Please take your Bibles and turn back now to Matthew's Gospel in chapter 27, page 834, if you're using one of our pure Bibles. As we come to our scripture meditation this evening, our particular focus is on verse 45, where we read that from the sixth hour, There was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour, that is from 12 till three in the afternoon. We begin with a very marked contrast. On the night when our Lord Jesus Christ was born, the darkness was turned to light Luke tells us in his gospel that there were shepherds out in the field keeping watch over their flock by night. It was dark. And then says Luke, an angel of the Lord appeared to them and the glory of the Lord shone around them and it was light. The birth of Jesus Christ, light dispels the darkness. A vivid picture, isn't it, of what our Lord has come to do, the great purpose of his coming. Why has he come? He has come to bring light into our darkness, into our darkened world, into our darkened hearts. When we come to Calvary, however, to the hour of our Savior's death, we have the opposite phenomenon. If at Bethlehem, light illumines the darkness, at Calvary, darkness extinguishes the light. Now from the sixth hour, there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. From noon till three, When the sun is at its height and the land would otherwise have been flooded with light, it is darkness. Now with the Bible in our hands, with the Bible to guide our thinking, we have no hesitation whatsoever in tracing this darkness to God. How he did it is of no importance. Whether this was some so-called natural phenomenon, as men have wondered, we need not pause to even ask. It is of no importance. The clear and consistent teaching of Holy Scripture is that behind all of nature's phenomena stands nature's God, the Creator. It is He who gives light, He who sends darkness, this darkness that was over all the land from the sixth hour until the ninth hour was His darkness. And that's the one thing that we need to know. And our task this evening is to explore for a little what this darkness does, or perhaps better, what God was doing in sending it. And in the first place, I want you to think about him excluding men or people. Calvary, when you think about it, was a busy place, lots and lots of people there as Jesus suffered. Roman soldiers were there. The chief priests and the scribes and the elders of the people were there. Criminals, one on either side, there. In verse 39, Matthew mentioned those who passed by. From another gospel, we learn that the apostle John and Christ's mother were there. From this gospel, verses 55 and 56, many other women, lots and lots of people, lots of participants, lots of witnesses. And you can picture them as they play their part. And you can listen as some of them speak. And you can listen as the Lord in turn speaks to them. And then all of a sudden, the darkness falls. And though these people do not disappear from the place, they do step out of the picture. they've played their part. And a little later, when the darkness is almost past, and the Savior is about to give up His Spirit, they will come back into the picture. And we will hear them speak. And we will witness someone giving something to our Savior to drink. And when he breathes his last, we will hear a centurion declaring that this was truly the Son of God. And we will witness onlookers going away, beating their breasts in anguish. At the last, people come back into the picture. But with the falling of the darkness, people are, as it were, excluded. every one of them. And for these three final hours, it is just Christ and God. The son alone with his father. The sin bearer alone with the judge. Or to put it another way, it is just God. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. the Son in our nature suffering, the Spirit upholding Him as He does so, the Father not sparing Him, but delivering Him up for us all. Man has done his bit, and he will do his bit again. but for the duration of the darkness as the atoning work of God is brought to its climax and its close, people are excluded. And it is the darkness that does it. Think about him in the second place expressing compassion. or sympathy. This evening's sermon was suggested to me by a very beautiful devotional piece that I read a couple of months back by Reverend George H. Morrison, who a century ago was a minister in the city of Glasgow. The cross speaks to us, he says, of the sympathy of God. If someone whom we dearly loved were mangled in some crowded thoroughfare, The agony of it would be vastly deepened for us by the cruel feature of publicity. To have someone dear to us in torture, in the center of a gaping crowd, must be one of the most awful of experiences. Instinctively, we draw a curtain around the sufferings of those we love. We cannot bear to think that loveless eyes should gaze upon their agonies and torments. That is why, he continues, in the ward of the hospital, the curtain is hung around the bed. God's curtain was the darkness. He had such pity as a father hath. He could not bear that cruel mocking eyes should feast themselves on the tortures of his son. And in his infinite fatherly compassion, from the sixth hour to the ninth, he drew the veil around that dying bed. So writes Dr. Morrison, and perhaps if it had been your devotional, you might have expressed yourself a little more hesitantly. But of this at least, brothers and sisters, we can certainly be sure our Lord was the object of the Father's deep compassion. Never let us forget that the dying Jesus is God's beloved Son. And oh, how his heart goes out to him. The father is not passive at Calvary. He's not standing back as it were, just watching. He is awesomely, terrifyingly active at Calvary. Not sparing his own son, but delivering him up for us all. But the fatherliness