Sunday School | Evidence for the Days of Death and Resurrection

Okay. So here's what we're doing, you guys. We've been doing a series that we call Red Letters, Stuff Jesus Said. And for the last several weeks, we've done a bunch of relatively quick little things. We'll cover multiple topics in a given Sunday. I've only got one topic planned for this morning because I think it might be where we need to work it through a little bit. And if we run out of time, maybe I'm wrong and maybe we'll be done at like 10:30 and you all can eat more chili cheese dogs or something.

I'll show you the question, and I believe we've talked about this in this room, but this is a revolving door. There's always new people coming, and so this might be surprising and weird to some of you. Here's the question that I was asked: How is the time from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning three days and three nights? It looks like only two nights to me, and really just kind of fragments of a day. And then the Scripture reference for that is Matthew 12.

The Sign of Jonah

If you want to go to Matthew 12, you can see this. Matthew 12:38 begins like this:

Then some of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law said to Jesus, "Teacher, we want to see a miraculous sign from you." And He answered, "A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a miraculous sign, but none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." — Matthew 12:38-40

So right there in verse 40, when Jesus says that the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth, what is He referring to, first of all? At what point would He be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth? After death. Between His death and His resurrection.

So what He's saying—what Jesus has done is He's taken this thing. By the way, this is a super recurrent phenomena. There's a gajillion things that happen throughout the Old Testament, and Jesus has an incredibly self-aware sense of himself such that he thinks that whole thing is about him. He would say that the rock in the wilderness that they drank from, that was him. He would say that the snake that was lifted up in the desert when the people were getting bit by snakes, that was him. He would say that Isaac, who was almost sacrificed when Abraham took his son, his only son, that story was about Him. Jesus thinks the whole story is about Him.

And according to Jesus, what was going on when Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a whale was indicative of, was anticipated, points to his own time between his death and his resurrection of being three days and three nights in the belly of the earth. Jesus is saying the sign of Jonah was in anticipation. And in that manner, when the Pharisees are saying "prove that you're God, show to us that it's really all true," He's like, "Well here's an idea: why don't you kill me, I'll stay dead for three days and three nights, and then I'll rise from the dead, and then we can talk." That's essentially what he's saying. The sign that I am who I am is chiefly seen, preeminently seen in his resurrection. Kill me, and in three days—or elsewhere he says "destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up."

But the problem is that if you start doing the math, you're like, okay, so if he died on a Friday late in the afternoon and was maybe in the tomb by Friday night, Friday evening, 6:00 or 7:00—who knows. Then he'd be like, one day from that would be Saturday night, and then it would be Sunday night, and then it would be Monday night. That would be three days. But he was actually already out of the tomb by Sunday morning at dawn. When they got there at dawn, we don't know when he was raised from the dead. We celebrate Easter on Sunday morning, but by Sunday morning it had already happened, right? They get there at dawn. They don't watch him come out of the grave at 7 a.m. They get there at like 6, at the break of dawn, and he's already gone. He could have been gone at 2 in the morning. We don't know when he walked out. So you just don't have much time from here to there. So where do the three days and the three nights work out? That's the question that we're being asked.

Bill, this is just a way of telling the Jewish people regarding counting days?

Okay. So what Bill said—isn't it the way? You've probably all heard, and I have heard, because I think pastors are just like making stuff up sometimes, that, oh yeah, well, it's common.

Everybody knows that in the Jewish reckoning of the calendar, any part of the day was counted as an entire day. So a little bit of Friday, a little bit of Saturday, a little bit of Sunday—that's three days and three nights. And there's no evidence that that's true. We're just trying to retrofit the data back into what we think we know.

So we're gonna try to do something different this morning. What we want to do is just challenge our premises. Some of you may know where I'm going with this. But here's what I want you guys to do. I'd like to invite this half of the room. You guys get to choose. This half of the room, I want you to find in your Bible—I don't care about anything else, just Bible. Find me the evidence that Jesus was raised on a Sunday. I'd suggest that you could look at the last chapters of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Just find the resurrected. Do you find any evidence that it was Sunday?

You guys get to choose which group you go with, but these guys, I want you to find any evidence that Jesus was crucified on a Friday. So the fundamental assumption is he was crucified on one day, he was raised on another day, and we gotta fit three days and three nights in between. We're having a hard time making things fit. Let's just go back to our source data.

