Judgement Day

I saw the large bill board first in downtown Boston, the weekend of the marathon. JUDGMENT DAY—it declared. May 21, 2011. At first I thought it was a rock group, then I noticed the sponsors tag: Family Radio, neatly along the bottom and assumed it was a conference on May 21. It wasn’t until I got home to New York and saw that the world was going to end at 6:00 pm Eastern time on May 21, that I realized what was happening. “Here we go again,” I thought. “More fodder for those who think of evangelicals as losers and lunatics.”

Doomsday prophets like Harold Camping, the progenitor of the recent Judgement Day scare, have been around for a long time. In the middle part of the 19th century William Miller predicted that Jesus would return sometime between October 21, 1843 and October 21, 1844. They are still waiting. Millers followers eventually became what we now call the Seventh Day Adventists. He has about a half a page description of his sect in Kenneth Latourette’s 1500 page tome on church history. The failure of Christ to return then became known as the Great Disappointment. I’m sure Campings supporters feel a similar set of emotions now. According to the New York Times, people quit their jobs, quit saving college tuition for their kids, and came to New York to usher in the Rapture. In their minds there was no better place to do it than in Grand Central Station where they were lined up in the passage ways near the underground trains challenging people to repent! According to my daughter, they were pretty aggressive. I bet money that Camping will come out and say he got the math wrong and they’ll start the campaign all over again!

To me it’s a no brainer. The scripture says, “The secret things belong to God” and God alone (Deut 29:29)! There is mystery and transcendence in this faith we call Christianity. When people start putting dates on the return of Christ or speaking with absolute confidence about the nature and scope of events like the rapture, they cross a line as far as I’m concerned. Millions of dollars were spent on advertising something Jesus himself said no one will ever know (Mark 13:34). In fact, in his incarnational earthly presence, Jesus, himself didn’t know!

So what can we know theologically for sure? Jesus is going to come back some day and restore all things and part of that involves judgment (Acts 3:21). If you are a Christian, you believe at least that. It’s pretty basic I admit, and not near as sexy as JUDGEMENT DAY. But that is what Christians believe! And we believe it because of revelation—the Bible. We don’t believe it because we can mathmatically figure it out. There is an element of faith in any worldview including secular Atheism. All of us bank our eternal destiny on some faith based belief system. I’m a Christian because Christianity makes sense more than any other world religion. I’m not a Christian because I can prove definitively that the resurrection took place or that the bible is inspired or that God created by the simple command of his voice or that Jesus is coming back. Simply put, Christianity is different. God enters our world and does for us something we can’t do for ourselves. He dies a death we should have died and lives a life we should have lived. By faith in Jesus righteous record we avoid the negative side of judgment day—whenever it happens! There is no other world religion like it. And while I think that there are many good reasons to believe in Jesus and his message, I also realize that ultimately, it’s a faith based belief system. There is no bomb proof truth in this life! The only one who knows truth objectively is God himself.

I hope that as the world snickers, Christians will be sobered; sobered by the reality that lives are seriously disrupted, perhaps even ruined, by Mr. Campings disregard for the clear teaching of scripture. I believe in a judgment day and it is something we should take seriously. But how I as a follower of Jesus present Jesus and his message of hope and redemption will do as much to promote the cause of Christ as wreck it. Perhaps Mr. Camping should take his judgment day belief system seriously and re-evaluate his own wreckless behavior. In the end, he may find that the finger of God’s just judgment pointed at him. And that is a scary thought!

Addendum: After writing this blog, but prior to posting it Harold Camping came out with the new date for the rapture and judgment: October 21, 2011—my wife’s birthday. I think I'll take her out on the 20th! (Just kidding)