Is this fascination with the end of the world unique to our times? You may be surprised to find that it is not. In fact, the modern fascination with the end of the world is actually very unmodern. Join me in a short stroll through history that will illustrate that the end of the world has always been upon us.

In 156 A.D., a charismatic leader named Montanis surfaced in Papuza, in what is now Turkey. He convinced many of the Christians in that part of Phrygia that a private revelation had predicted that Christ would return at any moment. They sought to bring the Church back to its “original simplicity” under the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit. Montanis’s followers came to believe that they were the spiritual elite of the millennial kingdom that Christ would set up at His return. Christ would rule on earth for a thousand years, with Papuza as His seat of government. Because of their stubborn misuse of The Apocalypse, the Church in the East found herself questioning the canonicity of the last book of the Bible. Perhaps most disturbing, Montanis taught that the ecstatic utterances of their prophets (private revelation) were more authoritative than the teachings of the Apostles (general revelation). This led to the Montanists’ splitting from the Church. Eventually Montanis’s followers became radically heretical, and the movement died out by the sixth century, but not before they became the blueprint for a multitude of later schismatic movements based on the promise of an imminent corporeal Millennium here on earth.

Almost all variants of the modern rapturist position cite the writings of St. Irenaeus as early evidence for their belief system. In 177 A.D., he was appointed bishop of Lyons. His life work was to combat the Gnostics. In that role, he began to teach that there would be a thousand-year earthly Kingdom of Christ immediately following the second coming. (This is called millenarianism, premillennialism, and chiliasm. But by any and all names, it was strongly and repeatedly rejected by the other leaders of the early Church.)

Irenaeus predicted that the world would end six thousand years after it had begun. He based his calculations on the Bible verse that says that a thousand years is as a day with God (2 Pet. 3:8). “For in as many days as this world was made, in so many thousand years shall it be concluded.… In six days created things were completed: it is evident, therefore, that they will come to an end at the sixth thousand year” (AH, V:28:3). This means the end of the world would have been around 1000 A.D., although some now claim he meant 2000 A.D. Either way, he was wrong.

A student of Irenaeus, the priest Hippolytus, also did what would be repeated throughout history as a logical conclusion of millenarianism. Around the end of the second century, he predicted that the world would end soon, and he set a specific date. Based on the size of Noah’s ark, he determined the date to be 500 A.D.

Around the same time, Julius Africanus (b. 160) also wrote that the second coming would occur six thousand years after the Creation. He calculated that by the time of Christ’s Passion, the earth had already been in existence for 5,531 years. As a result, he agreed with Hippolytus that the second coming would occur no later than 500 A.D. Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Julius Africanus ended up like so many other men who have made these predictions: with egg on their faces.

In Carthage, around 200 A.D., Tertullian developed a scenario for the end times that now seems rather provincial. He wrote that “the Goths will conquer Rome and redeem the Christians; but then Nero [come back from the dead] will appear as the heathen Antichrist, reconquer Rome, and rage against the Christians three years and a half. He will then be conquered in turn by the Jewish and real Antichrist from the East, who … will return to Judea, perform false miracles, and be worshiped by the Jews. At last Christ appears, that is, God Himself with the lost Twelve Tribes as His army, which had lived beyond Persia in happy simplicity and virtue. Under astounding phenomena of nature He will conquer Antichrist and his host, convert all nations, and take possession of the holy city of Jerusalem” (WQT, III).

St. Martin of Tours (316–397) believed the end was so near that the antichrist was already alive. “There is no doubt that the antichrist has already been born. Firmly established already in his early years, he will, after reaching maturity, achieve supreme power” (ETV, 119). Of course, this would necessitate the end of the world within sixty or seventy years at the most.

The next six centuries saw somewhat less speculation about the end of the world. Perhaps it was the bracing influence of St. Augustine, who explained prophetic texts in understandable and irrefutable language. But there were still a few speculators. At the end of the eighth century, Beatus, Abbot of Liebana, announced that the world would end on Easter eve of 796. Around the same time, St. Gregory of Tours speculated that the end would occur sometime between 799 A.D. and 806 A.D.

