The Enevitable Day

I caught part of a story on the radio the other day about leap year of which this year is one. What sparked my interest was, I thought I hear the speaker say that every four hundred years, scheduled or not, there is no added day to the calendar. What? Well, I made a note to myself to investigate what I just heard, or thought I heard. At home that evening I got on the computer and “Wikipedia’d, Leap Year” and found myself in another time dimension with way more information than expected. Wikipedia is an on line, non-profit, encyclopedia written and edited by scholars of the world. To start with, I had no idea how many calendars are currently being used in the world today. The most commonly used is the Gregorian, the one most of us are familiar with. Then, there’s the Julian, familiar to those in industry and the military; the Coptic, Ethiopian, Revised Julian, Chinese, Hebrew, Islamic, Hindu and Iranian. Anyway, back to leap year. In the Gregorian calendar, the standard is, if the year is divisible by four (4) it’s a leap year. Not always! Years that are evenly divisible by one hundred (100) are not leap years, unless they are also divisible by four hundred (400), then they are. The years 1600 and 2000 were leap years, but the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not. See, I told you, way too much information. It’s all because our annual trip around the sun takes 365.242374 days giving us an extra day every four years, unless those other rules invade the formula.
It’s incredible to think that man has the patience and the ability to sit and figure out the exact time of day to the billionth of a second, yet can’t, or won’t, accept inevitable dates of time that must be faced. Our mother’s taught us that certain days would come our way, but we never prepared for them. Did they come? Yes! Most of us procrastinated on school assignments until the last minute, resulting in a poor half-hearted failing effort to complete the task to the best of our abilities. This very day we’re all in a pickle because we didn’t believe the cost of fossil fuel would skyrocket dragging the cost of everything we use and consume up with it. Had we been warned of this day coming? Oh-ya! Three or more decades ago we were put on notice to find a replacement fuel for our vehicles and what did the manufactures do for us? They built bigger fuel-hungrier land yachts, which, in today’s economy, are worthless dinosaurs. Now we’re told it will take another decade or two to develop that which we should have been working on. I guess we’ll all simply adjust our formula for life and living and press on.
[2 Peter 3] Read the whole chapter and pay particular attention to the warning in verse 10 ... “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.” If you truly believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God, are you preparing for this day to come? How about the statement found in Hebrews 10: 27 ...”Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment”; are you ready for that day? Not every procrastinator is blessed with knowing that death will come soon by means of an illness. No, death is also a thief, no matter how long you live. In either case we must be found with humble hearts, prepared to face judgment holding to the hope of receiving God’s grace. We can’t adjust God’s time to fit our wants. God has hidden nothing from us. The last day is inevitable, and only God knows when it will come.