Types of Clock

3689 words long.

Published on 2024-06-03

The majority of this article is lifted from the chapter "Solomon’s Clocks: Ecclesiastes 1" in Peace, like Solomon Never Knew. It names and describes several type of prophetic clock.

Many scholars have turned to the Bible in search of prophecies and then attempted to decipher them. This task is complicated because who knows what to expect? What are the ways that God structures his messages? Do we know them all? Did He tell us that or have we tried to figure it out on our own?

A decade ago I found a pattern in world history that matched a pattern I saw in the Bible. I saw the Bible introduce ideas about the progress of civilization in one order, then I saw more recent history exhibit the same concepts in reverse order. Programmers call this a LIFO stack, which means "Last In, First Out". Was I right about the history pattern? The Bible pattern? Both? What warrant did I have from Scripture that such a pattern ought to be found in the Bible at all? I had no such confidence, so I abandoned the effort and set my spreadsheet full of correlations aside.

Years later, I began to study Ecclesiastes. My ideas about history surfaced again and again I pushed them aside. I told God I would proceed no further in my study without some assurance that such a pattern could be found in Scripture. Note that I was not asking God whether my ideas were right, that I had picked the right set of ancient Bible events and the right set of modern historical events and matched them up to tell a meaningful story of progress. I was asking whether there was any place in the Bible where an idea resembling my LIFO idea could be found. If God never causes history to progress according to such a sequence, then I had certainly NOT found a true and useful idea about history.

So that was what I told God. What did He tell me? He told me to reread Ecclesiastes 1. Well, not in so many words. The Holy Spirit does not speak to me with audible words but with meaning. A few days later when I reread chapter 1 for my own reasons, I found what I was looking for. The words were the same, but my mind was now illuminated. The words were also exactly where they ought to be in a treatise on time: at the beginning. They were hidden in plain sight.

In what follows, I catalogue five types of clocks from the words in Ecclesiastes 1. I would later find that the one that began my search is a sixth. The symmetric pattern of history where events proceed in one order then repeat in reverse is given here:

What has been will be again,

what has been done will be done again;

there is nothing new under the sun.

- Ecclesiastes 1:9, NIV

I call this pattern the Cosmic Chiasm. I first wrote of this idea in an Appendix in Job Rises. A Chiasm is a poetic form where ideas proceed in one order then repeat in reverse order. It is also called symmetric parallelism.

The "what has been" is the first half of the parallel structure.
The "will be done again" is the second half.

In my career as a software engineer, I have on several occasions thought up and implemented "new" algorithms to accomplish my work. Later I would discover that someone else published an article on an identical algorithm decades earlier. There truly is nothing new under the sun. This frustration at working so hard to do new and creative things only to find out that others have gone that way before is an existential one. It can provoke powerful emotions of despair and sap you of motivation. That emotion, a common experience among all peoples and all times, is the force that disguises the amazing truth behind Solomon's words. It is a potent emotional riddle. By calling this repetition meaningless and futile, Solomon hides this mystery from our sight. Recovering that meaning is as delightful as the emotion it builds upon is dreary.

Solomon’s Clocks: Ecclesiastes 1

Meaningless! Meaningless! says the Teacher.

“Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”

What do people gain from all their labors

at which they toil under the sun?

- Ecclesiastes 1:2-3

Is the irony of the book’s opening solely God’s joke, or did Solomon intend it? Few books “under the sun” are as meaningful as the Book of Ecclesiastes. The clever king gives us our first clue in verse 3: the sun.

When do we first meet the sun? Genesis. The story of creation has long triggered speculation about God’s plan for history. If He built this all in seven days, will He end it in another seven?

A thousand years in your sight are like

a day that has just gone by,

or like a watch in the night.

- Psalm 90:4, NIV

After investing much ink in applying the number five to the pattern of a harvest, let’s widen our focus to seven. Before plowing, you need to prepare your tools: plow, yoke, and all the rest. Then after the labor of bringing in the harvest comes rest. The seven days of creation give us that, plus something else: a prophecy that explains God’s overarching purpose during the millennia in which Solomon lived.

