Intersections: Where Faith Meets Life – by Bob Weathers

Looking forward to 2011? Every new year holds promise and potential. New jobs. Reunions. Graduations. Weddings. The list could go on and on.

Bob Weathers

But some folks say we should set aside May 21 for the event we have all been waiting for. The return of Christ. The rapture, to be exact.

Will Jesus come back May 21? Our friends at www.ebiblefellowship.com repeat the predictions of www.familyradio.com. You can go to either site, and many others that are rapidly popping up, and follow their reasoning. But I warn you, it’s complicated. In fact, to arrive at their conclusion that the rapture will occur on May 21, 2011, they have torqued principles of biblical interpretation beyond anything normally recognizable.

Before Christ ascended, He warned His followers to resist the temptation to speculate on His return (Acts 1:7). But we can’t seem to help ourselves. Obsessed with our own self-importance and the belief that we should know all things, in the absence of information we just make something up. So practically before the ground was cold beneath His feet, people started wondering when He would come back.

Even so, we do not know. And, more importantly, we will not know. And any effort to read the Father’s mind, to chart the course of history, is both dangerously presumptuous and unnecessarily distracting. Obsessing with the end times diverts us away from the reason the church is on earth: to fulfill the Great Commission.

Should we ignore biblical prophecies of the second coming? Of course not. But we must keep a healthy perspective, teaching this significant doctrine for the reasons revealed in the New Testament.

Both Jesus and Paul taught on the second coming, and both emphasized one primary reason that this doctrine should interest believers. Not to balm our curiosity. And not for marking the calendar. Rather, to keep us focused on the tasks before us, while at the same time glancing at the sky as we await His arrival. To remind us that we live in the expectation of His return.

Why? So we will be ready.

So will Jesus come back on May 21? Happily, I have no idea. Because my concern is not when He is coming, but what He will find me doing when He arrives.