This Is What Holy Saturday Was Like In Bible Times 2,000 Years Ago

This Is What Holy Saturday Was Like In Bible Times 2,000 Years Ago

18 hours, six [music] illegal trials, a man declared innocent four times by the very judge who sentenced [music] him to death.

And in between, the most brutal torture the Roman Empire had designed [music] in 500 years of practice.

That was Good Friday.

Not the summarized version they tell you in church, the real [music] version, hour by hour, minute by minute.

From midnight to 3:00 in the afternoon on April 3rd in 33 AD, and I’m going to tell you five things you probably never heard about that day.

One, Jesus’ trial violated 18 documented Jewish [music] and Roman laws.

Two, there’s a pagan historian from the 2nd century who [music] recorded the darkness of that noon.

Three, the most famous cry from the cross hides a vocabulary change that reveals something devastating.

Four, a Roman soldier stabbed him with a spear, and what came out of his body wouldn’t have a medical explanation until centuries later.

And five, there’s a Greek word Jesus said before dying that doesn’t mean what you were taught.

[music] All of it is documented, all of it is verifiable.

And today, you’re going to see it like no one ever told you.

Let’s start at midnight in a garden.

Jerusalem [clears throat] is bursting [music] with people.

It’s the week of Passover.

Between 200,000 and 300,000 pilgrims are crammed into a city built for 40,000.

The streets smell of roasted lamb, incense, and sweat.

And in the middle of that chaos, a man crosses the Kidron Valley toward a garden called Gethsemane with his disciples.

[music] His name is Jesus of Nazareth, and he knows exactly what awaits him in the coming hours.

Luke, who was a physician, records something [music] that modern science has confirmed as a real phenomenon.

He says that Jesus’ sweat was like [music] great drops of blood falling down to the ground.

Luke 22:44.

That has a clinical [music] name, hematidrosis.

It happens when anguish is so extreme that the capillaries surrounding the sweat glands rupture.

[music] It’s not a metaphor, it’s physiology, and it only happens when the body is on the verge of total collapse.

No one has touched him yet.

No one has struck him, but his body is already responding as if he were dying.

Because he knows what’s coming, every [music] blow, every nail, every second of the next 18 hours.

And yet he prays, [music] “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.

Nevertheless, not my will, but yours [music] be done.

” Luke 22:42.

That cup, remember that word.

Because when we [music] get to 3:00 in the afternoon and Jesus screams something in Aramaic that no one expected, [music] you’re going to understand what was inside that cup.

And it’s going to wreck [music] you.

And now, among the olive trees, torches appear.

John says, “A detachment of troops and officers from the chief priests and Pharisees came.

” John 18:3.

The Greek word is speira.

That’s a Roman cohort, between 300 and 600 armed soldiers to arrest a single unarmed man.

That tells you everything about the level of fear they had.

Judas approaches, he kisses [music] him.

That was the signal.

Mark 14:44.

“Whomever I kiss, he is the one.

Seize him.

” A kiss, the most intimate gesture in Jewish culture turned into a weapon.

And Jesus says something that cuts like a silent dagger, “Friend, why have you come?” Matthew 26:50.

He calls him friend after the betrayal.

They arrest him.

The disciples flee, all of them.

Mark 14:50 says it plainly, [music] “Then they all forsook him and fled.

” Men who 3 hours earlier had sworn to give their lives for him disappeared into the darkness as if they’d never known him.

But one didn’t leave entirely.

Peter followed from a distance.

He slipped into the courtyard of the high priest’s house and sat by the fire with the guards.

A servant girl saw him and said, “You also were with Jesus of Nazareth.

” Mark 14:67.

Peter denied it.

Another person recognized him.

He denied again.

A third time they pressed him, “Surely you are one of them, for you are a Galilean.

” Mark 14:70.

And Peter began to curse and swear, “I do not know this man of whom you speak.

” Mark 14:71.

At that very moment, the rooster crowed, and Luke 22:61 records a detail that destroys you.

“And the Lord turned and looked at Peter.

” Jesus was being dragged through the courtyard at that moment, hands bound, face beaten, and he stopped.

And he looked [music] at him.

Not with hatred, not with reproach.

He looked at him, and Peter [music] went out and wept bitterly.

Luke 22:62.

That look.

If you understand it, you understand all of Good Friday.

Because this is the same man who in a few hours, nailed to a cross, will say, “Father, forgive them.

