Strengthen your faith in God's word

Jesus said, “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” (Matthew 12:40). He was laid in the tomb on “the preparation, that is, the day before the sabbath” (Mark 15:42), and the women found the tomb empty early on the first day of the week. If the sabbath was Saturday and the crucifixion Friday, that is part of Friday, all of Saturday, and part of Sunday: two nights, and hardly two days.

The Bible never says Christ was crucified on Friday. It says He was crucified on “the preparation,” the day before “the sabbath,” and John says which sabbath: “it was the preparation of the passover” (John 19:14), and “that sabbath day was an high day” (John 19:31). The first day of the feast of unleavened bread, the fifteenth of the month, was a sabbath whatever day of the week it fell on: “In the first day ye shall have an holy convocation: ye shall do no servile work therein” (Leviticus 23:5–7). That year it fell on Thursday. Christ died on Wednesday afternoon, the fourteenth, as the passover lambs were slain, and was buried before sunset, when the high day began.

Three days and three nights later, at the end of the weekly sabbath on Saturday at sunset, He rose. “In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week” the women came (Matthew 28:1), and found Him already gone: “He is not here: for he is risen” (28:6). Mary came “when it was yet dark” and the stone was already taken away (John 20:1). “When Jesus was risen early the first day of the week” (Mark 16:9) says what He was by the first morning: risen.

The women’s week shows the two sabbaths. Mark says that “when the sabbath was past,” they “had bought sweet spices” (Mark 16:1); Luke, that they “returned, and prepared spices and ointments; and rested the sabbath day according to the commandment” (Luke 23:56). They could not buy spices before the high day and prepare them after the weekly sabbath, so they bought them after the high day (Friday), prepared them, and rested on the weekly sabbath (Saturday).

So His words are fulfilled to the letter: “three days and three nights” (Matthew 12:40), “after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31; Matthew 27:63), and “the third day” (Matthew 16:21), since He rose as the third day ended. The two on the road to Emmaus said “to day is the third day since these things were done” (Luke 24:21); Torrey answers that the things were finished as Thursday began, and Sunday was the third day since Thursday. And John 12:1, “six days before the passover,” puts the arrival at Bethany on Friday, not on a sabbath.

The usual answer, that a part of a day was counted as a whole day and night (Gill, Haley), accounts for “the third day” but not for three nights; Torrey calls it “a makeshift, and a very weak makeshift.”