A Brief Word on the World's End

For the record, I hope the Lord Jesus returns on May 21, if not today or the day thereafter.  His return is for those who love Him our “blessed hope” (Titus 2:13) and the culminating work of our salvation.  But Christians are engaging in as much snarky May 21-bashing this week as non-Christians on Twitter and the blogosphere, and I want to offer this caution to any who’ll heed it: beware our impulse to separate from the media circus doesn’t become clowning around with our hope. 

If Jesus were to rapture His church tomorrow (the word “rapture” comes from the Latin rendering of the Greek word for “caught up” in 1 Thess. 4:17), it will be coincidence for Harold Camping, not fulfilled prediction.  Camping’s been at the eschatological guessing game a long time, and his latest prediction (though he appeals to the precision of math: http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/0518/Judgment-Day-May-21-When-will-the-world-actually-end) is another bad sequel in his doomsday franchise.  I call Harold Camping the Steven Seagal of eschatology—every movie is the same and they're all bad.  Besides his penchant for date-setting, there are other problems in Camping’s theological constructs, enough to consider him not just mistaken but dangerously heretical.

And yet he has persuaded a following, people who’ve emptied their life savings and left jobs and loved ones to prepare for the end they are sure is coming tomorrow (Western Hemisphere time, of course).  I feel badly for these people.  Being misguided doesn’t make one a kook, no more than having eschatological convictions makes a Christian weird, although I know many in the hipster Christian set seem to think so by their nonchalant regard of anything eschatological.  That is their biblical problem. 

Yes, Camping’s followers are responsible for drinking the Kool-Aid in their own version of a doctrinal mass suicide.  But I also see in Camping’s followers people for whom the promise of the Lord’s return actually means something, enough to radically alter their lives for it.  I don’t see this in my church very much, nor the churches of my friends.  It’s similar to how I feel when the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on my door: why do the deceived and mistaken work harder for their cause than those of us who consider ourselves doctrinally correct and gospel true?

At least Camping’s people have evident passion for something God-oriented, mistaken though they are.  My text this Sunday as I move through 1 John includes 1 John 3:2, a portal-opening verse about the Lord’s imminent return: “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.”  I will try, as much as it depends on me, to open this reality—the reality of hope (see the next verse, 1 John 3:3)—for the people in my church such that they’re genuinely moved to action in response.  But what usually happens is more along lines of appreciative assent—“I enjoyed that, pastor!”  And then it’s on to other things.

Camping’s followers have staked everything on a theological Vegas act.  That’s tragic, but I also think it’s tragic that those of us who spend the most time with truth seem the most idle, preoccupied and distracted.  Harold Camping is an easy dude to mock and scorn, no doubt.  But he’s asked for and received a more noticeable commitment to his message from his followers than Jesus often gets from His.