Jesus HAD to Die at 3 PM (Do You Know Why?)

The town is Jerusalem. The date is 33 AD. The time is 3 p.m. on Friday afternoon. 200 yards apart, two things are happening at the exact same second. At the temple, a priest is pressing a knife against the throat of a Passover lamb. The horn blows, and the lamb is killed. On Golgotha, a man lifts his bloody head for the last time, and he cries out these words, It is finished. Same city, same moment. One of them was planned by God for 1400 years. And you know, most people have no idea that they're connected. Today, I want to show you three details hidden inside the Passover that God revealed in the death of Jesus. Details so precise, so specific, that there's no way they happened by accident. By the time we're done, you're going to see that the crucifixion wasn't a tragedy that God allowed. It was a divine appointment He's been writing into history since the night that Israel left Egypt. So stay with me to the end, because the third connection I will reveal will show you the exact moment that Jesus died, and it's going to change the way you read the crucifixion account forever. Welcome back to Get Into the Word. My name is Robby Gallaty, and today we're going to uncover three connections. And the first one is hiding in a detail so small that the readers skip right past it. To see this, we have to go to Exodus 12, and I want to read verses 21 through 23. Moses summoned the elders of Israel, and he said to them, Take a cluster of hyssop, make a note of that, dip it in blood that is in the basin, and brush the lentil and the two-door post with some of the blood that is in the basin. God instructs Moses to tell the nation of Israel to gather a cluster of leavened bread and to cover the bread with it. Then he said, and the two-door post with some of the blood that is in the basin. God instructs Moses to tell the nation of Israel

to gather a cluster of hyssop, dip it in the blood of a Passover lamb, and apply it to the doorposts of their homes, so the angel of death, when he comes, will pass over them. You see, hyssop was a small shrub that grew in the crevices of rocks. It was used in temple ceremonies for many things, but mainly for the sprinkling of blood during those rituals of cleansing. We hear about this by David even in the Psalms. Psalm 51.7, David says, Purify me with hyssop, and I will be clean. Every Jewish listener knew something we need to learn, and that is hyssop equated with blood atonement. So here's the question. Do we find hyssop anywhere in the New Testament, particularly in the crucifixion account of Jesus? The answer is yes. Let's go back to the Bible and look at John 19, and I want to show you what it says in verse 28. After this, when Jesus knew that everything was now finished, he's on the cross, he's about to die, the scripture will be fulfilled, and so he says, I am thirsty. Now, let me just pull over for a moment. This is not a man asking for a drink to give him thirst, to quench his thirst for his physical body. That is not what Jesus is doing. Jesus is making a spiritual statement of truth to the hearers and us today. Watch what he says. I am thirsty. And so a jar full of sour wine was sitting there.

So they fixed a sponge full of sour wine on a hyssop branch, go figure, and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the sour wine, it's then, at this point, he yells, it is finished. Then he bows his head and he gives up his spirit. What's interesting about this is that Jesus yells, it is finished, after they put the wine to his mouth. And what branch is it on? It's on a hyssop branch. It's not on a cedar tree or a sycamore branch or even an olive branch. It's on a hyssop branch. And on the day Jesus dies, they press a hyssop branch, soaked and dripping, against the lips of a bleeding man on a wooden cross. And it's at this point he says, it is finished. Now, this is not a coincidence. God is showing us that he's been stitching the Passover to Calvary with the same thread. But we're actually just getting started. Because the second connection that we see in this account involves the way the blood was actually applied. And this one, I have to admit, stopped me cold when I first saw it. Because you couldn't apply the blood of the Passover lamb any way you wanted. God gave a specific sequence in order to do this. We have to go back to Exodus chapter 12. And let's look at what the text says one more time. Take a cluster of hyssop, dip it in the blood and apply it.

