Apparently there is a fair amount of rapture fever going around at the moment with a swathe of people predicting that Jesus is either going to return or at least sweep his faithful out of the way of a pending period of tribulation sometime between 22/23 September 2025. By the time you read this, I am very confident that all of them will have been proved wrong and sad to think that a lot of other people will have been disappointed by their empty promises.
Why am I so confident? Part of it is the lessons of history. Plenty of people have made similar predictions in the past and those have all fallen flat. For example, you can read about the Great Disappointment of 1844. Further back in time, there were plenty of rumours stirring as 1666 approached, or the year 1000AD and probably around 666 as well. Going the other directions, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have notoriously made several predictions, eventually claiming that Jesus made an invisible return. That’s a cop out that others are likely to be repeating round about now! More recently still, I remember a spate of excitement around the late 1980s; I read some of the books, found it quite intriguing and then found that life moved on with every sign that all the careful calculations had been worked out in error.
Not inconsequentially, there is also what the Bible teaches. Jesus spoke on the subject several times, indicating that no-one knows the day or the hour except for God the Father and that his return would come “like a thief in the night”. You would be a pretty unsuccessful thief if YouTube preachers rumbled all your plans by announcing them online! Meanwhile, Paul reassures the Thessalonian church (as far as we can tell, afflicted by a very early burst of Millennial fever) that they don’t need to hold a fear of missing out because it will be a day that no-one will be able to miss.
There are likely to be a few more waves of predictions over the next few years because we are approaching the 2,000th anniversary of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Next time you hear one, it is worth looking for what that person has said about previous claims and also thinking about what grounds you have for trusting them more than Jesus himself!