” If he forgave Peter with a look, what wouldn’t he do [music] for you? And what happens in the next 5 hours is so illegal that a modern lawyer could have the entire case thrown out.

But there was no appeal.

What there was was a political machine determined to kill a man before dawn, and this is just the beginning.

1:00 in the morning.

They drag him before Annas.

Annas is no longer the high priest, [music] but he’s still running everything from the shadows.

He has five sons and a son-in-law, [music] Caiaphas, who hold the key positions on the Sanhedrin.

And he has a personal reason to destroy Jesus.

Remember when Jesus overturned the money changers’ tables in the temple? Those money changers operated with Annas’ permission.

[music] Jesus cost him money, and Annas doesn’t forget.

John 18:19 says Annas questioned Jesus about his disciples and his doctrine.

Sounds reasonable, but it was illegal.

The Hebrew criminal code prohibited making the accused testify against himself, and Jesus knew it.

That’s why he responded, “I spoke openly to the [music] world.

Why do you ask me?” John 18:20.

An officer slapped him across the face.

“Do you answer the high priest like that?” And Jesus, with his cheek burning, replied, “If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil, but if well, why do you strike me?” John 18:23.

Pay attention to what just happened.

A man struck unjustly maintains perfect [music] legal composure while his judges violate every rule of their own system.

That’s not weakness, that’s absolute mastery of the situation.

From Annas, they take him to Caiaphas, and here a quorum of the Sanhedrin assembles.

Not the full 71 members, only 23.

[music] Almost all relatives of Annas.

The law prohibits enemies of the accused from serving as judges.

That law was ignored.

They look for witnesses.

Mark 14:56.

“For many bore false [music] witness against him.

” But their testimonies did not agree.

Mosaic law requires at least two agreeing [music] witnesses for a capital case.

Deuteronomy 17:6.

They can’t find them, not even the liars can get their story straight.

[music] And then Caiaphas plays his final card.

He asks directly, “Are you the Christ, the son of the blessed?” Mark [music] 14:61.

And Jesus answers, “I am, and you will see the son of man sitting at the right hand of the power and [music] coming with the clouds of heaven.

” Mark 14:62.

Caiaphas tears his robes.

Blasphemy.

And they vote, “Guilty.

>> [music] >> He deserves to die.

” And then something begins that the gospels describe with a coldness that’s terrifying.

Mark 14:65.

“Then some began to spit on him >> [music] >> and to blindfold him and to beat him and to say to him, ‘Prophesy.

‘” They covered his eyes, hit him, and asked [music] him to guess who struck him.

It was a game.

The guards of the Sanhedrin, supposed representatives of divine justice, turned the accused into a toy.

Luke 22:63-65 adds that they said many other things blaspheming him.

Many other things.

Luke gives no details, and the fact that a physician who normally documents everything chose not to specify tells you how degrading it was.

Meanwhile, Judas, Matthew 27:3-5 says that when he saw Jesus was condemned, he brought back the 30 pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders saying, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.

” And you know what they told him? “What is that to us? You see to it.

” The same men who paid him to betray Jesus discarded him like trash when they no longer needed him.

And Judas went out and hanged himself.

The 30 coins lay scattered on the temple floor.

No one wanted to touch them.

Matthew 27:7 says they used them to buy a field to bury foreigners.

Even the currency of betrayal ended up serving the dead.

But there’s a problem.

The Sanhedrin can’t execute anyone.

Rome took that right away decades earlier.

John 18:31, “It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death.

” So, they need Pilate.

And to convince a Roman governor, blasphemy [music] won’t work.

They need political charges, sedition, treason against Caesar.

And that’s where sacred history [music] gets tangled with politics in a way the church almost never explains.

>> [music] >> If this is blowing your mind, hit that like button because we haven’t even reached 6:00 in the morning yet.

The strongest part is coming now.

6:00 in the morning.

They take him before Pontius Pilate.

And to understand what happens in the next 2 hours, you need to know something about Pilate that changes everything.

Pilate was not a secure governor.

He’d already gotten into serious trouble with the Jewish leaders at least twice.

Once for bringing standards bearing Caesar’s image into Jerusalem.

Another for taking money from the temple treasury for an aqueduct.

Both times there were massive protests, formal complaints to Rome, and Pilate was left politically wounded.

[music] The priests knew Pilate couldn’t afford another scandal, and they were going to exploit it.

