Blackout wrote:

It's been a while since I've read revelations, but isn't there a part that basically says no one can know exactly when it will happen? Isn't that what is supposed to be freaky scary about it, bang SURPRISE! Also, isn't there something in there that is pretty much a copyright warning, do not add to nor remove anything from this, so are they breaking the rules when they claim they have an exact date? Or am I rusty on all of this again?

This is why I stopped worrying about the end of the world. As for the second part, people are free to make their own meaningless guesses, but that's not the same as altering the holy word of God. I guess if anything, it would fall under bearing false witness, especially if it resulted in genuine believers wavering in their faith.

What I love most about these predictions is that they never take into account the fact that the calendars of the time of Revelations and the present day are entirely disparate, yet they are able to come up with exact times that fit neatly into Gregorian patterns.

Quote:

Years ago we learned from the Bible that the flood occurred in the year 4990 B.C. More recently we learned that Judgment Day is to occur in the year 2011 A.D. 2011 A.D. is exactly 7,000 years after 4990 B.C.

I can imagine God deciding that exactly 2556750 days after the great flood, which He shall never again exact upon His people for all time, He will decide that enough is enough and surprise everyone except a few super inquisitive preachers with a calculator. Never mind that it only has one 7 in it and that it isn't the first or last digit, He works in mysterious ways, so the majority of us will never see it coming.

I took a class that studied the Old and New Testaments and learned that bits and pieces of them have been lost to time, so the Bible is not as exact and infallible as it could be. The current version of the Bible was assembled from a variety of sources including a few human records, to say nothing of the books that were excluded from canon. Even so, do you need every single measurement and letter to be exactly correct in order to believe Jesus died for your sins? Would it matter so much if the people who recorded the genealogies and lengths of kings' reigns were off by a few days? Death tolls in present-day wars are only approximations, so how could you believe that Samson killed exactly 1000 Philistines with a donkey's jawbone and not a single soldier more? Do you think he actually counted and stopped when he hit a nice, round number in a time when base 10 hadn't been invented yet? In any of these cases, what reason does God have for using numbers that roll off the tongue in modern languages? It's like these people believe that God really would be so kind as to make the calculation of the rapture easier by giving out human-friendly exact timings and numbers as opposed to unscientific approximations for something that man isn't able to predict.