Episode 3: The Most Meaningful Eclipse in History

Laura Booz: Hey Erin, want to know a funny story?

Erin Davis: You have the best stories. I always want to hear your stories!

Laura: Okay. Well, the other day some friends and I were sitting in the living room, and our other friend came in from outside. She was walking around kind of bothered. She was like, “Why is it so dark in here? Put the lights on! Put the blinds up!” We were like, “The lights are on, and the blinds are up.” She was still like, “What? Why? It’s so dark!” Then we looked at her and we’re like, “You still have your sunglasses on!”

Erin: Nice!

Laura: So there she was.

Erin: I can totally picture your friend standing in the middle of your living room with her sunglasses on, because I feel like I’ve done that before.

Laura: Right. You’re wondering, What is wrong here? And you don’t realize all along you have your shades on.

Erin: Absolutely.

Laura: The tie-in to Episode 3 of The Deep Well is that so many times people are walking around in the darkness, and they’re confused and bewildered and upset by it, but not really sure what to do, why it feels dark, or what will solve their problem.

Erin: Right! They’re not even aware that . . . That friend, in an indirect way, was the source of her own darkness. She put the sunglasses on her eyes. To take it a step further, as we’re talking about salvation and the gospel, I think there are people walking around with a craving for the light of Jesus but an unwillingness to acknowledge that they’ve put the darkness over their own eyes with their sin.

Laura: Or maybe they’ve just never heard the good news about how they can see the light. But this episode is all about that good news, isn’t it, Erin?

Erin: It absolutely is—although I have to warn you, it’s not necessarily going to feel like good news during parts of this episode, but it is the best news. We are going to look at the place in Scripture where light pierced the darkness.

Laura: This is The Deep Well with Erin Davis. I’m Laura Booz. This season is all about eclipses. Today Erin will describe the most meaningful eclipse in history. Let’s listen.

Erin: I’ve never made it through the movie The Passion of the Christ. I went to see it when it was in the theaters. I bought a giant tub of popcorn and a root beer, like I do with every other movie. I guess I was expecting to be entertained. But very early on, I couldn’t stomach the popcorn, as I watched the scenes of Holy Week start to play out on the big screen.

I saw an actor playing Jesus arrested and tried and taunted and beaten, and my eyes filled with hot tears when they nailed him to the cross. And then I left. I couldn’t bear to watch it, and I’ve never watched it since.

Some parts of the Bible are hard to read. In fact, many parts of the Bible are hard to read. Maybe that’s not an admission you’d expect from a Bible teacher, but it’s true. Some parts of the Bible are hard to understand, and some parts of the Bible are easy to understand, but they’re hard to live. Some of it’s just hard to think about.

We’re going to park in one of those hard-to-think-about passages in this episode. We find it in the book of Matthew, in the New Testament, chapters 27 and 28.

I’m calling this series “Eclipses.” These are places in Scripture where it seemed like the darkness was going to take out—eliminate—the light. Now, they’re not necessarily places where something happens in the sky, although in today’s episode something did. But they’re those times when the spiritual darkness seemed so all-consuming that there seemed to be no spiritual light, where the emotional darkness seemed to cover over everything good.

My goal for The Deep Well is to get to know and love your whole Bible, and my goal for The Deep Well is to get me to know and love my whole Bible. So I’m always pushing us into parts of Scripture that we maybe haven’t read before, that are obscure. That’s not the case today. Today we’re going to a part of our Bibles that we might already know but that we need to revisit over and over.

I believe that the whole Bible is pointing to the moment we’re going to focus on together today. I believe all of the Old Testament is pointing forward to this moment, and that all of the New Testament is pointing backward to this moment. In fact, I think that’s what our lives are designed to do: to point to what God did in the verses we are about to read.

There’s a pattern here that I want for my life, that I want for your life, which is that in everything—in our hearts, in our words, in our actions—we would keep bringing things back to the cross.

I could spend the rest of my life unpacking the life and ministry of Jesus, and I certainly can’t reduce it to a preamble in a single podcast episode. Matthew’s Gospel reduces the biography of the King of kings and Lord of lords to just twenty-eight chapters—what a feat! I’m just going to focus on the last two.

