For a thousand years in Your sight are like yesterday when it is past, and like a watch in the night.
//Here’s one for you guys who think the universe is really thirteen or
fourteen billion years old. Hogwash, right? My Bible says the world
began in the year 4,004 BC. That’s just 6,016 years ago, folks.
Of course, the book of Psalms indicates that for God, a thousand years goes by like a watch in the night. A few hours.
Lamentations
2:19 describes the first watch, presumably from sunset to 10 pm. Judges
7:19 describes the second, from 10 pm to 2 am. Exodus 14:24 gives us
the third, the “morning watch,” from 2 am to morning light. So there are
roughly four hours in each watch.
Now,
let’s do a little math. Apparently, 1,000 years for God goes by in four
hours, and the number of four-hour periods in 1,000 years is 2,190,000.
God’s time runs 2,190,000 times faster than our time.
So
the universe began 6,016 years ago, from God’s perspective? How long is
that in “human years?” 6,016 X 2,190,000 = 13.2 billion years.
Hey, maybe our scientists got it right!
(Corollary:
Methuselah lived to be 969 years old. That means he died at the ripe
old age of three hours and fifty two minutes. Well, every theory has its
problems.)
Though surely that verse is mere hyperbole, and not a very imaginatively constructed one at that. Surely God's experience of time is completely incompatible with any linear measurement.
ReplyDelete2,190,000 faster than us may sound like a lot, but it still means that God's experience is finite, linear, and focused on one period of time at a time. That just places our limitations upon God and magnifies them.
Surely God is able to experience all time at once, or all dimensions simultaneously, or experience a nanosecond so fully that it lasts a million eons, or something even more beyond our comprehension.
I'm not fond of that Psalm verse. To me, its attempt to make God sound grand just make him sound small (kind of like "Wow God, you are so big, that you are like 5 elephants put together - no, maybe even 6!")
By the same token, I think Young Earth Creationists do the same thing when they insist on a literal Genesis interpretation. They make God out to be implausibly, depressingly small.
lol, Dave, you always bring a chuckle to my day. So the original writers were decribing as big a God as they could possibly imagine, but this is depressingly small by today's thinking?
ReplyDeleteI sorta read John's Gospel that way: It's a wake-up call to say "hey, guys, God is a whole lot bigger than you think!"