THE FIRST DAY symbolic meaning is the first thousand years. There was a separation made between light and darkness. This symbolically means that from the beginning, God was going to make a separation between good and evil. The instance given in the Bible, of God calling for a sacrifice from Cain and Abel, and Cain taking his fruits from the field and Abel taking a lamb, was only God’s way of showing us the working of the evil heart, as different from that of the good. Wherever light shows itself, darkness is revealed.

The First Day or first thousand years produced Enoch who lived for 365 years, and then walked so closely with God that “God took him.” Hebrews 11:5 declares that it was done by faith. His years on earth were the number of one solar year of days. This man, therefore, marked the end of the first day (thousand years) by being caught up into heaven without seeing death.

THE SECOND DAY symbolic meaning is the second thousand years. This second thousand years which is depicted by the creation of dry ground, in preparation for the growing of trees, symbolically spoke of the sons of God being a separate generation from the sons of earth.

It ended with Noah, whose righteousness sealed the doom of the other inhabitants of the world who would have destroyed him had they not been destroyed by the flood. Evil had run ahead of righteousness so far that God had to intervene and put a halt to it. In God’s plan, however, the first two thousand years represent the Outer Court of the Tabernacle, whose destiny is to be destroyed. This will be expanded in a later chapter.

THE THIRD DAY symbolically means the third thousand years. On this day, God created the fruit-bearing trees and the green vegetation. This is interpreted to mean that on the third thousand years of life on earth, God would bring forth men of godly nature to show forth fruits of God. This is the age which produced some of the mightiest men of the Bible.

Shem was a mighty one who some authorities think might well have been the Hercules of Greek mythology. Shem, of course, is the father of the Semitic nations of which is Israel, the chosen people of God. Of course, not much is said of him in scripture, but the inference is very strong when we consider him to be the father of Eber, from whom the Hebrews come. It is also believed that Shem was instrumental in leading the righteous people to fast for ten days and defeat the iniquity of Nimrod, which resulted in Nimrod’s death.

This period later also produced Abraham, the father of the faithful; the friend of God. Thus Abraham, a man “planted” of God, bore fruit abundantly on the THIRD DAY. Also Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, etc.

THE FOURTH DAY symbolically means the fourth thousand years. On this day were created the sun, moon and stars. Symbolically, the sun is Jesus Christ. The moon is the Church. And the stars are the sons of God.

Jesus was born during the law near the end of the fourth thousand years, and lived for thirty years under the law before He ushered in the age of grace by His resurrection. The church was born, and God began the process of begetting sons in His nature.

THE FIFTH DAY – Symbolically, the fifth thousand years were when Jesus resurrected, and brought forth LIFE EVERLASTING, and triumphed over death, giving us immortality as a present. On this day, the Lord created the living creature. Symbolically, this means that life and immortality would be brought to light by Jesus Christ, and so it was. 2nd Timothy 1:10.

THE SIXTH DAY – Symbolically, this is the sixth thousand years, and on this day God created the beast first, then He made man to control the beast and the whole creation. The word “beast” in scripture speaks of a man in whom the basic human function is missing. Man was made of God in His own image, and created in His likeness. This means that man would look like God in his natural attributes (seeing, smelling, hearing, etc.), but was created to be LIKE God in his final completion. God, of course, saw him as complete and perfect even before he was made. Man, therefore, was to function as a soul, having a spirit and living in a body. When a man blocks out his spirit, which is the only means of leading him to God, then he is soul and body being led by evil spirits – he is beast. The beast, then, is an evil spirit in a man, which will manifest itself in a system of government, void of God, and will not even be human, but totally demonic and infernal.

The time of the completion in the creation of this man, therefore, must be the sixth day or the sixth thousand year, which began with the dawn of the year 1000 A.D. By our calendar, which is not correct, but could be used for this purpose, it is well past the year 2000. This means that we are in the evening of the sixth day or sixth thousand years. I might as well be a little more specific in this matter.

The calendar we now have, called the Ecclesiastical calendar, or the Gregorian calendar, was created by a brief issued by Pope Gregory XIII in March of 1582, in which he abolished the use of the ancient calendar, and instituted the one we now have.

Man has had an interminable struggle with time, and the calculating of it, from the very beginning. God stated in Genesis 1: 14, 16,

“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 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.”

The word calendar comes from the Roman “kalends,” which was a method of distributing time into periods adopted for purposes of civil life: hours, days, weeks, months and years. The earth revolves around the sun in an egg-shaped or ecliptic orbit, once every 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds, and this is called an astronomical year. The civil year differs among different nations and peoples according to how they might set different events, and when they would begin their year. The great problem comes when men try to reconcile solar and lunar periods. Months are calculated according to the moon, whose synodic revolution is accomplished in about 29½ days. The confusion comes in, therefore, when we multiply this by twelve months: it only comes to 354, which leaves approximately 11¼ days to account for. No extended period of time, therefore, can be calculated by the lunar method.

We must assume that God, the great architect, deliberately created this situation, and clearly gave us a puzzle that we have not been able to reconcile over the years by generations of scholars. We count our weeks and months and years by days, and every year there is a fraction of a day which is not counted. We try to correct it by having a “leap year” every four years, which still leaves us with a fraction not accounted for. Let us look at two scriptures which seem to address this subject.

Daniel 7:25, “And he shall speak great words against the Most High, and shall wear out the saints of the Most High, AND THINK TO CHANGE TIMES AND LAWS: and they shall be given into his hand UNTIL a time and times and the dividing of time.”

Here we see that a man and his system would come in the end time and try to change times and laws which God has set into motion. Note that the scripture says “think to change,” which means that actually nothing would change by man’s action.

Ecclesiastes 3:11, “He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also He hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.”

The above verse tells us that there is a block in man’s thinking which prevents him from finding out what God is doing in the earth. In deciphering accurately where we are in time, the carnal, natural man does not have a ghost of a chance. This block might well be the flaming sword which God set in the garden to prevent man from returning where he could take of the tree of life while in sin. Genesis 3:24.

All the countries of Europe have borrowed the Roman calendar. In the time of Julius Caesar, there was a difference between the civil and the astronomical equinox of three months, which brought winter months into autumn, and autumn into summer. This was very confusing, so Julius Caesar abolished the use of the lunar year altogether, and regulated his civil year entirely by the sun. He it was, with the help of Sosigenes, who fixed our year at 365¼ days, and after every three years, a fourth year of 366 days (leap year, or in Latin, “bis-sexto calendas.”) This was done 46 years before the birth of Christ on the 1st of January, and the 708th year from the foundation of the City of Rome, which was the commencement of the first Julian year.

Now we get to the real heart of the problem to which Daniel 7:25 refers. The Julian method of intercalation was the best that could be adopted, yet it supposed that the year was 11 minutes and 14 seconds too long, and an error of a day in 128 years. In the course of a few centuries, the equinox moved towards the beginning of the year.

Pope Gregory XIII, therefore, in an effort to correct Julius Caesar, and to restore the equinox to its proper place (since the sun, God’s clock, is not watching our calendar), ordered that ten days be suppressed in the calendar, and because the error in the Julian calendar was now found to be 3 days in every 400 years, he also ordered that the intercalations (added days) of Caesar on all the centenary years be omitted, with the exception of those that occur on every 400th year.

Scholars and scientists, over the years, have contended and still do contend concerning the errors of the present Gregorian calendar, but no corrections have been made. It has been estimated that the calendar is wrong by about four to seven years, no one but God really knows.