Seeing as recently a lot of attention has been given to a certain Harold Camping and his "Rapture Movement", I thought I'd use my Sunday Special to help clear out this really annoying issue.
If you haven't already heard about this, or the name Camping doesn't ring any bells with you, let me summarize the news part of the story before I get on to the spiritual and biblical part of this: around the beginning of the year, Harold Camping, a Christian radio-show host, predicted that the Rapture/Judgement Day/end-of-the-world would take place on March 21st, 2011. Naturally, this caused some stir among the Christian culture--some people labeled him as a blasphemer, others blindly accepted his false teachings, but the majority of us just kept going as if nothing had happened. Surprisingly enough, that's exactly what happened on March 21st: absolutely nothing. And when our beloved prophet Camping was questioned about his failed prophecy? Well, he did two things--he covered himself by saying that the world would actually end on October 21st, and he actually congratulated himself on being humble enough to admit his mistake. He also said, in this ridiculous interview, "I can't be responsible for anybody's life; I'm only teaching the Bible!" in response to other news stories about people who attempted suicide and even murder because they feared the Judgement that he "prophesied".
Now, I'm assuming that my readers understand that Judgement Day is not on anyone's calendar--only God knows when that day will be, not even Jesus knows. We will know when it happened, and we will certainly be able to tell when it happens, but we will never have advance knowledge of any specific "day" of Judgement. Jesus even says it quite clearly in Matthew 24:36 "But concerning that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." If that's not clear enough for you, I don't know what is. "No one" clearly includes all forms of life except the Father, that being God the Father. But as I said, I'm pretty sure everybody reading this already understands that idea.
Now let's move on to something a little more pressing about this whole matter: how Camping is "figuring out" the day of Judgement.
Interestingly enough, a search of Camping's radio show's website showed absolutely nothing about how one finds the specific date and time of the Rapture. You'd think that if one had figured out the secret, they'd want other people to be able to figure it out as well. A search of the world "rapture" in the handy-dandy "Dynamic Bible Query" tool lead to absolutely nothing useful. The funnies thing I found was that there was a document explaining Matthew 24: 37-41, but nothing about the verse right before, wherein Camping's argument is torn to shreds with a single sentence from the Savior. Coincidence? I think not...
I did, however, find a video of Camping talking about why the knowledge hasn't come about until now. The interesting thing is that he talks about how God had to "hide" the facts in the book of Daniel until 1988. First off, why would God "have to" hide anything from us? If God didn't want us to know about it, then why would He put it in His Word? Secondly, while in this supposed Daniel interpretation, one has to search long and deep into the words and stretch the meaning to the point of misinterpreting the Scriptures, in the afore-mentioned verse in Matthew, the point is quite clear: no one but God Himself knows the day, so you can stop guessing, cuz you're going to be wrong.
We can't think of the Bible as some secret code that we have to decipher. The Bible is not malleable; it is not bendable to man's interpretation. That's why it's the absolute truth--as spoken by God. Whatever God says is Truth in the most definite sense. No matter what man does to it, we can't change the Truth. I will admit that there are many passages in the Bible that are hard to understand. To interpret those passages, we must rely on other Scriptural sources as tools. And when we find the meaning of those passages that we don't understand at first, we must check ourselves and see if the meaning contradicts anything in the Bible. For example, if someone says they've found a combination of verses that show what day Judgement will happen on, you can say, "But Matthew 24:36 clearly states..." and so on.
Until next time,
--CommanderSnowball
P.S. Sorry for being so monotonous referring back to Matthew 24:36 so often. Just trying to get a point across, that one verse is all it takes to find the truth sometimes. Of course, there are other verses in the Bible that refer to the day of Judgement. A couple are:
Just to name some. Of course, these aren't the only verses that talk about the Final Judgement. If you want more references about these things, talk to your pastor or (even better!) research it yourself! Cheers!
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