Day one: God created light, matter, & time. Preparation for the harvest of the world.
Day two: God created the sky and separated the waters. This is the early rain that softens the ground for plowing.
Day three: Dry ground appears and vegetation, too. This is the sowing of seeds.
Day four: The sun, moon and stars are made. Sunshine makes the plants grow.
Day five: God created birds and fish. There were no weeds or thorns yet! However, Leviathan, the sea monster that would come to symbolize Satan, was made that day.
Day six: God created the beasts and humankind. People use animals to gather the harvest.
Day seven: On the day of rest, Peace.

First millennium. Let’s work our way up to the sun. In our earlier discussion, everything begins with suffering, the day of plowing. It needn’t be so. God began by shining his light. If mankind had walked in the light from the start, there would be no need for suffering. Instead, we walked in darkness. The first thousand years of our history witnessed a descent into evil, from the death of Abel to the death of Adam, the first man.

Second millennium. What happened during our second thousand years? If you read Genesis 1:6-8, about the second day, it stands out from the rest. It is the only day of which it was not said, “And God saw that it was good.” The second millennia of our history witnessed the great flood, the beginning of slavery, and the crisis of the Tower of Babel.

Third millennium. Our third lap through history was an improvement. It begins with Abraham, a man of faith. The life of righteous Job starts off the Bible, and humble Moses receives the law. This is the day of planting, when the Word of God begins to be sown.

Fourth millennium. Which brings us at last to day four:

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 let them be for lights in the

firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth:

and it was so.

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.

And God set them in the firmament of the heaven

to give light upon the earth, And to rule over

the day and over the night, and to divide the light

from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

- Genesis 1:14-19, KJV

The sun is shining and the plants are starting to grow. Day four is when God created his heavenly timepieces for signs, seasons, days and years. We have already spoken at length about how in chapter three of Ecclesiastes, the twenty-eight times follow a lunar cycle. The rest of Ecclesiastes makes heavy use of the phrase “under the sun”, beginning in the third verse. Whose birth ushered in this fourth millennium of human history? Solomon’s!

Just as the purpose of the fourth day of creation was to regulate time, the purpose of the fourth millennium of human history was to prophecy the future and declare before the whole world that Yahweh is sovereign over time. This is another example of a fractal: a smaller seven of days fitting within a larger seven of millennia. This millennium was filled with the great prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. Tying all their prophecies together into a single framework was the work of Solomon. Ecclesiastes is the mainspring of the Bible’s timepiece, and God foreshadowed it by His very act of creating our world.

Jesus is the Word (seed) of day three and the Sun of Righteousness (Malachi 4:2) and Bright Morning Star (Revelation 22:16) of day four. The dawn of his coming was at the extreme end of day four and beginning of day five.

Fifth millennium. This epoch of history was the millennium of the Holy Spirit, the birth of the church. Spiritually, just as birds were created on day five, so the Holy Spirit is represented as a dove. Politically, the Roman Empire was the dominant force, its symbol another bird, the eagle.

Sixth millennium. On the sixth day of creation, God created beasts and men. During the sixth millennium, some people continue to act like beasts, while others act like men and women made in God’s image. This is the time for weeding, removing thorns, and reassessing priorities. God cursed the soil with thorns in Adam’s day. In our day, agricultural productivity has soared; indeed industry of all kinds has progressed to the point where the effects of that curse are rapidly diminishing. From a materialistic viewpoint, the world is experiencing the greatest harvest of all time.

Seventh millennium. The seventh day is the day of rest. That is the millennium we recently began (or according to some, will commence by the end of this century). For thousands of years, the expectation among theologians (like Irenaeus, Jerome, and Hippolytus) has been that this seventh millennium will see the consummation of the ages, the coming (or for Christians, the returning) of the Messiah. Will he come in the beginning (as in Premillennialism)? The end (as in Amillennialism)? Or somewhere in the middle? Nobody knows. Jesus is the Word, but that word the Father has not yet spoken.

Sequential Prophecies

We have established that there are sequential, prophetic passages in the Bible as regular as a clock. Not all such sequences are clocks and not all prophecies that look like they are in a sequence are. Let’s explore this distinction further.

