Recker's World
Reason 35
Jesus's return is past its use-by date
In 1999, with the new millennium fast approaching, there was a lot of hysteria regarding the Y2K bug and the Christians were convinced that the end times were here once again. Jesus’s return was eminent, after all, it had been around 6000 years since the earth was supposedly created. God tended to work in numbers relating to seven, so therefore the final Millennium predicted in the book of Revelations was surely due to start soon.
However, there was nothing really all that new here. Even my father insisted that people were saying stuff like this when he was a kid. Just how seriously could I take these doomsday merchants all insisting that the end is near and the tribulation is about to start?
I recorded some thoughts on the topic in a journal I did for a short while during 1998.
Journal entry: 12 August 1998
Is there really a Heaven? Sometimes it all seems too good to be true. Is it really there? Is it for us today? Or only for those back in biblical times. Will Christ really return? Or has he already, back around 70AD. If he has, then is most of the bible for us today? I can’t believe that I’m having these doubts. The thing is I have seen so much proof of the Bible’s reality, but most of it I can’t remember. I guess it’s a bit like the people of Israel who quickly forgot about God’s amazing miracles.
I keep telling myself that this is just a stage I’m going through. Deep down I know that Jesus is God. I don’t even doubt that, but I still can’t help but wonder whether Jesus really will return. I know God does things on Earth. He is here. But what will happen to us in the end? It’s crazy. I never used to have these doubts. This can only be an attack of Satan. I pray that God has patience with me. I just wish that I didn’t have to be so darn responsible all the time. I just hope that it’s worth all the effort.
The year 2000 arrived and the Y2K bug fizzled. So did all the other predictions made by Christians. Then everyone tried to justify Jesus’s failure to return by saying the year 2000 is not actually 2000 years after Jesus’s death and that the maths is actually wrong. So other years popped up… 2004, 2006… Years still to be reached. We hadn’t even got to the hysteria of the 2012 doomsday prophecies yet, but there were plenty of people using Bible Numerics, trying to insist it was all due to happen well before then.
New Zealand author/evangelist, Barry Smith wrote a few books. The first one he entitled “Warning” and about how terrible things were going to occur. Then he wrote a second book, “Second warning,” then a third, “Final Notice”. What would have been next if he’d had the audacity to write it? ‘More idle threats’? Yet that’s what we were getting from these sensationalist teachers. Idle threats. Nothing happened as any of them suggested it would.
My belief that Jesus was yet to return was looking a little wobbly. 2000 years is definitely not a short time, like Christians want it to be and if it were any other religion I would have been scoffing at them, the fact that their saviour and not yet returned. So why was I still taking the idea of Christ’s return so seriously, especially considering that so many predictions had been made about his eminent return? Even St Paul himself, judging by his letters to the various churches, was convinced Jesus was returning in his life time, but he didn’t.
Jesus's return is definitely well past its use-by date especially when you look at the things he himself said about his return and also Paul's insistence that his return was eminent. But you can see arguments relating to that all over the Internet.