I have it on good authority that today is the Rapture, wherein Jesus reappears on Earth, selects a few of the Righteous and Holy to ascend back into Heaven with him, and leaves the rest of us slobs down here to contend with the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons, the Scarlet Whore of Babylon, the Star Wormwood, the Beast With Seven Heads and Ten Crowns, and various other special offers created for our edification by the God of Goodness and Mercy.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalpyse, by Viktor Vasnetsov (1887) [Image is in the Public Domain]
Which brings up a question I've always wondered about: why did the Beast have seven heads, but ten crowns? It seems like logically, the head:crown ratio should be 1:1. Did he wear seven of them at a time, and kept three in his closet as spares? Did he stand in front of the mirror each morning, deciding which seven he was going to wear that day? I remember as a child, reading the Bible, picturing him as wearing one crown each on six of his heads and the remaining four stacked up on one head, and that mental image bothered the hell out of me. It just seemed unnecessarily asymmetrical. I recall trying to figure out if there was a way to make it work out better, and the best I could do was two crowns on heads one, four, and seven, and a single crown on each of the remaining ones.
I was kind of a neurotic child, which probably isn't a surprise to anyone.
Anyhow, I said that I found out today is the Rapture from good authority, but that may have been a slight exaggeration. The place I read about it was the New York Post, which ranks only slightly above The Weekly World News in credibility. The Post was quoting one Pastor Joshua Mhlakela, who made the announcement a couple of weeks ago. "The Rapture is upon us, whether you are ready or not," Mhlakela said. "I saw Jesus sitting on his throne, and I could hear him saying very loud and clear, 'I am coming soon.' He said to me, 'On the 23rd and 24th of September, I will come back to Earth.'"
The optimists amongst us might expect that Mhlakela would immediately be dismissed by everyone, given that Wikipedia has a list of 162 "failed apocalypse predictions," along with dozens more that are supposed to happen in the future. You would think after 162 times that people ran around with signs saying, "REPENT NOW, THE WORLD ENDS TODAY," and the next day came and the world just kept loping along as usual, people would shrug and laugh about any future prognostications of catastrophe.
You would be wrong.
Mhlakela's YouTube video has gotten millions of views, and the comments are, for the most part, favorable.
Another one posted, "Wow, I can read people and Joshua is 100% telling the truth. I never even listen to videos claiming visions, but God told me to watch this."
Yet another commented, "Last month I also had a vision, I dreamt I was dreaming… and the Lord appeared, telling me He is coming soon."
Well, last night I dreamed that I looked out of my office window, and there were a bunch of pterodactyls roosting in the walnut trees in our front yard, and I was afraid to let my dogs out to pee because I didn't want the pterodactyls to attack them. So I don't know that dreams are necessarily a good guide to reality.
Or at least mine aren't.
What comes to mind with all this is the biblical passage from the Gospel of Matthew chapter 24, wherein we read, "Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. And then all the peoples of the Earth will mourn when they see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other... But about that day or hour when all these things will happen no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."
Note that the passage doesn't say, "... no one knows but only the Father and Pastor Joshua Mhlakela."
So I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief that Wednesday will dawn and we'll all still be here. Of course, there is a downside to this, and that's... that we'll all still be here. Because if you consider *gestures around vaguely at everything* the current situation down here on Earth is really fucking awful. Maybe I should be rooting for Mhlakela, I dunno.
You know, I gotta wonder what sanctimonious hypocrites like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson would do if Jesus actually did come back. "Yo, Mike," I can hear the Lord saying. "What about that whole 'feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give the poor wanderer shelter' thing I commanded? 'Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do unto me,' I believe were my exact words? And there's also that thing about not bearing false witness." *grabs him by the ear* "Come with me, buddy, I think we need to have a 'little talk.'"
My guess is that for all of Johnson's pious praise-Jesus-ing, if that happened, he would piss his pants and then have a stroke.
So, yeah, at this point, bring on the Horsepersons. I know as someone who's generally speaking an unbeliever, I'm kind of screwed either way, but at least watching the evangelicals scramble around trying to figure out how to account for their behavior over the last ten years would be entertaining as I'm waiting to be smited.
Smote? Smitten? Smoted? Smoot? Smot? Smut? I've never been entirely sure of what the correct participle is.
****************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment