The Rapture that Wasn't

Spirituality Column #239
June 7, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

The Rapture that Wasn’t
By Bob Walters

The difference between Harold Camping’s evidently errant May 21 rapture forecast and almost everyone else’s reaction to it was smugness.

Not Camping’s … almost everyone else’s.

In Camping’s declarations I didn’t hear smugness; I heard faith. I thought he was biblically wrong – glaringly so – on several points, and I saw but didn’t really understand his eschaton (ESS-kah-tahn, i.e. last things) arithmetic. But I never heard from him a belittling smugness. The California Christian fundamentalist is obviously a true believer who I think is befallen by confused signals, not demon possession. It happens.

So let’s look at the bad news and good news.

On the one hand, Camping didn’t do the Kingdom any favors by being that wrong about something that even uber-secular Doonesbury got exactly right. To wit, Zonker in the May 20 comic strip very un-smugly (opposite most public commentary) cites Matthew 24:36. There Jesus says, “But concerning that day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.” Jesus is “the Son” and even He doesn’t know what Camping claimed to know.

On the other hand, Camping got everyone talking – even Doonesbury – about Jesus Christ. False prophet or misguided sop, Camping created a multi-national buzz that forced many people to stop (or at least downshift) and consider whether they personally were or were not a candidate for rapture. Motivating the many to mull that mystery, however momentarily, is quite a feat.

What’s really wrong with Camping’s prediction, which I think is the same egregious error of the “Left Behind” end-times novels, is this: The relationship focus that properly should be on Jesus Christ is at best obfuscated and at worst entirely lost.

“How is my relationship with Christ?” is the correct question, not, “What’s all this rapture business?”

Anything that lessens rather than sharpens a person’s focus on a relationship with Jesus Christ plays into Satan’s hands. That includes rapture, creation, prophecy, prosperity, faith healing, the Bible, the church, a preacher … anything.

Camping’s focus, for example, was always “The Bible says …” He used the Bible, in toto, to supersede Christ. Bad mistake, in my view.

So … we don’t know, we have to trust.

And I say “evidently errant” in the first paragraph because what if God threw a rapture and nobody made the cut? The last thing I want to be before God is cocky.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) holds the same opinion of Camping’s next date, Oct. 21. Focus on John 3, not Matthew 24; relationship, not rapture.