The charges now are completely different.

Luke 23:2, “We found this fellow perverting the nation and forbidding to pay taxes to Caesar, saying that he himself is Christ, [music] a king.

” Three political charges surgically designed so Pilate can’t say no.

Pilate interrogates Jesus.

“Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus answers, >> [music] >> “It is as you say.

” Mark 15:2, Pilate goes outside and says publicly, “I find no fault in this man.

” John 18:38, innocent.

But the priests insist.

Pilate finds out Jesus is Galilean and sends him to Herod Antipas.

Luke 23:8 says Herod was exceedingly glad because he wanted to see a miracle.

Jesus didn’t speak a single word to him, not one.

And Herod, humiliated, dressed him in a royal robe as mockery and sent him back to Pilate.

And here comes a detail that’s a political bombshell.

Luke 23:12, “That very day Pilate and Herod became friends with each other, for previously they had been at enmity with each other.

” The condemnation of an innocent man reconciled them.

Jesus’ blood served as political glue between two men who hated each other.

Pilate tries one last thing.

He offers to release a prisoner for Passover.

He gives them a choice, Jesus or Barabbas.

[music] Barabbas was a murderer and revolutionary.

Mark 15:7, a man with real blood on his hands.

>> [music] >> And the crowd, stirred up by the priests, Mark 15:11, shouts, “Barabbas!” Pilate asks, “What then do you want me to do with Jesus?” And the answer thunders across all of Jerusalem, “Crucify him!” And in the middle of all this, >> [music] >> Matthew 27:19 records a chilling detail.

Pilate’s wife sends him an urgent message, “Have nothing [music] to do with that just man, for I have suffered many things today in a dream because of him.

” While the crowd screams, “Crucify him!” Pilate’s wife is having nightmares that drive her to warn him.

And Pilate ignores both things.

His own legal conviction that Jesus is innocent and the supernatural warning from his own wife.

Matthew 27:24 says Pilate took water and washed his hands before the multitude saying, “I am innocent of the blood of this just person.

You see to it.

” He washed his [music] hands, literally, as if water could cleanse cowardice.

He declared a man innocent, handed him over to be tortured and executed, and [music] thought that wetting his fingers absolved him.

And then someone in the crowd throws the phrase that sealed the sentence, “If you let this man go, you are not Caesar’s friend.

” John 19:12, “Friend of Caesar” was an honorary Roman title.

Losing that title meant ruin.

[music] And Pilate, the man who declared Jesus innocent four times, handed him over to be destroyed because his career mattered more to him than the truth.

If you know someone who’s never heard this complete story, share this video with them.

>> [music] >> They need to see this.

And now comes what Isaiah prophesied 700 years earlier.

“His visage was marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men.

” Isaiah 52:14.

[music] The Roman scourging.

You need to erase from your mind any movie image.

What the Romans did doesn’t look like anything Hollywood has ever shown.

The instrument was called a flagrum.

We know exactly what it looked like because one was unearthed from the ruins of Herculaneum, the city buried by Vesuvius in 79 AD.

It was a short wooden handle with three or more heavy leather straps.

And at the end of each strap were lead balls and sharpened bone fragments.

Two soldiers positioned themselves on either side of the prisoner, who was tied naked to a post.

What follows is not [music] dramatization.

It’s a medical description published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1986.

The first blows cut the skin.

As they continued, the straps reached the muscle, producing what the physicians described as quivering ribbons [music] of bleeding flesh.

Eusebius of Caesarea, a 4th century [music] historian, wrote that eyewitnesses were horrified to see the condemned lacerated to the very veins and arteries, so that the inner parts of the body, both their entrails and their organs, were exposed to view.

Ecclesiastical History, Book 4, Chapter 15.

The Jews limited lashes to 39.

The Romans had no limit.

They flogged until the officer in charge decided the prisoner was close enough to death.

And after the scourging, an entire battalion of soldiers, between 200 and 600 men, according to Matthew 27:27, [music] took turns humiliating him.

They put a purple robe on him, a crown of thorns on his head, a reed in his hand as a mock scepter.

>> [music] >> They struck him on the head with the reed, driving the thorns deeper.

They spat on him.

They knelt in mockery.

“Hail, king of the Jews!” Mark 15:18.

When they finished, they ripped off the robe, and every blood clot that had stuck to the fabric was torn off with it.