Obviously, so much has already happened by the time we get to the end of Matthew that set the stage for Jesus’ death. Judas had already betrayed Jesus for a little bit of silver. Jesus had already prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. He’d already asked God the Father that the cup of His death would pass, and He’d already fully surrendered Himself to the fact that it wasn’t going to. 

Jesus had already been arrested. He had already been tried in multiple kangaroo courts. His friends had already denied Him, and the crowds had already yelled, “Crucify him!” by the time we get to Matthew 27.

But let’s force ourselves to face what happened next. Matthew 27:27–31: 

Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor’s headquarters, and they gathered the whole battalion before him. And they stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on his head and put a reed in his right hand. And kneeling before him, they mocked him saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” And they spit on him and took the reed and struck him on the head. And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the robe and put his own clothes on him and led him away to crucify him.”

When I read these verses, I think, Let me at them! There’s anger that rises up in me. Honestly, I want to throat-punch the guys who humiliated Jesus in this way. I would want to throat-punch anybody who humiliated anybody in this way, but this is Jesus, my Savior, my Friend, my King, and they’re mocking Him!

But when I look again, I also see in these verses a picture of what’s to come. These guards who thought they were executing a lunatic, before they did that, they kneeled in front of Him. 

As I was looking at these verses again for this series, that’s where I saw the first glimmer of hope, because even in their disregard, those soldiers were pointing forward to what is to come. Romans 14:11 tells us, “As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me and every tongue confess to God . . .” There are those who miss that Jesus is the Savior of the world, who can’t see that He’s the King of all creation; but they won’t always miss that. Even in this moment, as He was being humiliated, Jesus was not a defeated king.

Let’s force ourselves to keep reading. 

As they went out, they found a man of Cyrene, Simon by name. They compelled this man to carry his cross. (v. 32)

Every time I read that I think, Simon is one of the most blessed men in all of human history. Christ carried the cross for me, Christ carried the cross for you, and Simon’s the only one who got to carry Christ’s cross for Him.

So we keep reading. As I do, would you read with me? Let me urge you—I feel a little bit like begging you to resist the urge (and I have it too) to skim these verses, to skip over them, to just see them as familiar. They are uncomfortable. Let’s sit in that uncomfortableness for a moment. Matthew 27:33 says, 

When they came to a place Golgotha (which means Place of the Skull) they offered him wine to drink, mixed with gall, but when he tasted it, he would not drink it. When they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots. Then they sat down and kept watch over him there. And over his head they put this charge against him, which read, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.” Then two robbers were crucified with him, one on the right and one on the left. And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” So also the chief priests, with the scribes and elders, mocked him, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him. For he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’” And the robbers who were crucified with him also reviled him in the same way. (vv. 32–44)

When I read the Bible, I always try to picture myself as a witness. Verses 55 and 56 of chapter 7 tell us that at the foot of the cross there was a group of women, including Jesus’ mother, Mary. What I find when I read these verses is that I want to be numb. I don’t want to feel what it must have felt like to watch Jesus suffer in that way. So when I read these passages, I choose to see it through the eyes of Mary. You can’t feel numb from that perspective.

This isn’t just a story! 

• Jesus was a real man.
• He had real flesh and real blood.
• His real flesh was ripped off.
• His real blood was poured out in this moment. 
• The mocking crowds were real.
• The stench of death must have been real.
• The darkness was real. 

Unlike some of the other events that we’ve looked at in this series, this was a total eclipse. Pay attention to verse 45, which says, 

Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over the land until the ninth hour.

For us to grasp the deep truths that the deep well of God’s Word has for us, we need to be critical thinkers. We need to ask questions; we need to dig. God saw fit to preserve in Scripture these very specific details about the timing of this darkness in the sky. It’s really good for us to stop and ask why. When was the sixth hour, and when was the ninth hour?

A quick Google search is going to show you that Jewish hours ran from the approximate hours of sunrise and sunset, six a.m. to six p.m. So Matthew would have been referring to that Jewish clock as he described this total darkness. Do the calculation really quickly in your head. That means that darkness was over all the land from noon to three in the afternoon.

