“In the future, there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give me on that day, and not only to me, but to all those who have loved His appearing.”
[2Timothy 4:8 HCSB]
Reverend Harold Camping, founder of Family Radio Worldwide, is saying that the world is coming to an end on a calculated date of May 21st, 2011 which is coming this Saturday. On Syracuse.com (as well as other sites) Reverend Camping is quoted as saying….” "Beyond the shadow of a doubt, May 21 will be the date of the Rapture and the day of judgment."
This is a familiar ‘rant’ from Camping who miss-predicted the end back in 1994. This time, Fiji and New Zealand will get hit with earthquakes at 6pm and Christ will gallop across the sky to reclaim His followers right after.
The end of the world process will be complete five months later on October 21, 2011.
This has spawned so-called ‘rapture parties’ and ‘looting gangs’ on the social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
And many Christians are joining in the ‘fun.’
Ysolt Usigan posted an article on CBS.com “End of the world, May 21, 2011? Whatever, it’s funny” and remarked “Well naturally we though[t] that was kind of funny,” (apparently grammar wasn’t important to Usigan) in reference to Reverend Camping’s second prediction, “But we weren't the only ones.”
Usigan finishes the brief article with a link to ‘favorite rapture tweets.”
WendySparrow claimed the top one of the 20 with the remark, “I really don’t have time for the world to end this weekend. Plus, the weather is supposed to be crappy.”
GottaloveCYD says, “The only way I would believe in Judgment day is if Morgan Freeman came up to me and told me I was god.”
Nzcspaul quips, “So the end of the world coming on Sunday while I’m out of the country? Better pack my electric thumb and towel.”
Whether these samplings are from those who express a claim to be Christians or just atheists and agnostics who want to have some fun with such familiar doomsday preachers, Usigan is unclear and doesn’t specify.
A certain amount of ridicule from the non-Christian believers is to be expected and obviously will be used by the mainstream media to heap doubt and intolerance upon the end-time doctrine of the universal church.
It is common in this world, even as those very people question the validity of it and in backrooms often try to ‘buy some insurance just in case.’
We cannot predict the day or even the hour of Christ’s return…..we are instructed to live as if He’s coming tomorrow and keep watch to the skies for His eminent return. Reverend Camping’s prediction is presumptuous as it is ‘mockable.’ Of course, it won’t be portrayed that way, as another failed human attempt to define and predict God’s ways and timing, in the media…..it’ll be just one of those ‘fanatical Christian sects’ who were ‘wrong again.’
There are several sites debunking Camping’s prediction from the math he used to other data anomalies that skew his dating. Others are pointing to the fact we’ll not be able to watch the end of “Dancing with the Stars” or other ‘important’ events that ‘sweeten’ our lives.
What bothers me is the amount of “Christian” people who are jumping on ‘looting’ bandwagons and ‘before-rapture’ parties saying that they’re going to have a ball either as the 21st draws to a close and the world begins to end or jumping on the looting for that big screen TV after everyone has disappeared.
And then just answering posts against such comments as “lighten up, we’re just joking.”
The most important event in Christianity since the Resurrection is a joke?
Whether you believe in pre-trib, mid-trib, post-trib for the reclaimation of Christ’s followers from this world before He returns the whole of creation to its intended and original state, Christ warns us about ‘mocking’ God.
Proverbs 9:12, Isaiah 28:22, Obadiah 1:22 to name a few.
The biblical text is replete with what happens to those who do. But honestly, what does the mockery we are making of ‘end-of-times’ predictions say about our biblical beliefs about this event?
“About the times and the seasons: brothers, you do not need anything to be written to you. For you yourselves know very well that the Day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night. When they say, "Peace and security," then sudden destruction comes on them, like labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. But you, brothers, are not in the dark, so that this day would overtake you like a thief. For you are all sons of light and sons of the day. We're not of the night or of darkness. So then, we must not sleep, like the rest, but we must stay awake and be sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk are drunk at night. But since we are of the day, we must be sober and put the armor of faith and love on our chests, and put on a helmet of the hope of salvation. “ [1Thessalonians 5:1-8 HCSB]
How do you live your life?
If you have to live by the ‘predicated’ end-of-time hoopla that comes and goes with the marching of this world towards its true end, it would be nothing but a mockery on the public square as you silently (in the darkness of your own home) ‘make an insurance bet’ on such utterances.
