Words are powerful. I am a lover of words. I was led to my present love of words by the master wordsmith C. S. Lewis. Much of my life has been an effort to be like him, to communicate with the same clarity and beauty that he did, for the sake of others, and just because it seems a worthy thing in and of itself.
It turns out that God is also a lover of words. There is one that He chose to use that has changed my life and perspective more than any other. That word is tetelestai. It is one of Jesus' sayings from the cross, a Greek perfect tense passive participle. A wooden translation would be something like: "having been accomplished it is." But that sounds a bit too much like Yoda, so most translators put simply "it is finished."
My Greek professor loved the perfect tense, and often criticized the English language for not having it. He was effusive in his praise of the perfect tense. He would passionately impress upon us how beautiful it was that these were past actions that assure future standing consequences.
So, what does that mean in the case of tetelestai? It means nothing less than that God has decisively conquered evil. Occasionally you will hear Christians lament the dimensions of evil in this world, or in themselves. They will sometimes say things like this: "I yearn for the day when God will finally answer all this evil." But surely God has already given his answer; surely evil is utterly defeated. The cross is God's perfect justice and perfect mercy striking down into history, a past action that reverberates through history to the present, and will shape every future moment for all time, assuring final cleansing for God's children and final judgement for the enemies of the cross.
Christian, you are not waiting for God to win! He has already won. The only thing we wait for, and indeed participate in, is the unfolding glory of the magnitude of His victory. This is true of your salvation as well. You are perfected in Christ's work. His past work assures the future. When He acted, your perfection was galvanized for all eternity. It remains only for you to grow into the perfection that is already yours as wholly forgiven and adopted sons and daughters of the King.
Think about what this means. What have you gone through, or what are you presently going through, that just feels like evil is winning? Whatever the word is, be it divorce, or terrorism, or cancer, or doubt, or pain, or injustice, or enmity, or persecution, or fear; there is another word, spoken by the rider on the white horse, and the blade of this word protruding from his mouth is of such metal that it can never be broken. God has the final word, the word that vanquishes all others, and that word is Tetelestai!
