I Thirst!


Sermon by David Strain on August 19, 2018 John 19:28-30

Download Audio

Let me invite you if you would to take a Bible please and to turn with me to John's gospel, John's gospel chapter 19; page 906 in the church Bibles. We are greeted with an immensely solemn scene in the passage before us. Our Savior, having been betrayed and handed over to the Roman authorities, has been beaten and condemned to die. He was made to carry a cross to the place called Golgotha, "the place of a skull," and there the nails were driven into His hands and His feet and He was hung between two criminals with the sign pinned over His head that proclaimed in what was intended to be mockery and a declaration of Roman superiority. "Here is the fate of anyone who makes a rival claim to kingship over against the claim of the Caesars." That's what was intended by the sign that proclaimed that this is "The King of the Jews." Of course, the sign proclaimed so much more and preached glorious truth never more clearly seen in fact than in this moment when Jesus Christ gave His life, a ransom for many. Here is the King acting to save His people.

 

And I want to direct your attention to the words of verses 28 and 29 of John 19 because they seem to me eminently suited for the occasion before us. We are, as you can see, preparing to come and sit together around the Lord's Table where the bread and the wine speak to us about the self-giving love of Jesus Christ, crucified for sinners. Here we come to the Lord's Table to each and to drink together, believing that as we do so, we are nourished upon Christ Himself. His body, He said, is true food; His blood true drink. We come to the Table hungry and thirsty after righteousness and He promises to fill us. "As the deer pants for the water brook, so our souls long for you, O God." And here, the Lord has made provision to answer our cries and to satisfy us and to quench our thirst. Jesus is here this evening to give to us the water of life, which if we will drink Him in, we will never thirst again. And so we ought to come with some anticipation, with expectation even, looking for our communion with the risen Christ to be renewed and strengthened and deepened.

 

But I want us as we make our approach to the Lord’s Table to come with a clear view of all that it cost. I want us to come tonight seeing something more of the dimensions of our Savior’s love, the emblems of which we will see and handle and taste in the bread and the cup. And so I propose tonight that we take the time before communion to meditate on two words, really only one word in Greek, spoken by our Savior in verse 28. Would you look there with me? “Jesus said, ‘I thirst.’” Just one word in Greek. They comprise, these two English words, they comprise the fifth of the seven sayings of Jesus Christ from the cross. The sixth, the one that follows immediately in the passage, is a shout of victory. Verse 29, “It is finished!” Victory. The work is now complete. And the seventh, a prayer of contentment and satisfaction. You can read it in Luke 23:46. “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” But here before us is the fifth of the seven words from the cross; a word that speaks to us of the depth of the anguish and the profundity of the love of our Savior, the Lord Jesus, when He said, “I thirst.”

 

Before we consider all that it has to teach us, let me invite you once again to bow with me we as pray.

 

Lord Jesus, to whom else shall we turn? You have the words of eternal life. Grant us, by Your Spirit, ears to hear, faith to receive, and grace to live depending upon You alone. For we ask this in Your name, amen.

 

John 19 at verse 28. This is the Word of God:

 

“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.”

 

Amen, and we give thanks to God for His Word.

 

A Word of Suffering

I suppose we all have some notion of what it is to thirst. Although very few, if any of us, have ever endured the agony of unquenched thirst. We live in a place and at a time when, if we get thirsty, we have instant access to water. If I were a betting man, I bet that the experience of growing thirst without being quenched is an experience very few indeed any of us in this room have ever endured. But at the cross, our Savior descended into that nightmare and said, “I thirst.” And whatever else we might say of our Lord’s words, we do have to say this much – “I thirst” is a declaration of profound suffering. It is a word, first of all, of suffering. Think for a moment of all that Jesus was made to endure. His body was torn and lacerated by the Roman lash. His scalp punctured by the crown of thorns pushed down into His brow. The nails pinned Him hand and foot to the rough wood of the cross. He was held in a position that was carefully calculated to prolong His torture, leaving Him fighting for every breath, His lungs slowly filling till He drowned in His own fluid. Here is a wretched figure, broken and humiliated, naked, and He is parched; He’s dying of thirst. In Psalm 22, the great psalm of the cross, David hears the suffering Savior say, “I am poured out like water and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast. My strength is dried up like a potsherd and my tongue sticks to my jaws. You lay me in the dust of death.” Here is a man whose bodily agonies are aggravated to unimaginable depths by the torture of unquenchable thirst.