If you don’t believe in the gospel, well you’re going to establish such enterprises as “Pet care after rapture” and “Estate planning for the raptured.” You are going to live your life the way you want, assured of the day coming after that will allow you to get ‘caught up’ on those things that you didn’t do today or you make jokes about finally getting that big-screen TV that was abandoned by the raptured folk or looting the grocery stores.
You participate in the world’s madness or the world’s mockery of this ‘beginning of the Kingdom come.”
If you live with your eyes towards the sky, sobered by the fact that we cannot know the day or the hour of His return, only that we can remain ‘awake’ assured of its guaranteed happening, then such predictions are a method of answering the brokenness and sinfulness of the world desperate for God’s salvation.
You stand upon the biblical truths of this event and you use the mockery of the world to speak truth……”We know not the day or hour, but we do eagerly look to the sky for His coming.”
We live with the realization that tomorrow might not come and therefore the importance of what we do becomes relevant to what we believe. We hear the din of the battle waging and we grow not weary in our fight for the souls of the lost and the redemption of the worldly.
We no longer ‘panic’ when such predictions are uttered because we know regardless of truth or falseness, we are destined for home…..in God’s time. But we ‘panic’ about the abundance and overwhelming amount of ‘work’ left to be done under a timeframe we are not privy to.
There is no doubt that the end of the world as we know it is coming the 21st of May, 2011…this Saturday……..because we will know either the folly or the accuracy of Reverend Camping’s prediction.
Christianity will be proven right in the finality of the world or mocked again because of the misguided theology and predictions of one who claims to know God’s timing. Either way, the world changes. It will become more worldly or have judgment passed.
Either way, how are you living?
As I posted on the page on Facebook promoting a ‘looting party’ after the rapture day,
“I won’t be looting but preaching the Gospel to those of you who are.”
As I will do today……
And tomorrow……………
And the next day……………..
Until I see my Savior galloping on a white horse across the sky.
Thursday, May 19
Sunday, May 8
Waiting
“However, I have let you live for this purpose: to show you My power and to make My name known in all the earth.” [Exodus 9:16 HCSB]
The complexities of life sometimes overwhelm me and the simplicity of ‘waiting’ on the Lord becomes a painful reminder of how unworthy and inadequate I am for any cause or purpose that He’d put into my fragile and weak hands to carry. In every aspect of my life, every bump and resultant bruise that happens along the bumpy road of this journey, there is struggle and painful realizations of how accurate the ol’ song is “If it weren’t for bad luck……”
I’ve come to realize just how broken and lost my life before Christ had become, not by some simple measuring stick that I’ve come across in the Bible but as I’ve faced the situations that have left me grasping for air, struggling for understanding and agonizing over the feelings of being left behind again. As I face on a daily basis that major wound of community, with which I’ve been told I’ll never be able to find acceptability of my purpose within the family…..I’ll forever be the crazy old uncle or brother or friend who runs on the outskirts of the family muttering crazy things no one listens to.
Gone are the illusions of those who spoke edification into my life as if deranged themselves about me being some mighty leader on the front lines with lines of faithful standing with and behind me as I race over the hilltop screaming the battle cry “For My God and King!” (yes, someone actually said that to me years ago….) Gone are the assurances that sometime, in God’s time, such realized purpose will suddenly burst upon the landscape of this world like an atom bomb…..like a revolution of the Gospel speaking salvation into lives once as broken as mine. What I once saw my life as, not as completely in that moment of this imagined call as it had morphed and developed over time, is not what I now see my life becoming.
A friend of mine sent me a post via that great social media called Facebook all the way from the country of England (known as Great Britain or ‘our cousins across the pond’ in some circles). It’s not Mother’s day over there in the enlightened lands of the Brits…..but I digress. I’ll just print what the ‘gist’ of the post was:
“[Message] was on "If we are humble": Shepherds were detested by Egyptians; Moses, having been raised as Egyptian would have known that his kind didn't become one, became shepherd for 40 yrs, during which time he may have thought his being used by God wasn't really going to happen; God was teaching and developing Moses to be humble in tough times so he could be used in later good times.....”
No, I don’t suddenly see myself as a modern-day Moses…..born into slavery and sneaked into royalty until the realization of his birthright drove him to ‘connect’ with his ethnicity in quite the wrong way and he suddenly became a fugitive from both cultures after 40 years of the ‘good life.’ For one, I can’t recall ever having the ‘good life’ (though I am sure there are some who would dispute this fact with me…..) and I definitely screwed up my life well before my 40th year.
