For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the wale; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. Matthew 12:40 (RV).
Many an unbeliever ridicule the account of Jonah and the whale, as they do Noah and his ark, and no doubt there are many who would claim to be Christian that don't literally believe the accounts of Noah and Jonah. They have a problem - for the Lord Jesus obviously believed and taught that these accounts were literal truth (Matthew 24:37-39, Jonah 12:39-41), likewise they mock the account of Daniel and the lions den, again the Lord verifies the book of Daniel (Matthew 24:15).
It is said that Jonah was "cast into the depth, in the heart of the seas" Jonah 2:3, and so the "depth" is very deep, not a shallow grave. Likewise the Saviour went down, very deep, but into "the heart of the earth." After the burial of His body in the tomb, the Lord's soul descended down into Hades, into the subterranean places. Referring to the text in Ephesians - "now in that He ascended, what is it that He also descended first into the lower parts of the earth?" Eph.4:9. I have myself, visited the garden tomb, if indeed that was His burial place, for I noted that it is level with the earth as borne out by the Scripture in Luke 24:2; is it not then a stretch to believe all that is meant by "the heart of the earth" is a ground level burial chamber? Dr Gill thinks so, for he reasoned that because His tomb was "dug out of a rock" this then answers to "the heart of the earth".
B.W. Newton writes (Remarks on Mosaic Cosmogony and Genesis 2 verse 5 (1882)) from the sub-heading; Note on the locality of Hades.
"In the New Testament, Phil.2:10, we find a remarkable expression strongly corroborative of all that has been said, "that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth". This is a very important passage. It evidently speaks not of things inanimate or unintelligent, but of beings capable of bowing the knee intelligently; and it expressly teaches not only that all intelligent beings on the earth, but that all intelligent beings in subterranean places, shall finally be made to bow; the latter indeed, not bowing the knee of allegiance, or of worship, but of forced unwilling acknowledgment.
I scarcely see how we could refuse to admit on the evidence of this passage alone , that the interior parts of the earth are at present the prison of certain souls - souls of the lost. Bishop Ellicott commenting on this passage says, "The three classes here mentioned are not to be understood with any ethical reference ...... but simply and plainly, angels and archangels in Heaven - men upon earth - and the departed under the earth."
He continues...
"Another strong evidence of the connexion of Hades with the earth is this, that when the Adamic earth is destroyed at the close of the millennium, when the new heavens and earth are created, then Hades is destroyed likewise. It is cast into the lake of fire. See Rev. xx.
As then the grave is regarded in Scripture as the prison-house of the body, so Hades is regarded as the prison - house of the dis-embodied soul; evidencing, consequently, the power of death. In order, therefore, to prove the completeness of His submission to the real power of death, and in fulfillment of His own words respecting being three days and three nights in the heart of the earth, the soul of our blessed Lord was in Hades during the time that His body was in the grave. The text from the Psalms quoted by Peter in the Acts, "Thou wilt not leave my soul in Hades, Unquestionably proves this. The same truth is likewise taught in His words just quoted respecting His being "in the heart of the earth," - for, "heart of the earth" is not an expression that the Lord would apply only to the sepulchre in which His body was laid. If He had intended to refer only to the grave, He would no doubt have made especial reference to His body, saying, "the body of the Son of Man shall be three days in the earth;" whereas, His words are not so limited. "As Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matt.12:40) - words which cannot be understood so as to exclude reference to His soul, with which consciousness and feeling remained.
Whilst then the Scripture plainly declares that the soul of our Lord was in Hades during the time that His body was in the grave, it is equally evident that that part of Hades was not a place of torment, or of suffering. On the contrary, though it was a place of confinement bearing witness to the power of death, even as the grave is a place of confinement bearing witness to the power of death, yet to the soul of Jesus it was a place of rest, and peace, and communion with God. All the penal suffering that had to be borne for us by our great Substitute terminated at the cross when He bowed His head and said "It is finished." Then the cup of suffering that He had to drink for His people was drained to the dregs; and all after it was peace, rest and triumph. He soon proved that the gates of Hades had no strength to resist the mighty power of Him, whose soul, for a season, was enclosed within its bars.
Nor is the fact of the soul of our blessed Lord having been three days in Hades the only reason that we have for affirming that there was one part of Hades separated off from the rest, and allotted to the righteous.