If you need more help to understand what’s happening here, go ahead and picture it. Imagine that you’re on your lunch break, and suddenly an oppressive darkness covers all of the light for three hours. That was happening in the physical world. 

It was also happening in the spiritual world. At this moment, the demons were celebrating. Wherever the demons were, in the recesses of darkness, they were celebrating. They thought that darkness had won! They thought that they had snuffed out the light.

In the book of Amos, which is in the Old Testament, God spoke through the prophet Amos, and He foretold a day of great wailing. Amos 8:9 says, 

And on that day, declares the Lord God, I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight.

This was mankind’s darkest day. The seed of sin that was planted in the Garden bore fruit in this moment, as Jesus hung on the cross.

As much as I wish it wasn’t true, as much as I would rather just run out of the theater and not face any of this, when I read my whole Bible, I have to face the fact that my sin required a heavy price, and Jesus paid it. Whether you want to face it or not, whether you’d rather just keep on running from this idea or not, your sin required a heavy price, and Jesus paid it.

As I think about you on the other end of this microphone, you’re listening to these words I’m saying, and I imagine what I want God to do in your heart. I want you to feel this. I want you to feel the weight of it—not forever. I don’t want you to be squashed by your sin. 

But you know what I hear us say most often about our sin is, “Oh, nobody’s perfect.” That’s true; nobody’s perfect except for Jesus. This darkness that we see here that covered the land for three hours, that’s the darkness of God’s judgment, the judgment that was required for our sin, the darkness of our hearts that eclipses, that pushes out the light inside of us.

Let me pick it up at verse 46. 

And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’ that is, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” And some of the bystanders, hearing it, said, “This man is calling Elijah.” And one of them at once ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine, and put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink. But the others said, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him.” And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. (vv. 46–50)

This was a physical death, and there was physical darkness, but there were things happening in the spiritual realm too. The demons were celebrating. Wherever the corners of darkness were, they were having a party, because they thought in this moment that they’d won, that they had snuffed out the light of the world. That’s why we have to keep reading.

And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened. And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the Holy City and appeared to many. When the centurion and those who were with him, keeping watch over Jesus saw the earthquake and what took place, they were filled with awe, and said, “Truly this was the Son of God! (vv. 51–54)

Jesus’ death changed everything. Instantly, where just hours before these soldiers had bowed before Jesus, mocking Him, now they bowed before His dead body and worshipped Him.

As we look at the darkness of sin, as we face the darkness that lives in every human heart, we have the same choice every day: choose to mock Him or choose to worship Him.

I had someone say to me lately, “We use that word ‘gospel’ too much.” Maybe we do, if we’re using the gospel to describe anything other than this moment when Jesus, the Son of God, died for our sin; when the Creator of light, when the Light of the world was covered—temporarily—in the darkness of death so that we wouldn’t have to be. It was a total eclipse. For a nanosecond, the whole land was covered in darkness. But it was a temporary one.

As much as we need to read the account of the crucifixion, we might need to read the resurrection more. Matthew 28:1–10 is a long passage, ten verses, so again, I’d encourage you to follow along with me. But it might be the most important ten verses in all of Scripture. Read it with me.

Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.And behold, there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning [There it is! The light returning in this huge way!] and his clothing white as snow.And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay.Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him. See, I have told you.” So they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. And behold, Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped him.Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.’”

Sin is dark. God’s judgment on sin is dark. Death is dark. But when we read our whole Bibles, we see that there is resurrection hope. Out of that oppressive darkness, Jesus burst forth in glorious light! Death could not hold Him, my sin could not stop Him. 

Sometimes it feels like the darkness has won. Sometimes it feels like those three hours when Jesus died and the darkness takes over. Today as I’m recording this podcast episode, the Taliban has just forcibly taken over the nation of Afghanistan. The images that we’re seeing are horrific, and it seems like the darkness has won. In my own walk with the Lord, even though I know that Jesus died for my sin and I do worship Him as my King, there are times when I feel like the darkness inside of me might win.

Whenever we face an eclipse, anytime it seems like the darkness is going to overcome the light, there is a truth we can reach out for and hold onto with both hands. Listen to Isaiah 60:1–2. 

