Exactitude

I was going to write about the two adulterous sisters described in Ezekiel 23, but I figured you all remember that story well enough from Sunday School that there's no need for me to cover it again here...

Ezekiel 24 begins with this statement:

In the ninth year, in the tenth month on the tenth day, the word of the LORD came to me

My NIV Study Bible  states definitively that this was January 15th, 588 BC, which is pretty darn specific for a date over 2,500 years ago. This is also extremely specific when we don't know the exact dates for events such as:

1. Christ's birth--widely speculated to have occurred sometime in the spring

2. Christ's death

3. Paul's conversion

We really don't have an anchor date to which we can tie New Testament events. Luke, being a physician, attempted to correlate the births of John the Baptist and Jesus to events of the day ("In the time of Herod king of Judea...," Luke 1:5 as a descriptor for John the Baptist, "In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree...," Luke 2:1 for Jesus), but even these aren't as specific as Ezekiel is in this verse. This isn't even the first time Ezekiel has been this specific:

Ezekiel 1:2--July 31st, 593 BC

Ezekiel 8:1--September 17th, 592 BC

Ezekiel 20:1-2--August 14th, 591 BC

And Ezekiel has nine more instances of precise dating.

I alluded to this somewhat at the table I sat at on Sunday, and I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but my point is a simple one--there are times when God considers it significant enough to give us a precise date for an event, and times when God doesn't believe it matters. I have no idea when God created the earth--many people have strong opinions on this matter, and if anywhere in the Bible God tells me this is vitally important to my faith and salvation, I would also. He doesn't, which I take to mean that we have no need to know. Quite simply, if God wanted us to know, he'd tell us. He clearly did here with Ezekiel, and will do the same with the return of the people from exile as described in Ezra and Nehemiah.

Likewise, no one knows when Christ will return, and as we all know, Christ makes it explicitly clear in Matthew 24:36:

No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

No one means NO ONE, including Christ himself, and yet we continue to speculate. Granted, we are told to look for those signs and to always be prepared, but again, it doesn't matter when it will happen, only THAT it will. We need to be prepared, but we gain nothing by being obsessed with determining the time or date--it's the ultimate in chasing after the wind.

There's a wide gulf between two competing schools of thought:

1. The Bible contains all I need to know regarding my salvation (true)

2. The Bible is not the sum total of all knowledge and wisdom in the world (also true)

Everything we need for our salvation is in our Bibles, and part of that is NOT a detailed knowledge of when specific events occurred in history. As long as we acknowledge that we are sinners, that Christ died and rose again as the ultimate sacrifice and atonement for our sins and that we have done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to deserve this absolution, we'll know everything we'll need to know to receive eternal life. Every now and then, God throws us a morsel to help us date events, and that's great, but we don't need to know everything. 

Scott