Most Christians don’t question Good Friday. It’s tradition. It’s in the hymns. It’s been the calendar of the church for centuries. Palm Sunday leads to Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and then Easter Sunday morning. The story has a familiar rhythm, and that rhythm feels sacred.
Jim Cookman isn’t interested in tearing anything down. He has spent more than sixty years studying and teaching God’s Word, and his message this Sabbath wasn’t a theological argument. It was a biblical one. A careful one. And it starts with a simple observation: if Good Friday is true, then Jesus didn’t keep His own promise.
The Only Sign Jesus Gave
The religious establishment of His day kept pressing Jesus for a sign. Prove you are who you say you are. Show us something. Jesus’ answer in Matthew 12 is direct and, depending on how you understand it, either confirms or undermines Good Friday entirely.
“An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:39,40).
Three days. Three nights. That was the sign. The only sign Jesus offered as proof of His identity to a skeptical generation.
Jim’s question, asked plainly, without hostility, is this: can you fit three days and three nights between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning?
Running the Numbers
Work it out. Jesus dies late Friday afternoon, buried before sundown. Friday night is night one. Saturday, the Sabbath, is day one. Saturday night is night two. Then Sunday morning arrives and the tomb is already empty.
That’s one full day and two nights, at most. Even generous counting of “partial days” gets you to three days but never three nights. Jim was direct about this: “We can’t get three days and three nights between Friday and Sunday morning. Baloney.”
Jesus himself clarified what He meant. In John 11:9, He asked: “Are there not twelve hours in a day?” He wasn’t being poetic. He was specifying. A day means a day. Three days and three nights means exactly what it sounds like, in Hebrew, the language in which Jonah’s sign was given.
The Timeline That Actually Fits
Jim walked through an alternative timeline, one anchored entirely in scripture, not tradition. It begins on Wednesday afternoon.
Mark 15:25 records the crucifixion beginning at the third hour, 9:00 AM. Luke 23:44-46 records darkness falling across the earth from the sixth hour to the ninth hour, noon to 3:00 PM. When the ninth hour arrived, the veil of the temple tore in two, and Jesus breathed His last.
Mark 15:25 records the crucifixion beginning at the third hour — 9:00 AM. Luke 23:44-46 records darkness falling across the earth from the sixth hour to the ninth — noon to 3:00 PM. When the ninth hour arrived, the veil of the temple tore in two, and Jesus breathed His last.
He died Wednesday at 3 PM. The same hour the Passover lambs were being slaughtered at the Temple. The same hour, the same day, by no coincidence at all.
Now run the timeline forward.
Wednesday night is night one. Thursday, the High Sabbath — the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread — is day one. Thursday night is night two. Friday, the day the women purchased their spices and prepared them (Luke 23:55–56), is day two. Friday night is night three. Saturday, the weekly Sabbath, is day three.
At the end of Saturday, at roughly sundown, the three days and three nights are complete. And when Mary Magdalene arrived at the tomb while it was still dark Sunday morning — the tomb was already empty.
John 19:31 makes the timeline even clearer. The preparation day before the burial was preparing for a high Sabbath, not the weekly Sabbath, but the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which fell that year on Thursday. Two Sabbaths in one week. Missing that distinction is how the tradition got built on a broken foundation.
Why the Spices Tell the Story
One detail Jim pointed out is easy to overlook but hard to explain away. Mark 16:1 says the women bought spices after the Sabbath passed. Luke 23:56 says they prepared spices and then rested on the Sabbath according to the commandment. Both accounts are accurate — because there were two Sabbaths.
They couldn’t buy spices on the High Sabbath Thursday. So they bought them on Friday, prepared them on Friday, then rested on the weekly Sabbath Saturday. Then went to the tomb Sunday morning in the dark, and found it already empty.
That sequence requires a Wednesday crucifixion. It doesn’t work any other way.
Why It Matters Beyond the Calendar
Jim’s closing was not a lecture. It was pastoral. He wasn’t attacking Good Friday Christians or declaring anyone outside the faith. He made that plain.
But he did ask this: if Good Friday to Sunday morning cannot produce three days and three nights, then what happens to the only sign Jesus gave?
“The sign of Jonah was the only sign he gave to the religious establishment that He was the Messiah. If we believe Good Friday to Sunday morning, we are saying Jesus was mistaken. Jesus is never mistaken. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.”
Tradition is not the same as truth. The calendar of the church and the words of Jesus are not always the same thing. And when they’re not, the words of Jesus win.
This is not a minor correction. This is the sign. The one Jesus said would prove everything. It’s worth getting right.
Watch the full teaching from Jim Cookman on our YouTube channel.
Greater Phoenix Church of God meets every Saturday at 10:30 AM at 4300 N. 82nd Street, Scottsdale, AZ. All are welcome, wherever you are in your journey.