Take a couple minutes. Go to the end of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. Friday crucifixion—can you do it? Sunday resurrection—can you do it? Let's just grab some data and see where we land. And then, Milro, you guys can do both or either. You have about three minutes. Crucified on a Friday, raised on a Sunday. Can you prove it? If you want a little help, you might look at Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, or John 20 for the resurrection data.

Alright. Is that enough time? You got any answers yet over here? We finding anything? So we don't know. Generally people date Christ's death between thirty and thirty-three AD, somewhere in that range. But we don't know exactly, although there's some ways that we could kind of reverse engineer it when we're done here today.

The Berean Example

All right, so here's what you guys are doing, by the way. You're doing what the Bereans were famous for. Is this a group of people you know? In Acts 17, Paul went to Berea. He travels from city to city—Corinth, Athens, Thessalonica, Berea—and there's this great little comment here. Sometimes it's a throwaway, but highlight this one. Don't throw this one away.

As soon as it was night, the believers sent Paul and Silas away to Berea. On arriving there, they went to the Jewish synagogue. Now, hear this part. The Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. As a result, many of them believed, as did also a number of prominent Greek women and many Greek men. — Acts 17:10

So you're gonna go to some Bible study, go to some church, somebody's gonna stand on a stage, and somebody's gonna say this and blah blah blah. How do you know? I could be lying to you. I'm just making stuff up, right? Never trust anything anybody ever says for the rest of your life. Look it up. Could you prove it?

You're gonna stand in here. You're gonna recite the creeds. You're gonna say that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Well, is that true? Does the Bible say that? Is that reliable? I do think the Scriptures are reliable, but you can even check that if you want. But when somebody gives you some theological assertion—even as simple as Jesus was raised from the dead on a Sunday—like, prove it. Can you prove it? In fact, right now, what do you got? Did you guys find any evidence for Jesus' crucifixion or resurrection taking place on a Sunday?

What'd you get, Kat? In Matthew 28 it says after the Sabbath at the dawn on the first day of the week. Okay, very good. Kat just quoted Matthew 28, probably verse one right there. So here it is. After the Sabbath—what day is the Sabbath? At dawn on the first day of the week—what is the first day of the week? Sunday.

Okay, that's weird because sometimes we think the first day of the week is Monday. We kind of live your life like it's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then two days off, and then repeat. But really, if you look at a calendar, Sunday's the first day of the week, right?

So it says, "After the Sabbath, which was Saturday, at dawn on the first day of the week, which is Sunday, and Mary the other Mary went to look at the tomb." That's good data to support a Sunday resurrection. As long as you understand that that's not actually when he's raised from the dead, is it? What is that? That's when they find the empty tomb. So it was sometime prior to sun up Sunday, right? Could have been midnight for all we know. We don't know. That's when they discovered it.

All right, Jennifer, you want to throw something on? Mark 16:9.

When Jesus rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had driven seven demons. — Mark 16:9

And what is your point about that? When did he rise, right? So now we have Mark giving us supplementary data, not just when they discovered the empty tomb. Now we are constrained to early on the first day of the week. And so we don't know what that means. Is it 6 AM? Is it 5 AM? Is it 3 AM? We don't know. But still, more confirmation on this first day of the week. It's Sunday morning. I think we can be pretty confident midnight Saturday to 6 AM, right? It's in the wee hours. We feel good.

Bill? When does the day start?

Well, in a Jewish reckoning of time, do you know this? We tend to think it's like—go back to Genesis 1 real quick. Why are we going to Genesis 1? Just check it out. This is a funny little pattern here. If you look at all of the creation days in Genesis, it's funny. Just look at the first one. Go to Genesis 1:5.

God called the light day and the darkness he called night, and there was evening and there was morning the first day. — Genesis 1:5

See, this is the pattern throughout all the creation days. Do you feel how that's weird, right? We tend to think the day is like morning and then evening, or from here morning then evening. But the Jewish reckoning, the day actually starts the night before we think the day starts. So evening precedes the day—it goes from evening to morning, then evening to morning, and then evening to morning. So that's just odd. It's a little bit different than the way we count it. You'll see that whole pattern continues throughout Genesis.

