Today is December 21, 2012. If you are reading this is means that we are still here. The Mayan calendar ended today so I guess they got it wrong which means you need to pay your bills, go to work, and do that Christmas shopping you just thought you were getting out of.
This is not the first time our culture has had the "end of the world" craze. Who can forget what happened last year with Harold Camping? Y2K was one that got all computer geeks breathing a sigh of relief knowing they fixed a problem. Many Christian leaders have come out to say when the world may end. Hal Lindsey predicted the rapture would happen in the 1980's. The late Jerry Farwell said Christ will return between 1999-2009. I have also heard some church leaders say that Christ will comeback before I die. For one church leader that was not the case, a friend of mine said Pope John Paul II made that claim a couple years prior to his death.
Generation after generation, people have guessed when the end would come and they were wrong. Remember what Jesus told us "concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son,but the Father only" (Matthew 24:36). Peter wrote, "the day of the Lord will come like a thief" (2 Peter 3:10). The Apostle Paul said the same thing while also writing, "Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night" (1 Thessalonians 5:1-2).
When will it stop? We have not business to guess when Jesus will return because he told us he does not know. When the disciple, right before Jesus ascended to the Father, asked Him if He was going to restore the kingdom to Israel, He said, "It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth" (Acts 1:7-8). It is not for us to know when, but to faithful witnesses of Jesus. That is our mission. We know He is coming, but when is another story because we were not told.
If God did not tell His only Son when the end will be, what makes you think he told a group of people who no longer exist. Same thing with guys like Harold Camping and Hal Lindsey. One of my roommates in college said it best, right after hearing a guy saying the return of Christ is near, who called a bunch of college students boys and girls (fruitcake), if anyone knew when the end was, that person had a closer relationship to God than Jesus did because Jesus did not know when the end was.
One final thought, when a person or a group of people say when the end is and it does not come, do not drift from believing Christ will return. To paraphrase Voddie Baucham, those who have guess when Christ is coming to doing it as if they were joining a country club. Don't guess, just believe. Christ has come. Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again on God's terms not ours nor anyone else's
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