In the parable of our Lord concerning the rich man and Lazarus, it is very evident that Abraham and Lazarus were in a state of blessedness, for it is expressly said that Lazarus was "comforted;" but Abraham and Lazarus are not spoken of as being in Heaven. On the contrary, they are spoken of as being separated by a vast and impassable chasm from the place in which the rich man was; and he is expressly said to have been in Hades in torment. Would the Lord have spoken this parable if there had not been (I do not say now is) in Hades a place of blessedness as well as a place of torment? That the expectation of the Old Testament saints was to go to Hades (Sh'ohl) is manifest from the words of Jacob when he mourned for the supposed death of Joseph. "All his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted; and said, For I will go down to Sh'ohl unto my son mourning." (Gen.xxxvii. 35) And again, "then shall ye bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to Sh'ohl." (Gen. xlii. 38). Yet in expecting to go into Hades they must have regarded it as a place (not to them of sorrow and torment) but of rest and blessedness: otherwise they could not have died, as they did, in peace. They regarded it too, as a temporary state in which their souls were to wait only for a season, for "they looked for a city that hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God." I do not see, therefore, how we can avoid accepting the conclusion, that there was in Hades a division prepared for the souls of the blessed, and another division called "the lowest Hades" (Deut. xxxii. 22) assigned to the souls of the lost; and that the souls of those who died in the faith of a promised Saviour did, until the resurrection and ascension of that Saviour, remain in that division of Hades that was allotted to the souls of the blessed, being there sustained and comforted by the power of God, and proving the words of the Psalmist, "if I make my bed in Sh'ohl, behold thou [Jehovah] art there." (Ps.cxxxix. 8.)
Since, however, the ascension of our Lord into His glory, it is very evident that the souls of all believers at death depart to be with Him in Paradise: and that Paradise is not Hades (as some of the Fathers thought) is evident from this, that St. Paul speaks of Paradise as the third heavens. Compare second and fourth verses of 2 Cor. xii. Nor did St.Paul speak of Hades, when he said, "to depart and be with Christ is far better;" nor when He spoke of absence from the body being presence with the Lord. (2 Cor. v.8.) These texts put it beyond a question that the souls of believers do not now go to Hades, but are with their Lord in heaven, awaiting the resurrection hour.
Nor can there be any doubt that the souls of of the saints of the Old Testament are also in heaven. The Apostle in speaking of the one family of faith, speaks of it as divided into two parts only; namely, those still militant on earth, and those who are in the Heavens. "For this cause I bow my knees to unto the Father our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and on earth is named." Eph.3.14. He would not thus have written if that family had still been in Hades.
Nor is there any reason to doubt that when the Apostle, speaking of the ascension of the Lord, says, "When He ascended up on high, He led captivity captive," he did by these words refer to the Lord taking with Him into Heaven, as an evidence of His triumph over Hades, the souls of all His saints who had till that time been there detained; thus proving that He had the keys of Hades. Soon He will equally prove by raising their bodies from the grave, that He has the keys of death likewise-death being more especially connected with the grave, seeing that there its power is peculiarly shown in the dissolution and corruption of the body."
There are those who take the "three days and three nights" in the verse under discussion to mean a literal 72 hours, and certainly this would seem to be exactly what the Lord means from our present perspective, but is it necessarily so? Would we not be guilty of imposing our 21st century mindset, as it were, back on to the the Lord's meaning? The 24 hour clock as we now know it, was not used by the ancients back in the apostolic era; left to the Scripture alone, we could know absolutely nothing of a 24 hour day. The Bible only speaks of 12 hours in a day; there are some 365 days (plus an extra day for a 'leap year') in the solar (heliocentric) calendar, yet only 360 days in the biblical geocentric calendar. Both cannot be correct-do we believe what God says, or the invention of man? If we are to use the modern day clock as the basis of calculating the exact time that the Lord spent in Hades and the grave, assuming three full nights and full days as we know them to be; the resultant figure (72 hours) cannot therefore be correct-it is impossible.
John 11:9 unequivocally declares that there are only "twelve hours in a day"; are we to assume that within the day is the night also? In our present day, when we talk of the day, do we not also mean the night as well? For example, if I were to say to you, "I will see you in three days time" (God willing!) would you not assume that I meant the nights were also included within those days? I think you would! (you would not think that I meant a literal 72 hours, or would you?) It is interesting that a few verses prior to John 11:9, it is said that "He abode at that time two days in the place where He was." John 11:6 (RV). Is it not then incredulous therefore to suggest that nights were not included in those "two days"? The plain reading of the context fully supports this. It would seem to me, at any rate, that hours back in the NT era must have been approximately twice as long as they are computed today, but was the eleventh hour one hour (or more) before mid-day or mid-night, or both? Obviously the answer is neither, for the "eleventh hour" (Matt. 20:6-9) would have been within the last hour or so, of daylight before the sun went down.This then, is a variable point in any given day throughout the year-advancing toward the summer, and declining toward the winter months. If then, time wasn't regulated back in the apostolic age exactly as it is in our day, then is it not obvious that we cannot impose onto it our modern day manufactured (man-made) time constraints? In the apostolic age, the new day was reckoned from the time the sun went down, not from 12 o'clock mid-night; often many hours beforehand! To this very day observant and orthodox Jews observe the onset of the Saturday Seventh Day Sabbath in as they did in OT and NT times.
