Do Dates Matter to God?
Leviticus 23:4; Galatians 4:9-11; Colossians 2:16-17; Romans 14:5-6; Acts 1:7
Scripture gives appointed times real weight and simultaneously refuses to make calendar observance a measure of standing before God. Both testimonies are canonical, and neither cancels the other.
The case that dates matter
Appointed times are written into creation (Genesis 1:14), are called the LORD's own feasts (Leviticus 23:4), structure the whole Torah year, and frame the decisive New Testament events — the Passion at Passover, the Spirit at Pentecost. God acts on days he has named, and commands his people to keep them.
The case against absolutising a calendar
'Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. I am afraid of you' (Galatians 4:10-11). 'Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ' (Colossians 2:16-17). 'One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind' (Romans 14:5).
The distinction that holds them together
God's appointed feast times are one category. Human calendar systems for locating those times on a grid of numbered days are another. Passover is biblical; the Julian arithmetic for finding it is Roman civil engineering. Confusing the two turns a question about faithfulness into a question about astronomy.
What Scripture does not say
No biblical text endorses the Julian calendar, the Gregorian calendar, the Revised Julian calendar, or any other numbering system. Claims that one of these is 'God's calendar' are arguments from theological inference, and should be labelled as such rather than quoted as though a verse said it.
The limit Scripture sets on the whole enquiry
'It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power' (Acts 1:7). The same canon that dates the Exodus to a month and Pentecost to a day forbids using dates to schedule the end. Any calendar study that ends in a prediction has walked past this verse.
Where the archive leaves it
Appointed times matter because God appoints them, not because a calendar is accurate. Accuracy is a real good — a drifting equinox genuinely detaches a computation from the sky it was meant to track — but it is a practical good, not a sacrament. The open question is whether unity of observance is worth more than continuity of reckoning, and the Church has answered that differently in East and West for over four centuries.