Toward the end of the tenth century, Bernard of Thuringia calculated that 992 A.D. would mark the end of the world. Around the end of the first millennium, the Archbishop of York preached a message of repentance linked to the imminent Day of Judgment that the turn of the century would bring. Even the German Kaiser Otto III proclaimed, “The last year of the thousand years is here, and now I go out in the desert to await, with fasting, prayer, and penance, the day of the Lord and the coming of my Redeemer.”

These men were evidence of the phenomenal interest in the end of the world that arose around the end of the first millennium. Many followed Irenaeus in believing that a thousand years was literally “as a day” to the Lord. Since they reasoned that there had been six thousand years before Christ’s first advent, they expected the seventh day to come to a close one thousand years after Christ’s birth. They taught that the Millennium of The Apocalypse was going to be completed at the end of that millennium.

There was intense anxiety as the last day of the millennium arrived. Many people were worshiping in church, preparing themselves for the end. When Christ did not return, however, some teachers recalculated the thousand years to begin with Christ’s Ascension, rather than with His birth. This meant that the end of the thousand years would be in 1033 A.D.

I hope I need not remind you that nothing of significance happened in 1033 A.D. But a new technique had been born, one that would serve end-times speculators for ten centuries: When a prediction concerning the second coming does not materialize, simply rework the calculations to move the date back a few years! I call this the “rolling end of the world.” Just as stock analysts will update a fifty-day or two-hundred-day average by dropping the oldest date, doomsayers update their calculations every time a prophetic fulfillment fails to arrive on schedule.

The thirteenth century was a very difficult and discouraging time to be a Christian. The Muslim soldier Saladin had conquered Jerusalem, wresting control of it away from the Christians. Into this situation stepped Joachim Fiore, who popularized (some say invented) the historicist view of The Apocalypse.

Fiore took The Apocalypse as a description of all the events that had been occurring since the first advent of Christ. He placed the letters to the seven churches and the visions in chronological order and tagged them to various centuries in history. He was also the first “dispensationalist” in that he split the New Covenant in half. He believed in three ages: from creation to Christ was the age of the Father; from Christ to Fiore’s time was the age of the Son; and from Fiore to the final judgment was the age of the Spirit.

When Fiore discovered the mention of 1,260 days in Apocalypse 12:6, he jumped to a conclusion that seemed logical to him. He modified Irenaeus’s system, based on the notion that “a thousand years equals a day,” and determined that the second coming could not come later than 1260 A.D. Until his death in 1250, many believed that Emperor Frederick II would be the one to usher in Christ’s Kingdom as Fiore had predicted. Even after his death, many expected the emperor to reappear in time to start the Messianic age.

Obviously, nothing of note occurred in the year 1260. Fiore had died in 1201, so he did not live to witness his error. But his faulty exegesis of The Apocalypse caused a crisis of faith for many. Fra Salimbene of Parma wrote, “After … the year 1260 passed [without event] … I am disposed henceforth to believe nothing save what I see.” Unfortunately, eventual loss of faith frequently accompanies belief in the end-times frenzy.

In 1501, the famous explorer and discoverer Christopher Columbus wrote The Book of Prophecies, in which he predicted that within 155 years, Christians would have converted all of mankind. Christ would then return, and the world would end. The date he calculated for the end was no later than 1656. As of this writing, that date is three and a half centuries off the mark, and counting.

Something huge did occur shortly after Columbus’s book was published, but it was not the final victory of Christ’s Church. It was the splintering of that Church in the upheavals in Europe caused by the emergence of the Protestants. The more anarchistic Protestants, such as the Anabaptists, made an imminent Millennium a centerpiece of their theology, taking their cue from the radical Taborites and Hussites of a century earlier.