So I think that we can be reasonably confident that his resurrection was accomplished early in the morning on Sunday. You all feel good about that? We've seen it in Matthew, we've seen it in Mark, it's actually in Luke and John. It's very well attested. Resurrection day: Sunday morning, sometime prior to 6 AM. Good enough?

Jennifer? I saw a challenge. What if there was darkness and then God created light? Yeah, well, but not just even on that first day. You go back—the whole genesis of it is that that pattern is there: there was evening, there was morning the second day. There was evening, there was morning the third day. There was evening, there was morning the fourth day, which is just a different cultural reality than how we tend to think about it. And we do know—this is pretty well attested within Judaism—they see the Sabbath begins at sundown, not at sunup. We just split the day a little bit funny. That's fine.

Crucifixion on Friday

Okay, Friday crucifixion. What do we got? John 19:14.

Now it was the day of preparation of the Passover. It was about the sixth hour. He said to the Jews, behold your king. — John 19:14

The day of preparation is Friday. So this is great. It's good. We have in John—we're going to see it in a number of different places. But in John 19, let me read this text. Were you in verse 31 by chance? Or were you reading someplace else?

Okay, so we'll read in a couple places. John 19:14, it was the preparation day of the Passover, it was about noon. Here is your King, Pilate said to the Jews, but they shouted, Take him away, take him away, crucify him. That's all around John 19:14. And then if you go down to verse 30:

When He had received the drink, Jesus said, "It is finished." And with that He bowed His head and gave up His spirit. — John 19:30

Verse 31:

Now it was the day of preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. Because the Jews did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down. — John 19:31

The soldiers therefore came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with Jesus, and then those of the other. Okay, so we're in John 19, and just like we saw in the resurrection passages, we're anchoring this thing relative to the Sabbath. It was the day after the Sabbath, the first day of the week. It was the day after Saturday, it was Sunday, early in the morning they go to the tomb. Good enough there? And then we're seeing a similar phenomena over here in John 19.

Did anybody else get any other passages? Eric? Mark 15 verse 42 basically just reiterates the same thing, but it's talking about Joseph of Arimathea at the end. That's right. I'll read it to you.

So it was preparation day, that is the day before the Sabbath. As evening approached, Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the council who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for Jesus' body. — Mark 15:42

Okay? We can see it in John, we can see it in Mark, can just play the same game in Luke. All the Gospels have this same kind of language. Anybody do it in Luke?

Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus' body, then he took it down, wrapped it in linen cloth, and placed it in a tomb, cut in the rock, which no one had yet been laid. It was preparation day, and the Sabbath was about to begin. — Luke 23:52

Okay. So far, so good? So Friday to Sunday, and we're constrained. But wait, there's more. Okay? So we're gonna be as Berean as we can possibly be. We're gonna diligently study the Scriptures to see what the truth really is.

Gina, when we were in John, and it talks about the preparation being on the Sabbath, and then it says that that Sabbath was a high day, which suggests that it's not the same Sabbath. This is right. Gina's gonna unravel things, and your whole world's about to come unmade. Alright? So let's do two things. Gina's exactly right. Let's go back to John. John is gonna give us a couple of clues that may be challenging to you. Just stay with me. Nobody freak out.

The Preparation of the Passover

In John 19 we'll go to verse 13 first.

When Pilate heard this, he brought Jesus out and he sat down on the judge's seat at a place known as the stone pavement, which in Aramaic is Gabbatha. It was the preparation day, what? The Passover. — John 19:13

Oh, hold everything, hold everything. It was the preparation day of the Passover. That means probably nothing to you, but it will in a few minutes.

Now it was the day of preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. — John 19:31

What's going on there is that John is giving us a clue that there's more going on than meets the eye. We have a tendency to be like, It was a special Sabbath, meaning it was a really good Saturday. That is not what he means. Okay? It's not what he's talking about.

So let me ask you something. What day of the week is Thanksgiving? Thursday. What day of the week is Christmas? Wednesday. I mean, who knows? Tuesday, it could be Wednesday. What's the worst day of the week for Christmas to be on? Sunday. Man, this ruins everything, right? Okay. So what day of the week was Passover? Was Passover like Thanksgiving, that it's anchored to a specific day of the week? Or is Passover like Christmas, it varies year to year? It varies year to year.

