What Happens To Us? Series

God doesn’t have, nor did he create calendars. He created everything in six days and on the seventh day he rested, because he was finished. Whether we take those as literal days or not, they represent what we have termed a week, and I believe those were literal days, but to God those numbers may have just meant that he was finished on the seventh day (the day of completion or perfection) and could now rest.

So what does the word day (or Yom) mean? Well let me tell you that this word in Strong’s concordance literally means to “be hot” representing the heat of the day. It is used as an adverb often and in this form can mean 54 different things, including age, everlasting, season, year, forever, elder and on and on it goes.

Why is this important? It’s important because we do not have the literal Bible. Does that make it wrong? No, it just means that as we have translated the original languages over time, we get the gist of the word, or the best choice of the translators. So when we talk about taking the Bible literally, we have to remember that the literal Bible is Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and our translations are the best guesses, and are probably sometimes based on our biases. That’s why you get some disagreement about specific words even amoung our best English translations.

Now some will say that we should use the King James for the most accuracy as it is the first English translation. The problem with that is it is also based on newer Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. Now they are pretty accurate, but since the 1600’s we have uncovered thousands of much older original manuscripts that had not gone through as much translation as the ones the King James uses. My point is that we cannot fully understand the little specifics of the Bible unless we can read the original manuscripts in the language and context they were written.

Remember God mixed up the languages at the tower of Babel so that we could not understand, just as he had to kick Adam and Eve out of the Garden for danger that they would know what God knew and be able to do what God did. Nothing would be impossible for them.

God wanted humanity to be dependent on Him, in other words to have faith in Him, like the baby Jesus did all through his life. The more we know what he knows, the less we need to have faith. He wants us to know principles not always specifics. And our translations of the Bible portray the principles we need to know very well. Could Jesus have not let the disciples know when he was coming back? I think so, but he didn’t, he says only the Father knows. The Father is in Him, so I think he knew, but we would not understand so he just refers us to the signs and principles. If we did have all the details, then everyone could wait until the day before he comes back, live any way they wanted and quickly repent and turn to Jesus right before he returned.

The point in all of this is that we are not to know the times or seasons, or the day or hour. We are given the signs, we are told it is coming, and we are told it will surprise those who don’t belong to God, so we must be ready for it at any time. It requires faith when we can’t know or agree upon the specifics.