Introduction
   Try as you may, you simply cannot fit three days and three nights into a Friday afternoon impalement to a Sunday morning resurrection. Yet, the three days and nights are the only sign given that the Savior was the true Messiah: Then certain of the scribes and of the Pharisees answered, saying, “Master, we would see a sign from Thee.” But He answered and said unto them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas: 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,” Matthew 12:38-40.
   Notice, the as and so in verse 40. Three days and three nights are three days and three nights, the argument contending for the Jews reckoning a part of a day as whole day, notwithstanding.
   Note also, “there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas” (Matt. 12:39). Not even the blind receiving their sight; the lame walking; the lepers cleansed; the deaf hear; the dead raised; the Evangel preached to the poor, were offered by Yahshua as signs that He was the Messiah (Matt. 11:5-6), only the resurrection was.
   Interestingly enough, many people won’t believe Moses and the Prophets, and neither will they accept the Messiah was resurrected today (Luke 16:31).

Passion (Suffering) Week Finally Understood
   The actual sequence of events follow: on Tuesday evening, after sunset, Yahshua eats the Passover memorial at the correct time with His disciples as mandated by Torah (Lev. 23:5). He then retires to Gethsemane. There is singing of the Great Hallel (Psalms 115-118) and they proceeded to Olivet to pray (Matt 26:30). Judas and a band of men come, and seize Yahshua. During the night and early morning of Passover day, there is shuttling of the Master from priests and elders to Pilate to Herod back to Pilate and back to priests and elders before delivering Yahshua to be mocked, tortured, and murdered. All this on the night of the 14th of Abib, which was the start of Wednesday. That is, Passover, and the day of Preparation for the First High Sabbath (the First Day of Unleavened Bread). See our mini-study on When Does the Scriptural Day Begin?
   Yahshua’s death at the 9th hour (3:00 PM) on Passover Day, was no ordinary event in the course of Roman impalements. Supernatural phenomena attended this Man’s Offering. For three hours, from the 6th to the 9th (noon to mid-afternoon) the sun was darkened, and darkness covered all the earth (Luke 23:44). At the moment when He uttered, “It is finished” (John 19:30), “the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened” (Matt. 27:51-53).

Hebrew or Roman Timing?
   According to Mark 15:25 and John 19:14, there appears to be a contradiction as to when the Savior was impaled. Some have claimed one was Hebrew time, while the other was Roman. What’s going on?
   If we think about the Hebrew way of describing daylight hours, we see that daylight is 12 hours (John 11:9). Yahshua gives a breakdown of that time period in Matthew 20:1-6, with the 1st hour being daybreak or morning (around 6am); 3rd hour would equal 9am; 6th hour would equal 12 noon; 9th hour would equal 3pm, etc., down to the end of daylight around 6pm. However, this is not the only way to reckon the daytime hours. The Romans recorded times differently, though still recognizing a 12-hour day. They counted from midnight as the 1st hour. Some suggest John recorded Roman time, but that is unlikely.
   In Mark 15:25 it says that He was put to the torture stake in the 3rd hour (Hebrew time, 9am; Roman time, 3am). It was recorded there as darkness from the 6th-9th hours, so we know Mark was using the Hebrew reckoning of daylight hours. At the 9th hour Yahshua died, was taken down and placed in the tomb somewhere, most likely, before the 11th hour. The apparent conflict found in John 19:14, we believe, is answered in the following source:
   "An early copyist has confused a Greek Γ—the letter that stands for three—with a ϝ [digamma]—the letter that stands for six," The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, by Zondervan Publishing House.

The Day of Preparation
   Contemporary scholars have examined the words “the preparation” in John 19:31, but they have not related “the preparation” peculiarly to the weekly sabbath. As a matter of fact, “the preparation” as words, nowhere else in Scripture, attends any mention of the weekly Sabbath!
   Many of contemporary Jewry, who like to posit that the Passover was also the First Day of Unleavened Bread, ought to look at Matthew 26:3-5: Then assembled together the chief priests, and the scribes, and the elders of the people, unto the palace of the high priest, who was called Caiaphas, and consulted that they might take Yahshua by subtilty and kill [Him]. But they said, “Not on the feast [day], lest there be an uproar among the people.”
   If, indeed, the Passover day, the day on which Yahshua was murdered by wicked hands had been a High Sabbath day, then they violated the trust invested in them to guard the Sabbath by risking “an uproar among the people.” It would undoubtedly have been met with swift retribution from the Roman Legion garrisoned at Jerusalem.
   The day on which Yahshua was impaled upon the stake was indeed the day of the Passover, and not a High Day. The chief priests, scribes, and elders of the people, responded with haste to remove their bodies before the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread. This is further evidence they knew the 14th (Passover) was not a High Sabbath.
   Leviticus 23:5-8 clearly delineates the Passover from the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, to wit: In the fourteenth [day] of the first month at even [is] Yahweh’s passover. and on the fifteenth day of the same month [is] the feast of unleavened bread unto Yahweh; seven days ye must eat unleavened bread. In the first day ye shall have an holy convocation: ye shall do no servile work therein. …in the seventh day [is] an holy convocation: ye shall do no servile work [therein]. For further insight, please see our study entitled, Why Passover is NOT a High Day.