In my experience, new believers absorb the prophetic content of the Bible haphazardly. Individual prophecies are tied by preachers to individual historical events. There is no sequence to it, with exceptions:

Pharaoh’s dream of sleek and skinny cattle
Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the statue of gold, silver, bronze and iron, told to Daniel
Daniel’s dream of four beasts: winged lion, bear, leopard, and a terrible beast
Daniel’s vision of the ram and goat
Daniel’s vision of the angel Gabriel and the 70 weeks
Daniel’s vision of the unnamed angel and tales of a future conqueror
The many prophecies of Revelation

I was unaware of any besides these. Consequently, I never looked for them. Thus I was surprised to find a sequence of eight prophecies about Jesus set in chronological order while researching Job for my previous book. Since then, I discovered a ninth in Job. See the chapter titled “Months of Futility” for the expanded list.

The list of nine prophecies in Job is a prophetic sequence, but not a clock. The events neither cover a long stretch of time, nor are spaced evenly in time, nor explain large political movements or spiritual themes affecting large numbers of people. Think of it more like a calendar or a planner.

Sequential prophecies require careful reading. Confusing and contradictory interpretations of Revelation have been forwarded by people who ignore the section breaks in Revelation where one sequence ends and another begins. Sequences overlap; the Bible shows the same events from different angles. It hits a milestone, then backs up and starts again using a different metaphor, whether seals, trumpets, bowls or something else. People who try to splice those prophecies end to end into a single chronology make a mess of the message.

One proviso: different principles govern different types of clocks. Wouldn’t it be helpful if the Bible listed the different kinds? Otherwise, we might misunderstand the purposes and peculiarities of the clocks we find, or find kinds of clocks put there not by God but our own imagination.

The Clocks

Backing up to Solomon on day four of the world’s history is in order. If anyone catalogued those prophetic clocks, it would be him. Let’s see if we can’t find that inspirational inventory.

Generations come and generations go,

but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises and the sun sets,

and hurries back to where it rises.

The wind blows to the south

and turns to the north;

round and round it goes,

ever returning on its course.

All streams flow into the sea,

yet the sea is never full.

To the place the streams come from,

there they return again.

All things are wearisome,

more than one can say.

The eye never has enough of seeing,

nor the ear its fill of hearing.

What has been will be again,

what has been done will be done again;

there is nothing new under the sun.

- Ecclesiastes 1:4-9, NIV

Earlier we discussed how these verses describe four independent natural cycles that intersect in the realm of farming. Man works the soil (the earth from which plants get their minerals, in verse 4), the sun provides light needed for photosynthesis (verse 5), the winds supply the oxygen and CO2 needed for respiration and the formation of cellulose (verse 6), and the streams and oceans circulate the water plants need to grow (verse 7). Man employs earth, fire, air and water in his labor leading to a wearisome harvest, which he must repeat year after year (verses 8 and 9).

Generational clocks

Years ago, as related in the chapter on numbers, I found a pattern in Matthew’s genealogy suggesting that all of human history may be constrained to be forty-two periods in length, measured not in years, but by human lives (generations) of potentially unequal length. Fascinating idea, but where in the Bible does it say God measures history in generations, much less forty-two of them?

This year I was rewarded with verse 4. “Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.” Alone, this might mean nothing, but it comes at the head of a list of five cycles. Four are explicit and the harvest cycle which combines them is implicit. The connection between a cycle of generations with “forever” or eternity and the fact that this cycle is listed first suggests that this is the most important kind of cycle. We will call this a generational clock.

In subsequent chapters, we will explore generational clocks in Job, Psalm 119 and the story of Pharaoh’s dream from Genesis 42.

Celestial Clocks

The motion of the earth about the sun in the second cycle marks off days, seasons and years. We are accustomed to using celestial clocks for mundane purposes. Bible prophecies also make use of precise counts of years. A memorable one was given in Pharaoh’s dream in Genesis 42. As interpreted by Joseph, seven years of plenty (seven fat cows) would be followed by seven years of famine (seven emaciated cows). The Bible contains other prophecies that foretell, with the same precision as the motions of the celestial bodies, the exact number of years until an important event. Among them are prophecies in Exodus, Ecclesiastes and Matthew.

Spiritual Clocks

The third cycle is like the old folk song: the answer is blowing in the wind. When God brought Adam to life, He breathed His Spirit into him (Genesis 2:7). Spirit is breath and wind. As Jesus told Nicodemus:

“The wind blows wherever it pleases.

You hear its sound, but you cannot tell

where it comes from or where it is going.