And did you know that in the rules for the Passover, there's not only the Sabbath that occurs ritually every Saturday, every Saturday, every Saturday, but did you know that there's a special Sabbath that follows the Passover as it shifts through the week, shifts through the days of the week? This is true.

Pete? I'm in Mark 15 towards the end. Yeah. It says:

When the evening had come, since it was a day of preparation, the day before the Sabbath. — Mark 15

If it was evening, if it had been Friday, it would already be the Sabbath. This is Thursday. Yeah. So there are a number of clues in the text if we read it carefully and attentively that tells us there's more to the story than meets the eye. We'll unpack these.

Do you know where you would go to find out the rules of the Passover, how it's all laid out? Leviticus is right. Leviticus 23. Alright, Michael, take us to Leviticus 23. When you go to Leviticus 23, here's what you're gonna find. I mean, we don't do this because why would we, right? But if we were good Jews, we would know the rules.

This is odd, okay? — Leviticus 23:3

Look at what he says. There are you with me yet? Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus. Leviticus 23:3:

There are six days when you may work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of rest, a day of sacred assembly. You are not to do any work. Wherever you live, it is a Sabbath to the Lord. — Leviticus 23:3

That's talking about Saturday. That's normal every day. There's endlessly Saturday is the Sabbath. Saturday is the seventh. We call it Saturday; they didn't call it Saturday. They weren't worshiping Saturn like our calendar namers did. You know all calendar days are Monday is the moon, Thursday is Thor, Saturday is Friday. They weren't pagans like we are. So in verse four, it says:

These are the Lord's appointed feasts, the sacred assemblies that you are to proclaim at their appointed times. — Leviticus 23:4

Remember the Sabbath rest is called a day of sacred assembly? Verse five:

The Lord's Passover begins at twilight on the fourteenth day of the first month. — Leviticus 23:5

What day of the week would that be? Whatever. I mean, it's just going to rotate. And on the fifteenth day of that month, the Lord's feast of unleavened bread begins, that is Passover, and for seven days you must eat bread made without yeast. Check out verse seven:

On the first day of that Passover week, hold a sacred assembly and do no regular work. — Leviticus 23:7

That means there's a special Sabbath that follows Passover and has no relationship to Saturday. You with me? For seven days present an offering to the Lord made by fire, and on the seventh day, and then again, another one at the end of it, hold a sacred assembly and do no regular work. So whenever Passover comes, you're going to have the Saturday Sabbath, seven days later the Sabbath, Sabbath, seven days later the Saturday Sabbath. But whenever there's a Passover, wherever that is, there could be like Sabbath on Wednesday, Saturday, Wednesday, Saturday, and then we're back to life being normal. There's these special Sabbaths, these high days that are appending it.

And John explicitly is telling us, and when he says the preparation comment there in John 19:14:

It was the preparation day of the Passover. — John 19:14

He's explicitly saying, I'm not talking about Friday to Saturday, I'm talking about whatever day of the week relative to the Passover. And then he says later on down there in verse 31:

Now it was the day of preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. — John 19:31

So John is telling us explicitly, when we date now it could be on a Friday, this could all be on a Friday if Passover happened to fall in such a time that that's how it is. But John is saying, listen, you're not very good Jews, you don't know how this works, so let me make it a little bit more clear to you. Jesus' death was right before the Passover, and he's not saying anything about which day of the week that Passover occurred. You with me? So far so good?

The Friday Crucifixion Question

Now, historically, traditionally, the church has always observed a Friday crucifixion and a Sunday resurrection. We are absolutely right about this Sunday resurrection provided that you understand it was sometime in the middle of the night prior to Sunday morning. It's fine, no problem, that's great. But the Friday thing, I think we got it wrong. I don't think it matters. It's fine. Your faith is intact. Jesus died on a cross for your sins. He was raised on the third day, but I think that we have made some faulty assumptions about what the text is saying and then traditionalized this Friday crucifixion death. And I don't think he died on a Friday. Not only because you can't fit the three days and three nights in, but because of something else I'll show you in just a second.

Was that Brad? It was. I just want to hear you talk. Keep going.

Well, I don't mind listening to you talk if you want to say something.

I was going to say that if it happened on Tuesday and then he raised on Thursday, you're just saying that he raised on Sunday for sure.

Absolutely raised on Sunday. There's no question that they went to the empty tomb on the first day of the week, is unambiguously Sunday. So am I missing it that he died on Passover and raised on Sunday?