 

But, you might say, we ought to remember that this man, this man with a true body and a reasonable soul, this man is more than a man. Isn’t He? He is the divine Son, the Lord of glory, the second person of the blessed Trinity, infinite, eternal and unchangeable. And yes, He is, but that doesn’t for a moment minimize the depths of His suffering. In fact, it adds a layer of wonder to them beyond our comprehension. The One who made the expanse and separated the waters from the waters as the creation narrative in Genesis 1 puts it; the One who gathered the waters together in one place and called the dry land, “earth,” and the waters, “seas,” this One is literally dying for a cup of water. At the end of the book of Job, you remember the famous confrontation between God and Job. And we’re told that unlike Job, the Lord shut the sea with doors; He entered into the springs of the sea and walked into the recesses of the deep. He cleft a channel for the rain to bring rain to satisfy the waste and desolate places. He is the Lord of the waters, and here He is now, hanging on the cross bleeding out between two criminals, thirsting desperately even for a drop of water.

 

A Word of Submission

And we might well ask as we try to take the enormity of that in, we might well ask, “Why should He? Why, after all, should He endure it, the God-Man, when just with a word He might end it all and slake His thirst and end His pain and stop His suffering? Why should the Lord of the waters thirst?” And the answer, at least in part, has to do with His resolve, His determination to fulfill the mission entrusted to Him. That’s the second thing that I want you to see about this word, “I thirst.” First, it is a word of suffering – obvious, profound, horrifying suffering. Secondly, it is also a word of submission, of submission to the will of the Father, of a resolve no matter the cost to obey all that God requires of Him to secure our redemption.

 

Jesus’s Resolve

You remember how at the end of the forty days of fasting with which Christ’s public ministry began, Satan came to our Savior and tempted Him in the wilderness. Do you remember? And he incited Jesus to turn the stones into bread. It was a temptation to forsake the path of obedient, sacrificial suffering, and instead to draw upon His divine power and His divine authority and to provide for Himself whatever He needed – to fill His hunger and to make bread from the stones. Now that temptation at the start of His ministry was no doubt sharp and severe, coming as it did, remember, at the end of a prolonged hunger. And yet on that occasion, our Savior obeyed the Father. “Man shall not live by bread alone,” He said, “but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” And He submitted Himself at great cost and at real pain to the will of the Father and the program of the Father for our salvation. How much more much the temptation He endures here now at the end of His public ministry have been; this climactic moment at the conclusion of it all simply to say the word and quench His thirst and end His pain and level His enemies. And he doesn’t do it. When Jesus says, “I thirst,” it’s revealing to us not only the depths of His suffering – it is – but also the strength of His resolve, His determination to stay the course, endure the cross, to submit Himself in obedience to the Father’s will to everything that your salvation required.

 

Isn't that precisely the point of verse 28? "Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scriptures), ‘I thirst.'" "All is now finished," He thought. As the nails were driven into His hands – "The work is complete." Hadn't He prayed in precisely those terms in the Upper Room in John 17 at verse 4? "Father," He said, "I glorified You on earth having accomplished the work You gave Me to do." And now here at the cross, we're told that thought remains with Him as He hangs between the two criminals, amidst the jeers and the mockery of the crowd and the agony and the shame of it all. "All that the Father has required of Me in order to secure the salvation of His people, all the obedience, all the law keeping, all the suffering, all of it is now accomplished but for this one final work. And now I must crown My obedient sufferings by becoming obedient even to death on a cross."

