How to Predict the Rapture Like a Fundamentalist
October 21, 2011 Update:
Given that God botched His first few attempts to get the world the way He wanted it, it should come as no great shock that one of His servants met with similar success trying to predict just when the Big Guy might decide to show up again. In keeping with the official Christian Creed of "We Don't Admit Mistakes Because We Don't Make Them," Pastor Harold Camping apparently took the fact that he was wrong about the imminent Apocalypse in 1994 - and again on May 21, 2011 - to mean, not that he wasn't hearing from God, but that possibly he should be doing his math with a Texas Instrument instead of a damn abacus.
Well, lo and behold, it's 8:52 Central Time on the reconfigured Day of Reckoning, and all my friends in Australia assure me that they're carrying along as usual (which I imagine consists largely of drunkenly hurling boomerangs at wallabies). So without further ado, here's what I wrote when Pastor Camping screwed up 5 months ago...
Original posting:
If there’s one thing Fundamentalist Christians love to do, it’s explaining at length and in great detail precisely why every other branch, sect, and denomination of Christianity besides them is going to burn in hell. And if there’s a second thing they love to do, it’s coming up with overly complicated and usually baffling mathematical formulas predicting exactly when this date is going to arrive (see http://www.ebiblefellowship.com/may21/index.html for how some lunatic decided this was going to happen on May 21, 2011).
Since this entire procedure basically amounts to coming up with any numbers and dates that may or may not be even vaguely related to the Bible somehow, extrapolating their “hidden” meaning (as directed by the Holy Spirit, probably), and then multiplying/adding/subtracting/dividing those figures in random combinations seemingly chosen out of a hat, the whole process yields a veritable smorgasbord of raised eyebrows and concerns.
Not one to pass up an opportunity to demonstrate my own algorithmic prowess (not to mention clear direction of the Holy Spirit), I have endeavored to compile The Authoritative date and time of the End of the World for your convenience and family-picnic planning. And since the two indelible rules of math I gleamed from 5th grade have yet failed to slip my memory, I will show all of my work below.
Let’s get started.
We know from those intellectual prodigies over at the Creation Science museum that the earth was created on June 14, 6,000 BC, at 4:37 pm Pacific Standard Time. It was a Wednesday. Converting the hour to military time, we can write this date as: BC 16:37:06:14:6000. Immediately, we begin to see God’s divine hand print upon our starting point, as this is clearly the call number of John Milton’s Paradise Lost in the Library of Congress.
Paradise Lost was printed in 1667. If we subtract the first digit of that date (1) from the last (7), and leave it beside the remaining digits, we get 666, which is the Mark of the Beast as described in Revelation 13:17-18. Are you getting tingles down your spine already? I know I am!
Now, the very first commandment God ever made to humanity was, “Go forth and multiply” (Genesis 1:28), so we multiply 16:37:06:14:6000 x (Rev) 13:17-18. If we drop out the separating colons, this looks like:
163,706,146,000
X 131,718
= 21,563,046,138,828,000
After taking an hour and a half to solve this equation with a pencil and legal pad because no calculator in my possession actually showed that many digits on the display, I began to realize that God was speaking to me metaphorically, which resonated with the part of me that didn’t feel like doing any further manipulations to it by hand. It’s an astronomical number, to be sure, which obviously corresponds to God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 15:5 to make his descendants “as numerous as the stars in the heavens.” It was awe-inspiring and humbling how performing something as mundane and rote as a simple math problem could convey to me the awesome love our Heavenly Father has for us all! I momentarily stopped what I was doing, dropped to my knees, lifted my hands and sang a loud song of worship and thanksgiving to the Lord Almighty. I was so enraptured that I hardly thought twice about all the annoyed glares from the other people using the library’s public computers.
But back to our formula. God had
obviously directed me to Genesis 15:5. As Genesis is the first book of the
Bible, this could be written as 1:15:5, or 1155. The Holy Spirit revealed to me
that this represented 1155 BC, which is the year Pharaoh Ramesses III of Egypt
died. That we were still on the correct, divine path was assured to me by the
“III” suffix, the perfect number 3 representing the Holy Trinity.
Furthermore, if you take the year 1667 that Paradise Lost was published, and subtract the 1155 of Ramesses death, you get 512. Adding up the digits in 512 (5+1+2) yields 8, which is the symbol for infinity, representing the Alpha and Omega who has no beginning or end! Hallelujah and Amen!
We now have two divine numbers: 3 and 8. If we multiply these together we get 24, which clearly represents the 24 elders of Revelation 5:9-10.
Since Revelation is the 66th book of the Bible, we can write this number as 66:5:9-10, or 665,910. Now, 910 is the area code serving southeastern North Carolina, and 665 is the area code for Tecate, Mexico. The distance between these two area codes is 2,486 miles.
