Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of the Dallas First Baptist Church, turns to the Bible for advice in how to deal with Harold Camping and his failed end-times prophecies.
Jeffress confirmed with The Christian Post on Thursday that he is still condemning Camping.
“The Bible says that if someone makes a prophecy that doesn’t come true he is to be considered a false prophet and stoned to death,” he told CP. “Harold Camping has made at least three false prophecies about the day of the Rapture. And so, if he’s not going to be stoned to death, he at least needs to be muzzled.”
Yeah, it must be really frustrating for a Bible-believing Christian to live in a godless nation that won’t even let you carry out Biblical commandments on how to treat your fellow Christians.
Jeffress is treading on rather thin ice here, though, since Jesus himself also sets time limits on when The End is supposed to occur.
Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it… For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and WILL THEN REPAY EVERY MAN ACCORDING TO HIS DEEDS.
“Truly I say to you, there are some of those who are standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.”
Needless to day, those guys are long since dead, without anyone ever seeing the Son of Man coming in His kingdom (which, in context, is supposed to happen at the great judgment of the wicked after the Great Tribulation). The traditional excuse for this failed prophecy is that the Bible is infallibly true anyway—we’ve just misinterpreted what it was trying to say. That way, you see, believers can still claim infallible authority for their Bible-based claims even after being proven wrong. But what has Harold Camping done that’s any different from what Jeffress and other believers do with respect to Jesus’ failed prophecies?
So no stonings after all, I guess, and that’s a good thing. I kind of like Harold Camping. He’s basically a nice guy whose most obvious failing is that he believed the Bible too much.
Why do I find myself agreeing with the man… sort of.
I dunno that I’d say that I like Camping. A lot of money moved around in very unfortunate ways due to the people who were taken in by his pronouncement. I think that his operation in general is a scam, regardless of whether or not he in particular believes his predictions.
By the way, Jeffress is the Perry supporter who made those controversial comments about Mormonism being a cult.
What Jesus meant was that he was making some of the people in the audience immortal, just so they could hang around until he came back. He could totally do that, he’s Jesus after all.
Why shouldn’t Camping be stoned to death, Jeffress? It sounds like you are trying to put man’s law above God’s law. How very liberal and ungodly of you.
Brian
Harold Camping is a nice guy!?
I’ll bet that Mr “nice guy” isn’t on his radio show today, assuring disappointed members that he will refund all the money they lost after following his advice.
I’ll bet, instead, that it won’t be long before he is back to his usual routine, begging the mugs in the pews to give until it hurts.
I don’t get it. They will terrorise pro abortionists and scare the hell (yea I know!) out of young women. They will fight tooth and nail to have creation taught in schools. But they will not follow their own rules on dealing with false prophets.
Actually i do get it. If they followed this rule every pastor, priest, Father, or whatever would have to have a massive stoning fest…to each other. What a great idea, all the Christians can get together and stone each other to death.
But wait! That would go against a million years of altruistic evolutionary development to follow the bible…Oh this is so confusing!!!
ProfMTH has an excellent discussion of this in his “Jesus Was Wrong” series.
ProfMTH has a great series on Youtube that addresses this.
Would this be a single elimination tournament, or a round-robin?
Interesting how the Youtube comments devolve into bafflegab about how it wasn’t talking about literal destruction and so on. Sorry, but it was. The “it’s all a metaphor!” stuff came later, much later, and we can see changes in the Bible text’s attitudes (e.g., differences between 1 and 2 Thessalonians and trends in 2 Peter) showing that, yes, people DID expect the world to end literally.