Psalm 90:4, How Old is the Universe?
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.)
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Twice before Lee Harmon has written about Christian topics, once on the gospel of John and once on the book of Revelation. But the question people keep asking him is this: As a liberal Christian, why do you care so much about the Bible? Others wonder whether he is truly a Christian at all.
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| Revelation: A love story gone awry. | The Gospel: A love story set aright. |
What really happened 2,000 years ago? How did a persecuted minority of end-time believers known as Christians, with their dreams of Armageddon and a conquering Messiah named Jesus, evolve into the largest religion in the world? Author Lee Harmon explores the period in which the New Testament was written in his books about John's Gospel and Revelation.
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Lee Harmon interviewed on The God Show about the History Channel's miniseries The Bible and Lee's latest book, John's Gospel: The Way It Happened.
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Hello! I'm an author, historical Jesus scholar, book reviewer, and liberal Christian, which means I appreciate and attempt to exercise the humanitarian teachings of Jesus without getting hung up on any particular supernatural or religious beliefs.
The Bible is a magnificent book that has inspired and spiritually fed generations for thousands of years, and each new century seems to bring a deeper understanding of life’s purpose. This is true of not only Christianity; through the years, our age-old religions are slowly transforming from superstitious rituals into humanitarian philosophies. In short, we are growing up, and I am thrilled to be riding the wave.
I avidly read all thought-provoking religion titles. New authors: I'd love to read and review your book!
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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.
2,190,000 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?
I 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!”
i think that the last few thousand have probably been measured by human standards.