Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast,

The Whole Council of God. Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the

Reformed Church, but now an Orthodox priest serving at St. George Orthodox Cathedral in Charleston,

West Virginia.

Now it was about the sixth hour. Sixth hour is roughly depending on the time of year,

about high noon. And there was darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour.

So the reason the time there is important isn't just because St. Luke wants you to know exactly what time Jesus died. The point there is, you know, if it was 9 o'clock at night and it got real dark, that might be explainable by natural phenomena.

If it gets pitch black, dark at noon, something's happening.

Noon to 3 p.m., brightest, sunniest part of the day, right?

Goes black.

It goes black.

Then the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was torn in two.

We don't have any more detail on that.

It just says the veil of the temple was ripped open.

And we've talked before in the other synoptic gospels as we went through.

Often people interpret this in an inverse way.

They interpret this as if God tears the curtain open so that everybody could see inside.

Well, we know at this point in history there was nothing inside.

Right?

So if you look at it that way and you say, okay, well, God was tearing it open so people could see what was inside,

that means he was tearing it open so they could see that there was nothing inside.

Because what's actually going on here is God is leaving.

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