 

Fulfillment of the Scriptures

And so knowing this, John says, knowing that all is now finished, He said, “I thirst.” Here when everything in the natural frailty of His constitution as a human being screamed at Him for relief, here when the power to end the pain lay entirely within His grasp as the divine Son, here He chose instead to endure and to say, “I thirst.” He understood that this was the Father’s plan. It had been mapped out for Him in ages past in the holy Scriptures. Psalm 69 at the twenty-first verse – “They gave me poison for my food and for my thirst they gave me sour wine to drink.” Isn’t that what happens here when He says, “I thirst”? They put a sponge full of sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to His mouth. That’s not an act of mercy, you understand. They’re not trying to relieve His agony by quenching His thirst. You don’t give vinegar to a dehydrated man. This is an act of spite and venom and cruel mockery intended only to intensify His suffering. But Jesus knew this was the path marked out for Him. He knew that all was now fulfilled and said, “To fulfill the Scriptures, ‘I thirst.’” So this is a word of suffering, isn’t it, but it’s also a word of submission to the Father’s plan, to the price of the cross, the cost of your salvation.

 

A Word of Substitution

And then thirdly, it is also a word of substitution. A word of suffering, a word of submission, and a word of substitution. You remember that on the night of His betrayal, He had gone down into the Garden of Gethsemane to pray and there He poured out His heart to the Father. Looking into the horror of what waited for Him at the cross, He turned to God and cried out, “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me. Nevertheless, not as I will but as You will.” We’ve spoken about Christ’s obedience, His submission to the will of God, and in Gethsemane, we hear that note sounding loud and clear, don’t we, in this prayer – “Not my will but Your will be done.” But what was the will of the Father? It was that He should drink the cup, that He should drink the cup.

In Matthew 20 at verse 22, we are told James and John asked Jesus to sit, one at His right hand and one at His left when He came into the glory of His kingdom. And Jesus replied, no doubt with some astonishment at the audacity of their request, “You don’t know what you’re asking! Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?” The Father’s plan was that He should drink a cup. And Christ balks at it. His humanity shrinks back as it contemplates the horror of the suffering involved in that cup. The prophets of the Old Testament had spoken about the cup of wrath. Jeremiah 25:15, “Thus the Lord, the God of Israel said to me, ‘Take from my hand this cup of the wine of wrath and make all the nations to whom I send you drink it.’” It is the cup of the wine of the wrath of God. Habakkuk 2:16, “The cup in the Lord’s right hand will come around to you and utter shame will come upon your glory.”

 

The cup, you see, is a picture, a symbol of the wrath and curse of God, the judgment of God. And this is the cup the Father is asking His Son to drink. And in Gethsemane, He resolves to drink it to the dregs. "Not my will, but Your will be done." And here at the cross now, He takes the cup and He's drinking it down in all the fury of the wrath and curse of God my sin, your sin deserves. He drinks it down, and in the drinking, He thirsted. When we drink, we drink to satisfy our thirst. But the cup the Father gave His Son was a cup that increased the agony of His thirst. It was more than the physical effects of crucifixion, you see, that prompted Him to cry, "I thirst." It was the fury of the curse, it was the wrath of the Father, it was the condemnation of hell. Isn't that exactly how Jesus depicts the anguish of hell? In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:24, you may remember the story. The unrepentant rich man is pictured suffering in hell and he calls out to Abraham in heaven, "Father Abraham, have mercy on me and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame!"

