As you’ve no doubt heard by now, Harold Camping, president of California-based Family Radio, predicted that the rapture would occur today, May 21, and that the subsequent end of the world will occur on October 21. He and his followers do not claim to follow any new prophetic teaching, but rather claim to have deciphered a hidden teaching within the text of the Bible itself that gives exact dates as to the timing of the rapture. However, this teaching didn’t make much of an impact on us at PleaseConvinceMe.com for several reasons:1) The Bible claims Jesus is unaware of the exact date that the world would end.
This is the most apparent problem with Camping’s teachings, and the one I hear most from Christian friends. Matthew 24:36 reads, “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only” (NASB). If Jesus is unaware of the exact date it’s difficult for us to say that we can ourselves know. However, it might be argued that the exact date was revealed after Jesus’ time on earth, and could then be found in books written after his ascension, i.e. The New Testament. However, that leads us to a problem: Camping claims the dating of the end times is exactly 7,000 years after the time of Noah. Camping claims that there is a 7,000 year gap between the time of the flood and the end times, according to Genesis 7:4. However, Jesus had access to the book of Genesis during his lifetime; if the exact timing of the end times could have been deciphered since the time of Moses then it is hard to believe that Jesus would have been unaware of it.
2) Camping uses the genealogies found in the Bible to determine when the flood occurred and when the Earth was created.
Camping claims that the flood recorded in Genesis occurred in 4990 B.C. To come up with this, Camping and his followers use the genealogical records found in the Bible to gage how much time has transpired since the time of Adam. However, the Biblical genealogies are incomplete. The purpose of the genealogies in the Bible is not to compile a complete list of people but rather to show that a certain person is a descendant of another; the genealogies were certainly never intended to be used to construct calendars or timelines. Because the genealogies are not complete, it is impossible to use them to come up with a reliable dating of the flood or any other historical event. As far as the date of creation, whether you believe in a young earth or an ancient earth one thing is clear: the Bible is ambiguous as to how long ago creation occurred and how long the creation of the universe itself took.
3) If it was important to God that his believers knew the exact date of the end times he would have made it explicit.
It’s important to remember that many early Christians owned only a few pieces of scripture, if any. Early Christians and many Christians around the world today, did not and do not have access to the complete Biblical record, and so could not make the calculations that Camping says are required to find out the exact age of the earth. The apostles and early church fathers did not claim to know the date of the end times, nor how to decipher it. The fact of the matter is that the knowledge of when the end will come is not necessary to be a Christian. The Bible is clear that, in the end, all the believers in Christ will be in Heaven with God. So we don’t need to concern ourselves with discovering when the world will end, or worry about our fate.
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7 comments:
Great point Concerning the "of that day and hour no one knows" verse! The verse is not explicitly saying that "no one will EVER know" just that no one knows (then) including Christ (at the time Christ said that).
I also agree that it does not seem to have been that important for Christians to know the date even if it were attainable.
I would love to see an interview with one of Camping's followers to see if they could help us understand the journey it took for them to become so fanatical in this event.
I have used this to point out that we all need to be ready. It doesn't matter if you're pre-trib rapture, amillennialist or something else entirely. All of us will have to stand before Jesus and explain ourselves, whether through the rapture or drawing your last breath.
Do we care about the judgment that others are going to face? Are we spreading the gospel?
— a.k.a. Stormbringer
This article is very well said. I couldn't have said it better myself.
Jason
I just received this, have to share it: A "Reverend Fun" cartoon: http://tinyurl.com/3nhtz7l
nice job, Jimmy :)
Not knowing the exact date is one thing. But we would expect a 100-year span to be identified. Oh, wait, it was -- the time during which the bible was written and the 100 years following. After all, the claim was that he was coming soon.
Of course, like with many things in scripture, a sense of perspective and acquaintance with Hebrew/Greek are required for a proper interpretation. Does “quickly” mean the same thing as “soon” in that context? Probably not. Although I’m not certain about the precise interpretation, I’d suggest at least these three possibilities:
1. Through the writers of scripture, Christ has a desire that his people would be ever ready, ever anticipating his coming. When he comes, I have no doubt that a sense of rapidity will accompany it and the realization that everything is permanently different for the believer thereafter will take our breath away.
2. Those of us who hold to an old earth position and concur that human history is probably at least 40,000 years would concur that 2,000 years or so is relatively brief by comparison.
3. Since Christ confers through the NT writers this knowledge while he is in heaven, he speaks from the perspective of heaven and his position of glory. From the perspective of a dog, if it was capable of such thought, would likely think its owner nearly ageless: its 15 year lifespan, if occurring during its human’s middle years, would barely perceive the human’s passage of time. So too, Christ in glory, can see our generations pass quickly whereas from our perspective the time seems ageless.
Others, who hold to a preterist position for instance, would suggest other thoughts. Being dispensational, I don’t share those thoughts but can understand that other perspectives are at least possible as well.
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