The Rapture Probably Won’t Happen May 21

*These past few months have been infused with lots of propaganda about the world coming to an end soon and the rapture or the coming of Jesus to take place May 21. But some are doubting the event, calling it unlikely.

One columnist says there are three reasons it just won’t happen as predicted:

Here are three reasons why Harold Camping’s end-times prediction should be ignored.

I spent the past week in Guyana, a South American nation where the people are friendly, the food is spicy and churches are growing at a healthy pace. But Christians there face a serious challenge because of the sad legacy of Jim Jones, the American cult leader who ordered his followers to drink poisoned Kool-Aid at their compound in Jonestown in 1978. The mass suicide, which killed 909 people (including Jones), went down in history as the world’s worst example of religion gone wrong.

“Even today, the Jim Jones tragedy poses a problem of credibility for us,” one pastor in the city of Corriverton told me last week.

You can imagine my dismay when I arrived in Guyana and learned that groups of Americans were combing the streets and passing out literature claiming that Jesus will rapture the church on May 21. These Christians apparently are so convinced of the prediction that they traveled to the only English-speaking country in South America to deliver a last-minute warning.

This outbreak of rapture fever originated with Harold Camping, 89, a California-based Bible teacher who says he figured out the date of Jesus’ return by studying the book of Daniel and other biblical texts. Never mind that Jesus said no one would know the timing of His return (see Matt. 24:36). And never mind that Camping has a bad track record—he previously set Sept. 6, 1994, as the date for the Apocalypse. Many gullible Christians are still willing to trust Camping’s instincts.

Read more here.