 

Picture of the Anguish of Hell

What is the great picture of the anguish of hell, enduring the curse and judgment of God? It is unquenchable thirst. And that is what Jesus bears here at Golgotha, nailed to the tree. That’s what He endures. That’s what we are confessing in the Apostles’ Creed when we say, “He descended into hell.” Here, here is His descent into hell, His descent into the full, unmitigated experience of the wrath and curse of God due my sin. And so at the cross when He cries out, “I thirst,” He is drinking to the dregs the cup of wrath without mercy that we might drink the cup of mercy without wrath. This is a word not just of suffering and not just of submission, but a word of substitution. He is drinking the cup we deserve to drink that we may drink a cup of mercy, never a cup of wrath. And so He cries out like the rich man from the abyss, “I thirst!” And as He does so, He does it so that I who deserve, you who deserve to join the rich man in hell, might never thirst again. He was made to thirst that He might keep His promise to us.

 

“Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life. Whoever believes in Me shall never thirst. If anyone thirsts, let Him come to Me and drink. Whoever believes in Me as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” The water that gives life, the water that satisfies, the deepest thirsts of our hearts, the water that sustains us when all the wells of the world run dry, they’re broken cisterns where there is no water, that water flows only from one spring. You can draw it from only one well. It was a spring opened here at the cross when Jesus said, “I thirst.” There, He endures the dreadful curse, the anguish of unquenched, unsated longing without relief that our hearts, your heart, might be satisfied. Our thirst slaked; our lives sustained in the desert places.

 

The Lord’s Table

And so as we turn our attention to this Table before us, to the bread and the cup, we hear again Jesus’ cry, “I thirst,” and we remember that He took from the hand of the Father the cup of wrath we deserve, He took it willingly and He drained it. He drank the cup of wrath without mercy that we might drink a new cup – a cup of mercy without wrath. The cup before us tonight is a cup of mercy. There is no wrath in it. There is now no condemnation for you, believer, none. Christ has drained that cup forever. There’s no judgment waiting for you; not today if you trust in Christ. Only mercy. Only grace. Only sustenance. Only soul-thirst quenched; heart-hunger satisfied. That’s what waits for you here at this Table. That is what Christ died to provide – true food; true drink. Drink Him in and be satisfied.

 

Now perhaps you are here and you’re not a Christian tonight. I want you to look at what takes place at this Table and understand the message that the bread and the cup are preaching. As Christians eat and drink together, they are proclaiming what is on offer in Jesus. The bread and the wine, they are preaching soul-satisfaction, thirst-quenching grace, life-nourishing mercy, unfailing, never ceasing, never giving up, always and forever love. And it’s available for you. It’s available for you. Not in the bread and the wine but in Jesus Christ, who drank the cup of judgment and said for you, “I thirst,” that you might never thirst again. If you will believe in Him, He promises you living water to satisfy. “Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scriptures), ‘I thirst.’” It’s a word of suffering. It is a word of submission, obedience to the Father. It is a word of substitution. Because He thirsted we can be satisfied. Will you come now and drink Him in, believing, trusting, and looking to Him who thirsted that you need never thirst again? Let’s pray together.

 

O Lord Jesus, would You keep Your promise to us and open the fountain of living water and grant us faith to drink, to come to the cross. For some of us, that may be to come to the cross for the very first time. Some of us, we’re coming back to a familiar haunt, back to the cross. And there before the One who said, “I thirst,” nourish us, quench our thirst, answer our hunger, and feed us with Yourself. For we ask it all in Your name, amen.

© 2024 First Presbyterian Church.

This transcribed message has been lightly edited and formatted for the Web site. No attempt has been made, however, to alter the basic extemporaneous delivery style, or to produce a grammatically accurate, publication-ready manuscript conforming to an established style template.

Should there be questions regarding grammar or theological content, the reader should presume any website error to be with the webmaster/transcriber/editor rather than with the original speaker. For full copyright, reproduction and permission information, please visit the First Presbyterian Church Copyright, Reproduction & Permission statement.

To view recordings of our entire services, visit our Facebook page.

caret-downclosedown-arrowenvelopefacebook-squarehamburgerinstagram-squarelinkedin-squarepausephoneplayprocesssearchtwitter-squarevimeo-square