An Inkling
Have you heard? Jesus is returning in 2011. A radio preacher named Harold Camping and his followers have determined a specific day for the return, May 11, along with a date for the world’s end, October 21. So says their website, wecanknow.com. And just to make sure that the news gets out, they’re buying billboards and issuing press releases.
To which I believe the best answer is, “We’ll see.” The easy thing to do is mock them, as many already are. Leno and Letterman will have a comedic feeding frenzy. The repeated failures of such predictions across the centuries make Camping and crew an easy mark. Indeed, Mr. Camping predicted 1994 the last time around.
In addition to the secular snickers, most Christian people are also rolling their eyes, and hope to distance themselves from the contrived biblical interpretations that lead to such calendaring. That’s understandable. We try to present our faith with intellectual clarity and credibility. Thus we draw back from biblical interpretations which lack both, and pray that Christ’s claims will be taken seriously even when many who use his name cannot be.
Back to the best answer to such claims: “we’ll see.” That is actually one of the Bible’s clear promises about Christ’s return: when he returns we’ll see him (Mt. 24:30, etc). We won’t miss it. We will see! The other clear promise (despite the claims of wecanknow.com) is that we won’t know ahead of time when he is coming (Mt. 24:36, etc). So when someone claims to know a date, knowing full well that we don’t know the date ourselves, our best answer is, “we’ll see.”
And in the meantime, we will live as those who know that Mr. Camping and company may well have put the day too far off! What if Jesus comes today? How will you live for him knowing that he might? That’s the pursuit which brings both clarity and credibility to our faith.
We’ll see,
Keith