When the Anabaptists took over Munster, Germany, in 1534, they immediately proclaimed that it would be the center of the millennial kingdom. They preached forebodingly that those outside the city of Munster were in danger of Christ’s condemnation upon His return. Catholic Mass was prohibited, and many Anabaptists flocked into the city. But the situation was far from stable. Even Protestant leaders of the day were alarmed at the developments. Polygamy was endorsed. Eventually even one of the three wives of the Protestant leader “King of Justice, the King of New Jerusalem Buckhold” was publicly executed by her husband because she resisted the teaching that all property must be shared—including wives.

In 1546 Martin Luther wrote, “All the signs which are to precede the last days [have] already appeared.… The day of judgment is not far off.… [It] will not be absent three hundred years longer” (BET, 25). Like Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Columbus, and Fiore, Luther fell into the trap of trying to generate enthusiasm by predicting a quick end of the world. Yet Luther was canny enough to predict the end a good distance off; no later than the mid 1800s. Need I say it again? Nothing happened.

The emerging Protestants picked up on Fiore’s discredited idea, but added a slight twist. They claimed that 1260 A.D. marked the start of the Great Tribulation rather than of the second advent. They reasoned, rather conveniently, that if the Church had been in the Great Tribulation for three centuries, then antichrist must have been on the scene since 1260 A.D. They did not look too long before settling on the Pope as the most likely candidate. This meant that the overthrow of the papacy was necessary for the millennial kingdom of God to come. Unfortunately, much of the Church’s activities during this period gave credence to this theory by resembling those of a “beast” and a “harlot.”

But the Pope was not alone. The Anabaptists believed that Luther was the antichrist. (Many Catholics of the time agreed with this one teaching of the Anabaptists.) A little later, the Puritans thought King George III was the antichrist. Down through history, the list of those tagged for the role of the final antichrist has been long. It includes Attila the Hun, King Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Mussolini, Hitler, Henry Kissinger, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Ronald Reagan, to name a few.

Even in modern America, many rapturists believe that “somewhere, at this very moment, on planet Earth, the antichrist is certainly alive—biding his time, awaiting his cue. Already a mature man, he is probably active in politics, perhaps even an admired world leader whose name is almost daily on everyone’s lips” (GPR). Rapturists postulate that “at all times Satan has had to have one or more antichrist candidates waiting in the wings, lest the rapture come suddenly, and find him unprepared. That is why so many malevolent world leaders have had names whose letters added up to 666 when combined in certain ways” (ATF). Presumably if you want your child to grow up to be a good world leader rather than an evil one, it is essential to pick his name very carefully!

In 1593, John Napier of Merchiston published a book predicting the time of the Day of Judgment. Napier was no ignoramus. He is credited with the invention of mathematical logarithms. He approached his subject as a math problem that could be solved with sufficient study. He determined that the Bible predicted the end of the world within the century, sometime between 1688 and 1700.

In the mid-seventeenth century, the Fifth Monarchy Men arose in England. They believed that the four kingdoms of Daniel were about to be replaced by the fifth kingdom of Daniel—Christ’s Millennium. They sought to bring about Christ’s return through “fire and sword” and set up a supreme council called the “Synhedrin” (CSP, III, 479). Christ was to be declared the only King of England, and the only law was to be that found in the Bible.

These men sounded strikingly similar to rapturists of today. They pointed to current events as signs of the end times. “All the teetering and tumbling affairs on earth now, which is universally shaking into a new Creation, are a history of Christ’s coming to reign” (FMM, 26).

The Fifth Monarchy Men used the prophecies of Daniel, combined with the “thousand years for a day” proposal of Irenaeus, to determine that the end would be between 1650 and 1700. In preparation, they sought to begin the Kingdom of Christ by force in England and then “to go on to France, Spain, Germany, and Rome, to destroy the beast and whore, to burn her flesh with fire, to throw her down with violence as a millstone into the sea” (ADH). They were convinced that the monarchies of Europe were the ten evil kingdoms of Daniel and The Apocalypse.

In 1694, the rector of Water Stratford in Buckinghamshire, John Mason, gathered a group of Englishmen who believed Christ would return on Easter Sunday, April 16. When nothing visible occurred that day, he convinced his flock that Christ had returned to begin His reign and would eventually become visible to all who were in Water Stratford. He died before that event occurred, but his followers continued to await Christ’s appearance for another sixteen years.

