I wrote this Commentary on May 19. You’re reading it because Howard Camping was wrong – again.
KirklandThe 89-year-old former civil engineer had predicted that the world would end on May 21. The radio station he leads in California had announced the end of time on approximately 1,000 billboards nationwide as a warning to unrepentant commuters and other travelers.
Camping had initially predicted that the curtain would fall on the final act of history in 1994. He blamed that mistake on his miscalculation. Some things were not clear in the Bible then which he said are clear now. Both then and now, he should have known better.
Camping and his followers counted on a collection of clues for their May 21 doomsday prediction. We’ve got it this time, they thought. God had told Noah the world would end in seven days. The Bible equates seven days to 1,000 years. Camping had set the date of the great flood at 4990 B.C. So, add 7,000 years and factor in a “missing” year, and the year 2011 popped up. He translated a biblical reference to a month and a day from the Hebrew calendar to the Gregorian calendar, and arrived at the date – May 21.
Perhaps Michael Garcia, the special projects coordinator for Camping’s Family Radio enterprise, felt as bad as anybody about the failure of our Lord to show on May 21. He had told Religion News Service, “It’s no other date. It’s only that date.”
It is true – and it is to their credit – that most Christians had dismissed the May 21 deadline as “silly.”
Never mind that many doubt, said Garcia in that same RNS news story, pointing out that Noah had met with skepticism, too, as he forged ahead on building the ark. “It probably wasn’t even raining at the time,” Garcia said.
That same RNS article quoted Vern Sheridan Poythress, professor of New Testament at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, as saying, “There’s been a tendency by some Christians – and it’s not new to our century – to try to make detailed speculation and to calculate the end, in spite of the fact that the Bible says no one knows the day or the hour. The people I’m talking about know these verses (Matthew 24:36-44), but it doesn’t stop them from doing what these verses say not to do.”
Barbara Rossing teaches at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. She specializes in eschatology, which deals with matters related to the end of time. She told RNS that belief in the discovery of supposed secret information that appears to reveal the return of our Lord is “alluring.”
“It’s like the decoder ring you found in your cereal box,” she noted. “You can be the first on your block to decode the Bible.”
Some said recently that those who claim to know when the end of time is due have not read the Bible closely enough. In Camping’s case, it seems that he has read it closely, but wrongly.
In the late 1960s, I was a young sports editor working for my hometown newspaper, The Lancaster News. One summer, a sect of True Lights in North Carolina predicted the end of the world. Some sold everything they owned and waited for Jesus to return. A reporter asked one of them, “What if Jesus doesn’t return on the date you’re expecting him to?” The man’s faith in the imminent Second Coming faltered. “I guess I’ll just have to start all over again,” he said.
Curiosity about the end of time can be expected to continue until – well, until the end of time.
The disciples of Jesus were curious about it, and so they asked Jesus. He didn’t satisfy their curiosity. He kept ministering and instructed them – and us today – to do the same.
Every believer knows that the return of Jesus could happen at any moment. It will be when we least expect it, not after days of preparation for it. Such preparation is a daily, minute-by-minute matter for us.
The lesson from the Bible and from the unfolding of God’s plan in history is that we continue to do the work of our Lord “while it is day,” making the most of our time in service to God and to others.
Predictions about the Second Coming bring nothing but derision upon believers and the church of Christ. It is far better and more obedient to the Great Commission to tell the world why Jesus came to earth the first time.