Saints and Sinners: How long will the universe last?
It’s called the “rapture,” and there are Christians who take this Bible prophecy literally.
Some believers have even pasted instructions on the dashboards of their cars, telling passengers what to do if the driver of the car should suddenly be whisked from behind the steering wheel and transported to heaven.
The passengers who find themselves in a driverless vehicle are told, “Do not panic. Shut off the ignition and steer the car to the side of the road.”
Many of those who take these precautions seriously are people who have read the runaway best-seller “Left Behind” (Tyndale House, 2000), which purports to be a true-to-life account of Earth’s last days when believers will be snatched away from whatever they are doing and taken to “meet the Lord in the sky.”
In the apocalyptic suspense thriller, airline passengers simply vanish in mid-air leaving their clothes and bewildered companions behind while chaos breaks out worldwide.
The novel by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins is pure fiction but is based on the Bible. St. Paul describes the “rapture” in one of his letters. The word “rapture” comes from the Latin word meaning to seize or carry off.
In the words of St. Paul, “the Lord shall descend from heaven … and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we who are alive … shall be caught up together with them in the clouds and meet the Lord in the air.”
In other words, when the end of the world comes, the believers shall be snatched away to safety wherever they are — driving an automobile down the freeway, walking behind a plow or sitting in a theater.
Christianity has always taught that the days of this world are numbered. The Bible points to the signs that will accompany the “end times,” as they are called. With these Bible signs as their guide, prophets through the ages have warned that the curtain was about to fall on human history.
So far they have all been wrong. Even Billy Graham misread the signs. In 1950, the evangelist told an audience, “We may have another year, maybe two years. Then I believe it’s going to be all over.”
Among the biblical signs pointing to the last days of the world as we know it, Graham mentioned the “perplexity and distress in the world, the breakdown in morals and more devastating and more frequent wars.”
The end did not come and Graham no longer predicts when the world will end. “God alone knows,” he says. But more Christians than ever appear to believe that the “end time” is approaching.
Time magazine this summer ran a cover story titled, “The Bible and the Apocalypse — Why More Americans are Reading and Talking About the End of the World.” The article said that 17 percent of Americans believe the end of the world will happen in their lifetime.
These scholars say the book of Revelation where many of the Bible prophecies appear was written to be a steadying influence on Christians suffering persecution in the first century. Such expressions as “what soon must take place” or “for the time is near” must stand as warnings against applying the book of Revelation to later centuries, they maintain. The prophets were not talking to us in the 21st century but to their own generation, they say.
Meanwhile, we may want to take comfort in something a conference of world scientists said recently. They predicted that the universe can look forward to about five million more years. We should be able to settle our differences by then.
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)