In 1733, Sir Isaac Newton’s study of the end was published posthumously. Although he set no definite date, of one fact Newton was quite certain: the blasphemous “little horn” of Daniel 7:8 was undoubtedly the papacy.

About a century later, Joseph Smith founded The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, also known as the Mormons. In 1832 Smith proclaimed that he was sure that he was in the final generation. He stated that “fifty-six years should wind up the scene” (BET, 25). Some readers may perhaps agree with me when I claim that this was not the only teaching of Smith that was dead wrong.

In the early nineteenth century, William Miller predicted that Christ would return in the twelve months preceding March 21, 1844. He then extended the deadline to October 22, 1844. Many Millerites lost all faith when even this attempt at a rolling end of the world failed. Other followers coalesced into what is now known as the Seventh Day Adventists.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses took “rolling end of the world” to a completely new level. On different occasions, they have set the date for Christ’s return in the years 1874, 1914, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975, and 1994. Amazingly, to this day they refuse to admit they were ever mistaken. Following the cue of John Mason, they teach that Christ really did return on these dates. Of course, any objective observer might point out that nothing visually significant happened on any of them.

The nineteenth century was a hotbed of end-times speculation. Into this environment stepped a man who would change the Protestant movement in America. John Nelson Darby (1800–1882) was an ex-Anglican priest who founded the Plymouth Brethren movement, and his apocalyptic view appealed to a young nation that was just recovering from the trauma of the Civil War. Christians who adhere to his theology are known in some circles as the Darbyites, although they dislike this name.

Around 1830, Darby met fifteen-year-old Margaret Mac-Donald, who claimed to have had a private revelation of a secret rapture that would occur shortly. Not all Christians would be included in this rapture, however. Only certain especially faithful believers would be rescued.

From this beginning, Darby and his followers developed a system that taught that all true believers would be rescued in a secret rapture that was distinct from the second coming of Christ. Although they never state it in this manner, this amounts to two future comings of Christ, or at the very least, two stages of the second coming. They justified this novel doctrine by claiming that, in the first stage, which was the secret rapture of only believers, Christ would not actually set foot on earth. Believers would “meet Him in the clouds” and go back to Heaven with Him before He touched down. There would be a “judgment” of Christians’ works at that time.

Darbyites taught that the rapture would usher in Daniel’s seventieth week: a seven-year Great Tribulation that would end with the defeat of the antichrist and the judgment of his followers. Then the Millennium could begin: a thousand-year earthly reign of Christ for the benefit of ethnic Jews. After the Millennium, Gog and Magog would battle Christ one last time, and the final judgment would commence. This made for two to four judgments, along with a two-stage understanding of the second coming. Truly an innovative scheme!

Although it is questionable whether Darby himself was even aware of the full ramifications of his theology, his Millennium also forced his followers into a new view of the Church. It meant that the Church was not God’s main plan of redemption, but a parenthetical time—dubbed the “Church age”—that would eventually give way to God’s primary plan: a corporeal reign of the Messiah over the Jews. Jews who came to God in the Millennium would never become a part of the Church. They would be part of redeemed Israel, which would remain forever distinct from Christ’s Bride.

J. Dwight Pentecost wrote extensively from this perspective in the mid-twentieth century: “There are two new covenants presented in the New Testament: the first with Israel in reaffirmation of the covenant promised in Jeremiah 31 and the second made with the church in this age. This … would divide the references to the new covenant in the New Testament into two groups” (TTC, 124).

This idea, when developed, lays the foundation for the rapturist belief that most of the teachings of Jesus do not apply to present-day Christians! Clarence Lakin assured his readers that the Sermon on the Mount has “no application to the Christian, but only to those who are under the Law”; that is, those Jews who will come back to God during the Tribulation and the Millennium (DT, 26). Although this is gospel to rapturists, to many other Christians it sounds dangerously close to blasphemy.