Once again we see the divine numbers: 24, 8, 3! ("Wait,I thought it was '6', where did we get the '3'?" Simple: Tecate is an imported beer from Mexico, commonly sold in a 6-pack of two side-by-side rows of 3...so it goes without saying that they're interchangeable.)
God’s fingerprints are everywhere! Clearly, God has hidden these clues in His Word, awaiting the technology of long-distance calling, barley and hops fermentation, and Google Mapquest to unlock them!
Now we really begin to see God’s magnificent design at work. If you add 1155 and 1667 together, you get 3,222. If you then subtract 2,483 (the divine numbers), you get 738. Adding the 24 elders to this figure yields 762. Who can tell me the significance of 762? It’s the number of homeruns hit by Barry Bonds in his career, though marked with an asterisk in the record books due to his “alleged” steroid use.
And on which numerical key on the keyboard is the asterisk found? The 8!
When such order and design is found everywhere we look, we can only bow our heads in humility and nod in quiet acquiescence that only “a fool says in his heart ‘there is no God.’”
And since 762 is marked by the asterisk, (AKA “8”, AKA infinity), we easily deduce that it is infinitely in our best interest that we eventually multiply or subtract or add 762 to something. But after hours of prayerful searching and unable to find anything relevant for 762 to do, I fell into a troubled sleep. I was awakened by the Lord in the middle of the night with this crystal clear message: It’s a code! Seventh book, sixth chapter, second verse! Judges 6:2 held the key to the Apocalypse. If we then take the 7th word of that passage, followed by the 6th word after that, then finally the next 2nd word…
The power of Midian prevailed against Israel. Because of Midian the sons of Israel made for themselves the dens which were in the mountains and the caves and the strongholds.
…we get “Israel of made,” which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever until we realize that is an anagram of “Oil Fees Drama.” So, one of our important reference points is the date when oil prices reached a dramatic peak: July, 2008, when oil hit its highest mark in history at $147.30 a barrel.
July, 2008 was the beginning of one of the biggest tribulations in mankind’s history, a Great Tribulation, if you will. And since the Great Tribulation is set to endure for 7 years before Christ’s millennial reign, we can clearly see God’s Holy Word pointing to a grand finale sometime in July of 2015. Startling in and of itself, but is it conceivable to get even more specific than that? The answer is a resounding Yes!
Narrowing our possible dates down to a span of 31 days in a specific month and year provides insightful revelations: The first important number in the month is obviously 3, again the number of the Holy Trinity. Could July 3, 2015 be the exact date of the rapture? It seemed unlikely, as we had not yet utilized the number 12, which is God’s favorite number. We also know that blue is God's favorite color (because of the sky). If you were to take the digits of 12 and add them together (1+2) you get 3 again; and if you multiply that by the number of letters in "blue" (4) you're back to 12! God created 12 Tribes of Israel, and Jesus chose 12 apostles, so this figure obviously holds a great deal of prophetic significance, maybe. Adding a dozen to 3 gives us 15. However, I quickly realized that there were in fact 13 apostles, not 12, since Judas was replaced after his death by either hanging or tripping and falling down a hill. I asked the Lord if I was to add a dozen or 13. Both seemed equally applicable. He answered me with, “Hurl a secondary intro.” Hurl a secondary intro? What could that possibly mean? I did what I always do when confronted by a riddle of Biblical proportions. I asked myself, “What would Robert Langdon do?”
The answer was immediately apparent: It’s another anagram! Hurl a secondary intro is rearranged to spell Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote Sherlock Holmes, who lived on Baker Street. The answer was a baker’s dozen! 13! It wasn’t either/or, it was both! How awesome is the mind of God!
So, adding 3 and 13 yields us 16. I checked the calendar for July 16, 2015 and was immediately floored by what I found. It was the final day of Ramadan, one of the holiest holidays of the Muslim faith. What better day for God to elect His return than the final day of observance of Christianity’s most persecuting and competing religion, it’s sworn enemy? The grand design in all of this is truly majestic to behold!
Something else jumped out at me about Ramadan: the fact that it contains three “A’s”, or Alphas. Again, our God, the Alpha and Omega, is a 3-part Godhead. Surely this couldn’t be a coincidence. I realized that God would desire to be extricated from association with Ramadan, so removing the 3 Alphas from it leaves us with Rmdn.
If we then assign the corresponding numeric value to each remaining letter, we get R=18, M=13, D=4, N=14, so Rmdn=1813414. Since 8 is the symbol for infinity, and Ramadan is not only coming to its yearly end, but its end for all of time, it logically follows that the only appropriate thing to do is eliminate it from its place. This leaves us with 113414, or 11:34:14; the precise hour, minute, and second on July 16, 2015 when the trumpets shall sound and the dead shall be raised! Glory be to God in the highest forever and ever! Amen.
