We can say with certainty that
the date-setters have always been wrong. Who are the date-setters? They’re the
people who predict that the world will end on a certain date. They’re the ones
who say they know the time of the second coming of Christ. They’re the ones who
announce all this to the world with false certitude. They’re the ones who are
never in doubt but always wrong.
The list of date-setters is long and
embarrassing, but I’ll mention just two of them as we think about the strange,
somewhat disturbing passage we read today from Luke’s gospel.
Based mostly on his interpretation
of a single Bible verse, Daniel 8:14, in 1822, William Miller (1782-1849), a
Baptist preacher, told followers that “the second coming of Jesus Christ is
near, even at the door, even within 21 years — on or before 1843.”1
Later, he got more specific by
declaring that Christ would return sometime between March 21, 1843, and March
21, 1844. His failure of math and analysis became known in theological circles
as the “Great Disappointment.”
In more recent times, some of you
may remember Harold Camping, a radio preacher who died in 2013. He was a rather
famous voice on Family Radio, a Christian network that, at its peak, was heard
on about 150 stations.2
Camping made all kinds of
world-ending predictions — each one, of course, wrong. First, he said Judgment
Day would happen on September 6, 1994. Well, in one sense, the world did end
for author and director James Clavell, who died that day at age 69,3
but as for the world ending for everyone else, Camping was wrong.
But Camping didn’t retreat in shame.
Rather, he revised the date, pushing it back to September 29 and then, when he
was wrong again, to October 2. Anot
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