While Darby’s ideas were originally taught by the Plymouth Brethren, they were spread in the United States by various means. Edward Irving introduced these ideas to the Pentecostal churches in the early nineteenth century. In 1883, the Niagara Bible Conference movement aggressively spread his teachings. W. E. Blackstone, Charles Erdman, C. I. Scofield, and J. Hudson Taylor were all involved, and any knowledgeable rapturist will recognize their names. Moody Bible Institute, Dallas Theological Seminary, and Talbot Seminary all trained new pastors and supplied Bible study materials that promoted the belief that this imminent rapture was at the very core of the gospel message.

During this time, the Scofield Reference Bible was becoming the most influential study Bible in America, and its notes always explained passages from the rapturist perspective. Scofield himself had claimed that World War I was the beginning of the Armageddon he saw predicted in The Apocalypse (BET, 6). Oswald J. Smith predicted that “the Battle of Armageddon must take place before the year 1933” (IAH). Blackstone wrote that the rapture might very well be in 1934 or 1935 (TWE, May 13). Regardless of any failed predictions, however, by the mid-twentieth century, rapturists could be found in virtually every Protestant denomination in America. With the spread of Darby’s ideas, Protestantism in America changed dramatically as end-times frenzy took America by storm again and again with the help of rapturists in the Protestant pulpit.

The 1940s saw World War II and more predictions of the end. America was assured “that we are nearing the great battle of Armageddon” (PE). The evil army of the north was the Soviet Union. “Stalin is now in the process of building the very Empire outlined in Ezekiel 38–39” (RLP). After World War II failed to usher in the Great Tribulation, many rapturists saw the Cold War as the trigger mechanism for Armageddon.

Even someone of the reputation of Billy Graham has fallen prey to this fever. In a 1950 issue of U.S. News and World Report, Graham is quoted as claiming, “Two years and it’s all going to be over.” Granted there was tremendous world intrigue during that period, but we are well past 1952 and still counting. Much later, in April 1984, Graham proclaimed, “Anybody who’s anybody believes that global war is imminent.” Even as late as 1995, he wrote, “Each day, as we read our newspapers or watch the news on television, we are reminded of some of the signs Jesus told us to look for.… When will the end be? We don’t know.… But every indication is that it will be sooner than we think” (DM, September 1995).

In 1970, Hal Lindsey’s book The Late Great Planet Earth broke upon the American scene. Its entire message centered on the prediction that the rapture was due before the end of the 1980s. Its bestseller status revealed how widespread rapturist ideas had become.

In 1976, the United States elected its first avowedly Evangelical president. Rapturists rallied with more pronouncements of the impending end. In 1978, Chuck Smith, the pastor of a huge California Evangelical church, wrote, “The Lord is coming for His church before the end of 1981” (FS).

In a 1978 edition of the influential Evangelical periodical Christianity Today, rapturist Gary Wilburn wrote, “The world must end within one generation from the birth of the state of Israel. Any opinion of world affairs that does not dovetail with this prophecy is dismissed.” This is a reference to the “generation of the olive tree” which we will examine in the Olivet Discourse. Rapturists claimed that this means the rapture must occur within forty years of the founding Israel in 1948.

The crucial year 1988 came and went. In the midst of this anxiety-ridden year for Evangelicals, Edgar C. Whisenant published and distributed his pamphlet 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988. He specified September as the month in which Christ would return. The pamphlet sold an incredible 4.5 million copies before the year was out.

Believe it or not, when the rapture did not occur in 1988, Whisenant wrote 89 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1989! He claimed he had previously forgotten to include the extra year in 0 A.D. and confidently asserted, “It’s going to be in September 1989.” (He sold substantially fewer than 4.5 million copies of this second pamphlet.)

It is interesting to peruse the library at a seminary such as Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Before 1988, there were plenty of Masters’ theses being written about the rapture and its imminent arrival. After 1988, that choice of topic dropped off sharply.

