A Letter to Harold Camping and Those Who Expected Judgment Day

By Timothy Dalrymple

When people say, “It’s not the end of the world,” they usually mean those words to be comforting. Yet those words will not be comforting to you. Not today. That the Day of the Lord did not arrive when you had expected it to arrive will be a source of profound disappointment, of embarrassment, and perhaps — now or in the days to come — of disillusionment with your faith.

You were wrong. Let’s face that fact. You were confidently wrong. You believed with all the fervency of a hopeful heart, a heart that longed to see God and longed to see the day when suffering would cease and justice would reign and the truth of God would be made known. When people mocked you for what you believed, you thought to yourself, Just wait and you’ll see. Today I will be thought a fool for Christ; tomorrow the world will see that we were right.

Harold Camping, the 89-year-old founder of the Family Radio Network, used his broadcast empire, two thousand billboards and a flood of tracts and posters to warn the world that Judgment Day would arrive on May 21. He expected earthquakes that would spread across the world; two percent of the world’s population would be raptured to heaven while the rest would be left behind for tribulations. You believed it. You kept in prayer throughout the day, you shared important words with your loved ones, and you waited eagerly for the news you were sure would come. Yet the earth never shook. This day was just like so many other Saturdays before it. The sun rose, the sun fell, and the world kept turning.

Now, some of you may be wondering: What happened?

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