Watch this. Brush the lentil and the two. your post with the blood from the basin. God is very specific in how to do this. Take the blood and go across the top of the frame and then go up and down on each side of the post. Let me do it again, watch the image. Side to side, up and down. Now, I don't wanna make more of this than what's there, but I do wanna say this. The text is giving us a picture all the way back then of the cross. Follow me here. The shape that was traced was a sequence. You start with the top beam and then you go across both sides. That's the shape of a cross. Even in the Exodus, 1400 years before the crucifixion even happened, God was outlining what was coming. What does that show us? Jesus wasn't a surprise victim whose movement got out of hand and cost him his life. No, Jesus is the sovereign Lord who walked willingly to a divine appointment on a dusty hill outside of Jerusalem. Every detail was planned. Every element pointed forward. God hid the cross in the doorpost of Egypt. So we're seeing the method, the hyssop.

We've seen the means by which it's applied, the pattern of the blood. But this third connection is where God's sovereignty goes on another level entirely because it involves the exact moment of the day that Jesus died. And to understand this, I need to take you back to the temple courtyard on the Passover afternoon. According to the Mishnah, which is a rabbinic commentary of the Old Testament, twilight on Passover was 3 p.m. That was the time the Passover lamb was to be killed. From the time of the tabernacle in the Old Testament to the time of Jesus in the New Testament, animal sacrifices were to be offered twice a day, every day. 9 a.m. in the morning, 3 p.m. in the afternoon. Every day, every festival, every season, you could say it this way, the altar of God never went cold. The first century historian Josephus recorded that at one Passover celebration, I think it's the year 66 A.D., they counted the number of slaughtered animals and they multiplied the number by 10. Since each group shared a single lamb, they just decided to extrapolate the numbers that way. Guess what the final number of lambs he deduced were sacrificed that day? Brace yourself, 256,500 lambs in one day.

Think about that. Most scholars believe Josephus had a habit of inflating the numbers. I remember in seminary, they told us whatever he said divided by three. But even if that's right, you're looking at somewhere between 85,000 to 100,000 lambs sacrificed on a single afternoon. That's close to a million people packed into the city limits of Jerusalem. I want you to get the picture here. The gutters didn't just run red, they ran red like a river. Lines of people, worshipers, stretching all through the streets, wave after wave, people flooding into the temple courts with animals in hand. The gutters literally were gushing with blood. The altar was soaked red. Basin after basin was passed from one priest to another. One ancient observer said it this way, the gutters of Israel in Jerusalem on Passover flowed red like water from a torrential downpour. At that moment, a priest would climb to his position in the niche of the temple mount. He would have a ram's horn in his hand and he would get ready to blow to signify the time of the morning sacrifice at 9 a.m. At the exact moment below him, there was another priest with a cold knife

resting against the throat of an innocent lamb. And the city goes quiet, preparing for this moment. Five, four, three, two, one. Mark 15.25 tells us the exact moment Jesus was nailed to the cross. Look at what the gospel writer Mark tells us about the time. Mark 15.25. Now it was nine in the morning. Nine in the morning, is that for me? Oh, we already know that. Nine in the morning was when they were sacrificing in the temple a lamb to be offered to God. Now we know he's going to hang Jesus on the cross for six hours and then we go down to this. Look at verse 33. When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until what, three in the afternoon. And at three in the afternoon, it was at that moment that Jesus cries out with a loud voice. He hangs for six hours. At that point, the sun fails. As soon as he yells, it is finished. The curtain in the temple. John tells us is torn in two and Jesus lifts up his head and cries out to his father, father into your hands, I commit my spirit. What time was it? 3 p.m. The exact moment the Passover lamb was killed at the temple.

200 yards away, the lamb of God breathed his last. God didn't just allow this to happen on Passover, God orchestrated it down to the very minute. And then something happened that most people actually read past if they don't look closely. It's a profound picture of the heart of God that you won't find really anywhere else in scripture. When Jesus dies, the temple veil tears from top to bottom. The curtain was 60 feet high. It was about 30 feet wide and five inches to six inches thick. It shows us that this is not a shower curtain you have in a bathroom. This is a big, thick piece of cloth. No human hands could tear this. It was actually torn, the Bible says, from top to bottom, from heaven to earth. The veil had one purpose and that was to separate the presence of God from the people of God. Only the high priest could pass through once a year to make an atonement for the nation's sins. Everyone else, including us, if we would have been there, would have been kept out. When Jesus took our sin upon himself, we know from the Bible that the barrier between God and man was destroyed, amen? Access to God for every believer now is open. There's no more barrier or roadblock, but there's something else. You see, in the Jewish world, when a person was in anguish