And they placed on his shattered shoulders the patibulum, the horizontal [music] beam of the cross, between 70 and 90 lb of raw timber.

John 19:17 says Jesus went out carrying his [music] cross.

But he couldn’t complete the journey.

600 m of cobblestone street uphill after a sleepless night, beatings in two courts, and a scourging that left him on the edge of death.

His body collapsed.

Imagine the scene.

Narrow streets, thousands of Passover pilgrims packed against the walls, Roman soldiers shoving people aside to clear a path.

And in the center, a man who no longer looks human.

Isaiah prophesied it.

“His visage was marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men.

” Isaiah 52:14.

His back is an open mass of flesh and blood.

His face is swollen from the beatings.

He has thorns driven into his scalp.

And on his destroyed shoulders, a 90-lb wooden beam crushing him down.

He falls.

His knees hit the stones.

The beam rolls.

The soldiers yank him up.

He takes a few more steps, >> [music] >> falls again, and the centurion, who needs to complete the execution before noon, makes a >> [music] >> practical decision.

He grabs a man from the crowd.

Mark 15:21 says they compelled Simon of Cyrene to carry the cross.

And Mark [music] names Simon’s sons, Alexander and Rufus.

Why name them? Because when Mark wrote his gospel, the Christian community knew them.

Paul greets a Rufus in Romans 16:13.

A man who was forced to carry a cross that Friday ended up founding a family of faith.

No one knows at what point Simon stopped carrying the cross out of obligation and started carrying it out of conviction, but something happened in those 600 m.

Luke 23:27 adds something no one else records.

“A great multitude of the people followed him, and women who also mourned and lamented him.

” And Jesus, dragging himself toward his own execution, stopped.

He turned [music] around, and he spoke to them, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.

” >> [music] >> Luke 23:28, about to die and still thinking about others, still warning, still loving.

But what you just heard is only the preparation.

The crucifixion hasn’t started yet.

>> [music] >> And what comes next is worse than everything before it combined.

Golgotha, a rocky mound outside the walls beside a busy road because Rome crucified in public so everyone would see and be afraid.

It’s 9:00 in the morning, the third hour, Mark 15:25.

They strip him.

They lay him on the beam, and they drive in the nails.

Not through the palms.

That’s an artistic error that lasted centuries.

>> [music] >> The Greek word cheir includes the wrist, and archaeology confirms it.

>> [music] >> In 1968, northeast of Jerusalem, they found the body of a first-century crucified man named Yehohanan ben Hakol.

The nails went through the carpal zone between the radius and the carpal [music] bones.

If they went through the palm, the body’s weight would tear through the flesh, and the hand would pull free.

Rome knew exactly what it was doing.

The nail in the wrist crushes the median nerve.

Physicians who have studied crucifixion say it produces [music] a continuous discharge of pain that radiates through the entire arm.

A pain so specific that 19th-century doctors had to invent a new word to describe [music] it, causalgia.

Then they lift the beam and fit it onto the vertical post.

They nail the feet, one on top of the other, knees slightly bent.

[music] And here’s Rome’s diabolical engineering.

To exhale, Jesus [music] has to push himself upward against the nails in his feet, scraping his shredded back against the rough wood.

To inhale, he has to let himself drop, hanging from the nails in his wrists.

Every breath is a designed cycle of agony.

Rome turned the survival instinct itself into an instrument of torture.

And in the midst of that pain, [music] Jesus’ first words on the cross are not of complaint, not of hatred.

They are, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.

” Luke [music] 23:34.

There are soldiers below casting lots for his clothes.

John 19:23-24 gives a detail that seems minor, but isn’t.

Jesus’ tunic was without seam, woven from the top in one piece.

The soldiers decided not to tear it, but to cast lots for it, an exact fulfillment of Psalm 22:18, written a thousand years earlier.

“They divided my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.

” Roman soldiers who had no idea that Psalm existed fulfilled a millennial prophecy out of pure greed.

[music] Priests are mocking him.

“He saved others.

Himself he cannot save.

” Matthew 27:42.

And without knowing it, they’re stating the deepest truth of the gospel.

>> [music] >> They were right.

If he saved himself, he couldn’t save us.

The irony is so perfect that only God could have written it.

Over the cross, Pilate ordered a sign, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.

” John 19:19.

In three languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.

The priests protested, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but” he said, “I am the King of the Jews.

