CHRIS MCCANN FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 2020
Time has been tracked by most of the world for about 2,000 years according to the lifespan of the Lord Jesus Christ and when (they think) He was born. It is the same mindset today, even though we do not add the “AD” after we say the year and we are thinking only in terms of what year it is and most people do not even stop and think who the calendar is tied to, but the calendar has been tied to individuals since the beginning. For the first 130 years Adam was the calendar reference patriarch; then when Seth was born and for the next 105 years Seth was the calendar reference patriarch;
But now there are more options as more people have been born into the world, so God is going to make a change. He is not going to have Enos begat the next calendar reference patriarch when he is 90. That is not what it means. It means that when Enos was 90, an individual was born that would be in the line of Cainan and then Cainan would come later after Enos had lived 915 more years. In other words, the calendar would follow the entire lifespan of Enos and all the day of Enos were 905 years and then he died and in the year of Enos’ death Cainan was born the same year. Then the Biblical calendar would follow the life of Cainan until Cainan died.
You see, Mr. Camping discovered something that was unlike all of man’s previous attempts to uncover the true Biblical calendar of history and there were several previous attempts to do so. You may have heard of Bishop Ussher who was from the Church of Ireland in the 17th Century. He laid down a Biblical calendar based on the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11, and so forth, and he came up with a creation date of 4,004BC. Of course, if creation was 4,004 BC, it would make the age of the earth just over six thousand years old in our time and it is just much, much too short. Actually, the methodology that Ussher and some others used was thrown off because where it says, “Enos lived 90 years and begat Cainan,” they assumed Cainan was the immediate son of Enos. We can see how they could make this error because God had established an earlier pattern that He now would break – the error was assuming that the word “begat” always means an immediate father/son relationship. In this case, Cainan was “begat” when Enos was 90, but he was not born then; he would not be born into the world for over 815 years after that point. So you can see how there would be a wide discrepancy of years. Even if you were just off by this one instance, your calendar would already be off by 815 years.
The result for these early generations that led up to Noah (the 10th generation) would be a miscalculated calendar that would be off by 4,397 years. There would be 4,397 years that would be missing by the time you got to the flood. Almost 4,400 years would not be taken into account because of the way God has hidden truth in the Bible with His calendar, which was very precisely set in place, end to end: upon the death of one Biblical calendar patriarch, the next calendar patriarch was born the same year and that individual’s lifespan would go on until he died and, upon his death, the next Biblical calendar patriarch would be born.
When people do not follow the proper methodology and they think that the word “begat” always means an immediate father/son relationship, then they end up thinking that from creation to Noah’s age of 600 when the flood began there is an elapsed timeline of only 1,626 years and 600 of those years are the in the days of Noah. This means that according to their calendar from the time of creation, if Adam died in the year 930, then about 100 years later Noah is born and 600 years into Noah’s life was the flood. Everything is jammed into a short span of time that does not allow for the necessary time that God has placed in His Word. Then they do the same thing with their calendar after the flood (Genesis 11) and that is how they come up with a very compact 4,004 years of the Old Testament, plus the 2,000+ years of the New Testament and when you put the two together, it is about 6,020 years, but the actual age of the earth from creation until Christ’s birth in 7BC was 11,006 years. They are off over seven thousand years on the Old Testament side. The error is on the Old Testament side where they have lost about seven thousand years because they failed to understand how God wrote His calendar.