Well, the rapture hasn’t come, after all. Not that it was any surprise. Harold Camping’s predictions of the coming of judgment day were never anything more than the ravings of a deluded man. Some comments are almost too easy here. For example, one might wonder how someone who claimed to have studied the Bible’s text in excruciating detail to divine the supposed date of the second coming could have missed something as straightforward as the text from Mark 13: “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” But apparently Harald Camping is cleverer than the angels and even the Son of God. A bit less easy (rather uneasy, actually) and significantly more infuriating is the tragic aspect for those who have bought into the claims and gave up jobs, spent their life savings, and so forth. There is much that could be said on the evils of this sort of prediction because of what it does to the people who actually believe such ravings.
It’s too easy, though, to get caught up on the date fixing and the ridiculousness of claims of rapture and earthquakes happening in each time zone and obeying the international date line. It’s all easy to ridicule, but it misses something actually worth noting. Perhaps it is the only thing really worth noting here. When Harold Camping and others talked about the supposedly coming rapture and judgement day, it was clear that it wasn’t something that ought to be feared, by everyone. It wasn’t something that just non-Christians should fear, while Christians welcomed it as a day of joy. No, it was to be a day of God’s terrible wrath, a day that would lead (apparently sometime this fall) to the violent destruction of the earth, of God’s creation. The picture of God and the consummation of all things was one of judgement, wrath, destruction, violence, and so on. It wasn’t the picture of a benevolent deity, one whose primary nature is love. (There’s another couple of verses that this Camping fellow apparently missed: “For God so loved the world…” and “Beloved, let us love on another, because love is from God; everyone who loves if born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”) At best, it seems, the select few (a small percentage of the world’s Christians, it is noted) who believe just so or are appropriately moral people, or some such, would get to escape all this by physically flying up into the sky.