Sometimes I get rather confused about the exact day our Lord was crucified, and Zola has reinforced the fact that our Lord was truly crucified on Friday, as you can discern from the Bible too.

 

This is from Zola Levitt’s teaching....

http://www.levitt.com/faqs.html#rapture

 

 

How does Zola explain the three days and three nights?

The question constantly arises: If the Lord was really crucified on Friday and rose again on Sunday, how could that have encompassed three days and three nights? The Gospel accounts indicate that the Lord was crucified on Friday at 9:00 a.m. and taken off the cross at 3:00 p.m. His body was prepared for burial and interred at sundown the same day, which was the beginning of the Festival of Unleavened Bread. The Lord then arose on Sunday morning after sunup. According to the modern way of counting, this spans barely two days. Yet that time period seems to disagree with Jesus’ earlier prediction: “For 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).

The prophecy can be understood when we examine the Jewish way of counting days and nights. We must recall that the Jewish day always starts at sunset, so that Friday really begins on Thursday evening (a fact that is reflected in the language of Genesis – “the evening and the morning” are the first day). The second day then begins at sundown on Friday and continues through the daytime on Saturday. Finally, Sunday begins at sundown on Saturday and stretches through Saturday night and the daylight hours of Sunday, making the third day. And since the Jews counted any portion of daylight as a full day, then Friday morning through Sunday morning would have been seen as three complete days.

People have sometimes struggled to move Passover (the “Last Supper”) back one day in order to get three days and three nights the way we would count them in the Western world, but that would be inaccurate. Even in the Western world we begin each day on the night before at midnight, so the concept is not strange to us. And supporting this understanding of the Lord’s crucifixion on a Friday (against those who claim it happened on a different day) is the centuries-long history of Christians celebrating Good Friday, not “Good Thursday” or “Good Wednesday.” So this is one more evidence that we can trust in the accuracy of the Biblical account, as well as further confirmation that knowledge of the Jewish roots of Christianity can open up a deeper understanding of God’s Word.