World Ends Again Today!

As the Official Blog of the End of the World™, I said,

As the Official Blog of the End of the World™, we'll keep you posted on October 21st.

So far, so good. Well, not good for Mr. Camping, who has hit the proverbial three strikes and you're out, but for the rest of us!

On his Family Radio Network website, Camping noted that Doomsday predicting is not easy.

"There's a lot of things that we didn't have quite right, and that's God's good provision," he says. "I really am beginning to think, as I restudy these matters, that there's going to be no big display of any kind. The end is going to come very, very quietly, probably within the next month. It will happen, that is, by Oct. 21."

After May 21 came and went, Camping -- who blamed a similar 1994 misfire on a math error -- did readjust his assessment by saying "God's judgment" was completed on that day, and the final sword would fall today.

"Thus we can be sure that the whole world, with the exception of those who are presently saved (the elect), are under the judgment of God, and will be annihilated together with the whole physical world on Oct. 21," he says.

So, he made his first prediction in '94. We didn't see the End of the World, but we did suffer through Bill Clinton, which was more of a localized disaster!

Camping, not willing to finally admit that "no man knows the hour of the Lord's return", figured that just his "math" might have been off. (We'll put Camping in the Barbie™ school of "Math is hard" prognosticators.)

And again, after the End of the World failed to materialize when he predicted it again for May 21, he'd convinced a number of people of the certainty of that date, and they, like adventists of old, who dressed in white robes and sat on the mountaintops waiting for end to come, sold everything they had to spread the word. After all, what need would you have for material possessions after the world ends? Quite logical, given your presupposition.

But, they presupposed wrong. Now if Camping had just been some codger sitting on his front porch rocker (than than being off it), telling you about the date the world will end, you might have said something like, "Bless his heart!" But Camping had access to a large, and otherwise faithful, Christian broadcast network. I do not want to judge Mr. Camping, but the Good Book says, "By their fruits, ye shall know them." It also says that "Pride goeth before destruction..." Pride can be very insidious. If you genuinely thought that you were the only man in recorded history to ever figure out this great mystery, which God himself proclaimed would not be known unto any man, it would be very, very difficult not to be affected by pride in some way, shape or form.

But, instead, celebrate! This is the day the Lord hath made, and you are alive to see it! And there are people today who will draw their last breath, and to them, it will be indistinguishable from the end of the world. And I believe that is the point. Live every day as if it were your last, because one day, it will be true.

More End of the World stuff here.