Jesus' death, we are caught up in the rapture because He saved us from having to face the wrath of the Father. The Tribulation is the wrath of God poured out first on Israel in order to lead them into faith in Messiah and then on the nations who were enemies to Israel and finally on unrepentant man for rejecting His Son. Jesus, we are told is a participant in the pouring out of wrath. Believers who have accepted Christ during the dispensation of grace aka church age having become the Bride of Christ after the rapture. It's such an important doctrinal issue that we are told 3 times in Scripture that believers are not appointed to suffer His wrath. No wonder Paul called the rapture our "blessed hope". Hallelujah to the Lamb!
 

ItIsFinished!

Blood bought child of the King of kings.
Yes, "it is finished" expresses exactly what you have said. God's work to restore humankind to Himself was completed on the Cross. At the beginning of His ministry Jesus said, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work." (John 4:34) And He did just that at Calvary. Everything following that exact moment in God's dealings with humankind flows from that finished work. It is merely its working out in the lives of individuals. Never again does God utter the words "It is finished." There is no need. And when in Revelation 21:6 God says, "It is done" He is referring to the fact that the working out of that finished work is now complete and, consequently, the old heavens and earth have passed away and the New Heavens and New Earth now exist for all eternity! And His plan for the restoration of human beings --and all creation with them-- to Himself in perfect union forever is complete. Hallelujah!!!

:yeah :yeah :yeah
Amen!!!
 

mattfivefour

Well-Known Member
yes, the phrase in Greek rendered in English as "it is finished" means the debt has been paid in full.
@ddo2013— Excellent! Thank you so much for bringing up this point, brother. Yes, while the Greek verb teleo (τελέω) denoted the idea of "to complete" or "to finish" in the sense of bringing something to an end, it also had a connotation of "paying" something. Numerous papyrii from the 3rd century BC through the 2nd century AD contain teleo in that sense. In fact, many receipts included in those papyrii collections begin with the very word Christ used on the cross: tetelestai (Tετέλεσται), which is the third person perfect passive of teleo and means "It is paid".

(If you are not a grammar nerd, skip this paragraph and jump to the next. English has no exact corresponding verb form to the koiné Greek perfect tense. That tense was a verb form that described a past action with present consequences. Another way of understanding it is that it describes a completed action whose effects are still being felt. In other words, when an action is presented in the perfect tense there is no explicit or even implicit end to the effect of that action. This demonstrates the importance not just of a verb but of the form in which that verb is presented when attempting a translation of (or simply trying to properly understand) a verse or passage. Clearly, then, the grammatical form of a verb has a great bearing on the theological significance of the verb. Never try to grasp the meaning of a Greek word without understanding its grammatical form.)

In any case, considering the meaning of the verb and the significance of the verb form in which it is presented in John 19:30, when the Holy Spirit inspired the use of this verb in this verse it was specifically to let us know that not only had Christ completely finished the Father's work in regard to restoring man to Himself by fully paying the debt owed, but that the effect of this act—man's salvation—would have no end. Hallelujah!

And all that man needs to do to receive the benefit of Christ's sacrifice is to simply accept it.
 
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