Yeah, that's true. Well, okay, so then we get into this. I used to have this on a website. I want you to check the website for this; the page kind of evaporated or something. We can go back and see what days of the week the Passovers have been. It's all lunar calendar, and somebody figures it out. And you can go back and see that like in AD thirty, it would have been probably a Friday. And in AD thirty-two, it was something else.

So we can go back and see what the range of options were between AD 30 and 33, and I was gonna do that, but I just couldn't find the data and ran out of time. But I think he died on a Wednesday or a Thursday, and depending on how you look at the numbers, three days and three nights—you can't get exactly seventy-two hours. Three days and three nights would be seventy-two hours, right? But it's gonna have to be plus or minus because he goes into the grave at six p.m. and he comes out by six a.m. So we're already gonna be twelve hours off from exactly three twenty-four-hour days, right? Whether that's two and a half days or three and a half days, I'm certain. And I don't think it particularly matters.

In fact, let me even say this: to a certain extent, none of this matters. It's fine. Everything's fine. Don't worry, it's all fine. However, the reason I think it's worth going down this path and saying that it does matter is because the Bible is true. Your traditions might not be, but the Bible is true, and I'm gonna show you we haven't gotten to the worst contradiction yet.

The three day, three night thing is hard to reconcile with a Friday crucifixion. So that causes us to kinda play these games and be like, "Well, you know, da da da da da." And I don't like playing games. This is supposed to be about saying true things. Everything in your whole life—just say true things. The whole world's a better place if we just stop saying false things. But it also gives us confidence that when we're standing with some professor and your kid goes off to freshman lose-your-faith class and they're all about showing you the Bible contradictions, there aren't contradictions. We just might misunderstand some things. And I'm gonna show you another one of those in just a second.

Understanding Biblical Inspiration and Textual Precision

One of the things too—as far as not being a precise seventy-two hours, that's right. So the Bible—I believe what's called verbal plenary inspiration, meaning every word. Verbal plenary—the plenary session at a conference is the one that everybody goes to. Verbal plenary: every single word in the Bible is exactly what God wanted recorded. But it doesn't follow from that, that everything we have recorded is like verbatim dictation of what was said. There's lots of room for rounding numbers. There's lots of room for paraphrase. There's lots of room for those sorts of things.

And so three days and three nights—I think it's hard to get to three days and three nights from a day and a half. I think that's tough, right? But if it's like two and three quarter days, like, no sweat, right? There's no problem with that. And we know that it can't be three twenty-four-hour periods because he's going to go into the grave at six p.m., he's going to be out by six a.m. Can't get three sets of twenty-four hours in there, right? So we work that out.

Textual Variations and Manuscript Authority

I use the Orthodox Study Bible. I think it gives me good context for historical things and all that. And this isn't on all the verses, but back to the one in Mark—it said in the early manuscripts, they didn't even contain these verses, and then when it was canonized, it was added in. Okay. So there is—okay, so the last little bit of Mark is—do I wanna do this right now? There are a handful of passages in the Bible that we're not sure if they were really original and are included. This is absolutely true, but you have no reason to question the veracity, the trustworthiness of your Bible because every time there's a question, there's a footnote that says, "Yeah, this might not be original."

And there's really three biggish ones. Jesus' whole conversation with the woman caught in adultery in John 8—that might not be real. It's not in the oldest and most reliable copies of the Bible. It might be real, but it might not be. And if you go to John 8, look in your footnotes, it'll be like, "Who knew?" It's like, "Hey, the earliest, most reliable manuscripts don't have this verse through this verse." That same phenomena takes place at the end of Mark. It's got the whole weird snake-handling passage. People are like, "What's up with that?" Well, it might not be real. And then the third biggest one is a passage in 1 John that I think is pretty self-evidently a later addition where he makes a very developed Trinitarian statement that I think is untrustworthy.

Then there's about, I don't know, like a hundred times where we're not sure if the text says "Christ Jesus" or "Jesus Christ" because there's different manuscripts that copy it differently. These are places with these very insignificant things. Every one of them is footnoted. If you look in your Bible at the bottom, it'll say, "Some manuscripts say 'Jesus Christ' instead of 'Christ Jesus'"—to which your faith should not be challenged by that.