” John 19:21.

[music] And Pilate, the same man who gave to the crowd’s pressure to condemn him, now stands firm and says, “What I have written, I have written.

” John 19:22.

It’s the only moment all day when Pilate doesn’t negotiate.

And it turns out what he wrote was exactly the truth.

Beside him are two crucified men.

One insults [music] him, “If you are the Christ, save yourself and us.

” Luke 23:39.

>> [music] >> But the other rebukes him and then looks at Jesus, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

” Luke 23:42.

[music] This man is dying.

He has no future.

He has nothing to offer.

And Jesus tells [music] him, “Assuredly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.

” Luke 23:43.

Today, not tomorrow, not after meeting requirements.

Today.

Then he looks down and sees his mother.

“Woman, behold your son.

” And to the disciple John, “Behold your mother.

” John 19:26-27.

In the middle of his own death, he arranges her care because a widow without a son in the first century was [music] left completely unprotected.

Jesus dying and thinking about the details of his mom’s life, >> [music] >> that’s real love.

And then noon arrives, and something happens that has no natural explanation.

“Now from the sixth hour, there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour.

” Matthew 27:45.

Three hours of total darkness starting at exactly 12:00 noon.

And this could not have been a solar eclipse.

Passover is celebrated during a full moon.

A solar eclipse requires a new moon.

It’s astronomically impossible.

Moreover, the longest solar eclipse ever recorded lasts just over 7 minutes.

This lasted 3 hours.

There is no known natural phenomenon that explains it.

But a pagan Roman historian recorded it.

Phlegon of Tralles, around 150 AD, wrote in his work Olympiads that in the fourth year of the 202nd Olympiad, at the sixth hour, the day turned into dark night so that the stars were seen in the sky.

Sixth hour, noon.

Exactly what the Gospels say.

And Thallus, another first-century historian, [music] also mentioned this darkness and tried to explain it as an eclipse.

But other ancient writers refuted him by pointing out that it was Passover, >> [music] >> and an eclipse was impossible.

Two non-Christian historians confirm a darkness at noon that matches the exact date and time the Gospels describe.

And during those 3 hours of darkness, something is happening that goes [music] deeper than any physical pain.

Something so terrible that it provokes the most heartbreaking cry in all of scripture.

[music] Think about something.

Jesus endured Judas’ betrayal without screaming.

He endured the Sanhedrin’s slaps without screaming.

[music] He endured the Roman scourging without screaming.

He endured the nails without screaming.

But this, whatever was happening during those 3 hours of darkness, this made him scream.

What he was experiencing was worse than the nails, worse than the whip, worse than any physical pain a human body can register.

Near 3:00 in the afternoon, Jesus cries out with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Matthew 27:46.

[music] Aramaic.

His mother tongue.

The language of the heart.

In moments of extreme agony, human beings revert to their first language.

This cry was not theology.

It was the scream of someone experiencing something he had never experienced in all of eternity.

And here’s what I promised you at the beginning about the cup.

Remember Gethsemane? “Father, remove this cup from me.

” That cup was not death.

Jesus was not afraid to die.

That cup was this, what was happening in the 3 hours of darkness.

Second Corinthians >> [music] >> 5:21.

“For he made him who knew no sin to be sin for us.

” Isaiah 53:6.

“The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

” Isaiah 53:10 says it even more directly.

“It pleased the Lord to bruise him.

He has put him to grief.

” In that moment, the full weight of human evil from all of history was placed on the one person who had never committed a single act of [music] wickedness.

And the consequence was separation.

Because Isaiah 59:2 says that sin separates from God.

And Habakkuk 1:13 says God is of purer eyes than to behold evil.

That’s why the vocabulary changed.

In 33 years of life, every time Jesus prayed, he said Father, Abba, every time.

But in that moment, the word changes.

He no longer says Father, he says, “My God.

” The intimacy was interrupted.

The cup Jesus begged to pass from him was experiencing what we deserved.

Total separation from [music] God.

He drank that cup to the bottom so you would never have to taste it.

[music] Maybe you’re watching this video at a moment where you feel like God is far away, that he’s not listening, that he abandoned [music] you.

Jesus felt that, not in theory.

He felt it with every fiber of his being for 3 hours of darkness on a cross.

And he did it >> [music] >> so that separation would never be your final destination.

Because Romans 8:38-39 says that nothing shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The reason nothing can separate you from God is because Jesus already experienced that separation for you.

