Last year, WeCanKnow .com, a Christian-based website in North Carolina, selected metro Atlanta as the site for dozens of billboards proclaiming Christ’s imminent return and the Rapture of Christian believers. In Nashville, similar billboards were paid for by Harold Camping, a Christian author and radio broadcaster in California, who is pushing the idea that May 21 is the date. He mistakenly predicted the same series of events in 1994. He bases that date on an analysis of Scripture.
With so many people skeptical about the date for various reasons, what’s behind the choice of May 21?
Tom Evans, media representative for Family Stations Inc., of which Camping is president and general manager, said, “All the signs that Jesus warned of in the Bible that would precede his return have taken place, and are evident in our world. For example, the re-establishment of the nation of Israel; the complete decay of the church; the dismal state of our world; and the moral breakdown of all of society.”
The belief holds that not only will the Rapture occur next Saturday, but the end of the world will occur on Oct. 21.
Bishop Chandler Jones, however, won’t be holding his breath. Instead, the rector at St. Barnabas Anglican Church in Dunwoody will be performing a wedding May 21 “that will go on exactly as planned.”
“I think it’s very presumptuous to try to predict the time and hour of Jesus’ return because our Lord says in the Gospel that even the Son does not know the hour of his return,” he said.
Jones said he thinks some people may buy into that theory, though, because of the recent number of natural disasters around the world, including earthquakes, tsunamis and floods, and the “anxiety of our times,” including the economy, politics and society.
The Rev. Lynn Eynon, pastor of Woodstock Christian Church, plans to talk about the prediction during his sermon Sunday. Not that he thinks it will happen, however.
“I think the whole concept is foolishness,” said Eynon. “What they’re doing is contrary to Scripture. The Bible says that no man knows the day or hour of his coming. Those dates have come and gone over the years in church history. It’s going to happen eventually, but we’re not going to know the date. It makes Christianity look silly.”
According to the Pew Center for the People and the Press, 41 percent of Americans believe Jesus Christ will return to Earth by 2050.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church “certainly believes Jesus is coming again, and soon,” said Ed Wright, president of the Georgia-Cumberland Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. “But our understanding of clear Bible teaching on this topic is quite different. ... The almost complete fulfillment of most lines of prophecy, together with the present condition of the world, indicates that his coming is imminent, but we do not know the exact date.”
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