To account for this failed prediction, rapturists have adopted the “rolling end of the world” technique used with such success by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Now rapturists claim that perhaps the year that Jerusalem was reunified, 1967, is the proper beginning of the forty-year “olive tree generation.” Others are proposing that 1993 might be the key year because of the Peace Accords. These proposals would give rapturists until either 2007 or 2033 to continue teaching their system without accountability.

In a 1993 interview for the television show This Week in Bible Prophecy, Lindsey reaffirmed his belief that we are at the very end of history (while implicitly admitting he was wrong about the 1980s): “I have believed from the beginning that the generation of the fig tree in Matthew 24 was the generation that would see all the signs come together, and that would see the return of Christ. I haven’t changed. This is the generation that will see the coming of the Lord in the rapture.” By 1994 he was warning again about making any plans for the future: “I wouldn’t make any long-term earthly plans.… The end times are almost here” (PEW).

In the pews of Protestant churches after 1988, the frenzy continued. In 1989, the prominent Fundamentalist Jerry Falwell sent out a mass mailing to raise money from his supporters. It stated, “In just a few days we will enter what may very well be … the final decade!… Jesus is coming soon.… I want you to be ready” (BET, 11).

On October 14, 1990, readers of the Chicago Tribune were informed that there were close to fifty million Americans who believed the “end is near.” A few years later, on December 19, 1994, U.S. News and World Report confirmed this number: almost one in five Americans believed the world would end within a few years.

As recently as the Persian Gulf War, fifteen percent of all Americans were sure that the conflict between Kuwait and Iraq was the start of Armageddon. In the midst of this speculation, Charles Dyer of Dallas Seminary fanned the flames of Armageddon Fever with the 1991 book The Rise of Babylon: Sign of the End Time. He argued that Iraq would successfully rebuild Babylon as a great city to have her ready for destruction as described in The Apocalypse.

In 1993, David Koresh appeared on the national scene. His Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, had calculated that Armageddon would occur in 1995. This final worldwide battle was to start at their compound in Waco, dubbed “Ranch Apocalypse.” A battle did occur: seventy-six souls perished on April 10, 1993 in the fire that suddenly engulfed their buildings during a raid by federal law-enforcement officials.

People continued to assure us that we were on the cusp of destruction. Harold Camping confidently declared, “When September 6, 1994 arrives, no one else can become saved; the end will have come” (NNF, 533).

Well-known televangelist Paul Crouch predicted on February 22, 1994 that the world cannot “go beyond 2005 or 2010.”

Televangelist Pat Robertson urged viewers of The 700 Club on May 12, 1994, “We are possibly talking about the final age of humankind, right now. Let’s work together while we have a chance. Please call and make a pledge.” Unfortunately, this was not an isolated incident. The next year, he pleaded, “All signs point to the end of the world and the end of life as we have known it.… Nobody knows the day or the hour.… We’re coming up on the time of the end.… Now the time is urgent to bolster the resources of the Christian Broadcasting Network.… The worst is yet to come.… Now is the lull before the storm.… Your dollars may not do any good in five years or so.” It is now more than five years later, and I am quite sure that Robertson is still asking for financial support.

As the end of the millennium drew nearer, the frenzy intensified. Jack Van Impe is a well-known radio preacher on the largest Evangelical television program about the end times. On June 22, 1994, he unequivocally stated during his television show On the Edge of Eternity that the rapture would occur around the year 2000. Without Christians on earth, “by the year 2001, there will be global chaos.” A few years later, on February 5, 1997, he started rolling the end of the world by announcing that “everything is winding up within the next ten years” and that the end would surely come somewhere between 2001 and 2012.

In 1995, Tyndale House published a series of books about the rapture and the Great Tribulation, beginning with Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days. The series’ theological assumptions are similar to those of The Late Great Planet Earth. Each new book in the series is also an instant bestseller. It seems as if almost everyone has read a book from this series, even otherwise sensible Catholics.

