Many years ago I promised God that before I left this earth I would undertake a project that I called “Ten Thousand Years.” At the time I made the vow, I was teaching children in church using what I called millennium sticks. I had made the sticks from pieces of hardwood sold in 6-inch square batches of 6 sticks each lightly glued to paper. I took the paper off and painted the sticks colors to represent 1,000-year periods in human history. The first few sticks ranged from solid white (the last ice age) to gradually tan and then green (represent melting ice and the increasing warmth and verdancy moving south). The final sticks were painted in this order, moving to the end of the 20th century: verdant green (agriculture), blue (sea travel), red (conquests), purple (church), gold (golden era).
I have used these sticks to lay out a timeline of history.
Step one: Lay them on a flat surface, end-to-end, in the order of history indicated by the colors.
Step two: Lay a ribbon perpendicular to the sticks 2 sticks down from the present time.
In using this model to teach, I have placed little items along the sticks to represent what was going on in human history at the time. The Greek Golden Ages began in the middle of the red stick. Moses lived about a quarter of the way back from the red in the blue. Abraham came up from Ur at about the line between the blue and first green stick. Writing was invented beginning in the second green stick. Europe did not start exploring the Americas until the middle of the gold stick. King Arthur lived in the middle of the purple stick. Jesus was born at the intersection of the ribbon and the sticks.
What we know today that we can place along the sticks below the ribbon is — surprisingly to most — information that was largely developed in the 19th and 20th centuries. Before Napoleon took some scholars with him to Egypt as the 19th century opened, much of that civilization’s early history had been buried in sand and forgotten for many centuries. Carbon dating was not invented until mid-20th century. Many ancient languages were deciphered during the 20th century.
The Bible, of course, contains a great deal of history. For the past two centuries, new tools for uncovering the past did a two-step with Biblical history. The first step was to demean the Bible as mythology — not real history. The second step has been increasing awe at the accuracy of Biblical history as it was confirmed by the new tools of the skeptics. I will not get bogged down here in splitting hairs about, for example, the Garden of Eden. Genetic studies are showing, with increase clarity, that we came up from the garden of Africa. Now, there are new and fascinating ideas to explore that were seen only dimly by the earlier thinkers.
Ponderings of a new kind in a new millennium
Now that we know Biblical history — both what happened and the accounts in the Bible — are not myth, our new millennium has opened new paths into the larger reality, with questions to examine like this one:
Just exactly what is the tiny twitter of just ten millennia of human history in the dozen plus billion years time seems to have been around? How and why did we emerge so quickly in this staggeringly long time timeline compared to our own?
My answer to these questions — in the lingo of the new era of complexity and network theory — is this: We emerged in an earthly Garden remembered in Scripture and are on our way to a Holy City that exists in dimensions we can only see partially until we arise imperishable. The Lord of all came to tell us about our journey where the ribbon crosses the line of sticks in the timeline along which human emergence has taken place.
