The end isn’t nigh

BY SAMUEL FRANCIS IMC

One thing that will never end is speculation about the future. We imagine and talk about our hopes, worries, goals and our possible demise. Throughout history, there have been theories and predictions from many great minds about the end of the world. Some people have taken much time and effort to build up supporting evidence from religious texts, historical trends and numerology to point to the end of the world. Most of these prophets wisely leave the date unspecified, presumably to avoid embarrassment when the end of the world fails to materialise.

Others have put the date far into the future, long after their corporeal bodies have returned to dust.

However, there are those few brave souls who are willing to stick their necks out and give the world a date in the near future, when they themselves will presumably still be around to either bask in the glow of glory or suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, should the cosmic plan go awry. These predictions, unfortunately, have at times confused many devoted believers of various religions and cults.

Speculation about the end of the world is nothing new. Many Christians of the first generation were intensely apocalyptic and believed that Christ’s second coming was imminent.

At the dawn of our new millennium, Ugandans were shocked by a tragic end of a doomsday prediction. After the world failed to end in December 1999, as predicted by the Movement for Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, hundreds of the sect’s followers were clubbed, strangled, hacked to death or poisoned. Trouble started when some cult members who had been asked to sell their possessions and give the proceeds to the church had apparently demanded their money back when a prediction that the world would end on failed to come true—so the cult leaders decided to kill dissenting and unruly cult members.

In the year 2006, members of the House of Yahweh, a religious sect in Kenya, braced themselves for the doomsday warning issued by their US-based spiritual leader, Yisrayl Hawkins. They started building special shelters to protect themselves from the prophesied nuclear war which would bring three and a half years of great tribulation. As we know, the nuclear calamity did not happen.

Last year US Christian radio host Harold Camping predicted that the Rapture and Judgment Day would take place on May 21, 2011, sweeping the globe, time zone by time zone. When the expected failed to occur, Camping feigned an error and postponed the end of the world to October 21, 2011. That also passed without the predicted apocalypse. It was reported that many of Camping’s followers had sold all their possessions and quit their jobs in anticipation of the rapture.

This year the world is scheduled to end again, based on the Mayan Calendar and other sources. The reason is that the Mayan long-count calendar ends on December 21, 2012 and so this date supposedly will mark the end of the world, just four days before Christmas.

The bottom line about all these predictions is that they have all been wrong, just as the December 21 doomsday will prove wrong.

The authors of New Testament—Mathew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, James, Jude—all gave warnings about the deceivers that had, in their time, already emerged and also about those that would come in the future. Jesus warns about false messiahs and false prophets who will arise.

Believers should not preoccupy themselves with constructed philosophies about the end of the world, but rather focus on the message that will free people from sufferings of earthly existence.

Jesus did tell us, however, to stay alert and be prepared: “Of that day or hour, no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mk 13:32).

Let us hold on to the words of Jesus: “Take courage…do not be afraid!” (Mt 14:27).