Arise, shine, for your light has come,
and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you.
For behold, darkness shall cover the earth,
and thick darkness the peoples;
But [that’s one of the best words in the whole Bible] the LORD will arise upon you,
and His glory will be seen upon you.
And nations shall come to your light,
and the kings to the brightness of your rising. (vv. 1–3)

I’d add to that 1 John 1:5: 

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.

When we open our Bibles—our whole Bibles—what we see is that without Jesus the world would still be covered in darkness. That eclipse that happened as Jesus surrendered His Spirit, that would be our constant and eternal reality. But Jesus died and Jesus lives so that we can walk in the light.

As you think about these passages, why don’t you just take a moment and pray. I’m right here with you, praying with you. I’d love it if right where you are, thank God for the light of Christ. Thank Him for giving you eyes to see the light of Christ. Right there, right where you are. Mama, if you’re there with your littles, pull them in close to you; whoever you’re there with. 

Think about where it seems like the darkness is winning. It’s probably inside you and outside the walls of your home at the same time. Take just a minute and think about where it feels like the darkness is winning, and then thank God again that this moment on the cross, those three hours of darkness, that that’s not the end of the story. Jesus died; Jesus lives so that we can walk in the light. That’s something I don’t think we can say to each other too often.

Laura: Erin, thank you for that moment to pray, and thank you for taking us to the cross. That is somewhere we need to go every day.

I remember when one of my children was very little, and for some reason she just loved to look at the page in her storybook Bible of the crucifixion. She would kind of be mesmerized by it and stare at it and ask questions about it. It got to the point where I kind of started to feel uncomfortable, like, Is this okay? It seems so gruesome. “Let’s turn the page; let’s see the resurrection!”

I remember praying about it and feeling in my heart this peace, that it’s okay. It’s okay to look at the face of Christ as He pays for our sin, because although it is hard and it is gory, it is also the breakthrough of where we put our faith, and what we see in His face is the glory of God.

At the time, I was reminded of a passage in Hebrews 12, which talks about the importance of looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, and right away it directs our eyes to Him on the cross, “who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” Here our eyes move from the cross to the right hand of the throne of God.

That’s exactly what you did in your talk today, Erin. I’m just wondering, take us to your desk where you were sitting with the Lord and writing out today’s lesson. What was going through your heart and mind personally as you processed this?

Erin: I put this one off, and I often wonder if other Christians have this experience, so you can let me know, but I don’t like to read the crucifixion. So I put studying for this episode off, I put it off as long as I possibly could. But then, really early on, as soon as I opened my Bible to Matthew and started to read the crucifixion story, I was teary—I was teary the whole time I was studying and preparing, and I think that’s a right response—but I also just kept thinking that all the good stuff, all the powerful stuff, all the hope-filled stuff is there in those verses, especially if you carry them all the way through to the resurrection.

There’s a little saying that I’ve said to myself a zillion times; I don’t know where it came from, but it’s helpful to me. It’s that I will measure Jesus’s love by the cross and His power by the resurrection. How I know He loves me is because of what we read in these hard-to-read verses, and how I know He’s powerful is because He rose from the grave three days later. That’s what I was feeling. I was just feeling everything I hope that the women listening to this podcast will feel: This is hard to read, but look what Jesus did for us.

So the Lord really met me there in His Word, as He does over and over, and I was glad that I chose to read those passages again, and grateful to get to teach them.

Laura: A couple of years ago we hosted an event at our local library to celebrate Easter. They have a community room there and make it available to whoever would like to reserve it. So we put a grand invitation out to the community, invited children and their parents, and we read the crucifixion and the resurrection story from The Jesus Storybook Bible. We had music and crafts and fun.

At the end, a little boy came up to me, and he said, “Why did He have to sacrifice Himself?”

It was such an insightful question, and I’m just wondering, Erin, how would you have answered him?

