I don’t know
about you, but I remember a lot of hype in the Christian world about the year
2000. I think people expected Christ to
return January 1, 2000 . I’ll admit I myself hoped for that to be the
case.
I spent many
fall nights in 1999 passing out Gospel tracks on the sidewalks of Washington DC
I remember the
movies made about the rapture and the time of the tribulation. A lot of people thought the end time had come. Sometime in December 1999 I turned to a
friend and said, “What’s going to happen to all of these preachers who are
saying, ‘Get ready, get ready,’ if Christ doesn’t come back?” I figured there would be disillusioned converts
at some point.
To give the
preachers credit, it made sense from a Western world view to set Christ’s return
on the millennium change. According to
the Gregorian calendar it would have been 2000 years since the birth of Christ (though
in truth the exact date of Christ’s birth was miscalculated by four or six
years). Nice round numbers do give
themselves to fulfilling prophecy.
I figure no harm
was really done. Any impetus for people
to straighten out their lives is good. Not
to mention the fact that according to scripture we are to be ready for Christ’s
return at any hour – like a thief in the night.
It did make a
lot of people think, including myself. I
started thinking about the sermon I never preached.
As I said above,
we live under the Gregorian calendar. The
Gregorian calendar is a solar based calendar that measures a year as one cycle
of the Earth around the sun. Other calendars
measure the seasons based on the moon’s cycles around the Earth, these are
lunar calendars.
The Hebrew calendar
is a solar-lunar calendar. It measures
the year using the solar cycle and measures the months using the lunar cycle. New years are proclaimed when the Mosaic Law
determines it is time for a new year, though yearly cycles are roughly equivalent
to Gregorian years. One Hebrew year is
the same in duration.
The Gregorian
system starts with the Birth of Christ as the center of things. The years Before Christ (BC) increment as you
get further ‘back’ into history, and decrement as you get closer to the
nativity.
The Hebrew
system starts with the beginning of time and counts forward. Year 1 Anno Mundi (AM) represents Genesis
Chapter 1. Year 1 of the Gregorian
Calendar Anno Domini (AD), represent the year that Christ was born.
1 AD in
Gregorian corresponds to 3761 AM in the Hebrew calendar. This year, 20013, corresponds to AM 5772. Year 2000 corresponded to 5760 AM.
If you approach time
from a Western World view, two thousand years after the Birth of Christ seemed
like a logical time for His return. If
you approach it from a more Eastern view or a strictly Hebrew view there really
wasn’t anything special about the year 5760.
I would have gone for the year 6000 AM – basing it on a creation
microcosm. God created the world in six
days and rested on the seventh. The
millennial reign would be the seventh day of rest.
Have you ever
asked the question, “Why did Christ come when He did?” When I was in third grade I had a friend who
asked me when the world was going to end.
I really didn’t have a clue, but I figured if Christ was the savior of
the world, wouldn’t he be at the center of time?
I had a religion
teacher in high school tell me Christ came to Earth when the Roman
Empire was at its peak so there would be a system in place to
spread the Gospel quickly. I don’t know
if I would word it quite like that.
God used the Roman Empire to spread the Gospel, I can agree with
that. However, it is a kind of man-centric
to assume God waited for the Roman Empire . I’m of the opinion God brought the Roman Empire to its peak at the right time to fulfill His
timing, not the other way around.
So. Why then? That question was asked again in one of our
Sunday Morning Bible Studies. I turned
to my wife and said, “I have an idea.”
I showed her
Genesis 1:16-19 “And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the
day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the
heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the
night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was
good. And the evening and the morning
were the fourth day.” It wasn’t until
the fourth day that God made the sun and moon.
Do you think he followed that same pattern in history? Maybe he waited till year 4000 before he
brought the Light of the World to the Earth?
What is
significant about the year 4000? Well,
nothing in particular, but if you look at creation as a microcosm of history,
like an atom is a microcosm of a galaxy, you might look at it in this way. Christ came to earth according to the Hebrew
calendar around 3761 years after creation.
If you go with Peter’s adage in II Peter 3:8, “But, beloved, be not
ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years,
and a thousand years as one day,” in a microcosmic approach to history it would
be the fourth ‘Day’ that the Light of the World came.
In Luke, the
coming of Christ was described as such, “the dayspring from on high hath
visited us, To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of
death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” (Luke 1:79)
Obviously, the
only one who really knows why God waited until He did to bring Christ to Earth is
God himself. Or, it may be that God
didn’t wait at all. Perhaps Christ came early. It does say time was shortened, Matthew 24:22
“And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved.”
The microcosm
idea lends itself as an explanation, though there is little or no empirical
proof. At the very least, it gave me a better theory than the one about
the Roman roads and the languages of the time.
