13Then He said to Abram: “Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years. 14“And also the nation whom they serve I will judge; afterward they shall come out with great possessions. 15“Now as for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried at a good old age. 16“But in the fourth generation they shall return here, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”
The Holy Bible, New King James Version, (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, Inc.) 1982.
So I had a small epiphany this afternoon. I was watching John Hagee on television. The subject doesn’t matter. What he quoted did. There is that passage above from Genesis 15 where God is talking to Abraham about the children of Israel going to spend 400 years in Egypt. What I found strange and did not understand was the use of the term “in the fourth generation” they will come out. It was one of those things I could not understand. A generation is 100 years long? It is one of those things that you read and put off understanding to the future.
Oh yes, the epiphany? It doesn’t matter why God calls it “the fourth generation.” It is that he does. It puts me in remembrance of what a writer of an epistle wrote “that one year is as a thousand and a thousand as one year.” Something is simply because God calls it that way.
So what does this have to do with anything for us today?
Remember that Jesus talking to his disciples on the night he was betrayed said to them that “this generation” that would see the signs he just talked about would not pass away till everything was fulfilled. I have seen many people try to figure out the length of this generation. Take all those listed in Matthew’s genealogy and divide that into the years that passed. Do the same for Luke’s genealogy. Or take three score and ten. Or?
The first use of time and generation is Genesis 15. Why not simply take what God has said and use that for the time scale. If Israel became a nation in 1948. If Jerusalem was taken back in the 1967. Using one of those dates as the start of the prophetic clock then Jesus could be returning anytime before 2048 or 2067. That certainly stretches out the clock.
So what does this mean? We could have a much longer time to wait for the appearing in the sky. The rapture could be after I die. Yet it is during this generation. Could be anytime soon…
So keep looking up.