05/06/2023
Look: We should have called this thing in the year 64CE...74CE at the outer limit.
Why?
"This generation will not pass away until all these things be fulfilled." ~ Matthew 24:34.
According to the Oxford Dictionary of English, a generation is:
1. All of the people born and living at about the same time, regarded collectively.
2. The average period, generally considered to be about thirty years, in which children grow up, become adults, and have children of their own.
Ad infinitum.
Now, some people have argued that a generation is a period of 40 years. The general consensus is this is the biblical view. Ok...we'll take that too. Hell, we'll even make it 100 years. But someone is yet to put forth the argument that a generation lasts 2 millennia.
"Waiting for Godot" is a play by Samuel Beckett in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting the titular Godot, who famously never arrives. Similarly, this waiting for Jesus business is an undertaking fraught with anxiety much.
As far as I can tell, it began with Sir Isaac Newton (unbeknownst to many also an alchemist and a theologian--the latter part a discovery many an excited Christian will not fail to remind you about--who apparently left a massive volume of work, literally thousands of pages attempting to decode the Bible which he believed contained "God's secret laws for this universe") who, in a curious end-times prediction known as "Newton's Riddle" set a definite date for 2016. We are almost midway through 2023.
But obviously, it all started with the disciples. Can you imagine the looks on their faces as the last one died off and yet the Saviour hadn't returned? Of course, dead men have no looks on their faces, unless one is crucified upside down. But you get the point.
Before Newton was Christopher Columbus who predicted in his infamous 1502 "Book of Prophecies" that Judgement Day would fall in 1657. Boy, did he get it wrong.
Next up was the man who TIME Magazine described as "perhaps the most famous false prophet in history," William Miller. In the 1840s, Miller preached that Jesus would return sometime between 21 March 1843, and 21 March 1844. Convinced by his calculations, as many as 100,000 "Millerites" sold their earthly possessions and sat back to wait for Godot. In the end, Miller recalculated The End as 22 October 1844. When 23 October came and went, Miller and his followers offered an explanation, giving birth to the Seventh-Day Adventist movement.
Contemporary prognosticators (by no means an exhaustive list) include Hal Lindsey, prophecy teacher and author of "The Late Great Planet Earth"--the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s--who predicted that The Rapture would occur by 1988; and former NASA engineer Edgar C. Whisenant who wrote "88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988."
But no doubt the most famous among this lot is Harold Camping, the radio preacher who convinced the entire world that the Apocalypse would happen in 2011. He even went as far as taking the singular risk (to life and limb) of buying billboards in the Arabian Gulf, the heart of Islam, to proclaim this once-in-a-lifetime event. Didn't we wait!
By all measure the most prolific modern predictor of the end times, Harold Camping has publicly predicted the end of the world as many as 12 times based on his interpretations of biblical numerology. In 1992, he published a book, ominously titled "1994?", which predicted the end of the world sometime around that year. His most high-profile prediction, of course, was for May 21, 2011, a date that he calculated to be exactly 7,000 years after the Biblical flood. When that date passed like a ship in the night, he declared his math to be off and pushed back waiting for Godot to October 21, 2011. Forlorn and discombobulated, his children eventually (mercifully) put him to pasture and inherited the multi-million dollar empire he had built, and promised the world that no more predictions would be forthcoming from Harold Camping Ministries.
