World History, Chapter 2: Edited 4/15/20.
Creation To Final Judgment:
What do we mean by “the last day or last days?” From my understanding of Scripture, there will be two last days: one for the bride of Christ, ending here on earth with the rapture of the church. The second is when the Lord Jesus establishes his kingdom here on earth. We need a starting point to determine when these two periods begin and end.
Through visions, dreams, symbols, etc., God has left many clues for us in prophecy, some revealed only now as the pages of history are being written. Specific prophesies were fulfilled in one day, such as Israel becoming a nation on 5/14/1948. Others have taken hundreds or even thousands of years, such as Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of an image of a man found in Daniel 2. From its head of gold to the very moment, the stone without hands crushes the image to pieces. It will take over 2600 years, and empires will have risen and fallen between these two periods.
We need to ask two questions. When did God’s time clock start up? And how long has the LORD given humankind and the devil before the Day of Judgment?
Let me answer the second question: God has given mankind 6,037 years, 4,000 from the fall to the birth of Jesus Christ. Then, thirty years of God’s peace and goodwill toward men. Then came three and one-half years when the Lord confirmed his new covenant. Then, in another 2,000 years, the two witnesses and antichrist will be revealed. Then the great tribulation follows, lasting three-and-a-half years, totaling 6037 years.
2 Peter 3:8, “One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day,”
Six days to create and a seventh day of rest. But God’s countdown did not begin until the fall of Adam and Eve when they were expelled from the garden.
Let’s get back to question one: when did the first day of these last days begin? The only correct and accurate source we have concerning the history of the world is the chronology Scriptures offer. We have many scholars who have studied the chronology of the Bible, but one man stands out from most others; his name is James Usher, D.D.
Mr. Ussher was the archbishop of Armagh; he lived in the late 16th century and died in 1665. He was the author of the standard chronology of the Bible, taking all the generations of the Bible from Adam to Noah, to Abraham, David, Solomon, and every son, daughter, and known historical event to give us a concise account from Adam’s fall to bishop Ussher’s death. When he completed his research in the 16th century, he calculated the earth to be some 5700 years of age.
Professor James Barr wrote in 1984: “So far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer of Genesis 1, intended to convey to their readers the ideas that the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a chronology from the beginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story.”
Who is James Barr? James Barr, 3/24, died 10/2006. Was a Scottish Old Testament scholar at Oxford University and the Oriel Professor of the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures and the Regius Professor of Hebrew; educated at Daniel Stewart’s College in Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh; ordained to the ministry of the Church of Scotland; held professorship in New College Edinburgh, University of Manchester, Princeton Theological Seminary and Vanderbilt University.
You may ask, what is a Regius Professor? a name given to the incumbents of those professorships founded by royal bounty. Obviously, this is a recanalization of great importance.
So, can Bishop Ussher’s calculations be trusted? I was looking for indisputable evidence from a Christian source by a person or persons who dedicated their time to draw a proper conclusion as to “when did God’s time clock begin”?
Again, when I speak of the start of time, I refer to the moment Adam was cast from the garden.
Genesis 3:24, “So He (God) drove out the man; and He placed at the east end of the garden of Eden Cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”
Several highly regarded individuals have examined the Biblical chronology of man and drawn the same reasonable conclusions. This chronology is called the Ussher-Lightfoot chronology because John Lightfoot published a chronology in 1642-1644. However, this is a misnomer because his chronology was based upon Bishop Ussher’s work alone and not his. It appears Dr. Lightfoot agreed with Bishop Ussher’s work because he signed off on it.
Who was Dr. Lightfoot? Born 3/29/1602, died 12/6/1675, an English churchman, rabbinical scholar, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and Master of St. Catharine’s College. Cambridge. He had left his library of Old Testament books and documents to Harvard University, but they were destroyed in the great fire of 1764.
Bishop Ussher calculated the first day of Creation began at nightfall on Saturday, October 23, 4004 BC, in the anticipated Julian calendar, near the autumnal equinox. Elsewhere, he dates the time to be 6 pm.
Ussher’s specific choice of the first year was possibly influenced by the wide belief that the earth’s potential duration was 6,000 years (4,000 before the birth of Jesus Christ and 2,000 after), corresponding to the six days of Creation.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “I shall be defending Ussher’s chronology as an honorable effort for its time and arguing that our usual ridicule only records a lamentable small-mindedness based on mistaken use of present criteria to judge a distant and different past. Ussher represented the best of scholarship in his time. He was part of a substantial research tradition, a large community of intellectuals working toward a common goal under an accepted methodology.
Who was Stephen Jay Gould?
Stephen Jay Gould was born on 9/41 and died on 5/2002; paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He taught at Harvard University and New York University and worked at the Museum of Natural History. His most significant contribution to evolutionary biology was the theory of punctuated equilibrium.
Ussher had narrowed down the date of Creation by using the Jewish calendar to establish Creation as having begun on a Sunday near the autumnal equinox. The day of the week was a backward calculation from the six days of Creation, with God resting on the seventh, which in the Jewish tradition is Saturday; therefore, Creation began on a Sunday. He estimated that the equinox occurred on Tuesday, October 25, only one day earlier than the traditional day of its Creation, on the fourth day of Creation week. Modern equations place the autumnal equinox of 4004 B.C. on Sunday, the 10/23 Julian period.
You may ask, what is an equinox? The word comes from the Latin aequinoctium, aequus (equal), and nox (genitive noctis) (night.) It is when daytime and night are of approximately equal duration. Sunrise begins in the daytime when the top of the Sun’s disk rises above the eastern horizon. At that moment, the disk’s center is still below the horizon.
Chronologies by others correspond closely to Ussher’s because they all used the same methodology to calculate certain events recorded in Scripture. Three distinct periods used by Ussher and others are,
1. Christ’s day of conception was given to Mary by the Holy Spirit.
2. Because Josephus indicated that Herod the Great died after Jesus’ birth in 4 B.C. The year 2 B.C. is an acceptable time for Herod’s death.
3. Other events and dates from this period come from other cultures, such as the Chaldeans, Persians, and Romans. We have the death of the Chaldean King Nebuchadnezzar, the 2ed, who destroyed Jerusalem and the temple in 586 B.C. This date correlates with the 37th year of the exile of Jehoiachin, 2 Kings 25:27, etc.
Now we have a starting point for our 6037 years, October 23, 4004 BC. It will end with the return of our Lord Jesus Christ when the great tribulation is over.
Phillip LaSpino www.seekfirstwisdom.com