Harold Camping, the fundamentalist minister from Norther California, is shocked–shocked! that the world did not come to an end May 21, 2011. Despite hammering this
end-time prophecy for years, beguiling many people into believing, proselytizing, and advertizing this misinformation, the mistaken minister is "flabber-gasted".
So are hundreds of thousands of disillusioned followers. Maxed out credit cards, mounting bills, broken relationships, ruined lives: all a testimony to the effects of religious licentiousness at its worst.
Yet the very Scriptures which this fringe movement was relying have made it abundantly clear many times over"
"The day that the Lord comes will a like a thief in night.
"You will not know the day nor the hour" when the Lord may come (Matt. 25:13)
"For you yourselves know full well that the day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night." (1 Thes. 5:2)
and
"But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up." (2 Pet. 3:10)
These scriptures make it very clear that the Lord's Return will be a surprise, one which we cannot predict and mentally prepare for with a few strokes of the pen to our calendars.
In fact, the secrecy of the date of the Lord's return is so cryptic, that:
"But of that day and hour knoweth no [man], no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. (Matt. 24:36; see also Mark 13:32)
Even the One who is returning has not yet been inoformed when He is returning! Who is anyone on earth to presume, therefore, that he can predict to the day and the hour when Jesus is coming back?
It is astounding, if not laughable, that preachers and thinkers insist on using archane and erudite methods to calculate the date of end-times, yet will not be bothered to read the Words of He who is to Come!
Well did Jesus say of the Pharisees and all other false teachers:
"Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me." (John 5:39) How sad that those well-verse in God's law, then and now, could know written word so well, yet miss the Written World walking in their midst.