over the loss of a loved one, they would tear their garments. They would rip them from top to bottom. When Job lost his children in the Old Testament, you may remember he tore his clothes. When Jacob received Joseph's bloody coat back from his brothers, he ripped his garments from top to bottom. King David even tore his clothes at the news of Saul's death. To this day at Jewish funerals, mourners will show up with a torn piece of fabric attached to their coat. It's called a kria. It's a sign of grief and anguish, this torn piece of cloth. So when a Jewish reader, you're gonna love this, encounters the tearing of the veil, they see two things happening at once. The veil between God and man came down, of course, but they also see a father tearing his garments in the anguish over the death of his one and only son. God was not unmoved by the cross. God didn't watch from a distance, detached sovereignly. No, he was in anguish over the loss of his son. And I wanna get personal for you, just a moment, and I wanna share with you something about my own life that I learned this years ago. There was a season in my life, if you know my testimony, that I made a bunch of bad decisions and I was completely cut off from my family.

Drugs and alcohol had taken a toll on my life and I resorted to stealing $15,000 from my own family. The people that loved me and cared for me, close Italian family, really tight-knit family, and it was really unthinkable, but I was desperate. I'll never forget the phone call when my mom called me and she said, Robbie, your dad and I found out what you did. Your father's disappointed and I'm furious. Don't ever come to this house again. And in my prideful self, I said, mom, you know what? I don't need you. I never did, I don't need you now. But I really did, and I wouldn't admit that, but I did. Every night I replayed that phone call. I couldn't shake it. What was I thinking? How could I rob my own family? How could I take from the people that gave me everything? And so one day at my grandfather's 80th birthday party, I decided to show up even though I wasn't invited. And the first person, believe it or not, I ran into that day was my mom. She walked up to me and she asked a question that would change my life. She said, Robbie, how are you doing? I tried to hold it together. I tried to lie, but I couldn't. And with a tear running down my cheek, I responded and said, mom, I'm not doing good. Can I come home tonight?

And that night, by God's grace, through tears on my knees, I begged my parents to take me back. And they showed a demonstration of grace I'd never seen before and welcomed me back in with open arms. If I would have never gone back to my parents, here's the point, and I would have let my pride or my arrogance or my self-sufficiency get in the way of asking for help, I probably wouldn't be alive today. But here's what's more tragic. Letting your pride or even your own sin or your own shame keep you from coming back to God because that separation doesn't just have present consequences, it will have eternal consequences. I imagine some of you have been running from God. You actually feel distant now. You feel like God is somewhere far away and you've done too much for God to ever want you. you back. But I'm here to tell you from someone that's been there and experienced that and thought that, the veil is already torn. The barrier between God is already down. He's not standing at the door checking your record or your past. He's actually standing there ready to welcome you back in with open arms. One day, the angel of death is going to come to the door of your house. And the only question is, has the blood of Jesus been applied to the doorpost of your heart? Here's what I mean. You have to experience repentance and belief. Repentance, recognizing that you need a sacrifice that you can never provide for yourself. And then belief is trusting in Jesus that he's the sacrifice and then applying that to your life or appropriating that to your life by faith. And that's it. It's not church attendance, although that's encouraged. It's not good deeds. It's not a clean record. It's not anything we do in and of ourself. The Passover lamb didn't care how good the

family was inside. It only cared that the blood was applied. God is in the details. He always has been. And the detail all points to knowing a person named Jesus. If this video helped you with something new, or maybe you didn't see an insight in the text that you learned today, would you do me a favor and help by sharing this video with another person? I'm assuming if you made it to this point, you're already subscribed to the channel. And if not, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss another lesson. I'll put a question in the comments so you can respond so that this is not just a monologue, but it's more of a dialogue. Until next time, get into the word until the word gets into you.