is not in any way canceled by the actings of the judge. The wrath does not in any way obliterate the love. There is no suspension of sympathy until the work of sin bearing is done. He who as sin bearer was the object marvelously of intense displeasure as Son is the object of the profoundest compassion. And that being so, it may well be that one of the many things that God is doing, because His purposes are never single, it may well be that one of the many things that God is doing in sending this darkness is veiling His Son. from the eyes of men, they have seen enough. And as we reach the point where his sufferings reach their most intense, no eyes will see but the eyes of divine love. Thirdly, Think about him restraining sin. There is a silence that falls when the sun is eclipsed. Silence of the creatures. Birds stop their singing. And I am told that other creatures fall silent too. And it is a striking thing that all the mockery that is heard on men's lips at Calvary is said to have been uttered before the darkness fell. It was one of the cruelest aspects of our Savior's sufferings. How men mocked Him. The robbers who were crucified on either side of Him, they mocked Him. The passers-by, they mocked Him. The chief priests and the scribes and the elders of the people, they mocked Him. Luke tells us that the soldiers mocked Him. The air is filled with a sound of mockery. And all of the Scripture writers who mention the darkness, they all note that it happens before the darkness falls. When the sun is shining and there is nothing out of the ordinary about the day, they give unrestrained vent to their badness. But when the darkness falls, they are silenced. And you can understand that, it's no surprise, because it's so sudden and so eerie, so utterly out of the ordinary, this darkness that goes on and on and on for hours at the very time when it should have been bright. And it puts a restraint, it would seem, upon the badness of even the worst of them. And I want you to see in that an expression of God's kindness. And I say that because there is always a kindness in God to put a bit in our mouths and to keep us from sin or to keep us from going on in sin, to restrain our madness. And especially when he does it, In such a striking way we cannot fail to see His hand in it. Maybe this past week there has been such an experience in your life. How God in a way that was unmistakably His intervened to restrain you from sin. And we are to take it that it has a very gracious end in view, and that is our repentance. When God restrains our sin, when he does something that puts a check upon our sin, it is that we might come to our senses and turn from our sin in repentance. Is that what God is calling you to do this evening? as you think about the sin in your life that He has checked. We may think of it in the fourth place, prompting reflection, reflection. Think about these men at the cross before the darkness falls, Christ's bitter enemies, and as you listen to them, they think that they have it all figured out. All these claims that he had made, the Son of God, equal with God. All these people whom he had saved in the sense of healing, well, they couldn't deny that. He can't save himself. It's all cut and dry for them. God has caught up with them. It's the day of reckoning for a sinner. And then the darkness falls in the middle of the day. And it remains over all the land for hours. What on earth is going on? They cannot but ask it. And nor can they answer it. There is A mystery about this, a mystery that they cannot penetrate it and it is God himself who has created it by the sending of the darkness. There is something going on here that no one can understand. That God alone can interpret. And it's the darkness that brings it home. Here is something that is evidently intended to prompt reflection, to prompt inquiry, to make men wonder, to make them ask. And that's how I want us to take that darkness ourselves this evening. Its purpose, in part, is to prompt reflection. Its design in part is to move us to ask questions. Or we may take it like this, think of it as a pointer to our need for light from heaven if we're ever to penetrate the mystery of the cross. How can we know what is really going on at Calvary? The very One who sends the darkness and shrouds it all in mystery, He must illumine our minds. He must show us what is happening, if we are ever to truly grasp it. And not just at the outset of our Christian lives, but all the way through. He, He must open our eyes. He must show us. We are dependent upon Him for illumination. It prompts reflection. Which brings me to my fifth and final point. We're asking what God was doing and sending this darkness at the climax of our Savior's suffering. And we've thought about Him excluding men and expressing compassion and restraining sin and prompting reflection. And then lastly, think about Him symbolizing judgment. Why was it dark? Well, I've given you several answers that we can suggest, but none of them has taken us to the heart of the matter. And in order to do that, we need to ponder what we might call the vocabulary of hell. How does the Bible speak about hell? What is the language that the Bible uses? Well, it uses the language of fire. And it uses the language of the worm. And it uses the language of death, the second death. And it speaks about destruction. And elsewhere it speaks about corruption. And it speaks about darkness. Again and again and again, those who are cast into hell are said to be cast into outer darkness. And if you look at the places where that vocabulary is used, you will see that it conveys the notion of hell as deprivation. There is something that the sinner is denied when he is cast into the darkness, some blessing that he would otherwise enjoy, but which by his sin he has forfeited. Here is Jesus, for