Reckoning the Three Days: From High Sabbath to Weekly Sabbath
   The Friday evening to Sunday morning theory grew out of an ignorance of the Law and especially, Leviticus 23. It prescribes the Sabbaths as days of Holy Convocation and Solemn Assembles, both the weekly 7th day Sabbath and the 7 Annual Sabbaths. Certainly, the early converts to the Faith were Jews, and they acknowledged this Truth. But as the accession of the Gentiles into the “ekklesia” (Acts 10) began to overtake Jewish proselytes to the Faith, the Greek Septuagint became a writing of choice, and the Old Testament statutes were not as much the focus of their attentions (not unlike it is in today’s churchianity).
   The “Good” Friday impalement grew out of the Gentile converts’ ignorance of the Torah. Furthermore, Jewish tradition reckoned any part of a day as a whole day, thus rendering thirty-six hours equivalent to three days, though simple arithmetic can determine that from Friday evening to Sunday morning includes 2 nights, but only 1 day. There is not a third night; neither are there 2 days. Nor do 2 nights + 1 day = 3 nights + 3 days!
   It is a preposterous and ludicrous argument that would count three nights as a Friday and Saturday night and a “3-hour” stint on the torture stake during which there was darkness over all the earth from the 6th hour until the 9th hour. During which, incidentally, Yahshua was not at all entombed but quite alive—alive enough to speak to His Father (Matthew 27:46; Luke 23:34, 46); to His mother and the disciple whom He loved (John 19:26, 27); to the thief impaled with Him (Luke 23:43); to those attending His passion/suffering (John 19:28, 30). The Sabbath following Yahshua’s impalement upon the torture stake was not the weekly Sabbath, but the first day of Unleavened Bread, a High Sabbath.

Occurrences During the 3-Day Entombment
   The Arimatheaen Joseph begging the body of Yahshua, wrapped It in a clean linen cloth and laid it in his own new tomb, sealing the opening of the sepulcher with a great stone and departing—all before sunset, the beginning of the High Day Sabbath (i.e., the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread) (Matt. 27:57-60).
   Yahshua lay reposed the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread. On the second day of Unleavened Bread and His second in the tomb (Friday), when the shops were open, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Zebedee’s children and other women who had come from Galilee, bought sweet spices (Mark 16:1). Intending to rest on the weekly Sabbath according to the Commandment, they afterward returned to the sepulcher to bring the sweet spices and ointments they had prepared to anoint His body (Luke 23:56-24:1).
   Very early in the morning of the first day of the following week, but several hours after Yahshua's resurrection the evening before, Mary Magdalene and Mary and Joanna returned to the sepulcher to care for Yahshua’s remains only to discover, the tomb was empty. The site secured by the angel of Yahweh who announced that Yahshua was not there, but risen as He said (Matt. 28:1-6; Mark 16:1-6; Luke 24:1-7; John 20:1-3).

Resurrection Sunday?
   The principal reason offered for 1st day worship is the erroneous teaching that Yahshua rose early the first day. But just because Matthew’s Evangel records, “as it began to dawn toward the first [day] of the week” and Mark and Luke record the time as “very early in the morning the first [day] of the week” (Mark 16:1; Luke 24:1) does not require Yahshua to have risen at a time proximate to these accountings.
   From what is supposed but which are also void of Scriptural validation, a corruption and deceitful handling of the Word has fabricated contemporary practices (i.e., Easter sunrise services and homage to pagan fertility rites, traditions of colored eggs, rabbits, hot cross buns, etc.). Read our free booklet, The Counterfeit Called Easter.
   Even if we can assume the Savior was resurrected on the first day of the week, there is nothing in Scripture that controverts 7th Day Sabbath assembly and worship, neither authorizing man to change the 7th Day Sabbath to the first day. It is, in fact, well documented in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 13:14, 17:2, 18:4) that the early Assemblies (led by the Master’s Apostles) assembled together on the Sabbath. These were both Jews and Gentiles, long after the Master had died and been resurrected.  
   The Savior was in the tomb three nights: Wednesday night, Thursday night, and Friday night. He was in the tomb all day Thursday, all day Friday, and was resurrected just before sunset on our Saturday afternoon, a full 72 hours. We are told this in Matthew 28:1: In the end of the Sabbath as it began to dawn [Greek = epiphosko meaning to draw on toward] the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre. Dawn (epiphosko) does not refer to the rising of the sun.

The Seventh-Day Sabbath, Forever
   The weekly 7th Day Sabbath will be kept in the Millennium and observed by all Yahweh’s people as it is written in the Prophets: But in the last days it shall come to pass [that] the mountain of the house of Yahweh shall be established in the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills; and the people shall flow unto it. And many nations shall come, and say, “Come, and let us go up to the mountain of Yahweh and to the house of the Elohim of Jacob; and He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths. For the law shall go forth of Zion and the Word of Yahweh from Jerusalem,” Micah 4:1-2.
   For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before Me, saith Yahweh, so shall your seed and your name remain. And it shall come to pass, [that] from one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before Me, saith Yahweh, Isaiah 66:22-23.
   But this [shall be] the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; after those days, saith Yahweh, I will put My Law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their Elohim, and they shall be My people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying “Know Yahweh:” for they shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith Yahweh: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more, Jeremiah 31:33-34. For those in Messiah, this process has started. Ultimately the full measure will be fulfilled (in the twinkling of an eye) when Yahshua returns the 2nd time.
   We are to grow in righteous character allowing a portion of Yahweh’s Spirit to move us closer unto perfection. Until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of Yahweh, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Messiah, Ephesians 4:13 RSV.
   For further insight into the resurrection of our Savior, read our free in-depth booklets called, Passover: A Memorial for All Time and He Arose… But When?