To Encourage You

John 19:28-30 “After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), ‘I thirst.’ 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.When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, ‘It is finished,’ and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.”

Have you ever read a passage of Scripture that you’ve read many times before but then, suddenly, you’ve seen something new, something that you had never noticed in all the other times you’ve read the same words? That’s happened to me many times, and most recently when I read the passage above this morning.  The thing that caught my eye was the parenthesis “(to fulfill the Scripture).”  In context, this phrase refers to what Jesus said next, namely, “I thirst.”  In other words, Jesus said these words for the specific purpose of seeing that the Scriptures would be fulfilled in exact detail regarding His death. He knew that by saying this the soldiers would be prompted to offer Him a drink of sour wine, in direct fulfillment of Psalm 69:21: “They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me sour wine to drink.” What struck me about this is God’s absolute sovereignty regarding future events.  I’ve heard some people talk about God’s foreknowledge by stating that God knows what will happen in the future, but He doesn’t have any direct influence on it.  That likens God to a kind of fortune-teller, but no more. However, the passage above makes clear that Jesus had a direct hand in assuring that this specific prophesy, stated hundreds of years earlier, was exactly fulfilled.  This tells me that God doesn’t just know about the future, He has a direct role in assuring that the future will happen exactly as He has said it will happen, to the tiniest detail.  Yet man, like the soldiers at the crucifixion, are responsible and active in fulfilling these prophesies, whether they know it or not. 

Then my mind went to the following New Testament prophesy from Philippians 1:6: “And I am sure of this, that He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”  Here we have a prophesy that says God will personally make sure that the good work that He began in us at the moment we were saved will continue in us and be brought to completion until the time of Jesus’ return.  And while we have a responsibility to obey God’s Word, pray, and seek to continually grow in our knowledge of Him, He has a direct hand in bringing about all the contingencies that will bring our maturity in the faith to pass.  He is directly at work in our lives in a thousand different ways through the people we meet and the situations and trials we face to bring us to full maturity in our relationship to Him. 

None of us have “arrived,” nor will we arrive until that Day. As Paul said, “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me His own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” And then he says this: “Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained” (Philippians 3:12-16). 

What a great God we serve Who will personally fulfill His purpose for each and every one of His children, while at the same time calling us to the responsibility of obedience as He works in and through our lives.  Jesus reiterated the very same idea in His teaching on the vine and the branches.  There He commanded us to abide in Him, drawing near to Him, for it is He alone that is the source of our spiritual life. But He has also told us that “Every branch (i.e., every believer) that does bear (spiritual) fruit He (i.e., God) prunes, that it may bear more fruit” (John 15:2).  What confidence we should have in God that He will continue to work in us to take us from where we are with all our spiritual shortcomings and failures, and make us into the very image of His Son. What a joy to know that “we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when He appears, we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2).