But Moses fled and spent the next 40 years in the wilderness tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian around the wilderness of Horeb (the mountain of God). A Shepherd, something the Egyptians despised (at least according to one pastor), is the very thing that Moses became…..apparently without argument or fight. He marries, has a son and doesn’t even have his own wealth….rather he protects and nurtures the wealth of another, his father-in-law, for 40 years. A royal, trained to lead a nation and educated in the methods of the time, puts his staff in front of him and pulls his body along after the sheep. Hard times? Indeed…..hard times that become so commonplace that he doesn’t recognize the hardships anymore.
I have come to learn the purpose of family by the hard road of having treated my family so loosely that I didn’t seek a covenant marriage in which to grow one…..I am blessed with three great kids; one of whom I have just been back in contact with since he was twelve (he’s now sixteen) and two who are living with me, struggling with the broken family that such foolishness of my actions caused. The ignorance of the Gospel only serves as a excuse and not a very valid one at that.
I have come to realize the power of intimate relationship in the brokenness of the many I thought I had before; where I thought I was a contributor and not a destroyer. Where, with God as the true center, there is glorious blessing and where God is put into a makeshift temporary shelter, disaster strikes as you try to make blessings of your own manufacture. The reflections of my earthly relationships have driven holes into the shallow relationship that I have with my Heavenly Father. I have come to realize the truthfulness of the trio of a relationship being sacrosanct….you, the other person and God. I have also realized that I’ll never open the door to that possibility again…..some things are best left in the rearview mirror of our departure, for everyone’s sake. Some would call me a coward, but I realize some wounds will never heal and if they cannot be identified…..the soundest course of action is inaction.
I have seen the good and bad of community, both within the larger context of the universal family of God and in the smaller context of earthly communities where I have spent my time as a resident and an outsider. I see how hard it is for that community to break from the stagnate stillness of the protective walls of its ‘society’ and I’ve seen the harshness that comes from the ‘inbreeding’ that takes place when such a community is so isolated. I have seen communities who struggle successfully despite disadvantages and achieve the type of fellowship that God intended for His bride and be brutally attacked by the world and even other Christians, myself included. Of course, I am one of those who wander in and out of community because my opinions have been said with the intentionality of murder, like Moses and the overseer while others have been because there are those who wonder by what authority I proclaim what I do……like Moses and the Israelites in captivity.
I realize that my life, wrought with pain and trials and suffering and sorrows, has not been worthless or in vain…….the very pain in my joints and the brokenness of my mind have existed because of the road I once walked and that beckons me from over the treetops of this path is nothing more than part of the journey I have been on since I was first gasping for breath in the harsh light of this cold, cruel world…….
We tend to look to God and expect as He has performed open heart surgery that we will recover quickly and completely…..new creatures who simply skip through this world with joy, joy, joy in these newly beating hearts with nar a sorrow to revisit. We find rather quickly that some of us are born for the adversity and others for the nobility of our Father’s kingdom. Some will struggle forever and some will find healing in the morning light.
Saint or Sinner. Noble or Shepherd.
All serve His purpose.
The complexities of life sometimes overwhelm me and the simplicity of ‘waiting’ on the Lord becomes a painful reminder of how unworthy and inadequate I am for any cause or purpose that He’d put into my fragile and weak hands to carry. In every aspect of my life, every bump and resultant bruise that happens along the bumpy road of this journey, there is struggle and painful realizations of how accurate the ol’ song is “If it weren’t for bad luck……”
I’ve come to realize just how broken and lost my life before Christ had become, not by some simple measuring stick that I’ve come across in the Bible but as I’ve faced the situations that have left me grasping for air, struggling for understanding and agonizing over the feelings of being left behind again. As I face on a daily basis that major wound of community, with which I’ve been told I’ll never be able to find acceptability of my purpose within the family…..I’ll forever be the crazy old uncle or brother or friend who runs on the outskirts of the family muttering crazy things no one listens to.
