Billboards Announce Return of Jesus

(CANVAS STAFF REPORTS) - Jesus may not know the exact time He returns to Earth, but one Bible teacher has marked his calendar.

Family Radio founder Harold Camping is predicting Jesus will come back for his followers on May 21, 2011. Family Radio’s campaign includes billboards in Nashville, Louisville, St. Louis, Detroit, Little Rock, Omaha, Kansas City, Fort Wayne, Ind., and Bridgeport, Conn. The ministry is also sending people around the world to proclaim Camping’s prediction, The Tennessean reported.

Camping predicts the rapture will happen exactly 7,000 years from the date that God first warned people about the flood. He bases his prediction on the flood happening in 4990 B.C., on what he says would have been May 21 in the modern calendar.

Camping says that God gave Noah one week of warning, and since the Bible says that for God a day is like 1,000 years, Camping predicts there will be a 7,000-year interval between the flood and rapture: May 21, 2011.

"We hope that anyone would get a Bible out and try and prove that this is wrong," he told The Tennessean.

Well, they could point to the Gospel of Mark, chapter 13, which records the disciples asking Jesus when “all these things will be fulfilled."

In the passage, Jesus answers: “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13:32).

The Rev. Fred Fuller of Madison (Tenn.) Campus Seventh-Day Adventist Church said the Bible points to Jesus' return, but no one knows when.

"The Bible says no one knows the day or the hour," he said. "I don't believe that date-setting or the scare tactic of an immediate date is a biblical approach."

Camping’s previous book, “1994?,” said the end of the world could occur that year, somewhere between September 15-17, according to the Christian Research Institute .

Camping wrote in “1994?” that we can know the month and the year that Christ will return, but he acknowledged he didn’t know the exact day because Scripture says “no man knows the day nor the hour” (Matt. 24:36).

Previous predictions of Christ’s return didn't pan out. The Tennessean said that in 1843, the so-called Great Disappointment happened when William Miller and his followers sold their homes and waited in a field for Jesus to come back.