1. The first method of computation, already referred to, as fixing the present period as approximately “the time of the end” is known as “the times of the Gentiles,” seven times, or years, each consisting of 360 year-days, or a sum-total of 2,620 years. Of this period, Professor Totten, of New Haven, following the lead of the British Chronological Association, says:
“Nabopolassar shook off the yoke of Assyria, and, by thus assuming the crown of Babylon, commenced the ‘times of the Gentiles.’ His accession took place in the seventh civil (first sacred) month of the year 3377 A.M. The ‘times of the Gentiles’ therefore ran out 2,520 years thereafter, or in March, 5897 A.M. (A.D. 1899).”
Thus by another method of computing the times of the Gentiles, he arrives at the present period as at least the beginning of the end.
“Joshua’s Long Day was the last day in broad prophetic chronology which is to be wholly counted as solar time. Since that day, the millenaries have been ‘shortened’ to lunar years. The sum of the 2,555¼+ ‘long’ or solar years up to that day, and the 3,444¾+ ‘shortened’ or lunar years, from thence to the vernal equinox of 1899 A.D., is exactly 6,000, and accurately terminates the sixth millennary since creation.”
2. Secondly, the Sabbatic system, impressed on the whole face of Scripture history, affords, as many think, a very obvious key to the divine chronology. This Sabbatic system reaches back to Eden and characterizes the whole annals of the world. There was first consecrated the seventh day, then the seventh week, then the seventh month, then the seventh year, then the seventh seven of years—introducing the “jubilee”—then the seventh seventy of years, the Grand Jubilee. This number 7 × 70, or 490, appears in at least two conspicuous places, 1 Kings vi. 1, where, adding the ten years of the temple building to the 480, between the exodus and the beginning of the work, we have 490; and, in Daniel ix. 24, where again the seven sevens reappear, as the sacred typical number, between the exodus from the captivity and the building of the new spiritual temple of God under the Messiah. This number 490 is doubly a type of completeness: it is not only the product of 7 multiplied by 70, but of 7 times 7 (49), the interval from jubilee to jubilee, multiplied by 10—another sacred number. These jubilee periods must be obviously reckoned from the time of Moses, when the law of the jubilee first appears. And, counting the exodus from 2515 A.M., the full seven periods of 490, or 3,430 years, would bring us to 5945 A.M., or somewhere this side of the middle of the next century as its extreme limit; and, if the years are to be reckoned by the prophetic-year standard of 360 days (twelve equal months of thirty days each) the limit would be somewhere about 1898, so that by this method again the “beginning of the end” has already come.
3. A third method of computation, “The Millennial Standard,” is thought to point to the same approximate terminus. “One day is with the Lord as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter iii. 8). This is regarded by many as another not very obscure hint as to God’s chronology, and they therefore reason that the predicted millennium or thousand years of Sabbatic rest, crowning the six millenniums of a world’s toil, can not be far off.
4. The fourth method of computation is “the historical.” The number 1,260 (“forty-two months,” “a time, times, and half a time”) is as we have already seen, conspicuous both in Daniel and in Revelation.
Those who accept the “historical” method of interpreting the Apocalypse believe that the beast and the false prophet represent the Papacy and Mohammedanism, or the crucifix and the crescent. They maintain that it is a curious fact, to say the least, that both these systems date from the period between 606 and 620 (the decree of Phocas and the first Hegira) as the terminus a quo, and, adding 1,260, they reach again a terminus ad quem somewhere between 1866 and 1886 as “the beginning of the end” of these systems, as world powers or kingdoms.
5. A fifth mode of computation is that of the “Antichrist Period.” The number, 666, is divinely given as the number of the lawless one (ὁ ἀνομος, ὁ ἀναρχος) who is to be revealed in the last week of years. This number, thus inseparably linked with the man of sin, in whom personally all the Antichristian systems of history are to “head up,” is thought by many to stand for the period of the race’s rebellion, and to be the symbolic number of perpetual unrest and incompleteness. There is a show of reason in this, for 666 is a repeating decimal that ever approaches, but never reaches, seven, the number of completeness and rest. Six times this number 666 gives 3,996, the grand crisis—the year of Christ’s birth, reckoning from creation; and again, reckoning from Abraham’s birth, as father of the faithful, brings us to the beginning of this century as a new crisis in history.
6. A sixth road by which the same terminus is reached is the “condition of world-witness” (see Matt, xxiv. 14, Mark xiii. 10). Christ distinctly stated that the Gospel must first be published among all nations, and preached as a witness to all nations, and then would come the END. With no little force many argue that there never was a period of such world-wide evangelism as now. Over three hundred missionary societies at work, about twelve thousand missionary workers, and nearly fifty thousand native helpers, engaged; the Bible translated into over four hundred tongues, etc., and “published to all nations.” It is also very noticeable that the motto of the present“crusade” is “The evangelization of the world in this generation!”