Setting a date for the rapture? Step right up, don’t be shy!

Other Posts:

How to Calculate when Jesus will Come – without even being a prophet!; “Let’s Put a Warning Label on False Prophets!“; Did your pastor/teacher/expert/YouTube guru set a wrong date for the Second Coming? Don’t let them off the hook; Another Astounding Prophecy to Toss in to the Trash Can


Autumn swings around, and with it this year’s harvest of Rapture Predictions. This year it’s September 23 (tomorrow!). And yes, I have looked over the “proofs”; given the late date, they are not worth the time it would take to overturn them.

Each Rapture Prediction typically begins with a bang and ends with a whimper. The author spends a year or two selling a ton of books and merchandise; the date comes and goes; and the “prophet” trails off in a mumble.

My advice is psychological and spiritual, and I will take a bit of liberty with Martin Luther’s dictum to “Sin boldly.”

If you plan to commit the SIN of setting dates (and I choose the verb “sin” with care), then

SIN BOLDLY.
BE DOGMATIC.
BET ALL YOUR CHIPS.
ALL IN OR ALL OUT.
WIN BIG OR LOSE BIG.

Only by sinning boldly, and in the aftermath owning up to your wickedness, will you set yourself up to repent of that sin. To put Luther in his proper context, “Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly.”

But let’s not have this shilly-shallying, which sidesteps the issue of sin in the first place, and later allows you to slip the leash of repentance.

This time I’ll quote Shakespeare, also sort of out of context!

That you…never shall,
With arms encumber’d thus, or this headshake,
Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase,
As ‘Well, well, we know,’ or ‘We could, an if we would,’
Or ‘If we list to speak,’ or ‘There be, an if they might,’
Or such ambiguous giving out…this not to do…
Hamlet, Act I Scene 5

“Such ambiguous giving out”: that’s the twilight sin that leads to failed redemption. Shakespeare might say, Don’t hem and haw and say, “Well, maybe, we can’t set dates, but here is my prediction anyway, I know more than I can let on, people in high places tell me important things that I cannot share, NASA scientists are worried even though they deny it,” and so on.

Sin boldly – then, for the sake of your soul, repent just as decisively.

PS – As it turns out: David Meade, the many who predicted that the world would end on Sept 23 announced to the Washington Post on the 21st that he had changed his mind! “The world is not ending, but the world as we know it is ending…A major part of the world will not be the same the beginning of October.” Things will be different in October?! Well, you don’t need to be a prophet to figure that out!

“Setting a date for the rapture? Step right up, don’t be shy!” by Gary S. Shogren, PhD in New Testament, Seminario ESEPA, San Jose, Costa Rica

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Published in: on September 22, 2017 at 8:46 am  Leave a Comment  
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Bible Prophecy, ch 1 – “Bible Prophecies” that are NOT found in the Bible

This is a long essay with numerous footnotes. The reader may prefer to download it in pdf form: Shogren_Bible Prophecy #1 Bible Prophecies that are NOT in the Bible

I plan on at least two more articles in this series, in which I will describe End-Time expectations that may or may not be found in the Bible, depending on your interpretation; and End-Time expectations that are in the Bible.

I grew up in the woods. By “woods”, I don’t mean a park with some scattered trees, but a place where large patches were so choked with brush and thorns and fallen branches and boulders from the last Ice Age that it was literally impossible to pass through. My mind returns to the woods every time I fight my way through the thicket created by our modern prophets. Because of their creativity, the predictions that people claim to be in the Bible outnumber, exponentially, the predictions that actually are in the Bible. That is why, before we can begin to talk about Bible prophecy, we have to clear the ground of heavy undergrowth, the things that people have been told are in the Bible, but which we cannot seem to find on any actual page of Scripture. I write this, not because I don’t love Bible prophecy, but because I respect it too much to see it taken lightly.

The very length of this article is the unfortunate side-effect of the tonnage of “prophecy myths” that are out there. One reason for this is that End-Time predictions are big business: take a look at the books by Tim LaHaye, Jack Van Impe, Jonathan Cahn, John Hagee, and even David Jeremiah. The Left Behind series of books alone has sold over 65 million, not to mention the movies and the merchandise. Irwin Baxter has no difficulty selling his very expensive DVD’s; and there are influential sites like Rapture Ready and End Times Prophecy News and Signs of the End and The Jeremiah Project and Terry James Prophecy Line or groups such as Hagee’s Christians United for Israel (CUFI). Many of them employ the same opening stratagem: “I have been studying and teaching Bible prophecy for X number of years; therefore, you should trust me to know what is in the Bible!”

In fact no: the Word of God tells us what to believe, and the believer has no need of a Prophecy Gatekeeper to access its pages.

