So we are right on top of it. We are, on a Roman calendar, on Passover AD 31. We now have everything in place to understand the implication of a verse that we jumped over many times in my dissertation here back in John 9. This verse will prove, as you study the charts that I gave to you, that John 7:37 is referring to the 7th and last day of the Feast of Tabernacles. What does John 9:13-14 say?
The day that the blind man was healed was a Sabbath. That ought to be very clear, because that was the Last Great Day, and that was a Sabbath. Now what day was that? It was the day after the 7th day of the Feast of Tabernacles. It was the Last Great Day, which was the day after the Feast of Tabernacles. Now we have a choice. That day was either a weekly Sabbath, or it was a double Sabbath. Which was it? The answer is, it was a double Sabbath. It was a weekly Sabbath, and it was the Last Great Day as well.
Now why did John not say in John 9:4 that it was a high day like he did in John 19:31? Actually, there is a very obvious reason, that obvious reason being that anybody who was unfamiliar with Judaism, (and there are pretty strong thoughts that John, in a way, wrote the book of John for Gentiles), would not have had a great deal of knowledge of the Hebrew calendar, and would have to be told that that particular day was a high day. They might know about the weekly Sabbath, but they might not know at all about the Holy Day Sabbath. So in order to be clear, God inspired John in John 19:31 to make sure that everybody understood that that day, which was the day after Passover, was a high Holy Day. We have no problem at all with that because we know about the Holy Days.
Now what day of the week did that Passover fall on? It fell on a Wednesday. So the day in John 19:31 was a high Holy Day. It was the 15th of Nisan. It was Thursday. Thursday was not the kind of day you would expect to be a Sabbath unless you really knew about the holy days, and you could say, "Yeah, that's right. It was a high holy day." If a Jew would read that, he would understand it, but if a Greek would read it, he would not understand, and so John put parentheses around that phrase in John 19:31—"(that Sabbath was a high day)"—to draw attention to the fact that we are talking about something that they probably would not know. In John 9, he did not have to do that because that day was a weekly Sabbath. It already was a holy day. That is just very simple to understand.
What we are heading for is this. This verse proves three things once we have calendar calculations that are available to us for these particular times of the year. (1) This will show that the seventh and last day of the Feast of Tabernacles cannot be the eighth day. (2) It is going to prove that Christ was crucified in AD 31, and (3), it also proves that the postponement rules were in effect at the time of Christ. All three of these together prove that we are using the correct calendar today in our time.
