Protestant apologist Cary Schmidt wrote the following:
While on the cross, Jesus made several statements. Perhaps the most important one was this, “ . . . It is finished . . . “ (John 19:30).
Done.
What was He saying? What does “it is finished” mean?
Literally it means “paid in full.” It means the complete and final payment for every sin you ever commit is now paid. This includes all your sins—past, present, and future—even the ones you haven’t committed yet! (Cary Schmidt, Done: What Most Religions Don’t Tell you about the Bible [Lancaster, Calif.: Striving Together Publications, 2005], 66)
The author is wrong in what he states about “it is finished” (τετελεσται), and such a comment, which flies in the face of sound biblical exegesis, is further proof why Protestantism is false and should be abandoned as the anti-biblical heresy it truly is.
Firstly, John 19:30 does not mean that that the atonement was a legal payment and that one’s sins, past, present, and then-future, were forgiven—such would mean if taken its logical conclusion, a form of “eternal justification” á la Hyper Calvinism. Furthermore, it ignores texts in the Bible that teach that one can lose their salvation (e.g., Heb 6:4-6; 10:26-29), something that happened to King David (see King David Refutes Reformed Soteriology). Furthermore, there are other passages, even those from John himself (e.g., 1 John 2:1-2) that refute the false idea that, at conversion (not the cross itself), one’s past, present, and then-future sins are remitted. For a fuller discussion, see:
One of the points I raise in that article is that, if the Protestant reading of John 19:30 is true, that would mean, apart from demoting Christ’s intercession in heaven to the role of a mere figurehead, without affecting salvation (contra Heb 7:24-25), it would also mean that Christ’s physical resurrection had no redemptive meaning, too, again, although such is contradicted by Rom 4:24-25:
Who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification.
The Greek is explicit that there is a causal relationship between the resurrections of Jesus, which took place after John 19:30, that is, we are justified due to the physical resurrection of Jesus. As one theologian stated:
If we are to be faithful to the parallelism of the statement, we must place our Lord’s resurrection beside his death as fully effective for our salvation. (F.X. Durrwell, The Resurrection: A Biblical Study [trans. Rosemary Sheed; New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960], 27)
