This is John, chapter 19, 28 through 30, here now God's holy, true and life giving word. After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said to fulfill the scripture, I thirst. A jar of sour wines stood there. So they put a sponge full of sour wine on a hissa branch and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, it is finished and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. This is the word of the Lord. Our Father, for those whom you have given to your Son and given love for your Son, it's hard to think about what he went through for us because of his great love for us, because of your great love for us. And so as we consider tonight, this moment, the death of Christ, would you speak to us? Would you help us to see His glory? Would you help us to grow in our love for Him and our trust of Him and our faithful living for, we pray, in His name? There were seven last words or seven final sayings of Christ on the cross that different authors of different gospels have recorded for us. And the passage that I just read contains two of them. And we're going to spend some time considering one of them this evening. And that is the two word phrase that Jesus utters in John 19, verse 28 when he says, I thirst. And tonight as we reflect on the tremendous suffering that our Savior endured willingly for us, we're going to talk about four reasons why Jesus said, I thirst from the cross. Number one. Jesus said, I thirst on the cross because the cross was God's plan A. It would be easy for us to think that the cross, the death of the Son of God, was something God came up with after the world fell into sin in misery. But the Scriptures teach us that it was always plan A. The plan was always from all eternity that the Son of God would go to the cross to pay for the sins of a people he was sent to redeem. And we see this even in this passage in verse 28 when John says that he said, I thirst to fulfill the Scripture. And the Scripture that John is most certainly referring to here is Psalm 69, verse 3, and especially verse 21. A Psalm written hundreds of years before, but very clearly pointing to this moment and this saying by the Savior. I thirst. Listen to Psalm 69, verse 3, and verse 21. I am weary with my crying out. My throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God. For my thirst, they gave me sour wine to drink. And John shows us here that that Psalm is fulfilled in Jesus not only expressing his thirst, but then also receiving sour wine to drink in this moment. So one of the reasons that Jesus said, I thirst, is because the cross was God's plan to reveal his glory, to reveal his love and his power. Number two, some of us suggested that Jesus said, I thirst, because he knows our pain. He knows all the different types of pain that we experience, the suffering that we experience, living in a broken and fallen world. If that phrase I thirst is taken literally, the Greek word when taken literally just means someone who is thirsting. And of course, Jesus at this point has been whipped and beaten. He's been wearing a crown of thorns. He's been paraded through the city carrying a beam. He has been crucified and hanged on a cross. And he's been hanging there in the midday sun for three hours, of course, physically he would have been unbelievably thirsty. But some of us suggested he may have said it also because of what it means when this phrase in the Greek is taken figuratively. If you take that phrase figuratively, then it said that those are said to thirst who painfully feel their lack of things that are truly things that truly refresh and strengthen the soul. So he may have been communicating not only the physical suffering that we experience. He knows that pain, but also our mental, our emotional anguish as we long for our souls to be satisfied in a world that cannot satisfy it. That he knows how it hurts to thirst for something and he is our savior and he wants us to know that he knows us, that we might relate to him and understand him and love him and understand that compassion that he has, that love for us, that he wanted, that made him want to alleviate our thirst. And there's only one way he could do that, which leads us to the third reason that Jesus said, I thirst from the cross. He said it to connect with the Old Testament in regard to what he was doing on the cross for the people of God. He said, I thirst because he was taking our punishment, you and I, who belong to God through faith. And here's the connection. In the Old Testament, there are places where the judgment that we all deserve, that all human beings deserve for our sin, the judgment of God, the wrath of God, is referred to through a number of different metaphors, one of which happens to be thirst and even dying of thirst. In fact, in Hosea 2, verse 3, through Hosea God is calling to his rebellious people and calling them to turn back, calling them to repent so that he doesn't have to dispense his judgment upon them. And there's a threat from God to his people that he will make them like a wilderness and make her like a parched land and kill her with thirst. And so when Jesus from the cross said, I thirst, he was demonstrating that he has stepped in to take that judgment that we deserve, that God's people deserve for our sin and for our rebellion. I remember the first time this hit me. There's a tremendous difference between saying Jesus died for sinners, which is true. And saying and believing Jesus died for me, and not just died, but he suffered the unimaginable wrath of God and judgment of God for our sins. First time this hit me was actually at a good Friday service many years ago, and he was during that service and through reading of texts like these that it hit me for the first time, that the tremendous amount of pain and suffering that Jesus experienced beyond what we could possibly even comprehend and that it was for me. I remember I began to weep, and I couldn't believe that he would actually go through that for me, and I couldn't stop weeping, the service ended, and I continued to weep. We drove to my grandmother's house, and I continued to weep.
