Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Well, the world did not end this week, as the South African pastor predicted,

Joshua McKella said that the rapture would occur on September 23rd to prepare some people even sold their homes and quit their jobs.

This is not the first end-time's prediction that failed to materialize. In 2011, a radio preacher named Harold Camping

identified May 21st of that year as when the rapture would occur. More famous was the 88 reasons

the rapture would happen in 1988 book, but it didn't. There was also a rapture panic surrounding Y2K, and back in 1844, a Baptist preacher named

William Miller misled so many people the event became known as the Great Disappointment.

American Protestants have been particularly interested in end-time's prophecies.

The Left Behind book series from the 90s and early 2000 sold

millions. Though its fictionalized account of the end times was described as a contemporary phenomenon,

it did not predict a specific day or year. And of course, there was that haunting Larry Norman

song from the 1970s, I wish we'd all been ready. Of the various views of

the end times that Christians hold the most well-known is some version of premillennialism.

The most popular view of premillennialism is that at a future point, Christ will meet

his saints in the air through the rapture before the Antichrist rules the world in a time known

as the Great Tribulation.

After that, Jesus will return again to rule for a thousand years before the final judgment.

Another view is preterism, which understands that much of the prophesied happenings of Scripture

that many people perceive to be of the end times happened during the first century.

According to on-millanism, the millennial reign of Christ and the tribulation aren't

specific periods of time, but rather representations of the rule of Christ through his church

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