What Are You Doing on May 21st?

If you're planning to be Raptured away to heaven, you may be disappointed:

Don't mark your calendars yet. Reports that the world will end Saturday are greatly exaggerated, according to many evangelical Christian scholars.

For starters, California radio host Harold Camping, 89, president of the Christian Family Radio Network, hasn't predicted the world will end this spring. He has predicted Jesus will return and believers will rise to heaven. The world won't end until October, he says.

But mainstream biblical scholars say his forecast contradicts Scripture. Jesus told his followers that no one knows the time of his return, they say.

"He's a sincere individual. I just think he's sincerely wrong," said Charlie Dyer, a professor-at-large of Bible at Moody Bible Institute and a Moody Radio host. Dyer devoted Saturday's show, "The Land and the Book," to the prophecy and plans to do the same this coming Saturday — the fateful day, according to Camping.

Dyer said Camping has interpreted the Bible based on numerology, symbolic numbers and his own personal longing.

"He sincerely wants Jesus to return, and I do too," Dyer said. "The problem is Harold Camping wants it so much he's almost using the Bible like a Rorschach test and trying to read his desires into the Bible rather than letting the Bible teach us."

This is not Camping's first apocalyptic forecast. In 1992, he wrote a book titled "1994?" in which he predicted the Rapture would take place on Sept. 6, 1994. When that date proved relatively uneventful, Camping blamed a miscalculation.

I remember when a lot of mainstream Christians thought the rapture would occur in 1968 because that represented one generation (20 years) since Israel became a nation. Israel is now 63 and we're all still here.

When the Bible says "no man knoweth the hour" I think it means it.