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The Celestial Clock
The true keeper of time isn’t the clock on our wall or the calendar on our desk. Rather, the true keeper of time is the celestial clock that God created on the fourth day of Creation:
“And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 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.” (Genesis 1:14-16)
Days
A solar day is defined as a single rotation of Earth with respect to the sun. In other words, it’s the time it takes the sun to go from a point in the sky one day to the same point the next day. The sun’s highest point in the sky is typically the point that is used when measuring a solar day and it is a constant 24 hours in length.
Months
A true month, from a Biblical perspective, is measured by the time between two new moons. The evening when the first sliver of a new moon is witnessed marks the beginning of a month and continues till the next sliver of a new moon is witnessed. This is called a lunar month. It actually takes about 29.5 days to complete a full lunar cycle so calendars that are based on moon cycles typically alternate their months between 29 and 30 days to maintain the average of 29.5 days.
Years
For the purposes of studying the history of time, this is the unit of measurement we are really interested in. A year is determined by the time it takes the Earth to make a full orbit around the sun. A true year is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds long. Written as a rounded demical a year is 365.24 days in length.
Notice that a year is not exactly 365 days in length. There is almost a quarter of an extra day. In order to keep our modern calendar in line with Earth’s orbit around the sun we add an extra day to our calendar every four years, so every fourth year is 366 days long on our calendar and we call that a leap year. If we did not do this our calendar would get an extra quarter of a day ahead of the celestial clock every year. As a result, in 758 years our calendar would be exactly half a year off. In other words, it would be summer in December and winter in July. So we prevent this by adding a day every four years.
However, there is not exactly a quarter of an extra day each year. There is almost a quarter: 0.24. This means that every four years when we add an extra day we are overcorrecting. We are adding a full day when there is only 0.96 of a day extra for which we are compensating. To compensate for our overcorrection, we do not add the extra day every 100th year even though when following the pattern that 100th year should be counted as a leap year. Then every 400th year we ignore this rule and still add the extra day. This keeps our calendar in line with the celestial clock over long periods of time.
This is quite confusing at first so to make sure we really understand this we are going to clarify. This is admittedly tedious but it is important to understand this when studying time closely as we will do in our end times study.
Now, the above formula works extremely well and is impressively accurate over thousands of years. When instituting this calendar in 1582 they had to determine what year to start counting from when determining which years would be leap years. They also had to determine which 100th years would mark the “leap” years where an extra day would not be added. To keep things simple, they used centennial years. This means that any year divisible by four is a leap year, unless it is a centinneal year (i.e. 1800, 1900, 2000). Every fourth centennial year is still a leap year. They decided to make 1600 a leap year. That meant that the next three centennial years (1700, 1800, 1900) would not be leap years and therefore would not receive the added extra day. The fourth centennial year, the year 2000, was the next centennial year that remained a leap year.
It’s important to note that they could just have easily chosen the year 1700 to be a leap year instead of the year 1600. This would have made the year 2000 a non-leap year and the year 2100 would have been the next centennial leap year. This would not have altered the overall accuracy of the calendar in any way.
The point here is to recognize the amazing accuracy of our calendar. In any given year, the most our calendar is ever off from the celestial clock is 18 hours. It’s important to recognize that this is the worst case scenario. On the grand scale over hundreds of years, it is amazing to think that our calendar has never been more than 18 hours off from the celestial clock that God created.
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