Today marks the day between Good Friday and Easter…between God’s sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross, and Jesus’ promised victorious resurrection from the dead. In between was the Sabbath day, the day designated for rest in obedience.
So, after Jesus’ body was taken down from the cross, wrapped in linen cloth and placed in a tomb, everyone went home to rest on the Sabbath: “But they rested on the Sabbath in obedience to the commandment” (Luke 23:56).
How strange it is to me to think that God’s people could “rest” for a day after such an event as Calvary. I wonder at how this “rest” would have been, this seeking after God’s face, this wondering what would unfold for those who had actually heard Jesus’ prediction to them, that He would be deliberately, willingly dying in that way, but that it would not be the end of the story.
The waiting would have been excruciating to me. It would have me wondering, why does there need to be this day of Sabbath, even now?
The chief priests and Pharisees who had lead the crowd in arresting and having Jesus executed, they would be celebrating perhaps, in their self-righteousness, observing the Sabbath as one of the commandments they followed so well as a badge of their own honor, as a status symbol perhaps to all the other Jews that this of course is why they are the elite in the house of God. They would have seen, still caught up in their own delusions of grandeur, Good Friday as somehow their victory, as vindication for their own case and purposes. It was what they wanted and devised, and God had allowed them “success.”
Even then, they cannot “rest” all smug that Sabbath day, as they are not unaware of the fact that the story may not yet be as they claimed, that it may not yet finish in their favor…
The next day, the one after Preparation Day, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate. “Sir,” they said, “we remember that while he was still alive that deceiver said, ‘After three days I will rise again.’ So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead. This last deception will be worse than the first.”
“Take a guard,” Pilate answered. “Go, make the tomb as secure as you know how.” So they went and made the tomb secure by putting a seal on the stone and posting the guard. (Matthew 27:62-66)
It is as though God allowed a day for the Enemy to gloat…and even to attempt to fortify their own position.
What’s silly though, is that if indeed they have set themselves up against God and His Son, then all fortification attempts on their end will only prove one day later just how much more God is able to carry out His plans over and against our best efforts to thwart Him. (I suppose though, it is to their credit to at least try their very best and follow through on what they’ve started.)
Still, this one day in between of silence…
God’s designated time frame for raising Jesus from the dead was 3 days…for whatever reason or purpose there is perfection to this 3 days. And to have the 3 days, He allowed for there to be stuck a Sabbath Day of silence in between…
It makes me wonder at how God has worked through all of time, and also how He continues to work things out today…that there is a sense of His perfect timing for things, “there is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1)…and God rarely seems to be in a rush to have things happen before or outside of His perfect timing for things, for His will to be done. He is not worried, and He is not phased. Most likely, He grieves alongside us…and He will hold and comfort us…but things will unfold as things have been determined for them to unfold, for purposes perhaps beyond our understanding.