There’s yet another doomsday date approaching, with some claiming that the rapture will start on Saturday.
That’s when certain Christians will get sucked up into heaven while the Earth descends into a chaotic “tribulation” period for those who are left.
Several videos about the supposed coming cataclysm are going viral with similar claims, showing some kind of space queen giving birth in front of a seven-headed moon lizard.
But don’t stock up on Jim Bakker’s doomsday food buckets just yet. The entire basis for the prediction is bunk. The September rapture date came from a Christian researcher named David Meade who calculated it would occur 33 days after last month’s eclipse, The Washington Post reported.
“Jesus lived for 33 years. The name Elohim, which is the name of God to the Jews, was mentioned 33 times [in the Bible],” Meade told the newspaper. “It’s a very biblically significant, numerologically significant number. I’m talking astronomy. I’m talking the Bible … and merging the two.”
Meade believes global catastrophes will be caused by a secret planet called Nibiru passing the Earth on Saturday. The world won’t end, “but the world as we know it is ending,” he told the Post.
NASA ― and just about every astronomer ― said Nibiru doesn’t exist.
“Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax,” the space agency said on its website a few years ago when similar doomsday predictions went viral. “There is no factual basis for these claims.”
Even fellow Christians are calling out Meade and others over the latest doomsday predictions.
“Meade’s views are not endorsed by Roman Catholic, Protestant or eastern Orthodox branches of Christianity,” Fox News reported.
“Meade is a made-up leader in a made-up field, and should not be on the front page of anything, let alone Fox News,” Ed Stetzer of Christianity Today wrote.
While the writers of the Bible have used numbers at times, Stetzer said there were no “secret numerical codes that require a profession called ‘Christian numerology.’”
In other words, go ahead and make plans for Sunday.