It is of considerable note that it was "upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread" Acts 20:7. Why didn't these Jewish believers do this on the Jewish Sabbath, instead of on our Sunday - the Lord's day; that is, why didn't they "break bread" on the Seventh day - as many so-called Messianic believers do in our day? They well knew its venerated significance. It is because God in Christ didn't rise on the Seventh day, He rose on "the first day of the week" Mark 16:9, as the Scripture of Truth testifies. The Old Testament, or Jewish Sabbath was never changed; unbelieving Jews regard this day to the present hour; but what of the first day when He was resurrected, do they believe on this - the Christian Sabbath (the Lord's day)? In the Lord's own words "The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath." Mark 2:27, and this from the Man whom the Pharisees accused of desecrating the seventh day that He had made! (Matt. 12:2, 10, Luke 13:14 etc.)
The ancient, (and present day) observant Jews reckoned a part of one day (no matter how small, or large the part thereof) as a whole day.
On Matt. 12:40, Jamieson Fausset & Brown write; "The period during which He was to lie in the grave is here expressed in round numbers, according to the Jewish way of speaking, which was to regard any part of a day, however small, included within a period of days, as a full day. (See 1 Sam. 30:12, 13; Esther 4:16; 5:1; ch. 27:63, 64, etc.).
Dr. Gill writes regarding the time the Lord was entombed;
"It was on the sixth day of the week, we commonly call "Friday", towards the close, on the day of the preparation of the sabbath, and when the sabbath drew on, that the body of Christ was laid in the sepulchre; where it lay all the next day, which was the sabbath of the Jews, and what we commonly call "Saturday"; and early on the first day of the week, usually called "Sunday", or the Lord's day, He rose from the dead; so that He was but one whole day, and part of two, in the grave. To solve this difficulty, and set the matter in a clear light, let it be observed, that the three days and three nights, mean three natural days, consisting of day and night, or 24 hours, and are what the Greeks call "night days"; but the Jews have no other ways of expressing them, but as here; and with them it is a well known rule, and used on all occasions, as in the computations of their feasts and times of mourning, in the observance of the Passover, circumcision, and diverse purification's that "a part of a day is as the whole" and so, whatever was done before sun setting, or after, it was reckoned as the whole preceding, or following day; and whether this was in the night part, or day part of the night day, or natural day, it mattered not, it was accounted as the whole night day: by this rule, the case here is easily adjusted; Christ was laid in the grave towards the close of the sixth day, a little before sun setting, and this being a part of the night day preceding, is reckoned as the whole; He continued there the whole night day following, being the seventh day; and rose again early on the first day, which being after sun setting, though it might be even before sun rising, yet being a part of the night day following, is to be esteemed as the whole; and thus the Son of man was to be, and was three days and three nights in the grave; and which was very easy to be understood by the Jews; and it is a question whether Jonas was longer in the belly of the fish."
(Regarding 24 hours-Dr Gill was influenced heavily by the false RCC inspired heliocentric theory).
Matthew Poole, another reformed Bible expositor, is in full agreement with the above; regarding a part of the day being reckoned as a whole, also adding that "It appears by Gen. 1:5, that the evening and morning made up a day."
On the verse in question, it should be obvious that to insist upon a literal 24 hour night and day (not that the Bible knows of a 24 hour day), or for that matter, to insist upon three complete full days, would create insurmountable problems, denying plainly what is written in Mark 16:9, and the strong inference that the Lord rose early on the first day of the week as stated in Luke 24:1-3, John 20:1. Scripture doesn't reveal; but it may have been only a matter of minutes, or less than an hour or so between the Lord rising from the tomb and when the women "found not the body of the Lord Jesus."
As the apostle Paul said; "He rose the third day according to the Scriptures." 1 Cor. 15:4 (my emphasis).
No comments:
Post a Comment