The Perfect Work of Christ

In Greek, "gospel" means good news. So what is so good about the news in the New Testament?

When Jesus came to earth as a Man, the last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45), He came to fulfil the law of the old covenant and to pay the price for humanity’s transgressions, which have their root in the first Adam. Jesus came to establish the new covenant based on grace.

At the start of His earthly ministry, Jesus revealed this when He entered a synagogue in Nazareth and read the following verses from the book of Isaiah.

Luke 4:18–19
The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because he has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

Jesus stopped there and closed the scroll, leaving out the last line of Isaiah’s original words: “And the day of vengeance of our God”. (Isaiah 61:2)

He did so because He came to demonstrate God’s grace and lovingkindness, not His wrath and justice. The Bible says that the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came in the person of Jesus. (John 1:17) He did not come to condemn the world, but to save it. (John 3:17)

The glory of Jesus’ finished work is in what took place on the cross of Calvary. Through His pain and suffering, He took upon Himself all our sin, our curse, our sicknesses and diseases. He bore on our behalf the full wrath and judgment of God Almighty.

The Bible tells us that when He took all that for us, He became so hideous and deformed that God in His mercy covered the face of the earth with darkness for three hours to hide Him from sight. Yet Jesus held on until all of God’s fiery judgment for sins had been exhausted.

What Jesus did at the cross effected the divine exchange on our behalf — He took all our blame and was punished in our place, while we take His place. He did not just take away the bad things from us, but also gave us every good thing that He had in His position as the beloved Son of God. Isaiah 53 describes all that Jesus suffered, so that the very opposite might become ours.

The Divine Exchange

The moment Jesus had fully paid for our sins and died, God tore the veil in the temple that hid the Holy of Holies from top to bottom. The veil was there to separate sinful man from God, so by tearing it, God demonstrated that there was no longer anything to stop us from coming into His presence.

On the cross, Jesus exhausted God’s wrath and justice. His body was broken and His blood was shed as our substitute and He settled the sin issue with God once and for all. And because Jesus is also God, He was not consumed by the judgment, but instead rose from the dead and sat down at the right hand of God the Father in heaven.

Today, our right standing with and access to God is perfect and complete, because Jesus’ work on the cross is perfect and complete. We come to God based on what Jesus has done, and not what we have or have not done.

Through His sacrifice, Jesus has also made us children of God. Our Father in heaven hears our every prayer and answers our every request because of the finished work of His beloved Son, Christ Jesus.