Have overwhelming confidence, but there are some places, including the end of Mark, where there's a lack of confidence. Now, for the sake of argument, I want to show you another reason that I think we should be very skeptical of a Friday crucifixion.

Follow this with me. Go to Mark 16:1. We're going to look at two passages and try to compare them and see if we can make sense of it.

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus' body. — Mark 16:1

When did they do this? When the Sabbath was over. What did they do when the Sabbath was over? They bought spices. Keep your finger there and go to Luke 23:54.

It was preparation day and the Sabbath was about to begin, and the women who had come with Jesus from Galilee followed Joseph and saw the tomb and how his body was laid in it. Then they went home and prepared spices, but they rested on the Sabbath in obedience to the command. — Luke 23:54-56

So it says they prepared spices in verse 56, and then they rested on the Sabbath. So when did they prepare the spices relative to the Sabbath? Before. They prepared the spices before the Sabbath. When did they buy the spices that they prepared before the Sabbath? After. After the Sabbath.

Is that a problem for anybody? They prepared the spices before the Sabbath, but they bought the spices after the Sabbath. That would be a little bit like somebody saying that George Bush was President of The United States before Bill Clinton and George Bush was President of The United States after Bill Clinton. Does anybody have a problem with that? No. Why not? Because there are two George Bushes. There's George Herbert Walker Bush and George W. Bush. And because you know there are two George Bushes, you don't even blink.

I think if you knew that there were two Sabbaths, you'd just be like, "Yeah, no sweat." But if you don't, then you're going to be in the situation of, "Well, is this one of those classic contradictions where your Bible can't get its act together?" And I think that's probably why this question interests me, because I'm always kind of chafed by people that like to say, "See, the Bible is untrustworthy, it's not reliable, it can't get a story together." I think every time you find something that's like, "How does that work?" just slow down, give it time, do a little work, be Berean, and we're going to find the Scriptures are immensely reliable. God's word is true, it says true things, but there's a lot of stuff that we don't know. There are discontinuities from the culture in which it was written, different expectations, a different knowledge set. But I think if we lean in and do the work, then all these supposed contradictions resolve.

The Best Reconstruction

I think—and I could be wrong about this, I wasn't there—but I think the best reconstruction of the data suggests that Jesus wasn't crucified on a Friday, but he was absolutely crucified. And he did rise from the dead. And I genuinely believe that Sunday morning at six a.m., that tomb was empty. So sometime late that night, early that morning, however you want to characterize it—Mark calls it early in the morning—he was raised from the dead. Three days, three nights in the belly of the earth, just like Jonah was three days and three nights in the fish. It's all reliable, and we don't need to be freaked out by any of this.

Tom, I recently read a commentary by a former Jew about this.

Tom: Oh, really? What did they say? He said that in the year that he did all the math, that Christ most likely was crucified on a Thursday. And that in years when the Passover would fall on a Friday night to Saturday night, they would celebrate two Passovers—the normal and special Passover.

Yes, exactly. Tom was saying—if you couldn't hear him—that he recently read from a formerly Jewish Christian who observed that he thinks Jesus was crucified on a Thursday, that on the Passover they're going to have two Sabbaths. Pretty much everything I just said, from somebody that's not me. I think it's trustworthy. I think that's the best way we understand it.

Now, let me say this: These kinds of things, these little Easter eggs, maybe you're just like, "Blah, blah, blah, who cares?" If so, that's fine. Live your life. Be happy.

But if this kind of stuff is like an Easter egg—a fun hunt to go on and describe—I would just say to you, God's word is rich and it rewards diligent study. When you read John 19 the first hundred times, it's like, "oh, it was a special Sabbath." I didn't even notice it. It's just blah blah blah, special Sabbath, whatever that means. But words mean things. So when you can train yourself to slow it down and be like, "What do you mean it was a special Sabbath? What does that even mean? What was special about it? Why is this?"

Or if you had noticed: wait a minute, he just said up there earlier around verse 14 something about it being the preparation day for the Passover. I always thought the preparation day necessarily meant Friday before the Sabbath. Let me go look at how you find out about the Passover. You go back and you read Leviticus 23 and then you discover something like, "Oh! Oh! Oh!" Wouldn't that be fun? Wouldn't you love to pull on a thread—and if it wasn't somebody explaining things to you but you were just discovering this because you built this habit into your life? Where every day for the rest of your life, you're going to set aside thirty minutes, and you're just going to read this thing, and who knows what you're going to find?

