Without attempting, at this time, to enter into the meaning and character of this wondrous scene, we desire simply to call attention to the threefold testimony C which is here. given to Christ and His work the moment He had cried with a loud voice, and yielded up the ghost, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom. This was a divine action, God’s own interposition, the significance of which may be gathered from Hebrews’ 9 and 10. It proclaimed that God was now free in righteousness as well as in grace, ‘on the ground of what had been accomplished on the cross, to go out after the sinner, and that the sinner was also free, on receiving the testimony concerning that finished work, to go into the holiest of all, into the immediate presence of God. The rending of the veil was God’s own testimony to the efficacy of the blood of Christ. We also read that “the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after His resurrection.” There was therefore a three days’ interval between the rending of the veil and the resurrection of the saints, but the Holy Spirit has connected the two because both alike are the fruits of the death of Christ. If the rending of the veil speaks of the efficacy of His precious blood, the raising of these saints tells no less clearly of Him who is the resurrection and the life, and it was thus a testimony to the power of life in Him as risen from the dead. (John 11:25; 2 Corinthians 5) In the last place the centurion, and those who were with him, convinced by what they had seen, “ feared greatly, saying, Truly this was the Son of God.” This was a testimony, whether rendered intelligently or otherwise, to the truth as to His person. If therefore Christ stood alone, no one raising his voice on His behalf before His persecutors, if He were forsaken by God in His death, as He must have been as made sin, no sooner has His mighty, work been accomplished than God steps fix and raises a powerful and glorious threefold testimony to the efficacy of the atonement, to the power of His resurrection, and to the fact that He who had died on that shameful tree was no less than the Son of God.
E. D.