On Friday, Jesus was crucified. That’s the first day. On Saturday, Jesus rested on the Sabbath in the tomb. That’s the second day. On Sunday, Jesus rose from the dead. That’s the third day. The Gospel accounts, and subsequent church tradition, confirm this ordering and counting of events.

Not everyone is convinced that Jesus died on a Friday. There is a fringe view that Jesus must have died earlier than Friday (like maybe Thursday or even Wednesday), because Jesus said, “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt. 12:40).
Jesus’s words in Matthew 12:40 seem to suggest a 72-hour period (three full days and three full nights) that can’t be placed between a Friday death and a Sunday resurrection. So if Jesus rose on a Sunday morning, he had to die earlier than a Friday afternoon—right?
No. Several important pieces of information are missing here.
First, the use of “three days and three nights” can simply mean a three-day period. Jesus is reading the story of Jonah typologically. Just as Jonah was delivered (after a period of time associated with the number three), so would Jesus be delivered (also after a period of time associated with the number three). The insistence for a 72-hour period of death for Jesus is an unnecessary and overly literal reading of Matthew 12:40.
Second, we know that Joseph of Arimathea needed to wrap Jesus’ dead body and lay it in the tomb before the Sabbath began. The Sabbath is, of course, the seventh day of the week. Logically, if Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus before the seventh day began (Mark 15:42), then Jesus’s death occurred on the sixth day—Friday. All four Gospels confirm that Jesus was buried after his death and that his burial occurred right before the Sabbath day began (Matt. 27:62; Mark 15:42; Luke 23:56; John 19:31). Let that sink in: all four Gospels confirm this.
Read More
Related Posts:

Rather than taking a blank canvas and layering paint drop by drop, he takes a soiled heart, made hard by sin, and softens it, reworks it, in fact, remakes it into his image. His art is not of the kind to hang on a wall for admiration. It’s the kind that stands in the hall, shouting down the corridors the glory of the artist. He’s creating not a showpiece but sons and daughters for himself. And if he’s producing such characters for his own enjoyment and pleasure, to share a part in his joy and gladness, why would he be content with any remaining sin or spot or imperfection? 

The world recognizes Leonardo da Vinci as one of history’s great artists, arguably the greatest ever. His Mona Lisa is the most famous painting the world will ever know. He never finally finished the picture. He was still working on it at the time of his death. Leonardo kept it with him, moving it from city to city, never handing it over to the one who commissioned it, because he was never done perfecting it. He tinkered and touched up and remade it throughout his last years of life. He even went to the lengths of painting the undergarments so that the proper texture was visible on the outer garment. He was meticulous and discerning. He researched the muscles of lips on corpses to get the smile just right—a smile that has sparked conversation since its revealing so many years ago. Is she smiling or not? Look at her eyes, and it appears the answer is yes. Look at her mouth, and it becomes debatable. Who could paint such a face full of motion? Only Leonardo because he alone cared enough to research the exact movements of the human mouth. He was never finished until the painting attained a specific and intentional character. So too is God.
In his book, The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis says about God something we see in Leonardo’s intention with his art.
Read More
Related Posts:

Whoever you are, and whatever the depths and agony of your trials, God is hovering over you: he loves you, he is near to you, and he can rescue you. We see a living picture of his rescue unfold in the subsequent six days of creation. God does not stand aloof from the world in all its chaotic agony. His caring, brooding presence is very near, and he is at work.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. —Genesis 1:1-2

If we are going to get anything out of Genesis, then we must prepare ourselves.
Basil of Caesarea (330-79) said at the beginning of his Hexaemeron, a series of sermons on Genesis 1,

How earnestly the soul should prepare itself to receive such high lessons! How pure it should be from carnal affections, how unclouded by worldly disquietudes, how active and ardent in its researches, how eager to find in its surroundings an idea of God which may be worthy of Him!

And John Calvin (1509-64) said in his commentary on Genesis, “The world is a mirror in which we ought to behold God.” “If my readers sincerely wish to profit with me in meditating on the works of God, they must bring with them a sober, docile mild, and humble spirit.”
So remember that the author of these words, Moses, saw an appearance of God at the burning bush, and God spoke with him “face to face, as a man speaks with his friend” (Exod. 33:11; cf. Num. 12:6-8). And don’t forget the power of these words, “which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15).
The Hebrew word for “beginning” is ראשׁית (rēshīt), which may also mean “starting point” or “first,” and is closely related to ראשׁ (rōsh), which means “head.” The word God translates אלהים, Elōhīm, which may be the plural for אל (el), the generic word for god. The plural does not in itself teach the doctrine of the Trinity, that there is one God and three persons in the godhead, but is more likely a “plural of majesty.” God is not just god, he is GOD. Elōhīm. GOD! The very sound of this word, naming as it does the Creator of the universe, should fill us with awe, dread, and love.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Before there was an earth and atoms, life and light, time and tide, there was God. He is eternal, which does not mean that he is very old, but that he had no beginning. He always was, is, and will be. Many have mockingly asked, “What was God doing before he created the world?” In his Commentaries on Genesis, Calvin relates a humorous answer he had read to this question:

When a certain impure dog was in this manner pouring ridicule upon God, a pious man retorted that God had been at that time by no means inactive, because he had been preparing hell for the captious.

We cannot speak reasonably of what God was doing “before creation,” because before creation there was no time as we know it—there was no “before.” Certainly there was nothing that brought God himself into existence.
The Hebrew verb for create is ברא (bārā); it is only ever used with God as the subject. What did God create? The “heavens and the earth.” Heaven, שׁמים (shamayīm), also means sky. Earth, ארץ (erets), also means land and ground. These words do not have a special meaning in Genesis 1:1; but when put together like this, “heaven and earth,” that is, “sky and ground,” “everything that’s up and everything that’s down,” they emphasize that God made everything. Only God himself is not made.
There are no time indications in these first two verses. The earth (erets) was formless and empty. There is some lovely alliteration here in the original, the earth was תהו ובהו, tōhu va bōhu. These words are neither “good” nor “bad” but are exceedingly and perhaps unpleasantly bland. Tōhu can refer to a barren wasteland, “a barren and howling waste” (Deut. 32:10; also Job 6:18). It can refer to futility (1 Sam. 12:21) and meaninglessness (Isa. 29:21). Bōhu appears only three times in the Old Testament. Isaiah 34:11 describes how “God will stretch out over Edom the measuring line of chaos and the plumb line of desolation,” and Jeremiah uses just the same phrase as Genesis 1:2: “I looked at the earth, and it was formless and empty (tōhu va bōhu); and at the heavens, and their light was gone” (Jer. 4:23). We will return to Jeremiah’s hugely significant phrase in a moment.
Read More
Related Posts: