Harold Camping said the world would end 6 p.m. Saturday, May 21, 2011. It didn't. It wasn't the first time, he was a false prophet. by Dr. Jeffrey Lant
Author's note. To get into the right mood for this article, search any search engine and find the well-known gospel tune "I'm on my way (to Canaan land)". (Written by William M. Golden, 1914) . My favorite is the version by the great Mahalia Jackson.
Chances are over the last few days you've heard of a zealot named Harold Camping. He's the originator of Oakland, California based Family Radio... and he's got a bee in his bonnet for sure.
He's a man so fervently longing for the world to end, so that righteous rewards and punishments can be meted out, that he's willing to risk (over and over again) the public ridicule and mockery that inevitably follow when his specific world-ending predictions fail to occur.
Today he'll be especially busy explaining to his discombobulated flock just why he goofed on this occasion and why his absolutely precise prediction for the end of terra firma -- 6 p.m. May 21, 2011 -- was erroneous... but not, he'll aver, wrong,really.... in fact perfectly reasonable once you understand the minute horological calculations and Biblical truths he will be, today, explicating a mile a minute, without apology, embarrassment or any excuse whatsoever.
For you see, divinely appointed prophets like the egregious Camping are never, ever wrong. In Camping's case when he seems to be in error, it is rather that he, for an instant, misunderstood God and His purpose. But shortly and with prayer, God corrects his misapprehension and gives him yet again, total clarity, complete understanding, and a vision which cannot be doubted of how and when rapture will occur -- this (next) time for sure. Eternal damnation and total perdition will come to those who doubt... never mind the muddle that just occurred and the complete chaos and disruption to the lives of the disappointed True Believers who were certain today they would awake to eternal bliss in the bosom of the Lord... but instead heard nothing but the insistent assurances and renewed certainties of the prophet they trusted... the prophet who mislead them, again.
Camping's legacy: lives high jacked, disrupted, shattered without compunction or remorse.
When one is a prophet, with a speed dial to God, one has better things to think about and deal with than the tiresome, annoying but essential realities of life. Those are beneath the notice of the Elect of God. The job of such is to seize your body and soul; to prepare you for revelation, exaltation, rapture, for total immersion in eternal God. These prophets, with the stern message and visage of their ancient prototypes, are masters of agitation, fulmination, damnation and submission.
They -- and Camping is very definitely one of them -- tell a parent whose children are not believers that they shall not be together in the infinity of Paradise, because the children are on Satan's path. Prophets want total submission.... and so, obsessed by their mission, they are happy to spread fears, terrible fears, and profound anxieties, the better to achieve their objective. Believers in a household have an obligation to cause pain to those still at risk... if by so doing they can capture the soul and shepherd it to Heaven and bliss. They are under a moral obligation to do this... and they must act promptly since their leader and prophet has revealed God's specific date when personal choice ends...
And so, with the complete support of Harold Camping believing wives tell still disbelieving and unsaved husbands that they shall be separate through eternity if the husband will not submit. Day and night this argument is made, made again, insistently made, made with sincerity and profound belief, disrupting everything until it is resolved and the soul garnered....
Believing children turn the tables on non-believing parents and, speaking of eternal love and togetherness, work their will on them... and so, worn down, these parents announce, for love of child, their born-again belief. Hallelujah!
And so it goes as each family member using the potent threat of eternal loneliness and isolation, of alienation, despair, profound miseries and the unspeakable pain of Hell fire work tirelessly to capture the souls of the people they most care about. For so important are these people, that the pain Camping encourages you to give must be the greatest pain of all; you love them so and must, therefore, do everything, anything to harvest their souls. And the date, the date when you will be irrevocably placed throughout eternity is coming, coming... a God-given certainty, Prophet Camping says so... and he is a goodly man.
About Harold Camping
Harold Egbert Camping, born July 19, 1921, is a Christian radio broadcaster and president of Family Radio, a California-based religious broadcasting network that spans more than 150 outlets in the United States as well as website. Educated at the University of California, Berkeley, he earned a B.S. degree in Civil Engineering in 1942.
Camping early saw the potential of using media to establish a ministry without walls. His first acquisition was station KEAR in San Francisco; his mission to broadcast traditional Christian Gospel to conservative Protestants. During the 1960s, Family Radio acquired six additional FM stations and seven other AM stations under guidelines established by the Federal Communications Commission (FTC).
Camping went on the air at once and made an impression with his deep, sonorous voice coupled with a slow, emphatic cadence. Right from the start he was fascinated by and often broadcast about Bible-based numerology to predict dates for the end of the world.
Central to Camping's teaching is the belief that the Bible alone and in its entirety is the Word of God, absolutely trustworthy. However, he emphasizes, this does not mean that each sentence of the Bible is to be understood only literally. Rather the meaning of individual Bible passages also need to be interpreted in the light of two factors. The first is the context of the Bible as a whole. The second is its spiritual meaning.
With these guidelines, Camping has moved step by step towards ever more radical beliefs, including his oft broadcast assertion that the date of Christ's second coming can be worked out to a precise moment of time.
He regards three factors as essential to this precise determination:
1) Jewish feast days in the Hebrew calendar, as described in the Old Testament, 2) the lunar month calendar (1 synodic month = 29.53059 days), and 3) a close approximation of the Gregorian calendar tropical year (365.24219 days, rounded to 365.2422.)
He projects these into modern times and combines the results with other information in the Bible. His predictions, based as they are on the infallible Word of God, follow as a matter of course, including both his original prediction that the Lord's return would be in 1994; then when that failed, he lay low for a while, before announcing the amended prediction that this return would be May 21, 2011 with the entire world destroyed in a fiery inferno, October 21, 2011.
Nothing that Harold Camping has predicted with such absolute assurance and ringing certainty has come to pass. But hundreds of people revere him anyway and still pay credence to what he says, no doubt his reassuring voice assisting. But I say this unto these poor souls. Is what you are being asked to do truly what a loving God would ordain? Thus I admonish you:
"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves". (Matthew 7:15).
About the Author
Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc., providing a wide range of online services for small and-home based businesses. Dr. Lant is also the author of 18 best-selling business books. Republished with author's permission by Luigi Panarella http://StarterBiz101.com.
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