Most who believe in the 2012 Armageddon attribute it to the ‘Rapture’, the Rapture is a prophesied event in Christian eschatology, in which Christians are gathered together to participate in the Second Coming of Christ. Christians who have died are to be resurrected to participate in the coming of Christ along with those who are still living at the time of the event.
Thessalonians 4:15-17 - ‘For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. [17] After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.’
Apparently this is going to be a very bad time to not be a Christian because:
‘After The Rapture, God will begin executing judgments against unbelievers, during a period called the Tribulation.’
Ok, so the first time I heard all this I was getting a little worried, at the time of writing it’s half way through 2009 already, and that doesn’t leave me very long to be getting on with all the things that I had planned to be doing. In fact I hadn’t even planned to start planning the things that I wanted to do with the rest of my life for at least another five years or so.
2012, the end of the world, the Armageddon, the Rapture, the second coming, judgements and tribulations and comets and mega volcanoes, it would be very easy for a person to get pretty upset about all of this. However before we all start going mental, quitting our jobs and swimming with dolphins, committing suicide and raping and pillaging, let’s all take a little look through the book that I like to call ‘History’.
The World Will End in the Year 2001
In July 1997 the ‘International Association of Psychics’ issued a warning that recently over 92% of their 120,000 strong member base had received the same psychic vision predicting the end of days. This mass psyschic prediction had the date of the end of the world pegged as the year 2001. ‘Madame Vredeau’ a spokesperson for the association issued a statement warning that in the year 2001 the world will experience the reappearance of prophets and saints who will lead the faithful to safety, the oceans will shrink, crops will fail, all known laws of nature will be disrupted and Satan and his Demons will appear followed by war, plague and pestilence.
The World Will End in the Year 2000
The year 2000 was a busy year for Doomsday predictions, according to ‘The Sun’ in 1961 the Pope John XXIII predicted the coming of the end of the world starting on January the 1st 2000 starting with the detonation of an atomic bomb in a major European city by a Libyan terrorist group.
Also on the 1st of January 2000 lay the prediction by a ‘William Cooper’ head of a militia group that on this day the secret pyramids of Giza will open releasing Satan to walk amongst us, heralding the coming of the end of days.
A story run in the ‘Weekly World News’ in 1997 told of the CIA having captured an alien that had revealed to them that ‘God is furious with all of his creations everywhere’ and that due to his dislike for all of his creations throughout the universe he is ’systematically working his way across the galaxies, setting fires to the planets and exploding them one by one, and that Earths turn will come on the 11th of January in the year 2000.
In addition if you divide the number 2000 by 3 the holiest of numbers you will find: ‘666.66666666666667’ the number of the beast (well almost).
The World Will End in the Year 1997
Russian scientist ‘Vladimir Sobolyovhas’ having spent a great deal of time analysing prophecies made by Russian saints (including Nostradamus) predicted that the world would end in September of the year 1997, his analysis of these predictions led Vladimir to believe that on this date the Earth would tilt on its axis by 30 degrees submerging the Scandinavian countries and Britain in what he labelled ‘The Armageddon Flood’. Luckily for him however Siberia would be spared by alien intervention, the aliens would come and lead the world into the fourth dimension.
The World will End in the Year 1992
According to the Korean group known as ‘Mission for the coming days’ October 28th 1992 was the date of the end of the world. This date was predicted by the Korean church based on numerology and ghostly images appearing in pictures and was taken very seriously by the churches followers. An estimated 20,000 South Koreans believed they would be lifted into Heaven at the stroke of midnight upon this date and then the end of the world would commence below.
Large numbers of South Koreans sold their homes, quit their jobs and abandoned their families and at least four followers of this Korean church are known to have committed suicide prior to the coming Rapture
Analysts have not offered authoritative explanations as to why the Rapture phenomenon seemed to seize so many in South Korea, a well-educated nation where about 20% of the people are Christians and where religion has long played a major role in the society.
World Record for Doomsday Predictions
Probably the group with the largest number of incorrect Doomsday predictions is the ‘Jehovahs Witnesses’ who have throughout their time predicted that the world will end in: 1874, 1878, 1881, 1910, 1914, 1918, 1925, 1975 and most recently in 1984.
The End of Days
There have been at least 220 known predictions for the end of the world dating back to the year 30 CE.
The above are just a few of the hundreds of predicted doomsdays that have been and gone throughout our history, most of which have caused unneeded stress and suffering to those who have believed in them. The end of the world prophecy is possibly just another phenomenon of human existence and our need to attempt to control the environments that surround us. But these recurring Doomsday prophecies are not without their benefits, from time to time they rear up and remind us that life is for the living, compel us to live every day as our last, because despite these many and varied predictions, nobody really knows just what tomorrow holds.