Left Behind author Tim LaHaye wants to convince America that the rapture “could be any time: today, tomorrow, next week” (CT), while protecting his flanks with the “rolling end of the world” strategy. He will not compromise on the fact that we are in the final generation. In his book Are We Living in the End Times? he writes that either the 1948 or 1967 date (for the beginning of the generation that will see the end) works just fine. But he goes on to add that a generation is no longer forty years, as rapturists have always assured us, but could be as long as eighty or ninety years. This, of course, gives him almost until the middle of the twenty-first century, most likely long after his own death. Only then will the truth of his interpretation of prophecy be determined. Of course, he will sell a lot of Left Behind books in the meantime.

In the 1997 Prophecy Study Bible, John Hagee also teaches that our generation is the final one. That is not a new statement. But his rolling end of the world has discovered a new start to the forty-year generation: the November 4, 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. That would give rapturists until 2035 to publish more books.

Perhaps the silliest proposal leading up to the new millennium was made by Michael Drosmin in The Bible Code, published in 1997. This book contended that computers have unlocked the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch to predict that the “time of the end” began in September 1996 and that Armageddon will be fought in 2000. Now that we are past that year, I suppose we can all rest easier. But don’t get too comfortable. According to The Bible Code, all life is in danger of being wiped out when a comet crashes into the earth in 2012.

One of the scarier groups in the end-times frenzy is the Concerned Christians. Eight of their American members entered Israel with the intent of causing a deadly shoot-out with Jerusalem police on the eve of the new millennium. This violence was supposed to trigger Christ’s return. There were also dozens of nonviolent Christians who settled in Israel in 1999 in hopes of getting a bird’s-eye view of Jesus’ return to the Mount of Olives.

Christian groups have reportedly raised more than five million dollars to assist in the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. Although this rebuilding need not start before the rapture occurs, they believe that the rapture cannot occur later than its completion. Therefore, the start of construction on the Temple would force the rapture to come quickly. Of course, the appearance of a completely red heifer for the Temple’s cleansing is seen as a sign of the impending rapture as well.

The war on terrorism that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001 quickly became another reason for rapturists to declare the end was imminent. I had two friends contact me within days. One reminded me that The Apocalypse predicted that “Babylon would be burned up in a single day.” This person saw a direct fulfillment in the tragedy in New York. The other stated that this was an event of biblical import, because Matthew tells us of “wars and rumors of wars” (Matt. 24:6) that would occur just before the end.

Rapturist preachers have certainly tried to connect September 11 to the prophecies of the Bible. Grant Jeffrey, a Pentecostal author and speaker, called this event a “part of the distress of the Last Days” (CT). Bishop G. E. Patterson, head of the Church of God in Christ, wrote that this “could very well be the beginning of the countdown that will usher in the final world conflict which will usher in the return of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (CT). Baptist Bishop Alden Gaines of Philadelphia has stated that the fulfillment of biblical prophecy “is happening right now.… I believe that’s going to set the stage for this particular antichrist to step forward.… I see it all fitting in” (CT).

Although the events of September 11, 2001 were momentous and horrible, there is no more reason to believe that they were prophesied in the Bible than was the sacking of Rome or the Communist revolution in Russia. (Come to think of it, some contemporaries did say the sacking of Rome was foretold in the Bible.) But the fact that this war on terrorism will be at least partially waged in the Middle East is seen by rapturists as confirmation that it is probably the beginning of the end. Anything touching on Jerusalem in Israel or Babylon in Iraq strikes a raw nerve with them.

Let me assure you: I do not doubt that Jesus is coming again! He said He would, and I certainly do not doubt His word. But there is something horribly wrong with the history we have just briefly surveyed. All these predictions, from the Montanists to the Left Behind series, fail for lack of fulfillment. Perhaps those who have made such predictions are misinterpreting Scripture. Perhaps if we examine the biblical data carefully, we will be able to ascertain its teaching while avoiding predictions that necessitate another rolling end of the world.

But first, we need to delineate exactly what rapturists believe. And so in this next section, I will attempt to explain and defend the “pretribulational scheme” of rapturist thought. (There are two others, the midtribulational and posttribulational. These two systems, however, have very few adherents.) We must first thoroughly understand this system if we are to decide for ourselves whether the Bible supports it.