What Is So Hard to Understand About "No One Knows the Day or the Hour"?

Here we go again.

A South African Baptist pastor, Joshua Mhlakela, claims that the Lord revealed to him in a vision that the Rapture would occur on September 23-24 (during the Feast of Trumpets) which falls on those days. His YouTube video has over a half million hits and this is now buzzing all over the news in addition to social media. He’s interviewed by two spiritales presumably named Prisca and Maximilla.

I too eagerly await the Lord’s return, but am amazed that this seemingly endless stream of prophetic visionaries continue to do this and claim that the Holy Spirit reveals this nonsense to them, when Jesus was direct and crystal clear in Matthew 24:36, “But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.” It is bad enough that Mhlakela would make such a claim, but it still amazes me that the gullible and curious among professing Christians would give any credence to this. Until Jesus does come again, we will be plagued by Montantists of various stripes doing an end-run around the biblical teaching regarding our Lord’s return. Jesus urges us,”therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect” (Matthew 24:44). Neither does the Holy Spirit reveal anything to anyone contrary to the express teaching of Scripture.

The great irony here is that Peter warned about such conditions in 2 Peter 3:3-5.

Knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.” For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God.

These so-called “prophets” do great harm to Christ’s church and their falsehoods only create the kind of rank skepticism the apostles warned us about in regard to the Lord’s return.

The critical question remaining is that like Edgar Whisenant and Harold Camping before him (as well as a host of others across the ages), will Mhlakela go merrily on his way, re-tweak his calculations, and do this all over again? Many of them do. It matters not a whit to me that he might be sincere, but rather will he repent and demonstrate even a modicum of shame for doing the very thing Scripture warns him not to do?

Is there no shame or embarrassment? We will see.