The May 21, 2011 Prediction

Over the past few months Harold Camping has gotten a great deal of media attention for telling the world that the Lord will return on May 21, 2011. I have been greatly surprised to find that many Christians are taking this prediction seriously, to the extent that they are abandoning their jobs and homes and are camping out, waiting for the end of the world to come. Apparently the warning against “date setting” has fallen upon deaf ears, and people are flocking to this prediction.

I find this horrifying, for a number of reasons. Since people are talking this prediction so seriously I thought it would be worthwhile to explain how Camping arrived at his number – and why it is completely fraudulent.

First of all, Camping has set up a website. You can find it here:

One of the things the website says, right on the main page, is this:

“This web site serves as an introduction and portal to four faithful ministries which are teaching that WE CAN KNOW from the Bible alone that the date of the rapture of believers will take place on May 21, 2011 and that God will destroy this world on October 21, 2011.”

So we see his prediction, right there in the open. There are a lot of reasons why he is wrong, and I’ll get to those in a moment, but my first question was this: how did he arrive at those dates? That was actually difficult to discover; even though the main page on his website is quite long and discusses a lot of things, one topic it does not discuss is the source of those two dates. In order to find that out I had to click on the link to “The Doomsday Code” PDF and browse through it. I finally found the answer on page 292 of that book. This is what he says:

What is significant about this number of days? Its significance is in its key factors:

5 x 10 x 17 x 5 x 10 x 17 (inclusive days – time interval from the Crucifixion to May 21, 2011)

What can we say about this numerical pattern? We have learned that the number 5 is associated with the atonement (emphasizing both judgment and salvation), the number 10 with the completeness of whatever is in view, and the number 17 with heaven. When we consider this pattern in view of the time interval from which it came, we may say that the meaning of these numbers is as follows:

It is God’s purpose to apply the atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus to bring His elect to heaven on May 21, 2011. This will complete God’s program of salvation, begun since the foundation of the world. The doubling up (remember Pharaoh’s dream about the coming famine) of the numbers indicates that this will definitely happen, and that it will happen shortly.

Let me summarize that for you. Camping believes that the number 5 is symbolic of atonement, 10 is symbolic of completeness, and 17 is symbolic of heaven. If you multiply 5 x 10 x 17, and then do it again, and then add that may days to April 11, 33 AD (which is the date Camping believes Christ was crucified), then you get May 21, 2011. That’s where the date comes from. In other words if you multiply ‘atonement’ by ‘completeness’ by ‘heaven’ twice, and add it to the date of the crucifixion, you get the date of the Rapture.

I imagine that, for most people, this is all you need to know to realize that Camping is utterly, entirely wrong. In fact, his logic is so blatantly ridiculous that I have to think that most people who believe him have no idea how he arrived at that date. How could anyone take such arbitrary and ridiculous logic seriously?

However, in the interest of being thorough I think it would be good to ask a few key questions:

Q: Is 5 symbolic of atonement? It’s possible this may be the case. If you read through Exodus you’ll see that the number 5 crops up quite a bit in the design of the Tabernacle: there were 5 curtains, 5 pillars, etc.

Q: Is 10 symbolic of completeness? Not to my knowledge. There were 10 commandments, so 10 is probably symbolic for the law, if anything. Everything I’ve read suggests that seven is the number of completeness.

Q: Is 17 symbolic of heaven? No. If you search for the word “seventeen” in the Bible you will find it, but not in connection to Heaven. The Flood started on the 17th day of the month, and it ended on the 17th day of the month. Joseph was 17 when he told his father that his brothers were up to no good. Jacob lived in Egypt for 17 years. Rehoboam reigned in Jerusalem for 17 years. From what I can tell it doesn’t appear to be symbolic of anything.

Q: Was Christ crucified on April 11, 33 AD? No one really knows when Jesus was crucified; there is actually a lot of debate around this. Some say April 3 while others say April 23rd. Even these dates assume that Jesus was crucified on a Friday, which I believe is an error (there are not “three days and three nights”, as Matthew 12:40 says, between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning).

But the biggest question of all is this: does the Bible actually say that you can find out what date the Lord will return by multiplying 5 x 10 x 17 by 5 x 10 x 17 and then adding that to the date the Lord was crucified? Absolutely not! Camping likes to say that “we can know”, but the Bible actually says that we don’t know. That is why we have to be watching! Think about it: if we knew when Jesus was returning then we wouldn’t have to be watching for it, would we? We could just mark our calendars and wait.

Besides, the Bible teaches that the Rapture could happen at any time; in fact, it could have occurred in the days of the disciples. There are many prophecies that need to be fulfilled before the Tribulation can begin, but the Rapture has no precursors. The apostles thought that it might happen in their day. Theologians like to say that it is imminent, meaning nothing else has to happen or pass by before it can take place. Camping’s teaching that centuries must come and go before the Rapture can happen is a serious violation of this doctrine.

There are a whole host of other problems with his reasoning. Camping states that the Lord will destroy the world on October 21, 2011, just a few months after the Rapture. That is impossible, and goes against what the Bible teaches concerning the Tribulation and the Second Coming. As I’ve explained in great detail elsewhere, after the Rapture takes place there will be a seven-year period known as the “Tribulation” (which Christ expounded upon in Matthew 24). After this period the Lord returns – not to destroy the earth, but to end the reign of the antichrist. Even after this the planet isn’t destroyed; instead the Lord establishes His Millennial Kingdom (which is discussed in Revelation 20), which lasts a thousand years. After the thousand years Satan is released, the final battle occurs, and then the Great White Throne judgment happens. It isn’t until after all of these things that our current earth passes away and the Lord creates a new one. What this means is that even if the Rapture happened today the planet would not be destroyed by fire for a very, very long time.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that this is not the first time Camping has tried this. A number of years ago he wrote a book in which he claimed that the world would end in September 1994. After that date came and went people should have realized that Camping’s “infallible proofs” (as he has put it) are perhaps not as infallible as he would claim, but sadly many people have been deceived by this.

The worst part of all this is these unbiblical predictions discredit Christianity in the eyes of the world. When the media sees people like Camping claiming to have “infallible proofs” that the Lord is going to return on a specific date, they report on it far and wide so that they can mock him later. This does more than make Camping look like a fool; it also makes the Bible – and God – look like fools to those who don’t know the Lord. After all, why would anyone trust a religion that keeps making failed predictions about the end of the world? This is not harmless fun; this does very real harm, and dishonors the Lord – to say nothing of the effect this is going to have on those who have abandoned their homes, jobs, and lives based on this false prophecy.

Yes, Christians should be watching for the Lord to return. It is a wise thing to keep an eye on prophecy and be aware of what is going on, and we should be praying “Even so, come, Lord Jesus”, as it says in Revelation 22:20. But this kind of date-setting only encourages people to mock God and convinces them that the Bible has no credibility. It needs to stop.