Another rapture and doomsday has passed and once again Harold Camping’s mathematical proof from Scripture has failed to yield the precise return of Christ. It is a strange message to focus on and the billboards and street prophets do not help. However I find this feeling on my gut of respect for Camping. I am not endorsing his desire to announce the day of Christ’s return or doomsday, his last prediction passed on October 21st without event. I believe that “no one knows about that day or hour.” While Camping might go a lot too far on predicting the return of Jesus, he does what most Christians are afraid to do– share the message of Christ’s foretold return.
Teachings about the end times, eschatology, the rapture, and the completion of this world have been at best ignored and at worst abandoned by pastors. Hope has changed from Christ’s glorious return to life getting a little better or the potential that lies in humankind. Writing and teaching on the subject has been left to popular book series that take great liberties with a handful of passages or Bible mathematicians who can take a number give it a meaning and then use a math equation to yield the exact date of Jesus’ return. All of this has clouded what orthodox Christianity has taught for generations, that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead.
We need to take a cue from Harold Camping and talk about Christ’s return. There is a great disservice being done in Christianity today because we have abandoned our creeds and beliefs about the hope of Christ’s return We should proclaim the hope that Christians have held for millennia, the hope that Paul describes in Romans 8. A hope that transcends the world we live in now. C.S. Lewis describes this world as an echo of the future reality.
This is why earthly desires never fully satisfy us, they always leave us wanting more, because there is something more that we were created for. We need to share that our great hope is not in living a happy life here, that our hope is not a cure for death or living the American dream; our hope is eternity with Christ. Not some ethereal, nonphysical world, but in the New Heaven and New Earth. Where there will be no more weeping and no more pain. We will worship the king with perfect bodies in a perfect world. Hope is not about our abilities, our potential, our dreams, it is ultimately about Christ because he can bring everlasting peace, joy, and love.
So secretly I respect Camping because he has the guts to proclaim the truth, that Christ will return. His method may be off, and his proclamation a bit strange but he broaches a topic too often forgotten. So I like Harold, just don’t tell anyone.
