----- Christ said that "Just as Jonah was three days
and three nights in the whale's belly, the Son of Man
will be three days and three nights in the heart
of the earth" Matthew 12:40).
-----Christ was crucified on Good Friday and He rose on Sunday. How
many nights are between those two points? Just two nights: Friday
night and Saturday night. So He spent
only two nights in the tomb. But Christ specifically said
"three nights in the heart of the earth."
How are we to account for this discrepancy? This amounts
to a bit of a riddle, wouldn't you say? Well here's what I
can offer as the way out: First of all He didn't say
"three nights in the tomb" so there's no
need to look for a third night therein. Christ specified
"the heart of the earth". He did this
deliberately .So we are free to look for a place other
than the tomb that fits the words," heart of the
earth."
-----The heart of a thing needn't mean its center so much
as its depths. So "the heart of the earth" can
refer to the depths of the earth. And "the earth"
here needn't be taken as referring the planet Earth so
much as to simply the ground. So "heart of the earth"
can apply to any place below the surface of the ground.
-----Where was Christ kept after His arrest on Thursday
night in the garden of Gethsemane?? We read that He was
taken to the house of the high priest (Luke 22:54). More specifically, He
was kept in the dungeon in the basement
of that house. The high priest served as a judge over the Sanhedrin. As
judge he heard cases and held court. Naturally defendants awaiting trial would need to be held somewhere.
Hence the logic of having jail cells in the basement of
the high priest's house.
-----Anyway, that's my little contribution - the
interpreting of the dungeon that Christ suffered in as
"the heart of the earth." So Thursday night
would be the first of the "three nights."
Thursday night plus the two nights in the tomb would be
the "three nights in the heart of the earth"!
-----To those who would claim that Christ's dungeon
doesn't deserve to be called "the heart of the earth"
because it wasn't deep enough, let me give this defense. It was far deeper than the tomb
was. The tomb was carved out
of a hillside. It was below the surface of the ground only
in the barest sense. So if the deep dark dungeon that
Christ was kept in on Thursday night doesn't qualify as
"the heart of the earth", neither does the tomb.
-----The identity of the "three nights" may
seem trivial. But because it touches on two things that
are at the core of Christianity - the Cross and the
Resurrection - this question takes on borrowed importance
- like the moon has no light of its own but shines with
borrowed light.
-----I was part of a Holy Lands tour group in March l973.We
visited that sacred jail cell, which is why today I can
assert that Christ was kept in a dungeon on Thursday night. That
site is well-authenticated. The Israeli
lecturer there stated that St Jerome is known to have
done some of his translation work right in that cell. He went there to gain inspiration ..(He gave us the Vulgate
Bible in the early 400s,the Latin translation of the
Hebrew and Greek Bible.)
-----Speaking of the Early Church Fathers, they are unanimous
in writing that the crucifixion occurred on a Friday. Not one of them wrote anything about a Thursday or Wednesday
date. But today idiot preachers dare to throw out Good
Friday as the date of the crucifixion - on the basis of
Mt 12:40.This totally insults the Early Fathers. Those
early Christians, many of whom died a martyr's death very
much like that of our Lord, deserve better treatment from
preachers!!
For their sake I stand up for the traditional date
- Good Friday. I hope you will too.
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