God's Calendar

"If you had a watch, you'd know what time it is.  Then you'd know it be night time, and night time ain't no time to be in this here neighborhood, so how bout a watch?"  While this quote off an old Cheech and Chong album is kinda silly at face value, it really does (as any good comedy does) have some measure of truth to it.   If you don't have a means by which to measure time, You won't know what time it is.  This all circles around to what I want to get at, the subject of time.

The way we measure time today is not the way we used to measure time.  It was more of a man made invention.There are all kinds of Calendars though.  The Mayan calendar was recently popular; then there is the Chinese calender, the Jewish Calendar, and so forth.  I even read somewhere where someone had thought up a metric calendar.  So many ways to keep track of our comings and goings.

Did you know the Bible has a calendar too?  Most people would assume it to be the Jewish calendar, but not really.  The Jewish calendar has been adjusted over the years and is now more reflective of the common calendar we use world wide.  God's calendar is found in scripture, and is really quite different than the measuring of time accepted today as standard.

For the student of the Bible, and especially those who are into the prophesies of the Bible, the difference is significant.  For the apologist out there defending the bible, it will be of great import.  To illustrate this, I will give you some examples of where this might come into play.

Someone once calculated the age of the earth based upon the biblical genealogies by taking the given ages in them and adding them up until we came to a known time.  The age approximated to 6,000 years, or something like 4004BC  (if I am remembering correct).    Also using this method, the flood was dated around roughly 2500 BC our time.  These times run into problems with historians and archaeologists who have evidence of civilization, such as the Chinese, existing to 3500 BC (assuming they are correct).  The problems come in the translation of times.

There are also issues with translation of language.  In biblical genealogies, the word we translate as "begat", may not mean the next in line, only that one eventually came from the loins of.  We can find where they begetting was direct, but other places there are gaps of time.  All the books we have in the bible are also not directly one after another, having gaps of time between prophets and writers.

When calculating prophecies, one has to consider biblical time as opposed to our measurements.  Many who went by our time when measuring the Bible thought for sure we were entering the millennial kingdom in the year 2000, being that would then be the 7th "day" with calculations on our current calendars.  The current Jewish calendar though only has us in 5773,  nearly 200 Jewish years from that supposed setup. 

You can see where all this time translation can get kind of confusing.  Most people are not all that into these calculations, but, It is important for the believer to get an understanding about God's calendar and how it operates.  Maybe not so much about the past or the future, but about the present.  We live in the now.  Knowing about God's calendar will help us to know what we should be doing and when we should be doing it.  There are holidays and observances that should be observed, and they won't be observed correctly if you are not using God's calendar.    The holidays on our current calendars are not correct and does not observe many of the things a believer should observe. 

I know I did not get into the nuts and bolts here very deeply, and this is something I am still learning about.  Suffice it to say that if you had God's watch, then you would know what time it is.  Then you would know it is the end times, which is no time to be in the lost neighborhoods. 

Here is a nice calendar calculator
Calendar Converter