Length of creative days. (page 2)

drwtsn32

the 7th day should be the same length ... hence no harmagedon in sight.

Isn't it pure speculation that armageddon will come at/near the end of the 7th day? It's not an official teaching, right? That speculation is what caused the 1975 fiasco.

Nathan Natas

The Watchtower Bible & Tract Society is a man-made organization that is "moved" by the will of men.

Fred Franz was brimming with crackpot "Bible-based(tm)" theories and pet ideas and those ideas had been honored and kowtowed to since the days of Rutherford, even more so when his buddy Nathan Knorr came to be President of the WTS.

Franz's death in 1992 was no doubt an occasion of joy for some in Bethel who came to see his brand of chronology as a liability. With Knorr and Franz safely tucked away in the dirt, there was no one with any clout who could give voice to Franz's failed ideas.

Unfortunately, this leaves a "doctrinal vacuum" in place of the once honored, neat and tidy albeit wacked out Franz doctrines. Today the Watchtower's answer to almost any question is "WE DON'T KNOW - BUT YOU BETTER FOLLOW US, FOR WE ARE THE SPOKESMEN OF GOD."

I have to imagine that somewhere near the Watchtower universe, lying low for now, is a "prophet" from the line of Franz who is just waiting for Jaracz to go to his earthly reward. Quite possibly some of the contenders for this position have posted on this board either personally or through his small group of followers. One example might be "TWMC," who published the first volume of "The Report" but who has failed to keep to his self-imposed schedule for the release of volume 2.

The bottom line is this - the Watchtower Bible & Tract Society is a man-made organization, and they are followers of whatever man is alive and in power at the time.

Nathan Natas

Doc asked,

"Isn't it pure speculation that armageddon will come at/near the end of the 7th day? It's not an official teaching, right? That speculation is what caused the 1975 fiasco."

For Dubs of the 50's it was really a pretty thouroughly-worked-out "Bible-based(tm)" speculation, however. The basic idea was that IF the creative days were each 7,000 years long, then the "creative week" was 49,000 years long. Thus the second "creative week" would begin on the 50,000th year.

This all lines up pretty nicely with the Israelite's count of time. For the israelites, each 50th year was a "Jubilee" year. Wouldn't it be neato-keen if Jehovah's had a Jubilee too?

Wouldn't it be significant if that jubilee marked the beginning of the second creative week - and just coincidentally, the presentation of a now completely renewed and cleansed earth to Jehovah by King Jesus?

It could happen, if we see that Jesus rules for 1,000 years. Allowing for a bible-based(tm) understanding of 7,000 years for a creative day (7 is a number of spiritual significance, you'll recall) we subtract 1,000 years for the reign of King Jesus, and -- HOLY COW! Look at this! the time of the end is RIGHT NOW!

Grab your magazines, son, we've got a life-saving ministry to accomplish! Lucky we have the voluminous spewing of the Watchtower Bible & Tract Society to help us along!!

Faraon

Unfortunately, this leaves a "doctrinal vacuum" in place of the once honored, neat and tidy albeit wacked out Franz doctrines. Today the Watchtower's answer to almost any question is "WE DON'T KNOW - BUT YOU BETTER FOLLOW US, FOR WE ARE THE SPOKESMEN OF GOD."

LOL @ Nathan.

Yeah, so Earth was created thousands of years before the stars.

Plants were in the dark for thousands or millions of years until sources of light such as the moon and the stars were created later. They still had to wait more thousands or millions of years for bees and other polinators in order to reproduce because they had to wait until animals flying animals were created from the water on the fifth day. No, wait. On the second chapter it says that animals were created first.

Let me revise this. There was no days before the fourth day because the sun had not been created, so there couldn't have been markings for days. How could I have been so stupid!

Faraon

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/xray_race_010911-1.html

Brandt explains that only higher energy X-rays survive the trip across the cosmos and through our galaxy from objects that may be up to 12 billion light-years away, which means the objects existed in time and space nearly 12 billion years ago -- just after the Big Bang.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/farthest_supernova_010402.html

The finding has bolstered cosmological models for the universe's expansion and a mysterious "dark energy" pervading it. The supernova, or exploding star, is located 10 billion light-years from Earth.