And after that cry, “I thirst.

” John 19:28.

Psalm 22:15, written a thousand years before, “My tongue clings to my jaws.

” They bring a sponge [music] with vinegar to his lips, and then one single word in Greek that changes everything, tetelestai, [music] translated as it is finished.

John 19:30.

But tetelestai doesn’t mean it’s over.

It was a commercial term.

It was written on receipts when a debt was paid in full, paid in its entirety.

The last thing he did before dying was to declare that the debt you and I owe to God, a debt we could never pay, had been canceled.

That’s the fifth thing I promised you at the beginning, and the final word, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.

” Luke 23:46.

He said Father again.

The communion was restored, the cup was [music] emptied, the bridge was built, and he gave up his spirit, and the world broke apart.

Matthew 27:51.

The veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.

That veil separated the holy place from the most holy place.

The historian Josephus describes that veil as a curtain roughly 60 ft high, 30 ft wide, and a handbreadth thick, so heavy [music] that 300 priests were needed to move it.

And it tore from top to bottom, [music] not from bottom to top as a human hand would do, from heaven.

Access to God, [music] blocked since Adam, was ripped open in an instant.

The earth shook, and this isn’t just [music] the Bible.

Geologists found a layer of disturbed sediment in the Dead Sea [music] that corresponds to a seismic event in 33 AD.

NOAA’s earthquake database >> [music] >> does not record any other significant earthquake in Jerusalem between the years 1 and 50 AD.

The tombs were opened.

Old Testament saints rose from [music] the dead and appeared to many in Jerusalem.

Matthew 27:52-53.

[music] Matthew writes this as a factual report in a gospel aimed at Jewish readers who could verify it with living witnesses.

And the Roman centurion who supervised it all, the earthquake, the darkness, the veil, fell to his knees and said, “Truly, this was the Son of God.

” Matthew 27:54.

A pagan soldier trained to believe in nothing but Rome broke [music] formation and confessed what his eyes could not deny.

Shortly after, the soldiers [music] break the legs of the two thieves to speed up death.

But they come to Jesus, and he’s already [music] dead.

John 19:33.

A soldier drives a spear into his side, and immediately blood and water came out.

John 19:34.

Forensic physicians identify this as pericardial fluid mixed with blood, consistent with cardiac rupture following extreme trauma.

John adds, “And he who has seen has testified, and his testimony is true.

” John 19:35.

A detail John could not have invented because the medical explanation wouldn’t exist for centuries, and there’s a prophecy here that’s spine-chilling.

Exodus 12:46.

About the Passover lamb, “Nor shall you break one of its bones.

” Psalm 34:20.

“He guards all his bones, not one of them is broken.

” A prophecy written 1,500 years earlier, fulfilled by the casual decision of a Roman soldier who had no idea it existed.

Joseph [music] of Arimathea, a member of the very Sanhedrin that condemned Jesus, but who had dissented from the verdict.

Luke 23: 51.

Goes before Pilate and asks for the body.

He risks his position, his reputation, and possibly his life.

Nicodemus arrives with about 75 lb of myrrh and aloes.

John 19:39.

A quantity fit for a royal burial.

They wrap the body, place it in a new tomb hewn out of rock, and roll an enormous stone over the entrance.

And the women who had followed him from Galilee sit down in front of the tomb.

Mark 15:47.

[music] Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Joses, in silence, staring at a rock.

Friday, 3:00 in the afternoon, a man died on a cross after 18 hours that included six illegal trials, a scourging [music] that stripped the skin from his bones, 600 m carrying the instrument of his own execution, and 6 hours nailed to a beam breathing his own pain.

That’s what men did to him, but what he did is another story.

In those same 18 hours, he forgave the men destroying him.

He opened paradise to a dying criminal.

He protected his mother.

He bore the sin of the entire world.

He paid an unpayable debt, and he rebuilt the bridge between God and humanity that had been broken since Eden.

Every nail, every drop, every second of those 3 hours of darkness, [music] all of it had a recipient, and that recipient was you.

Romans 5:8.

[music] “But God demonstrates his own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

” That Friday, a veil was torn, and it was never closed again.

There’s a video on screen right now that connects directly to what you just lived through in these 30 minutes.

What you’re about to see there answers something I left unresolved on purpose.

If you made it this far, what comes next was made for you.

Click