The End Is Near, He Said

From global warmers to Mayan calendarists, apocalypse is in the air. So that must mean it’s time for another Harold Camping prediction. Camping, a civil engineer by trade, is the guy who runs Family Radio, and he predicted that the rapture would happen in 1994. Undaunted by that failure, he’s back with another date, according to the San Francisco Chronicle:

Harold Camping lets out a hearty chuckle when he considers the people who believe the world will end in 2012.

“That date has not one stitch of biblical authority,” Camping says from the Oakland office where he runs Family Radio, an evangelical station that reaches listeners around the world. “It’s like a fairy tale.”

The real date for the end of times, he says, is in 2011.

Camping, 88, has scrutinized the Bible for almost 70 years and says he has developed a mathematical system to interpret prophecies hidden within the Good Book. One night a few years ago, Camping, a civil engineer by trade, crunched the numbers and was stunned at what he’d found: The world will end May 21, 2011.

Well, I’m glad we’ve got that cleared up. Leave it to the “number crunchers” to figure it out. And how did he come to this conclusion, you ask?

By Camping’s understanding, the Bible was dictated by God and every word and number carries a spiritual significance. He noticed that particular numbers appeared in the Bible at the same time particular themes are discussed.

The number 5, Camping concluded, equals “atonement.” Ten is “completeness.” Seventeen means “heaven.” Camping patiently explained how he reached his conclusion for May 21, 2011.

“Christ hung on the cross April 1, 33 A.D.,” he began. “Now go to April 1 of 2011 A.D., and that’s 1,978 years.”

Camping then multiplied 1,978 by 365.2422 days – the number of days in each solar year, not to be confused with a calendar year.

Next, Camping noted that April 1 to May 21 encompasses 51 days. Add 51 to the sum of previous multiplication total, and it equals 722,500.

Camping realized that (5 x 10 x 17) x (5 x 10 x 17) = 722,500.

Or put into words: (Atonement x Completeness x Heaven), squared.

“Five times 10 times 17 is telling you a story,” Camping said. “It’s the story from the time Christ made payment for your sins until you’re completely saved.

“I tell ya, I just about fell off my chair when I realized that,” Camping said.

Me, I just about fell off my chair when I realized that a guy who should have learned his lesson the first time–the lesson that comes from Matthew 24:36, where Jesus says that no one, not even civil engineers with vivid mathematical imaginations, knows the day or hour of His return–was making the same mistake. The Bible isn’t a code book, waiting for a clever enough cryptographer to crack it. And Camping’s math, of course, is gibberish built upon wholly arbitrary assumptions. For instance, why is seventeen the number of heaven? The only conjunction of the two is in the Noah story, which in Genesis 7:11 says, “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.” The reason Camping puts these two things together is because it fits his scheme, which is designed for the purpose of finding a date in the near future (it really wouldn’t excite anyone to say you’d found out that the day of the rapture was August 12, 2845, now would it?). Put together the right combination of numbers and assumptions, and you can come up with just about anything. In particular, you can juggle the numbers in such a way as to come up with what you want.

The sad thing is that this would-be prophet, like so many before him, is going to take in who knows how many people with his numbers game, and do who knows how much spiritual damage in the process. Every time some bozo with a megaphone puts out this kind of tripe, there are people who buy it, and then, when he turns out to be wrong, are turned from Christ because they think He failed them.

God save us from guys with calculators.