"Now to the question I know you are itching to ask me: do you believe Harold camping? My answer is “NO”. It’s “no” because I am of the firm belief that while God has said we are capable of knowing the signs, the date of the end-times remain His to determine. Now to my own question to you: SUPPOSE, JUST SUPPOSE CAMPING IS RIGHT; ARE YOU READY FOR THE RAPTURE? That’s a question for us all to ponder - now!"
Harold Camping, 89, is host of a daily nationwide "live" television and radio "phone in" talk program, called the "Open Forum." He has been on the air since 1961, and is heard on about 150 radio stations, in parts of the United States and globally on short wave radio, a network of AM/FM stations and on the internet.
He is President and co-founder of Family Radio, which he founded with two others in 1958, as the non-profit ministry of Family Stations, Inc., and which he serves as a full-time volunteer. The author of about 30 books and booklets most of which are available free from Family Radio, his fame or notoriety, depending on your viewpoint, derives mainly from his end-time predictions. He had earlier predicted that the world was to end on September 6, 1994, but of course, you already know how accurate that was!
I have tried to read two of his books, “Time Has an End” and “We Are Almost There.” I went quite far with the latter, which is a much slimmer volume, but didn’t quite succeed with the former. They both read more like a course in numerology, than biblical expositions. And from many of the comments I have read about the man and his doom-saying predilections, there are so many like me out there. But with less than a week to Camping’s Rapture Day, I decided to try to make some sense out of his very elaborate thesis, for whatever it is worth.
Camping’s big idea is that there are what he describes as spiritual numbers, which reveal hidden truths, or mysteries. Each of these numbers, he says, represents certain phenomenon or historical events in the Bible which, put together, somehow reveal timelines that can help decipher the ultimate deadline.
Among Camping’s numbers are:
3 - God’s purpose
5 - The atonement, which emphasizes both judgment and salvation
7 - The perfect fulfilment of God’s purpose
10 - The completeness of whatever is in view
11 - The first coming of Christ, 11,000 years after creation
12 - The fullness of whatever is in view
13 - The end of the world, the details of which began exactly 13,000 years after creation
17 - Heaven
Space will not allow detail explanation of the interplays of numbers and figures as he applied them, but the following may probably allow us in glimpse into his complex calculations and conclusions.
Camping says there are exactly 722,500 Days between the Atonement, the date of the Lord Jesus’ crucifixion and the Rapture. His words: “God gives us another piece of interesting and significant time information that further demonstrates the accuracy of May 21, 2011, as the date of the rapture. On April 1, 33 A.D., the Lord Jesus was crucified for the sins of those He came to save. Exactly 722,500 days (inclusively) later, the rapture (May 21, 2011) will occur. This number breaks down into the very significant numbers: (5 x 10 x 17) x (5 x 10 x 17) = 722,500.
Explaining how he arrived at this, he refers us to his numbers dictionary (above): “We have learned the spiritual meaning of these numbers. The work of the atonement (5) is completed (10) when all of the elect are safely in heaven (17). This wonderful fact is doubled by a repetition of the three numbers, 10 x 5 x 17. This emphasis is, according to Genesis 41:32, “because the thing is established by God, and God will shortly bring it to pass.”
Can we see how God has tied the time of the rapture on May 21, 2011, to the time when heaven was made possible (the atonement), because when Christ was crucified, He made the full payment for the sins of those who are to be caught up to heaven to live eternally with Jesus?
Camping’s other mathematical route to May 21 2011 goes like this in his own words: “According to the Biblical ceremonial calendar, May 21, 2011, is the 17th day of the second month. Precisely 7,000 years earlier, on the 17th day of the seventh month, according to the calendar used by Noah, God shut the door of the ark…
“The calendar of Noah’s day was slightly different from the later Biblical calendar in that it had 30 days in a month, whereas the later Biblical calendar had 29 ½ days in a month, as it followed the moon phases. But God, in a remarkable way, tied the time of the shutting of the door of the ark, on the 17th day of the second month, to the shutting of the door on May 21, 2011, which, according to the Biblical ceremonial calendar is the 17th day of the second month. This forever separated the true believers in the ark from all the unsaved who perished outside of the ark. This foreshadowed the fact that on the date in which all the true believers are to be raptured, there never again would be any possibility of salvation for those left behind.
“Thus, we can know that it is as if there are exactly 7,000 years, to the very day, from the shutting of the door on any further possibility of salvation, both during the worldwide destruction of Noah’s day and the worldwide destruction of our day. Can this be coincidental?”
Now to the question I know you are itching to ask me: do you believe Harold camping? My answer is “NO”. It’s “no” because I am of the firm belief that while God has said we are capable of knowing the signs, the date of the end-times remain His to determine. Now to my own question to you: WHAT IF CAMPING IS RIGHT; ARE YOU READY FOR THE RAPTURE? That’s a question for us all to ponder - now!
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