“In that day,” declares the Sovereign Lord,
“I will make the sun go down at noon
and darken the earth in broad daylight.”
Amos 8:9
The darkness shrouded our Lord, and at the moment when He suffered
the most extreme agony, His suffering was hidden from all human eyes.
The impenetrable secrecy of those last hours is what enables us to
imagine and appreciate the inconceivable suffering He endured. In
His previous hours of suffering, He had been exposed to view. But
human eyes were never intended to see Him in His supreme anguish.
There is no way we could ever do justice in describing that horrible
time, so God hid it from us.
If Jesus’ experience as the Sinbearer revealed itself on His face,
as Isaiah seems to indicate in his fifty-third chapter, and if it
affected His appearance that men should take no notice of Him, then
those last hours in which His sufferings climaxed must have impressed
themselves on Him in unequaled severity.
Gethsemane is described for us in Scripture, but we read nothing about
the last half of Calvary. Peter,James, and John were given an audience
to His private suffering in Gethsemane, but at Calvary, God drew the
drapes of darkness around Him to hide Him from human eyes.
Oh, the mysteries of that suffering! No man’s eyes should ever see them.
All that man was permitted to know of His suffering was to hear the terrible
cry of incomprehensible pain and torment. Yet in that cry was the sound of
certain victory, for the mournful cry, “Why have you forsaken me?” follows
only upon the heels of the confident shout, “My God,my God.”
from The Six Miracles of Calvary by William R. Nicholson. Pages 24,25