Erin: My little boys ask me that same question. I think maybe that’s that faith of a child that Jesus encouraged in each of us. I wouldn’t want to communicate that I think I have a handle on that, but in that instance I think I’d drop down on my knees, eye to eye with that little guy, and boil it down as much as I could, knowing there are volumes and volumes and volumes of books that could be written. But isn’t the bottom line answer that He had to sacrifice Himself because He loves us so much? Isn’t the bottom line answer that He had to do whatever it took, and wow, did it require a lot of Him, but He had to do whatever it took, because His love is so great for that little boy that He couldn’t stand to be separated from Him.

That wouldn’t answer all of that little boy’s questions, and all of my questions about Jesus aren’t answered, but I think that answers the big question.

Laura: Well, Erin, I don’t want to miss the opportunity to speak directly to our listener; to, in a sense, get down on our knees and look our listener in the eye and talk to her about the crucifixion, about the Scripture that we’ve read today and what we’ve seen in the face of Christ today. Would you do that? Would you speak to the woman who’s listening and facing the cross with us today?

Erin: I would love to.

I think what I want you to know is the terrible and wonderful dichotomy that Jesus hung on the cross for you, and Jesus hung on the cross for you. We have to understand that it was our sin that put him there, and I think that is the part that’s hard for us to look at. But to the Christian woman, my encouragement would be to think about the cross every day, not as a way of inflicting punishment on ourselves, but as a way of honoring what Jesus did for us. And to the woman who’s listening that hasn’t put her faith in Jesus, I want you to know that it wasn’t shame that put Him there, it wasn’t His anger at you that put Him there; He was motivated by His great love for You.

Even though it is uncomfortable, I think we have to look to the cross. It is the greatest monument of love and hope that exists.

Laura: The cross invites you to kneel to Jesus as your Lord and Savior and to confess your sin and turn to Him and come out of the kingdom of darkness into His glorious light by abandoning it all, like Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress, letting that burden just fly off your back because of the power of the cross. It just rolls down the hill, all of the shame and the sin and the remorse and the grief that you have felt and even that you have not felt but is still there, burdening you, simply because you were born into sin, as Scripture says. So we welcome you to the cross, to the feet of the Lord who loves you and who died for you, to confess your sin and accept Him as your Savior.

During this session one song was going through my mind, and it was “Is He Worthy?” Have you ever heard that song?

Erin: Oh, what is so powerful about that song? Yes, I’ve heard it and listened to it and clung to it many times.

Laura: In that song, the lyrics are specifically thinking about these questions: 

Do you feel the world is broken?
We do.
Do you feel the shadows deepen?
We do.
But do you know that all the dark
Won’t stop the light from getting through?
We do.

Of course, it ramps up to Jesus the Messiah. It asks,

Is anyone worthy?
Is anyone whole?
Is anyone able to break the seal
And open the scroll?

It is the Lion of Judah, who conquered the grave. So that song has been running through my head, and I’m just wondering, do any other songs come to mind that our listeners can put on a playlist as they listen to this series of The Deep Well?

Erin: This is going to sound so elementary, but when you asked that question, the song that came to mind is, “This little light of mine,  I’m gonna let it shine . . .” It’s this idea that Jesus is the light in us, and that little song that I hope we learned from little was that we are bearers of the light, and that we point to Jesus. So—I don’t know—maybe revisit that song, sing it in your car, or sing it again with your kids as an anthem to all that we’re talking about, that the light is going to shine.

When it comes to Jesus, “Hide it under a bushel—No!” You can’t! He won’t be contained. As we saw in the passages we looked at it in this episode, you could kill Him, you can beat Him, you could put Him in a cave and roll a stone in front of it, and you’re not going to hide the light. That’s what that little song’s about. So that’s what comes to mind for me.

Laura: That is a great one.

Erin: Probably my favorite twenty minutes in every year is when my church, every year, has a candlelit Christmas Eve service. There’s this moment where the sanctuary goes dark, and the pastor lights one candle, and then he starts singing “Silent Night.” And he uses his candle to light a candle on the front row, and it doesn’t take very long at all till all of us are holding candles, and those of us with little ones are just trying to keep them from burning their brother—but we’re singing “Silent Night” a cappella, and it’s really, really powerful. “All is calm, all is bright.” It’s because Jesus, the Light of the World, was born. 