So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

- John 3:8, NIV

The Holy Spirit is associated with the number seven, so the distinguishing feature of spiritual clocks is that they count things in sevens. However, like the wind, each of the seven parts may be of a different duration, just as the movements of weather fronts, hurricanes and thunderstorms are unpredictable.

Because of this, the expectation that history shall last for exactly seven millennia should not be held too tightly. The 295 key events in each of these seven “days” of history occurred sometimes at the beginning of a day (like Solomon and his meditations on time), sometimes the middle of a day (like the flood), and sometimes at the end (like the birth of Christ). Thus, should Christ return during the seventh day, we cannot tell from this spiritual clock whether that day is tomorrow or in a thousand years.

Many spiritual clocks are found in Revelation. We will look at two of them. An important cluster is found in the historical psalms. In each case, the seven ticks of a spiritual clock are tending toward some concept of completeness, whether of holiness or judgment. The seven events are more likely similar than dissimilar. However, if the seven is wrapped around a harvest pattern, like in Genesis 1, the differing characteristics of the phases of the harvest will shine through.

Empire Clocks

Designating the water cycle of 1:7 as “empire clocks” requires explanation. In ancient mythology, the sea represents chaos. We use the phrase “a sea of faces” to describe a crowd. In Revelation, the sea is given special meaning:

The dragon stood on the shore of the sea.

And I saw a beast coming out of the sea.

It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns

on its horns, and on each head a blasphemous name.

- Revelation 13:1

This means that the beast, identified by most theologians with Leviathan from Job, will arise out of the chaotic sea of unsaved mankind; it will be an empire.

Like the sea collects more and more water from its tributary streams, empires conquer ever larger numbers of people. Many Bible prophecies use wild beasts as symbols for empires. The most notable are found in Job, Daniel and Revelation.

Empire clocks convey the sequence of political movements, wars and changes in government, but tell us little about time. They are qualitative clocks. Nevertheless, as each empire forecast in Scripture rises and falls, we are assured that we are progressing toward a predetermined goal, the arrival of one final kingdom:

“In the time of those kings, the God of heaven

will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed,

nor will it be left to another people.

It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end,

but it will itself endure forever.”

- Daniel 2:44, NIV

The last kingdom will be God’s kingdom.

Harvest Clocks

Harvest clocks are characterized by either the number five (for the shorter harvest pattern) or seven (for the complete pattern). Like spiritual clocks, the time periods may be of unequal durations. The five events will tell a story of growth, of moving toward maturity through the phases of plowing, planting, pouring, plucking, and producing a harvest.

There is a distinction between the seven-stage process of growth (the seven pieces of peace) distilled from the twenty-eight times of chapter 3 and the five-stage harvest process. The former describes the normal process of growth through a person’s life, from infancy to maturity, along with crises peculiar to each stage. The harvest process is a template for growth applicable to each crisis at any stage of life.

The harvest pattern sprang from studying spiritual warfare and spiritual growth, trying to synthesize a deeper understanding of the three encounters with Satan, the structure of Job, and Jesus’ parables. Initially, there was no hint of any prophetic content. Only when I saw Reitman’s outline of Ecclesiastes and compared it to my pattern did I venture to infer a harvest pattern based outline of Ecclesiastes. Comparing that to the days of creation, I looked again, and saw that in Ecclesiastes, that pattern was not just a good way to organize the material, it was a good way to organize history. The chapter “Winding the Clock” will study the movements of the harvest clock of Ecclesiastes.

Commandment Clocks

A few prophetic clocks are structured according to the Ten Commandments. They break a stretch of time into ten eras, one per commandment. Each era then has a key historical event that relates to that commandment. Some also relate to the corresponding Exodus plague.

As a distinct kind of clock Commandment Clocks are not listed by Solomon in Ecclesiastes 1. These clocks fall under one of the other categories. Of the five Commandment clocks that have been discovered so far, four are celestial clocks (where each era is of the same duration) and one is an empire clock (where eras are of uneven duration and each follows the fate of a different world empire).

See Commandment Clocks for the details.

Other Clocks

This leaves one more clock, one not found on Solomon’s list. We introduced it earlier, but it bears closer scrutiny.

What about Satan’s clock?

NOTE: Satan's clock is described in the chapter "The Final Countdown" in Peace, like Solomon Never Knew.