Three Hours In Hell

People die all the time just to advance our knowledge. Have you ever wondered how

doctors knew the precise steps in the development of the fetus before there was any

means of seeing inside the mother? It came from a team of Harvard doctors who asked a

group of women who were scheduled for hysterectomies to stop practicing birth control

before their surgery. This was long before all of the present controversy concerning

when life begins, and the abortion issue. They did not see it as abortion, but simply as a

removing of the female organs. But in doing so they were able to study 30 embryos and

see the actual development of the fetus. Thirty babies had to die to give man this

knowledge.

Doctor Lawrence Altman in his book Who Goes First tells numerous stories of

doctors who have died in trying to get information on various diseases. I will share just

one. In Lima, Peru there stands what may be the only statue in the world of a medical

student. It memorializes Daniel Carrion who in 1885 decided to solve the mystery of a

strange disease that was killing many of his people. He took some of the blood of an

infected person and tried to inject it into his own arm. He failed at first, and so a fellow

medical student helped him. He got the disease as expected, but his case was far more

severe than expected. Thirty-nine days later he died. Some called it a horrible act and a

disgrace to his profession. They young man who helped him was charged with murder.

It was quite a scandal, but three professors came forward and sighted the many doctors

in history who risked their lives in self-experimenting. The charge was dropped and

Carrion became a hero. The medical students sing a balled to his memory, and enough

was learned about the disease to bring it under control. Others live because he died.

This is not an isolated incident. Every new medicine, every new test, and every new

therapy has to be performed on a human being before it can be approved. If a doctor

had not first put a tube into his own heart, which could have killed him, we would not

have many of the heart surgeries we have today. Somebody has to go first, and that

somebody often has to die to enable others to follow and not die, but be saved by the

procedure. We are looking at Jesus as our Great Physician who was also the Pioneer of

our faith. He went first into the hell of God forsakenness that you and I, and all who

trust in Him, might never have to endure it.

Those few hours of history in which Jesus laid down His life for the world of sinners

were the most unusual hours in all of history. Nothing was normal. It was the Creator

Himself putting Himself through the greatest self-experimentation of all time. As the

author of life He would experience death, and in so doing all of reality is being altered,

for He was turning the world of both nature and super nature upside down. The hours of

His death were hours of complex confusion. Let's look at these strange phenomena.

I. THE CONFUSION OF NATURE.

Verse 45 says that from the 6th hour until the 9th hour darkness came over all the

land. Mark and Luke record this same thing. Dr. Luke gives us one other word, and he

says that the sun stopped shining. We are not talking about a cloudy day or an eclipse.

We are talking about an event in creation that has never happened but this one time in all

of history. The sun took a break, and for the only time in its existence it ceased to shine

for 3 hours. This is one of the greatest miracles of all time, and Herbert Lockyer in his

All The Miracles Of The Bible includes this one, which most of us would miss as a

miracle.

Jesus was born in the darkness of night, but it was a natural night. He died in the

darkness, which was a supernatural night because it came just when the day was

brightest. It was from noon to 3 in the afternoon. That is the least likely time to have

darkness, and so the whole thing is being timed by God to give the world a message. God

never turned the sun off before, and He has never done it again. From God's perspective

this was an event without parallel. It was a once in a history, and a once in a universe,

time and space event. When you add the most unusual earthquake of all time to this

darkness, it is no wonder the Centurion and the others were terrified and exclaimed,