It's like fishing in McGelligott's Pool. You just never know what you might find. I can tell you the vast majority of the things that I know, I was taught by somebody else that did the difficult work. But not all of them. From time to time, I discover something, and I pull on a thread, and those things that I've pulled on and found and realized and recognized—those are all my favorite things because it's just so fun to discover things in the Scriptures. But the only way you're ever going to find them is because you just decide: yeah, every day, half hour, twenty minutes—I don't care, whatever it is—knock yourself out. But every day, I'm just going to layer by layer be curious. I'm going to read this book, I'm going to follow what it says. It's full of treasure, and you can find it if you'll start pulling on those threads and give yourself the time to do it.

When I first got saved, God set me up. I was unemployed and someone gave me a study Bible, the NIV Study Bible. I called it my "burning in" Bible because they found it in the trash and it was in perfect shape. So it was just for me, and it was red, which I love. Being unemployed, I had about four hours every day. I used to do all the cross references, and it would just be like you said. Something would open up and I would discover things and end up telling people stuff that I shouldn't really know because I'm a brand new person.

Yes. God does that. He supports us staying in the Scriptures like that. That's just one tool.

When Catherine says cross reference, you might have a Bible that has like a center column. Depending on what kind of Bible you have, you might have one that says, "Hey, this verse is related to these two or three other verses." The first Bible I had—and I didn't read it for a long, long time—my mom bought it for me and it sat by my bed for years unused. It was an NIV Zondervan Study Bible. And it was intimidating because there's the Bible and it's got all this other stuff. I didn't know what any of that meant. But that center column, the cross-referencing—that has been for me the same thing, Catherine. I love finding the internal connections. We did this last week. When I learned just the other day that Jesus' quote in Matthew 7, when he says:

"Depart from me, I never knew you"

—remember where that's from? Remember what he was quoting? This was a week ago. Psalm 6. Making those kind of discoveries for me is incredible. I didn't know he was pulling that because now the meaning of Psalm 6 informs what's going on in Matthew 7. My brain—I've got all these old school operator wires, you know? You want to have these wires in your mind from this passage to this passage, and this passage to this passage, and this passage to this passage, because it really is speaking with one voice. It's coherent. But it's so fun to discover this stuff.

You raised your hand a while ago and I ignored you. Go ahead.

I think God was rather explicit on how the Passover should be done. Certain things at certain times. And if you take the Passover preparation and lay it out by the timeline that you have to follow, Jesus is crucified on Thursday.

I think that's right. I think that's exactly right.

His inspection, his entry into Jerusalem. Yes. Exactly like the Passover ritual. I really think this is the case. It wasn't Friday. There's just not enough time to fit everything in, and there's nothing in the text that requires Friday. Okay?

However, let me just say this: for the rest of your life, we will observe the crucifixion of Jesus on a Friday, and there's nothing you can do about it. Honestly, that ship has sailed and we're never going to change it. I just don't see that happening. And if we did, they'd think we were a cult and it just wouldn't be worth what it cost.

But on Holy Week, right, as we go through and walk through—if you've never been to a Holy Spirit through-the-whole Holy Week service, it's really beautiful. Obviously it begins with Ash Wednesday, which is not Holy Week. It's like six weeks early. That's coming up on the twenty-second. We're gonna have an Ash Wednesday to begin this season. But Wednesday doesn't really follow in that week. Then in six weeks, it's gonna be Maundy Thursday, then a Good Friday, and then we have Easter Sunday.

If you get to go to all three of these services and the day's off, just flex it—it's cool, everything's fine. But on Maundy Thursday, we observe his last night: the Last Supper, the foot washing. Then you come in on Friday and it is a somber, dark day of death. And then you come in on Sunday morning, and it is a riot of color and joy and transformation. It's really fun to experience the brightness and the color and the beauty of Sunday morning after the dearth of the Good Friday service, of the crucifixion service.

So I'd really encourage you guys to come. Even if we're skew today, come on Thursday, come on Friday, come on Sunday as we worship God. He really did die on a cross in time and space—it happened. And he really did rise from the dead three days later, and you can bank your life on it.

That's all for now. We'll do it again next week. Thanks for coming.