Here we will focus on those who teach with the Bible in one hand, and today’s headlines in the other.[i] There are two problems with their method: first, it assumes that Bible prophecy must be being fulfilled in today’s news, as opposed to headlines from AD 582, 1007, 1851, or 2086; two, the prophecy experts have the unhappy tendency of starting with the news headlines, and then reading them back into the Bible. The 2016 Blizzard? Yes, someone discovered that it was an End-Times event, but only after the storm.[ii] Minor stock market crash in 2016? Same thing, and from the same source, the always-ready-to speculate Charisma News. While we would take to the streets in protest if some theologian placed his or her own tradition about the Bible, we don’t blink when the high priests of prophecy do basically the same thing with today’s headlines. We won’t even delve into the secular gurus such as David Ickes or Alex Jones or the Flat Earthers, who preach an apocalyptic viewpoint with very little Bible mixed in.

If some evangelicals (and yes, some Catholics,[iii] some Orthodox,[iv] some Adventists, plus the majority of the sects) are known for this sleight of hand, then the Jehovah’s Witnesses have to get the blue ribbon. Their modus operandi is to zero in on the Anxiety of the Day, knock on your door, mention how anxious people are about it, and then show how they, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, saw it all coming ahead of time! Exhibit A: this issue of Awake magazine from 1968: “Is it Later than you Think? Is time running out for this generation? What will the 1970’s bring?”

Take any headline from today’s paper, or Time magazine, or YouTube, or your newsfeed, or Facebook, and if you really, really try, I guarantee you’ll be able to find a Bible verse to show how it was predicted long ago. Syria in the news? Just look in the concordance and you will find a verse that fits.

Wow! All those 7’s, and just because Donald Trump sent a few small missiles into an empty airfield, one which the Syrians were able to quickly repair and start using again.

Another example: I just saw on CNN, “Promising Zika Vaccine Moves to Next Stage.”[v] And so let’s say I channel my Prophetic Ingenuity to put together an article like this:

“Revelation 16 says that there will be many plagues, which will kill a huge number of people. And what do we see in the news? People are coming down with Zika, and desperately trying to find a vaccine, instead of repenting from their sins.”

Now – remember that I did this “blindfolded,” without peeking, but let’s see if I can find someone doing this very thing (more…)

Published in: on April 27, 2017 at 1:23 pm  Comments (1)  
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Did your pastor/teacher/expert/YouTube guru set a wrong date for the Second Coming? Don’t let them off the hook

It appears to be the busy season of people telling us when Jesus will return. I have seen five dates for the period of September-December 2015 and others for 2016 or 2017. Four of those dates have already passed us by. Whether these date-setters claim to be prophets or not, they all transgress the Lord’s warning – “Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There he is!’ do not believe it.” (Matt 24:23); and Paul’s statement that we shouldn’t let anyone confuse us with their predictions (2 Thess 2:1-2).

As I have written at length elsewhere, these Date Setters tend to fall into predictable behaviors. Download the entire article here: “Shogren_How to calculate when Jesus will come without even being a prophet!”

First, people speak with great confidence ahead of time, naming dates or months or years and offering incontrovertible proof that the Lord will return as they predicted.

130909-signs-end-times

Second, when he does not return, what happens? Most date-setters have a strong psychological (more…)

Published in: on September 30, 2015 at 3:36 pm  Comments (3)  
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How to Calculate when Jesus will Come – without even being a prophet!

Download the entire article here: Shogren_How to calculate when Jesus will come

What follows is my response to the outbreak of Blood Moon Fever and the Shemitah Virus, and more broadly, to the rapidly-spreading epidemic of predictions of Jesus’ near return between 2015-2017. I offer it to the Christ whose coming I love.

Something like 41% of the American people believe that Jesus will definitely or probably return by 2050. That figure shoots up to 58% when the pollster asked white evangelical Americans.[1] So, once someone starts with that basic assumption, that we must be in the Latter Days, very few will question it: it now becomes a question of detail and voilà, a whole End Times cottage industry springs up.[2]

My readers know that I am a “Matthew 24:36 Strict Constructionist”: that when Jesus said that no human – or angel, or the Son of Man – knows the time of the Second Coming, his original intent was to forbid all date-setting, not just the “day or hour” but any time at all; and that he meant that we should leave off amateur predictions of the End Times.

I mention this verse, which is found in my Bible in Matthew 24; but I suspect that some imp has gone around and whited out v. 36 from many copies.

There are two types of individuals who set dates for the Second Coming: the one who regards him or herself as a “prophet” who receives messages from God; the one who insists that he or she not be called “prophet”. I break them down as follows:

Date-Setter by Revelation – an early example is that in the 2nd century, a man named Montanus claimed that Jesus would soon return, to a little town in Asia Minor; more recently, all sorts of prophets – and psychics – predict the Second Coming – we can probably put Emanuel Swedenborg in this group, also Edgar Cayce; so did Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter-Day Saints. Just go on YouTube and you’ll find plenty of these dreams and visions, and most are not cult leaders.

