A screenshot of Jack Van Impe preaching in 1989, assuring his audience that there was no way they\u2019d still be unraptured by 1999.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nJack Van Impe started his ministry 68 years ago, assuring his followers that the Rapture, Argmageddon, and the End of Time were poised to occur at any moment. At no moment in any of those 68 years did the Rapture occur.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019d sat down with Jack Van Impe in 1980, when the television aspect of his \u201cministry\u201d was just beginning, and told him that he\u2019d be preaching that same message for another 20 years, he wouldn\u2019t have believed you. In 1980, he knew for sure \u2014 with certainty derived from his infallible reading of an infallible Bible \u2014 that the Rapture was sure to occur well before the year 2000. By the 1990s, he was just as certain that the Rapture was coming before 2012.<\/p>\n
The book of Proverbs says \u201cgray hair is the splendor of the old\u201d and that \u201cgray hair is a crown of glory; it is gained in a righteous life.\u201d That may be true for some, but it\u2019s never true for End Times enthusiasts. The longer they live, the wronger they are proved to be. And some of these guys lived a very long time, getting wronger and wronger year by year.<\/p>\n
Tim LaHaye died unraptured at 90 years old. The fact that he \u2014 and the rest of the world \u2014 lived to see 2016 proved that nothing he told us about the imminence of the Rapture was trustworthy.<\/p>\n
Billy Graham died unraptured at the age of 99. He spent the better part of a century telling us the Rapture was imminent and assuring us that none of us would still be here, as he eventually was, by 2018.<\/p>\n
Donald W. Thompson died last year at the age of 91. He was still around to witness the 40th anniversary of his masterpiece, A Thief in the Night.<\/em> If that movie had anything true to say, it would never have had a 40th anniversary.<\/p>\nHarold Camping lived to be 92, outliving his first predicted date for the Rapture by 19 years and outliving his back-up date by two.<\/p>\n
John Walvoord also lived to be 92. He died in 2002 \u2014 a year that should never have arrived if anything in his 1974 book Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East Crisis<\/em> had been valid. (Or even if the search-and-replace 1991 First Gulf War revision of that book \u2014 a best-seller \u2014 had been more than sheer fantasy.)<\/p>\nHal Lindsey is 90 years old, still with us here on this old world, even though his 1981 best-seller The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon<\/em> is no longer in print.<\/p>\nNot all Rapture preachers live to quite such gloriously infamous old age.\u00a0Edgar C. Whisenant was only 69 when he died in 2001, only living another 14 years after publishing 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988<\/em>. C.I. Scofield was just 78 when he died in 1921. H.A. Ironside lived to be only 75, although even that was far longer than his elaborate End Times charts should have allowed. William Miller lived only to age 67 \u2014 spending his last five years in great disappointment.<\/p>\nJohn Hagee is 79 years old, still active and still preaching the same imminent-Rapture gospel he was preaching when he founded Cornerstone Church 33 years ago. If that gospel had been trustworthy, he wouldn\u2019t still be around to be preaching it. Do you still remember Hagee\u2019s \u201cBlood Moon\u201d prophecy from 2015? He hopes you don\u2019t, because it\u2019s no longer 2015, and that means his Blood Moon nonsense was wrong.<\/p>\n
But Hagee is a paradoxically forward-thinking End Times preacher. He\u2019s planning ahead by training his son, Matthew, to carry on his ministry, ensuring that his annually disproved and increasingly hard-to-sustain imminent-Rapture gospel will be preached for generations to come at Cornerstone.<\/p>\n
We should be forward-thinking too. I\u2019m already in my 50s, so I\u2019m probably too old to do this, but I think if you\u2019re only 40, or 30, or younger, it might be edifying and instructive to find some relatively young End Times \u201cBible-prophecy\u201d preacher and make a formal wager.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 2020 and they\u2019re telling us that the signs of the times are clear, the Rapture is imminent, and The End is nigh. \u201cNigh\u201d is a notoriously elastic term, but surely it cannot be stretched to mean 30 years. So make this a 30-year bet. If the year 2050 arrives and they\u2019re still here, still unraptured, they owe you $100. And they have to pay you in public.<\/p>\n
The tricky part of this bet is that if you lose you\u2019ll be unable to pay them on account of their having been whisked off to Heaven in the twinkling of an eye. So your side of the wager can\u2019t be monetary. Instead, you\u2019ll pledge that, should a Rapture occur between now and 2050, you will publicly acknowledge that and to take the baton from the departed saints, preaching the gospel of premillennial dispensational rapturism to the rest of the damned left behind to face the escalating plagues of the Great Tribulation.*<\/p>\n
That will be embarrassing, as it will require you to publicly admit that you were wrong and all those End Times preachers were right. But if that turns out to be the case, you may as well admit it. Any potential embarrassment will be the least of your problems what with the scorpion-locusts, the Wormwood, the flaming meteors, the seas turning to blood and whatnot.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to know what to say when an End Times preacher dies. The Bible is a rich storehouse of wisdom about the inevitability and certainty of death and of what that means and does not mean for we, the living. But none of those passages is of any use for comfort or consolation after the death of a Rapture Christian because Rapture Christianity has repurposed and reinterpreted all of them to be about the supposed Rapture instead. That means that every passage asserting meaning or hope in the face of mortality is, for them, instead about a fantasy of escaping death.<\/p>\n
\u201cCan you imagine, Rafe?\u00a0Jesus coming back to get us before we die?\u201d Irene Steele says just before that happens and she gets raptured in the fictional novel Left Behind<\/em>. Jack Van Impe was sure that would happen for him, too. But it didn\u2019t. And so now his followers are forced to confront the possibility that they\u2019ve been aggressively denying all this time \u2014 the possibility that they, too, might one day die without Jesus coming back just in time to stop it.<\/p>\nOne will be taken, the other will be left. Be watchful and strengthen the things which remain.<\/p>\n
\u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013<\/p>\n
* I\u2019ve got a half-thought-out and far more complicated variation of this wager that involves the creation of the Tribulation Trust, an endowment built by donations from End Times preachers and \u201cBible prophecy\u201d scholars that will be used to fund the continuation of their preaching after they\u2019ve all been raptured so that those left behind will have a chance to hear the gospel and refuse the Mark of the Beast before the Glorious Appearing. The bylaws of the Tribulation Trust would also state, however, that if some now-distant-seeming date arrives \u2014 say 2100 \u2014 then the trust will be dissolved and the funds would be used, instead, to support refugees displaced by climate change.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jack Van Impe started his ministry 68 years ago, assuring his followers that the Rapture and the End of Time were poised to occur at any moment. At no moment in any of those 68 years did the Rapture occur.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[238],"class_list":["post-50091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evangelicals","tag-left-behind"],"yoast_head":"\n
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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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