“For then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world: but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” Hebrews 9:26
The birth, death, burial and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ happened approximately two thousand years ago. And Paul, the apostle to the gentiles, says that is ‘the end of the world’. Which gives me a headache. Bishop Usher said that the entire time of the created world would only be 6,000 years. This current period marks off one third of Usher’s chronology since the Lord’s resurrection: not exactly the end of the world, is it? How about the Jewish calendar? That one gives 5,772 as the current year of creation. More headaches! What kind of calendar applies “the end of the world” to the history since the Lord’s resurrection? What about the Incas, what did they say? Well, most of their calendars were melted down by the Spanish for the gold. But some of their dates were translated and recorded in books. One of those books gave the number 1,716 for the years from the Creation to the Great Flood. Which doesn’t really clear up anything for me.
The hundreds of millions of years postulated by some scientists is simply impossible. The elements are decaying. In those millions of years, some of them should have disappeared. None of the elements seem to be missing.
Even Bishop Usher might admit that there is not one verse of Scripture to indicate just how long the Lord God planned to maintain this world. His 6,000 year model has no basis in the Bible. The one pattern that I’ve seen, which indicates a time frame, is in Leviticus 25. That chapter is 55 verses long, so I won’t print the whole thing here. It gives a pattern of 50 (fifty) years for the Jewish Year of Jubilee. Seven years, times seven times, equals forty nine years: and the fiftieth year is the Jubilee. If we extrapolate that pattern to 50,000 years for the earth, that will allow enough time for all the pre-historic cultures that have left beautifully crafted mysteries for us. Gold chains imbedded in coal: magnifying lenses found among beds of broken porcelain pots: fossils of humanoids who look quite different from us. There was time for those things before the Flood. And if these last two thousand or so years are the “end of the world”? Then it’s time for the Jubilee. Even so, please return, Lord Jesus.