Date-Setter by Calculation – these are the people whom we will study in this article. They base their predictions principally on the Bible text or some strained reading of the Bible text. They dazzle us with numbers, dozens of verses, references to lunar eclipses, killer asteroids, flip-flopping magnetic fields, RFIDs,[3] chemtrails, earthquakes, assertions about how many years a “generation” really is, and so on. Let’s call them End-Time Number Crunchers or ETNCs.[4]

I guess we could consider a third group the Blended Date-Setters; they appeal now to their calculations, now to dreams and visions. Here’s one, a man who sets dates according to Jewish feasts, and also collects testimonies of “Dreams and Visions of September [2015] Rapture”; for example, he tells of one dream about how Puerto Rico was covered by snow – hence the End is Nigh.[5]

article-2352717-01BD66460000044D-85_634x437

Who are the End-Time Number Crunchers (ETNCs)?

One of the reasons ETNCs are dicey about the label of “prophet” is because Deut 18:15-22 prescribes the death penalty for all who make “presumptuous” predictions, that is, “if the word does not come to pass or come true.”[6] I have run across a number of these date setters, some of whom use the title Watchman or Watchman on the Wall (see Isa 62:6, Ezek 3:17, 33:6). The idea is that they have a Get out of a Stoning Free card if they make mistakes in their calculations. (more…)

Published in: on September 10, 2015 at 5:47 pm  Comments (18)  
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Just look at the news – isn’t it the end times?

Let’s see what the Lord said:

“And this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations; and then the end will come.”  Matt 24:14

“The end” = Christ’s return.

I’ve heard plenty of people say that the whole world has already been reached by the media, but that’s nowhere near the case, despite phenomenal success in the last 100 years.

Today about 3 billion out of 7.2 billion people have not heard the gospel and in effect could not even if they wanted too. That’s 42% of people living today.

There are signs like wars, earthquakes, famines, etc., but this one sign can in no way be checked off. Of course, we cannot “jump start” Christ’s return by being more evangelistic. Still – let’s pray and then dedicate ourselves to checking it off.

unreached people groups

From – http://joshuaproject.net/global_statistics

 Other post concerning the Four Blood Moons doctrine
Published in: on October 2, 2014 at 11:01 am  Comments (6)  
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Christian urban legends

I can remember my first brush with an “urban legend”. In the early 1970s, I was in a group for Christian boys, and we got a monthly magazine, similar to “Boys’ Life”. One article passed along the following story, saying it was solid fact:

In a southern state, two men were traveling along a rural road. They saw a hitchhiker and decided to give him a lift. He sat in the back and chatted with them. Then out of the blue, the hitchhiker made the statement: “Jesus is coming back, you know, and very soon.” When they turned around to ask him what he meant by that, they saw that…the stranger had disappeared! They immediately braked, thinking he might have fallen out and gotten killed. They drove back and forth and couldn’t find him, so they pulled over at the next town to alert the sheriff. When they told him their story, the sheriff said, “Normally this would constitute an emergency; nevertheless, you’re about the tenth person this week to tell me they’ve had this same experience!”

Maybe you’ve heard the same story and are certain that it happened to a friend of a friend. Well, I too was a believer and repeated it as true. It didn’t strike me as odd that the details were a little vague: Now, where exactly did this happen? When? What was the sheriff’s name? In what newspaper was this reported? and so on. It was years later than I learned that I’d been pulled in by an “urban legend” – a story that is repeated again and again over many years. In fact, Jan Harold Brunvand, the authority on urban legends, titled one of his collections The Vanishing Hitchhiker. The whole phenomenon fascinated me enough that I got in touch with Dr. Brunvand and we exchanged several stories. In 2009 “the vanishing hitchhiker” started turning up again, with the new twist that now he says, “Gabriel is putting the trumpet to his lips; the Lord is coming back” (click HERE). People on this blog who affirm that the story is true report the experience happened to the aunt of a friend of my husband; my son’s friend’s mother; the friend of a friend of a co-worker. See the pattern? (more…)

Published in: on May 7, 2012 at 6:03 pm  Comments (17)  
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Let’s put a warning label on false prophets

Link – How to calculate when Jesus will come – without even being a prophet!

My wish is simple, and it would make me so very happy. I’m going to campaign for it until the proper authorities take notice and step in.

(1) I want us to identify all preachers who have mistakenly announced that it was the end of the world because of some newspaper headline. (2) I want their unfulfilled predictions to be logged in some sort of database so that any interested party might access it. In addition, and this is the gist of my plan, (3) I want these prophets to have to wear some visible sign, so that other believers will know to take heed of any future theories. (more…)

Published in: on September 27, 2010 at 9:16 pm  Comments (31)  
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