Between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844 There was a LOT of noise being made.
Many Millerites sold their worldly possessions, including houses and farms.
Twice, they gathered in churches awaiting the end of the world.
The local group in Calais, Vermont after twice slinking out of the church, dressed in their white robes, made especially for the ascent to Heaven realized the only thing that was over was the scam.
Their relatives and neighbors all had a good laugh over it.
After the second time (fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me) they gave it up.
The same with the followers of Muggleton in the 1700s.
It's not a new scam, just new scammers.
Of course at some point the end will come, it won't be a scam, sometime between 10 minutes from now and millions of years.
Still peddling that snake oil, “Rev” Bresciani? Have you no shame? Or are your motives mercenary? After all, there’s a sucker born every minute.
When I first encountered the pre-trib pre-mil paradigm, and bought into it wholeheartedly, I was a wild-eyed, long-haired, apocalypse-crazed Jesus Freak. David Chilton captured the ethos of those days quite well:
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I recall a “Jesus People” newspaper of the early 1970s which carried an interview with the most popular “prophecy expert” of those days. On the basis of the “fact” that Jesus was going to rapture His Church “at any moment,” this man actually counseled his young followers not to marry and raise families. After all, there was no time for that sort of thing. The Rapture was coming, so any work for dominion would be useless. (If you were the devil, could you devise a better, more “spiritual-sounding” excuse for Christians to abandon God’s plan for victory?) The “Rapture Ethic” of those years led many to leave school, jobs, families, and responsibility in general; flocks of Jesus People wandered aimlessly around the country, with no clear goal beyond the next Christian rock concert. It was years before many of them woke up, and it sometimes took years more to put their lives together again.
Chilton, Paradise Restored, pages 10-11:
]
During that time, I could not reason, think, or plan more than a week or two ahead.
As a friend pointed out, when I bewailed the five years of my vocational life that I’d lost to vain pursuits, “Tom, you were lucky. Many paid a far higher price.”
You may wonder why my icon shows me in academic regalia. Simple — note the wrinkles and gray hair, rather than the costume. And, of course, the manic grin. That is me at age 59, having just earned a PhD, so as to make the best possible use of the next 30-40 years I anticipate investing in my Lord’s service.
Your future profoundly affects your present. I have a bigger, brighter, and more meaningful future ahead of me at age 71 than I did at age 21.
Something about which to think ...
https://www.garynorth.com/freebooks/docs/pdf/paradise_restored.pdf
It simply does not matter. The rapture comes for people every second of every day. They die. No more chances. Their life is over, their own rapture has come
Obsessing over the rapture is just silly. It is just as silly as the pentecostals who get all wrapped around the axle over trinitarians when they themselves are in fact trinitarians. They pray to God, they pray in Jesus name and they seek the Holy Spirit. Now, if that isn’t being a trinitarian that they themselves condemn I’ll eat your hat..
Prophets are not needed today...we have the word of God as our guide and that reveales what we need to know. Pastors too who preach His word.....
When someone claims to be a Prophet my red light goes on immediatly. We were warned about those who claim so.