After decades of failed expectations, the question demands an answer: When has the end-time Prophecy Industry ever got one right? Prophecy
preachers usually claim they are not “date-setters” like William Miller and
Harold Camping. No, they only estimate the “season” of Christ’s return, not the
exact day. But this is splitting hairs.
From
Christ’s warning that we can know “neither the day nor the hour,” they assume
that we can calculate the approximate
“season” of his return.
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| [Photo by Matt Houghton on Unsplash] |
In fact, this self-serving argument has been used by the Prophecy Industry since at least the 1830s, including by Mr. Miller.
EXPECTATION LEVELS
But
if we have been in this final “season” for two hundred years, then this is
an exercise in futility, and claims about knowing the approximate “season” become meaningless. Two centuries is a rather large prophetic window.
But
prophecy “experts” cannot maintain their audience’s attention without raising its
prophetic expectation levels. The future coming of Jesus will remain only of
academic interest unless they believe it is very probable that he will return
within their natural lifetimes.
And
this is, in a sense, what the New Testament does by insisting that we cannot
know the timing of that day. We must be prepared daily since we do not know and
cannot calculate the timing of his arrival. In that scenario, Christ’s return
is ALWAYS IMMINENT since he can come at any moment without warning.
But
popular prophecy preachers ignore scriptural warnings and, instead, raise our expectations
artificially and deceitfully by claiming to know what, in fact, neither they nor
we can know. According to them, you must always be prepared, not because Jesus
can come at any moment, but because you live in history’s final hours and can approximate
the date of the last day. After all, though we cannot know the precise day or
hour, we can “know the general season.”
But
using their logic, can we not also conclude that Jesus did not say we cannot know
the week, month, year, decade, century, or millennium of his return, and
therefore we can? All this boils down to word games designed to create
loopholes in what Jesus clearly intended to say - God alone knows the
timing of that day. Arguing from what Christ did NOT say
is false logic – an argument from
silence.
NEITHER TIMES NOR SEASONS
In
fact, Jesus did say he will come in a “season”
(‘kairos’) when we least expect him, and he told the disciples further
that “it is not for you to know the times
or seasons” (‘chronous é kairous’). And in the passage from Acts,
the two plural nouns, “times and seasons,” cover just about any way a man
may wish to delimit time (Mark 13:33, Acts 1:7-8).
And
contrary to the self-justifying myth, William Miller did not, in fact, set a precise
date for Christ’s return. Instead, he estimated the general timeframe based on his
calculations of Daniel’s 2,300 “evenings and mornings.” From that, he
calculated an approximate date range for the second coming of the years 1843 and
1844.
Essentially,
Mr. Miller ascertained the general “season” of Christ’s arrival, and that is
exactly what today’s end-time prophecy “experts” do, the same ones who claim
they are not setting dates - “unlike William Miller.”
But
in fairness, the accusation of “date setting” certainly does apply to Harold
Camping, a man who set a precise date not just once, but at least three
different times.
Nevertheless, both William Miller and Mr. Camping differed from today’s prophecy experts in one very critical way - both came to admit their errors before they died.
In
the mid-twentieth century, the Prophecy Industry told Christians that Jesus
would return within a “biblical generation” of 1948, the year the modern state
of Israel was founded. At the time, the “experts” claimed a “biblical
generation” was about forty years.
But
ever since 1988 came and went without the rise of the Antichrist, the
commencement of the Great Tribulation, the attack on Israel by “Gog and
Magog,” Armageddon, let alone the return of Jesus, prophecy teachers have busied
themselves redefining terms and recalculating chronologies. And this has become
the standard operating procedure whenever their projections and predictions fail.
I
am not saying the end is not near, nor am I denying that Jesus will come in my
lifetime. What I am saying – shouting from the rooftops! – is that something
is fundamentally wrong with popular understandings and assumptions on the
end-times, and this is demonstrated by the long list of prophetic failures by
the Prophecy Industry.
It
is high time to return to Scripture and discover what it says about the end of
the age and the “arrival” of Jesus, beginning with the clear and
repeated warning that “no one” with the one exception of “God”
knows when he will appear “on the clouds.”