THE MANIFESTED TIMES AND SEASONS

Every civilisation that has ever lifted its head to the night sky has noticed the same thing: the sky keeps time. The sun keeps the day. The moon keeps the month. The circuit of the sun through the fixed stars keeps the year. And beyond all of these, moving so slowly that no single human life can perceive it, there is another motion - a vast, patient wheel that carries the entire frame of the heavens backward through the constellations at roughly one degree every seventy-two years, completing a single revolution in approximately twenty-five thousand nine hundred and twenty years.

The ancients called this the Great Year. The astronomers call it the precession of the equinoxes. The Scripture calls it something better. It calls it the ages.

I want to be understood exactly. I am not preaching astrology. Astrology is the theft of the sky - the attempt to extract fortune from a witness that was never appointed to give fortune. What I am preaching is the doctrine of Genesis 1:14, that the lights of heaven were set for signs and for seasons; the doctrine of Psalm 19, that the heavens declare, utter, and shew forth; the doctrine of Job 38, where God Himself, out of the whirlwind, interrogates a suffering man about Pleiades, Orion, and Mazzaroth. I did not put the constellations in the Bible. God did. My only offence is that I refuse to skip the verses.

But the Great Year of this book is larger than the precessional cycle, and here is the heart of the matter. The precessional Great Year is the shadow. The prophetic Great Year is the substance. The slow wheel above is a picture of a slower and greater wheel: the movement of God through the ages of His own purpose, from the age of innocence through the age of conscience, the age of law, the age of grace, and onward into what Paul calls the ages to come - the aiōnes tōn aiōnōn, the ages of the ages, the world without end.

So this book has four movements and three seals. The four movements are the Revelations, the Resources, the Expectations, and the Manifestations of the Great Year. The three seals are the World Without End, the Amen and Amen, and the Restitution of All Things. Each movement carries one hundred and fifty-three confirmations from the Scriptures. Each seal carries the weight of the whole.

One more word before we begin. The Great Year is not a doctrine about dates. I will give you no dates. Anyone who gives you a date has already told you he does not understand the subject, because the first law of the Great Year is stated by Christ Himself: of that day and hour knoweth no man. But between the forbidden date and the forbidden ignorance there is a vast permitted territory called discernment, and the children of Issachar lived in it, and the wise men of Persia travelled through it, and the sons of God are commanded to occupy it.

Let us occupy it.