I don’t know what time of year it will be when someone’s listening to this, but it doesn’t really matter. Anytime of year you can light a candle and sing, “All is calm, all is bright,” because of Jesus.

Laura: I’m so glad you brought up Christmas, because during your lesson I was thinking about how profound it is that the Christmas story talks about when Jesus was born, there were shepherds in the field and the angels appeared to them, and the nighttime sky shone with the glory of God. It just lit up, and the star lit up the sky. So with Jesus’s arrival we see light piercing through the darkness. It’s just so interesting to me that upon His death there were those three hours of darkness in the middle of the day.

Erin: Yes, what a juxtaposition. He was King at both points. He was King when the sky was full of light, and He was King when the sky was full of darkness. He’s always King.

Laura: Right, and God used the day and the night and all of that to teach us and show us and get our attention. I think that’s so kind of Him.

What do you make of the fact that it was only three hours of darkness? In the scheme of history, that’s such a little blip.

Erin: Yes, you’re right. I looked at that timeframe a lot as I was studying, I tried to make sense of it, I tried to trace it to somewhere else where there was three hours. I’m always hoping there’s a clue there that I’m going to unlock into some other great mystery. The answer is, I don’t know, but I did for the first time as I was studying these passages think about what a mercy that was. I mean, this was the full wrath of God falling on Jesus! Certainly a day of darkness would have been appropriate; a year of darkness would have been appropriate; a century of darkness would have been appropriate. But it didn’t take long for God to reverse that darkness and get busy with the business of bringing back the light. So I don’t know why it was three hours, but I sure am glad it was.

Laura: The verses made me think of Psalm 30. It says, “For His anger lasts only a moment, but His favor lasts a lifetime. Weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.”

I’m wondering, Erin, if you have any specific story where you experienced weeping for the night and then rejoicing in the morning?

Erin: What comes to mind is when my third son, Judah, had to have really major kidney surgery at ten months. It was awful. I mean, nobody wants their baby to have surgery, and I had prayed for longer than ten months, because we knew about this problem when he was in utero, so I’d prayed for probably eleven months that God would supernaturally heal Judah and that we wouldn’t end up in that place. And we did.

So we had this one really horrible night in the hospital. He had tubes hanging out of his back, he was only ten months old and they tried to put him in this giant hospital crib, and he wouldn’t sleep, and it was a terrible night. I remember it being one of those nights where I would think, Surely an hour has passed, and I would look at the clock and two minutes had passed. I remember feeling like, We’re not going to make it. I’m not going to make it through this night.

In the morning, he just bounced back. He just was my happy, smiley guy. We got to leave the hospital room, and he was just crawling at that point, but he crawled everywhere with an IV pole and tubes out of his back. I do remember feeling like, Oh, we made it through that night. We made it through that night that I didn’t think I was going to be able to survive because it was so hard to watch.

Now, we weren’t dancing the next day, but he did start dancing. He made an amazing recovery, and he’s a happy, strong eight-year-old boy with a big scar on his back now, but that’s the night that comes to mind. It was a night of weeping and a morning where I realized the Lord got us through.

Laura: It’s story like that and the stories you’ve been taking us through in this series that turn our eyes to this bigger picture, that we’ve explored today, of Jesus going into the vast darkness of our sin and paying the penalty for our sin, and then the light that comes from that—forever and ever! The everlasting light of our eternal life with Him.

Thank you, Erin. We’re only halfway, and I’m looking forward to the rest of this season.

Erin: Me, too.

Laura: If the Holy Spirit is stirring you to fill your mind with truth, there is nothing better that you can fill your mind with than the gospel. Erin will help you explore the gospel in a fresh way in her Bible study, which is called Seven Feasts: Finding Christ in the Sacred Celebrations of the Old Testament. This Bible study will help you get to know both the Old Testament and New Testament better and see how they’re connected, and to see Jesus from beginning to end. You can get a copy by visiting ReviveOurHearts.com/TheDeepWell.

Erin, what’s coming up on the next episode?

Erin: Well, we’re going to stay in the Gospels and look at something that might not seem like an eclipse at first glance: the ascension of Jesus.

The Deep Well is a production of Revive Our Hearts, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the ESV.

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