|
|
| |||||||||||
| From | Message | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
 No One"Behold, surely I come quickly." Suppose I say, "I'll meet you on the corner pretty soon." So you go to the corner and you wait. Twenty minutes pass. If I show up, I kept my promise. If two hours go by, that isn't all that soon. But if you are still waiting for me two thousand years later, how gullible are you? |
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
|
Applies Here? |
||||||||||
|
It doesn't matter. Whatever you are, you have great zeal for it. You have a very driven, religious devotion to whatever it is you believe. Zeal doesn't mean you are right. |
||||||||||
|
Psalm 53:1 - The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Corrupt are they, and have done abominable iniquity, there is none that doeth good. NKJV. Both psalms are psalms of David. |
||||||||||
|
Zeal I am not saying you are wrong. I don't pretend to know. Shirlmygirl anxiously awaits the Lord's return, wondering if she should even bother grocery shopping this week given it imminence. All I am saying is that I quit holding my breath long ago. I have lived through the last twenty ends of the world entirely unscathed, and expect to survive the next twenty equally unharmed. |
||||||||||
|
No one knows the day and hour of the appointed time. Not the son of man nor the angles in heaven. But only the Father. |
||||||||||
|
lord_shiva Robert (apatzer) is correct. No one knows the day and hour when Jesus will return for his people. Jesus said so Himself, when He was asked by the disciples as to when He would return. Jesus probably knows now, but at that time, only His Father knew. What I do know, and believe could be imminent, is the commencement of the Great Tribulation. Jesus, in preincarnate form as Michael the Archangel, Captain of the Host, the only "angel" capable of resurrection - He resurrected Moses on Mount Nebo after Moses had died, and took him to Heaven (Moses and Elijah) appeared with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. Michael is described as The Great Prince, as quoted in the scripture below. "And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince who standeth for the children of thy people, and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time; and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in THE BOOK. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that be wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness, as the stars forever and ever. But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, even to the time of the end; many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased. Daniel 12:1-4 NKJV. What I and my denomination (SDA) believe is that God's people will go through the Tribulation and not be "raptured" out, as some Christians believe. God's people went through the 10 plagues that fell on Egypt, but they were protected by God. The Bible says that our "bread and water will be sure." Knowledge certainly has increased. I am not sure that people are yet running to and fro (I think this means seeking the Word of God). |
||||||||||
|
Things Were Known The Greeks by 450 BCE (though quite some time AFTER the Pentateuch was penned) actually measured the distance to the moon in terms of Earth diameters. They could do this because by then they had a clock that operated at night--the clepsydra (water clock). Taking the ratio of the amount of time required for Earth's shadow to cross the moon against the time of the lunar orbit yields the lunar distance--30 Earth diameters. They just didn't know the Earth's diameter. Whatever it was, it was fairly large. I think they had fairly reasonable constraints on the minimum and maximum values. Two centuries elapsed, and Eratosthenes, while poring over ancient Egyptian texts, learned of the existence of a well in Cyene, the bottom of which had no shadow as the sun passed overhead on the solstice. Realizing he needed only the distance between Cyene and Alexandria, and the length of the zenith solstice shadow in Alexandria of some large structure, and he could compute Earth's diameter--he convinced the Greek Pharoah to send a team of geometers to mark off the distance between Cyene and Alexandria. Cyene was on Egypt's southern border, and Alexandria on the African coast of the Mediterranean. Eratosthenes thus laid his reed upon the Earth, and took its measure. 30 Earth diameters is 30x8000 miles = 240,000 miles. The moon is 240,000 miles away. If a ship could cross from Alexandria to Athens (where the Olympics were held once every four years) in five days time (a distance of 600 miles), then a ship that could float through space between Earth and the moon at the same speed would take 240,000/600 = x/5 days. x = 2000 days, or about 5.5 years. They knew this. They knew the voyage to the moon would be 5.5 years (with favorable winds) at the average rate of speed of the fastest ships from Alexandria to Athens. The reason we crossed this gulf in only three days time is because we flung our ships much faster. Orbital velocity is 17,000 miles an hour, instead of the sedate 5 miles per hour of the Phoenician sailing vessels. And escape velocity is faster yet--25,000 miles per hour. 240,000 miles/25,000 mph = about 10 hours. Why did we take 3 days? Good question. So the initial burn boosted them to escape velocity at their altitude, a bit over 11 km/s. But Earth's gravity would eat away at that vector the entire time they drifted towards the moon, so that by the time they entered lunar orbit they were moving a mere 5000 miles per hour. That is 48 hours, or 4 days. But the initial velocity was greater, and so you need calculus to determine the total time--which is beyond the scope of this brief review of history. They also spent some time in lunar orbit--not sure how much--before descending aboard the Eagle lander. |
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
|
Hmm Will have to search for it. I liked it so much I posted it on my Facebook page, with minor alterations, and a summation: Apollo landed 50 years ago this July. |
||||||||||
| |||||||||||
