Luke 23:44 Commentary and Bible Study

For several hours the Lord Jesus Christ hung upon that cross, and what happened from the sixth to the ninth hour? The sun was darkened. She refused to give her light. Everything was blacked out. Why was it that during the greatest suffering hours of the Lord Jesus Christ, everything was darkened? It was because something was about to happen there which no mortal eye could look upon. Something so deep and so terrifying and so awful was going to happen that nobody could bear witness to it. The Son of God who had suffered and suffered already was about to receive the stroke from his Father. God in heaven was to veil his face and with his own heart of love rent was going to put upon his own Son all the punishment which you and I should have borne throughout all eternity. It was going to be a punishment so intense and so terrible that no one could witness that. ‘We may not know, we cannot tell what pains he had to bear, but we believe it was for us he hung and suffered there.’ The sun's light is going to be eclipsed. No one will see as the Saviour bears the excruciating limit of agony, taking an eternity of hell for you and I, but compressed into a few hours in order that it could be charged to his account, in order that our sin could be paid by him instead of by us. That is Calvary. That darkness is not only a cover, but it is just a hint of the terrible darkness of soul which the Lord Jesus had to bear for us. If we could just imagine in some way the terrors of hell, the awful shame! You have felt moments of shame, moments of remorse and grief, and of agony. Multiply that many, many times and try to imagine an environment where every spirit around you is hateful and the air is thick with lies and there's nothing but darkness and blackness. Take that for the whole of eternity, and concentrate it somehow, and that is what the Lord Jesus had to endure. That darkness which descended upon Calvary was not only a picture of what the Lord Jesus had to suffer, but it was a cover for all the fiends of darkness, the devil and all his hosts, hemming the Saviour round. The Lord Jesus Christ had to experience hell for us in order that we may be delivered from it, and everything was heaped upon him on Calvary's cross. In those terrible hours of darkness, even the scourgings, even the beatings, even the open wounds and the nails through hands and feet were just small in comparison to what the Lord Jesus has to take for all our sin. The Lord Jesus Christ had to do all that in order to be able to pardon and forgive a single sinner. How can you ever find God without him? How can you ever be forgiven? How can you ever be converted without going to Calvary where the Lord Jesus is?‘And the veil of the temple was rent in the midst’ by the hand of God. That veil had been put in place at the command of God as a symbol which, the letter to the Hebrews tells us, taught the people that the way into the holy of holies was not yet open. There was located the mercy seat which symbolised the presence of God among his people. Only the high priest could go into that place, and he went in once a year on the Day of Atonement. But on the cross of Calvary Christ achieved once for all what the typical high priest could never achieve, and he accomplished the reconciliation between God and man which opened up the way for sinful man to have access to heaven and to come into the presence of God without being instantly destroyed. The temple on earth was just a picture, but the real temple is in heaven, and Christ’s atoning death opened up this way for us. It was entirely fitting and consistent with this that the symbolic barrier prevent access to the presence of God was removed when Christ died. ‘Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, ²⁰ By a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh’ (Hebrews 10:19-20).