example, in Matthew 8. Many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into outer darkness in that place. denied all share in the feast of the kingdom, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. So darkness is part of the vocabulary of hell. Darkness is one of the things of which the Bible speaks as it pictures hell and warns us against it. And it is this darkness as divine judgment that interprets more fully than anything else the darkness of Calvary. We've just been thinking about Calvary as a mystery, something that God alone can explain to us. It's what he's done in Holy Scripture. What Scripture does is to give us far, far more than just the outward facts. Scripture also explains the facts. Scripture tells us why there was a cross for the Lord Jesus, what His death was designed to do. And here is one of the things that that teaching enables us to say, Calvary is a place of divine judgment. God is punishing sin at Calvary. Lovingly, on behalf of sinners, Jesus is enduring in himself the judgment that would otherwise be theirs. You hear it in the language of propitiation, the wrath-bearing substitute. You read through Isaiah 53, you hear it over and over again. The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all, the punishment that brought us peace. was upon Him. And that, more than anything else, is why it was dark at Calvary. It brings a harmony into the scene. For Christ Himself, it is dark. As the substitute for sinners, He has gone Himself into the outer darkness. The darkness into which we deserve to go and into which we would have gone had it not been for Him. How fitting it is that when He is in darkness, there should be darkness all around Him. It is a symbol in the physical realm of what is happening in the depths of the Savior's soul. It is dark there. God deals with our sin in Him, in the language of Romans 8, as He condemns sin in His flesh. And it is holy in keeping with the darkness there, in the depths of our Savior's soul, that there should be darkness over all the land, from the sixth hour until the ninth hour, until the work was done. Two things, as we bring this meditation to a close, two very precious things for us to think about. Think first of all about the darkness passing from him. From the sixth hour, there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour, which means that when the ninth hour came, the darkness lifted and the light returned. and not just in the physical realm. The return of the light of the sun has its counterpart in the lifting of the darkness from the Savior's soul. You hear it in his great cry, it is finished. You hear it again in his final words, father into your hands I commit my spirit. What do you conclude as you listen to these final great words of the Lord Jesus? You conclude that the darkness has passed from Him. It is not only light around Him or is about to be light, it is now light within. And it is light within because the atonement has been fully made. and nothing remains to be done. But for him to give up his spirit into his father's hands and breathe his last, you see it. He has gone into the darkness, bearing our sin as our substitute. And now he emerges from the darkness. And he emerges from the darkness that is in his soul because he has accomplished his goal. Our salvation is won. It's now his possession. Christ the embodiment. of our salvation. His now to give to his beloved people. His to give to each and every sinner. The whole world over comes to him for life. His to give to you this evening. You who have yet to begin to experience it and to all of us who have drunk of it but have more to experience. So think about the darkness passing from Him. And think with me last of all, about deliverance from the darkness for us. Are you a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ this evening? Do you trust in Christ for your salvation? Can you say, Christ alone, my hope is found in Him. Here is what you can say. Because it was dark for Christ, it will be eternal day for me. Now we were thinking about eternal day the other Sunday morning. Romans 13, last part of it. This is night for the world, but the night is far spent. The day is at hand. The eternal day that will dawn when our Savior comes again. Eternal, unbroken day. It may well be that in the new world there will be night and day, as there is in this world. We may see the sun setting and the sun rising day after day, I can't tell you. But in terms of our relationship with our reconciled God, it will be eternal, unbroken, day, sun, fully shining sun of God's favor and delight. Or let me put it to you in another way. There are certain respects in which, in this life, the child of light walks in darkness. Isaiah speaks about that in his prophecy. Darkness of various kinds and to various degrees. You know something of that darkness yourself, child of light. But here is a darkness into which we will never go, a darkness from which we are eternally delivered in Him. It's the wonder of substitution. How will we sum it up? It was dark for Him, but it might be light for me. You put your trust in Christ. and you go on putting your trust in Christ. And it will be eternal light for you because of him. Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, We are so thankful to you that Christ was willing to enter our darkness and to extinguish it forever. And that for we who are trusting in him, there is not the anticipation of the outer darkness into which others will be cast, of the broad sunlight, beautiful sunlight, of the eternal day. Grant, Lord, that none may go from here into the darkness. But as Christ is offered to them again, as he himself appeals to them to come, let them come, that for them the darkness might pass, that eternal day will be for them too. Hear us and help us as we sing of this marvelous grace. Amen.