Yerusalyim

To try and force the Hebrew YOM to mean anything other than a standard 24 hour day in the context of Genesis is ridiculous.

frankiespeakin

The creation story of Genesis, while showing the important fact that Yahweh created everything, has many similarities and mixtures of other cultures in which the Hebrews were submerged.

The 7-24-hour day motif, seems to be highly metaphorical, and not accurate in its descriptions.

If God were to inspire someone to give an accurate description of creation, we would be unable to comprehend it even in our modern 21st-century. Of course God would gloss over the intricate details, and inspire something that we could comprehend as true, according to our limited understanding we haven't even in the 21st-century. This tecnically would not be true but merely close to true as we understand thing now.

If we go back 3000 years from now, the understanding of the natural world, was through myths, not science, for man had not advanced that far yet, and so the Genesis account even if inspired, God would simplify things, and speaking the concepts of that day. That it is highly metaphorical in its seven-day motif, is seen by the fact that God rests on the seventh day as if tired from all that work he's been doing on the six previous days. The ancient Hebrew language, is highly metaphorical, with very few words for addressing abstract ideas. This is the way they communicated before Greeks settled the promised land and brought with them Greek culture and Greek language with its ability to express abstract thoughts. It is very important to note this when reading the Old Testament in order to get a better idea of what is being expressed, and not reading to literally as if it was written in the 21st-century. Often persons have the common tendency to forget the limited concepts of the ancient Hebrews.

It is important when reading the book of Genesis, that one not expect, it to be written in the highly scientific language of the 21st-century. If we do we will expect the wrong things, and draw wrong conclusions.

Neither is the book of Genesis highly accurate in its history either. Many of the stories found in Genesis, were oral stories told and retold for generations, and then later put in written form. The stories have changed through the retelling of them over the years before they were written down, they also reflect Hebrew interpretation of events that often put God in every single event that happens, for example; if there's a storm God caused it, if doesn't rain it means God is angry, it a civilization like Sodom and Gomorrah is destroyed, it must've been God who did for their sins etc.... The way ancient cultures viewed things is bound to show up in how they interpret history. This should also be evident in an ancient book like Genesis.

Faraon

If God were to inspire someone to give an accurate description of creation, we would be unable to comprehend it even in our modern 21st-century. Of course God would gloss over the intricate details, and inspire something that we could comprehend as true, according to our limited understanding we haven't even in the 21st-century. This tecnically would not be true but merely close to true as we understand thing now.

He did not have to come into lies either. If he created everything and wanted us to know about it how come he is unable to write these things themselves?

If he/she doesn't care about us, why should we care about him.

What makes you think that the myths from other religions are not true either, and indicate the same creator? Jehovah is as much myth as any other religion.

blondie

What the Bible says, what the WTS said in the past, and what the WTS says now, are 3 different things.

The WTS once taught that a creative day was 7,000 years long. That is how 1975 was inferred, 6,000 years of human history plus 1,000 years of Christ's rule. The WTS gave 1975 as the end of 6,000 years of human history thus inferring that the great tribulation had to begin then for the Thousand Year Reign of Christ to occur within the last day of the creative week.

Now the WTS teaches that a creative day is an ambigous "thousands of years" long unhooking itself from the prophecy of 1975.

I was at a book study a few years ago when this came up and an oldtimer gave the comment that a creative day was 7,000 years long. The conductor corrected them and the oldtimer was befuddled because nothing had ever been directly pointed out in the publications, it was just slipped in.

The WTS uses this technique and then points back to show, "we always taught that."

Blondie

drwtsn32

To try and force the Hebrew YOM to mean anything other than a standard 24 hour day in the context of Genesis is ridiculous.

But you must if you are trying to keep the biblical account of creation from collapsing under the huge amounts of physical evidence that the earth and universe are billions of years old. Alternatively, you could be a YEC and believe that God created everything with an apparent age, but that's far-fetched IMO.

Length of creative days.

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