Time and Name Together

This book began with the one sign Yeshua gave, the sign of Jonah the prophet. He named that sign by a measure of time, three days and three nights, and He named it by a man who had cried out from inside a fish that salvation is the LORD’s. Both halves of that sign, the time and the name, have now been opened.

The Time

In Part One we asked what the sign actually measures. Jonah 2:1 (YLV, Masoretic verse order) and Matthew 12:40 both count daytimes and nights. A biblical day begins when the daytime ends and evening comes, and runs through the night into the daytime: “there was evening and there was morning, day one” (Genesis 1:5). We set out fairly the widely taught scheme of a supper on Thursday, a death on Friday and a rising on Sunday morning, but it cannot give three daytimes and three nights, and it does not fit John’s markers of time or the word the Gospels use for the bread.

In Part Three we sat at the table. The Torah sets the eating of unleavened bread “on the fourteenth day of the month, in the evening” (Exodus 12:18), and it commands nothing for the thirteenth. The supper Yeshua shared with His disciples took place “before the Feast of the Passover” (John 13:1), as the evening that begins Nisan 13 came on. It was the household’s last leavened meal, and every witness calls the bread artos ἄρτος ar'-tos, ordinary bread, not azumos ἄζυμος ad'-zoo-mos, unleavened bread. Over that bread Yeshua said, “Take, eat — this is My body.” And of the daytime of that same 13th, when Yeshua stood before Pilate, John writes, “it was the preparation day for the Passover” (John 19:14).

In Part Four we followed the lamb and the hour. The Passover lamb was kept “before(ad עד) the fourteenth day of this month,” and offered “between the evenings” (Exodus 12:6). After the night of Gethsemane, the arrest and the trials, on the daytime of the 13th He was nailed to the cross at the third hour (Mark 15:25), about 9 a.m.; darkness came from the sixth hour, about noon; and at the ninth hour, about 3 p.m., He gave up His spirit. To offer the Passover on the fourteenth, He had to die on the preparation day, for without the atonement of the cross on that day the offering on the fourteenth would have been impossible. Because He entered death in that daytime, it was the first daytime. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus laid Him in the tomb in the afternoon, finishing by late afternoon. Then the daytime ended and the evening that begins Nisan 14 came. That was the first night, and the Passover had begun; as John writes, “that sabbaton σάββατον sab'-bat-on(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23) was a high day” (John 19:31).

In Part Five we counted. The 14th was the Passover, the 15th was the great sabbath of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and the 16th was the day of the first sheaf, Omer Reshit, “the morrow after the Shabbat” (Leviticus 23:11). Three sabbatons stood in a row. From His death in the daytime of the 13th, He was in the heart of the earth through the daytimes of the 13th, the 14th and the 15th, and through the nights of the 14th, the 15th and the 16th: three daytimes and three nights exactly. Very early on the 16th, at first light, He rose. Matthew places it at opse ὀψέ op-seh', the far end of that run of sabbatons, “as it began to dawn” toward one of them, and Luke calls it “one of the Sabbatons.” On the morning of the first sheaf He was raised as “the first fruits of those who are asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20). The year was AD 33. By the AD and BC calendar calculation now in use, which almost all Jews also use, He died in the daytime of March 31 and rose very early on the morning of April 3. If that method of calculation were ever corrected, the civil dates would be recalculated with it, but the biblical dates and their order would not move.

This is not a matter of adjusting a few dates. It is the Torah’s own timetable, fulfilled in order.

The Name

In Part Two, before we counted anything, we turned from the time to the name. The angel told Joseph to call the child Yeshua, “for He will save His people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). The name joins the yod that points to the LORD with shua, salvation, and it says in one word what the angel said in a sentence: the LORD saves. Isaiah confessed, “God is my salvation (yeshuah יְשׁוּעָה yesh-oo'-aw).”

Then we followed one letter. The heh that ends yeshuah also ends Yah, the shortest form of God’s name. Three times the Hebrew Bible sets Yah and yeshuah in one sentence and says that He has become salvation. Jonah’s last line in the fish carries yeshuah with an added heh: “Salvation (yeshuah) is the LORD’s” (Jonah 2:10). In Genesis 3:15 the promised Seed is taken up by “He,” and in Genesis 4:1 Eve spoke of “a man (ish אִישׁ eesh), the LORD.” At the end of Genesis, Jacob spoke of a serpent and a heel, the two words of the first promise, and then said, “For your salvation (yeshuah) I wait, O LORD.”

The salvation Jacob waited for was not an idea. It was a person: the Word who was with God in the beginning and became flesh, and who bore the name Yeshua.

One Sign

The time and the name belong together. Jonah’s three days and three nights in the fish ended with a confession that salvation belongs to the LORD. Yeshua’s three daytimes and three nights in the heart of the earth ended very early, at first light, on the day of Omer Reshit, with the One whose very name says the same thing risen and alive. Hear the sign once more, in His own words.

Matthew 12:39-40 But He answered and said to them: "An evil and adulterous generation seeks a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah the prophet. For just as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.

The days are counted in the Torah’s own calendar, and the name is spelled in the Torah’s own letters. Neither needs anything added to it.

Grace is the ground of all of it. No one is made right with God by keeping a calendar or by knowing Hebrew. A sinner is justified by grace, through faith in the Lamb who died at the ninth hour and rose very early, at first light, on the 16th. And the One who saves calls those He has saved to walk in His commandments.

One word from Jacob’s last days still waits to be explained. Before he ever spoke of salvation, he blessed Joseph’s sons in the name of “the messenger who has redeemed me from all evil.” The near kinsman who pays the price and buys back what was lost is where the next book in this series begins.