It was like three hours before I finally was able to get some control, and all because I realized that he'd actually done that for me. And I remember I came out of this bedroom that in my grandmother's house, my whole family is sitting there, just kind of waiting for me to finish, and everybody just looked at me, and everybody was silent, and then my grandmother said, that really had an effect on you. And I said, yeah, really had an effect on me. It wasn't the service, it was the scriptures, it was the reality, and maybe even tonight you for the first time would let the suffering of Christ on your behalf have an effect. He said, I thirst because it was God's plan for him to be there. He said, I thirst because he knows all of our pains, physically, emotionally. He said, I thirst because he was taking the punishment and we deserve and forth. He said, I thirst because he was about to say something that he wanted everybody to hear, and he wanted it to be very clear, totally audible, unmistakable. He was about to make a promise, the most special promise we could ever hear. And if you've ever had an absolutely parched throat, if you've ever had the tongue of sticking to the roof of your mouth, if you've ever been so thirsty and tried to speak, you know it's virtually impossible. In fact, I would imagine when he said, I thirst, it was barely understandable. And you know that if you have something to say and you are parched, you are thirsting tremendously, that you want anything, something to just moisten your lips a little bit, your throat a little bit so that you can say whatever it is, you have to say. And so he asks, he says, I thirst and they give him sour wine, wine that has spoiled, but that's here and over there. He doesn't care about that, what he cares about, he's about to say something, he's about to make a promise. And so he wants it to be said clearly and heard clearly. And so the sour wine goes into his mouth and he gets enough moisture in his lips and in his mouth and on his tongue to say these words that we read in verse 30, it is finished. And everybody heard it, it is finished. And what he was saying in that moment is that suffering on behalf of his people is finished. He was declaring to you and I who believe, I did it, I finished it, I have taken all the wrath of God for the sins of my people, I have set them free, I have paid their debt, they are forgiven. It is. And so he bowed his head and gave up his, before he went to the cross, Jesus had said in John 4
to the woman at the well, whoever drinks of this water that I 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. In Revelation 22 17, it says, and let the one who is thirsty come, let the one who desires to take the water of life without price, let the one who is thirsty come, let the one who desires take the water of life without price. Why can we be assured that in eternity Christ will fulfill all those thirsts because he thirsted to death. Father, we will never know the fullness of the suffering that Christ endured willingly for us so that through faith in him we might be fully reconciled to you so that we might be fully forgiven. So that our judgment, the judgment we deserve would be fully paid for by him. But let us buy your grace and for your glory. Let us dwell enough on what he has suffered for us that our love for him would abound. And our thirst for him would be even more quenched as we know him more deeply and we pray all these things in Jesus' name. This is a service of shadows and we're beginning to see the shadows all throughout this room. We have one more reading and one final song tonight and during this final song we will be dimming the lights as each of the vocalists sing. Each one of us will sing a verse and then we will exit the stage in the back. I will be the final one to sing and leave the stage. And as I do I encourage everyone to follow me out in silence. We don't like silence in our culture but here we're coming to the tomb and let's sit in the silence knowing that in a couple days we're going to be celebrating in here.