Last year Harold Camping, the now 90-year-old founder of Family Radio, became notorious for his predictions of the Rapture on 21st May and the end of the world on 21st October. Nothing special happened on either day. But even afterwards Camping insisted that his general approach in predicting such events was correct, and he was mistaken only in the details.

But now, it seems, he has changed his mind. The Christian Post reports that Harold Camping Admits Sin, Announces End to Doomsday Predictions. In a letter to his radio listeners, the basis of the Christian Post article, Camping has written:

We have learned the very painful lesson that all of creation is in God’s hands and He will end time in His time, not ours! We humbly recognize that God may not tell His people the date when Christ will return, any more than He tells anyone the date they will die physically.

We realize that many people are hoping they will know the date of Christ’s return. In fact for a time Family Radio fell into that kind of thinking. But we now realize that those people who were calling our attention to the Bible’s statement that “of that day and hour knoweth no man” (Matthew 24:36 & Mark 13:32), were right in their understanding of those verses and Family Radio was wrong. Whether God will ever give us any indication of the date of His return is hidden in God’s divine plan.

We were even so bold as to insist that the Bible guaranteed that Christ would return on May 21 and that the true believers would be raptured. Yet this incorrect and sinful statement allowed God to get the attention of a great many people who otherwise would not have paid attention. Even as God used sinful Balaam to accomplish His purposes, so He used our sin to accomplish His purpose of making the whole world acquainted with the Bible. However, even so, that does not excuse us. We tremble before God as we humbly ask Him for forgiveness for making that sinful statement. We are so thankful that God is so loving that He will forgive even this sin.

So we must be satisfied to humbly wait upon God, and trust He will guide His people to safety.

I admire Camping for being prepared to publicly ask God for “forgiveness for making that sinful statement”.

Last June, after Camping suffered a stroke, I wrote:

I pray for a quick recovery for Harold Camping. I pray also for a genuine repentance and a return to the true gospel message with which he started.

The first prayer was apparently answered. I am pleased to see signs that the second one is also being answered, if perhaps more gradually. Camping also writes:

God has humbled us through the events of May 21, to continue to even more fervently search the Scriptures (the Bible), not to find dates, but to be more faithful in our understanding.

I now hope and pray that through this Bible study God will turn him away from his more general theological errors back to the true and powerful gospel of Jesus Christ.

Last year Harold Camping, the now 90-year-old founder of Family Radio, became notorious for his predictions of the Rapture on 21st May and the end of the world on 21st October. Nothing special happened on either day. But even afterwards Camping insisted that his general approach in predicting such events was correct, and he was mistaken only in the details.

But now, it seems, he has changed his mind. The Christian Post reports that Harold Camping Admits Sin, Announces End to Doomsday Predictions. In a letter to his radio listeners, the basis of the Christian Post article, Camping has written:

We have learned the very painful lesson that all of creation is in God’s hands and He will end time in His time, not ours! We humbly recognize that God may not tell His people the date when Christ will return, any more than He tells anyone the date they will die physically.

We realize that many people are hoping they will know the date of Christ’s return. In fact for a time Family Radio fell into that kind of thinking. But we now realize that those people who were calling our attention to the Bible’s statement that “of that day and hour knoweth no man” (Matthew 24:36 & Mark 13:32), were right in their understanding of those verses and Family Radio was wrong. Whether God will ever give us any indication of the date of His return is hidden in God’s divine plan.

We were even so bold as to insist that the Bible guaranteed that Christ would return on May 21 and that the true believers would be raptured. Yet this incorrect and sinful statement allowed God to get the attention of a great many people who otherwise would not have paid attention. Even as God used sinful Balaam to accomplish His purposes, so He used our sin to accomplish His purpose of making the whole world acquainted with the Bible. However, even so, that does not excuse us. We tremble before God as we humbly ask Him for forgiveness for making that sinful statement. We are so thankful that God is so loving that He will forgive even this sin.

So we must be satisfied to humbly wait upon God, and trust He will guide His people to safety.

I admire Camping for being prepared to publicly ask God for “forgiveness for making that sinful statement”.

