This is an excerpt from my book “40 Moments From Christ’s Final Days.” Click here to get it from Amazon using my affiliate link.
Find this moment in: Mt. 27:45, Mk. 15:33, Lk. 23:44
We can say much about the six hours Jesus spent on the cross. Many unique and interesting moments surrounded the most pivotal moment in history when Jesus Christ took on the sins of His people, suffering their punishment so that there would be no judgment left for those who trust Him for salvation. One unique moment that we can easily misunderstand is the sudden darkness.
Now from the sixth hour darkness fell upon all the land until the ninth hour. (Matthew 27:45)
Darkness covered the entire land during the last three hours on the cross. We often picture Jesus calling out to the Father as soon as the darkness began. However, the writers record that it went dark for three hours, beginning at the sixth hour, and at the ninth hour Jesus cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Also of note is what this darkness looked like. It wasn’t an overcast day, nor was it confined to the area around the cross. In 52 AD, about twenty years after Christ’s death, a historian named Thallus wrote a history of the area and explained away a sudden darkness as a solar eclipse.[1] This historian not only gives us confidence that three hours of darkness actually happened, but it also tells us that it was both worldwide and extraordinary.
A final mention must be made about the narrative we give this moment. Sermons, books, and even songs claim that the Father turns His face away from Jesus because He can’t look at the millions of our sins placed on Him. Nowhere does the Bible claim this, but it’s been said so often that we assume it’s true.
We must remember that God isn’t a spatial being with a field of vision. God can’t avoid seeing sin in the world by turning His head slightly. On top of that, the whole point of the cross was specifically so that God would see and punish our sins through Christ. For God to hide His head in the sand would mean He wouldn’t look upon our sins and unleash His full wrath while Jesus suffered in our place.
Passages like Joel 2:10 and Exodus 10:21 show that darkness is often a sign of God’s wrath and judgment. Rather than assuming God shied away from this event on the cross, it’s far more likely this darkness was a sign of God looking directly at Jesus and treating Him as guilty for all the sins the innocent Son carried for His people. Just as God will pour out His wrath against the sins of unbelievers in the future, at the cross, the Father punished Jesus for the almost uncountable number of sins we could never hope to pay for on our own. This moment in history is literally and figuratively dark, but when we seek to understand it, we see it as a moment of beauty, victory, and unmerited salvation.
Stop and think: If the darkness was a sign of the Father’s wrath on sin, then this darkness illuminates just how costly and serious sin truly is. How does this impact your awe and love for Jesus Christ?
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[1] Strobel, L. (1998). The case for Christ: a journalist’s personal investigation of the evidence for Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI, Zondervan.