Gone are the illusions of those who spoke edification into my life as if deranged themselves about me being some mighty leader on the front lines with lines of faithful standing with and behind me as I race over the hilltop screaming the battle cry “For My God and King!” (yes, someone actually said that to me years ago….) Gone are the assurances that sometime, in God’s time, such realized purpose will suddenly burst upon the landscape of this world like an atom bomb…..like a revolution of the Gospel speaking salvation into lives once as broken as mine. What I once saw my life as, not as completely in that moment of this imagined call as it had morphed and developed over time, is not what I now see my life becoming.
A friend of mine sent me a post via that great social media called Facebook all the way from the country of England (known as Great Britain or ‘our cousins across the pond’ in some circles). It’s not Mother’s day over there in the enlightened lands of the Brits…..but I digress. I’ll just print what the ‘gist’ of the post was:
“[Message] was on "If we are humble": Shepherds were detested by Egyptians; Moses, having been raised as Egyptian would have known that his kind didn't become one, became shepherd for 40 yrs, during which time he may have thought his being used by God wasn't really going to happen; God was teaching and developing Moses to be humble in tough times so he could be used in later good times.....”
No, I don’t suddenly see myself as a modern-day Moses…..born into slavery and sneaked into royalty until the realization of his birthright drove him to ‘connect’ with his ethnicity in quite the wrong way and he suddenly became a fugitive from both cultures after 40 years of the ‘good life.’ For one, I can’t recall ever having the ‘good life’ (though I am sure there are some who would dispute this fact with me…..) and I definitely screwed up my life well before my 40th year.
But Moses fled and spent the next 40 years in the wilderness tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian around the wilderness of Horeb (the mountain of God). A Shepherd, something the Egyptians despised (at least according to one pastor), is the very thing that Moses became…..apparently without argument or fight. He marries, has a son and doesn’t even have his own wealth….rather he protects and nurtures the wealth of another, his father-in-law, for 40 years. A royal, trained to lead a nation and educated in the methods of the time, puts his staff in front of him and pulls his body along after the sheep. Hard times? Indeed…..hard times that become so commonplace that he doesn’t recognize the hardships anymore.
I have come to learn the purpose of family by the hard road of having treated my family so loosely that I didn’t seek a covenant marriage in which to grow one…..I am blessed with three great kids; one of whom I have just been back in contact with since he was twelve (he’s now sixteen) and two who are living with me, struggling with the broken family that such foolishness of my actions caused. The ignorance of the Gospel only serves as a excuse and not a very valid one at that.
I have come to realize the power of intimate relationship in the brokenness of the many I thought I had before; where I thought I was a contributor and not a destroyer. Where, with God as the true center, there is glorious blessing and where God is put into a makeshift temporary shelter, disaster strikes as you try to make blessings of your own manufacture. The reflections of my earthly relationships have driven holes into the shallow relationship that I have with my Heavenly Father. I have come to realize the truthfulness of the trio of a relationship being sacrosanct….you, the other person and God. I have also realized that I’ll never open the door to that possibility again…..some things are best left in the rearview mirror of our departure, for everyone’s sake. Some would call me a coward, but I realize some wounds will never heal and if they cannot be identified…..the soundest course of action is inaction.
I have seen the good and bad of community, both within the larger context of the universal family of God and in the smaller context of earthly communities where I have spent my time as a resident and an outsider. I see how hard it is for that community to break from the stagnate stillness of the protective walls of its ‘society’ and I’ve seen the harshness that comes from the ‘inbreeding’ that takes place when such a community is so isolated. I have seen communities who struggle successfully despite disadvantages and achieve the type of fellowship that God intended for His bride and be brutally attacked by the world and even other Christians, myself included. Of course, I am one of those who wander in and out of community because my opinions have been said with the intentionality of murder, like Moses and the overseer while others have been because there are those who wonder by what authority I proclaim what I do……like Moses and the Israelites in captivity.
I realize that my life, wrought with pain and trials and suffering and sorrows, has not been worthless or in vain…….the very pain in my joints and the brokenness of my mind have existed because of the road I once walked and that beckons me from over the treetops of this path is nothing more than part of the journey I have been on since I was first gasping for breath in the harsh light of this cold, cruel world…….
We tend to look to God and expect as He has performed open heart surgery that we will recover quickly and completely…..new creatures who simply skip through this world with joy, joy, joy in these newly beating hearts with nar a sorrow to revisit. We find rather quickly that some of us are born for the adversity and others for the nobility of our Father’s kingdom. Some will struggle forever and some will find healing in the morning light.
Saint or Sinner. Noble or Shepherd.
All serve His purpose.
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