Last June, after Camping suffered a stroke, I wrote:

I pray for a quick recovery for Harold Camping. I pray also for a genuine repentance and a return to the true gospel message with which he started.

The first prayer was apparently answered. I am pleased to see signs that the second one is also being answered, if perhaps more gradually. Camping also writes:

God has humbled us through the events of May 21, to continue to even more fervently search the Scriptures (the Bible), not to find dates, but to be more faithful in our understanding.

I now hope and pray that through this Bible study God will turn him away from his more general theological errors back to the true and powerful gospel of Jesus Christ.

Harold Camping, the infamous preacher of the Rapture, has suffered a stroke which has affected his speech, according to the Christian Post (thanks to Joel for the link) and the Daily Mail. It seems that he has not exactly been struck dumb (UK) or mute (US), just that his speech “appears to be slurred”. So this may not mean a complete and immediate end to his radio ministry. But perhaps it should serve as a warning to him that at 89 it is time for him to take things easy, if he is to survive even until his predicted date for the end of the world, 21st October.

Did God have a hand in this? Did he strike Camping dumb, like Zechariah father of John the Baptist (Luke 1:20)? Well, it is clearly part of the divine design that the human body is frail and prone to sickness after nearly 90 years. Camping has very likely been under more stress in the last few weeks than is good for him, especially at his age. It would be wrong to suggest that this was a direct divine punishment for Camping’s false preaching, arrogant claims to know what God has not revealed, and more general heresy. But maybe this stroke will make him reflect more deeply on his life and on who is in control of it.

I pray for a quick recovery for Harold Camping. I pray also for a genuine repentance and a return to the true gospel message with which he started.

Kyle Roberts and Adam Rao have written about A Teachable Moment: The Perils of Rapture Theology. Like the article I wrote about in my post The Rapture and the Spirit of the Antichrist, this is a good and timely contribution to the current debate about the Rapture. Roberts and Rao quote N.T. Wright on this subject, as I did in my own Rapture non-post-mortem post. Here are their conclusions:

American Christianity will always be infatuated by and prone to predictions about the coming end. The recent media preoccupation with the doomsday, rapture theology of a well-meaning but deeply mistaken radio broadcaster is just the latest example. Christian leaders have a responsibility to remind people that we cannot know the “day or hour” and that it is counter-productive to speculate about it. They should also emphasize, however, that Christians should not seek to escape the world, but to embrace and engage it instead.

Thanks to Eddie Arthur for the link – also for linking to one of my other posts.

Thanks to Joel for linking to the live blog at Huffington Post of Harold Camping’s broadcast on Family Radio yesterday evening, two days after the failure of his prediction of the Rapture. It must have taken him a lot of courage to face a crowd of hostile journalists in this way, rather than disappearing as I predicted.

When pushed, Camping offered some kind of apology:

After being asked again and again if he will apologize for being wrong about May 21, Camping finally does.

“If people want me to apologize, I will apologize…I did not have all that worked out as accurately as I should have had it. That doesn’t bother me at all.”

Camping reiterates that he still believes Judgment Day came — just quietly.

So now he is predicting that the end will come all at once on 21st October this year:

“It won’t be a five-month terrible difficulty…that we have learned,” said Camping. Instead, he says, the world will end quickly on Oct. 21 without any build up.

As for the predicted earthquakes,

“the great earthquake didn’t happen on May 21 because no one would be able to survive it for a few days or let alone five months to suffer God’s wrath.”

Well, we will see what happens on 21st October, but my prediction is: nothing special.

The Rapture Wave is supposed to have hit the US east coast now, but Joel who claims to have invented that phrase has, despite his own confident predictions, been left behind! How do I know? He is still tweeting, although 6 pm local time has passed in Charleston, West Virginia – but oddly enough no one else I follow has tweeted in the last half hour. The end of Joel’s live video stream looked like he was trying to launch himself into heaven on a swing, but somehow I don’t think that will work. So either Joel was not one of the chosen ones, or else we were all left behind to carry on God’s work, as we should all have wanted.

So, with Joel still with is and even Harold Camping’s closest associates disowning his predictions, we can put this whole sorry story behind us. Normal programmes will resume shortly.