The media is reporting that the Family Radio's followers worldwide have spent over $100 million on billboards, signs, advertising, etc promoting the idea that the Biblical End Times are upon us all beginning today, May 21st.
However, there has always been some fine print included on their website and in some of their press releases, put there to answer in advance what many people will be asking on May 22nd and thereafter --
"Hey! How come nothing happened!?!"
Their answer is a fable from the Old Testament book of Jonah. Yeah, Jonah -- the guy who got swallowed by a "great fish" while running away from an assignment Yahweh gave him. He was supposed to go preach Jewish law amongst the sodomites and citizens of Nineveh. He didn't want to, and ended up spending three days and nights inside that fish, down in Davy Jones locker.
It was no fun down there, so he cried "Uncle!" at last and Yahweh got him back on dry land on the condition that he go do the prophesying he was supposed to do.
In Nineveh. Where people did pretty much what pleased them. Which did not please Yahweh at all, at all.
The Assyrian city of Nineveh (near Mosul in northern Iraq today) was deemed by Yahweh to be utterly full of wicked louts, fornicators, ne'er-do-wells and riff-raff. Because of a culture of misbehavin' and because it was sorely lacking in true believers, Yahweh was fixin' to tear that town apart, in that special way he had.
Jonah's job was to let the sodomizers and fornicators of Nineveh know that they had forty days to get their butts in line with the law according to Yahweh, or else. People took this kind of threat rather more seriously in those days, and a great many of Nineveh's hedonists and whores immediately put off their fancy clothes and donned sackcloth and ashes. They even started fasting the whole forty days.
There were enough miscreants who saw the error of their ways that Yahweh backed right off, and decided to let the whole city live.
Jonah was nowhere near as impressed with this big turnaround and said so. He'd rubbed elbows with these reprobates right in their native haunts while he was preaching to 'em, and by his best calculations there wasn't regret or remorse enough in this world or the next to whitewash their long list of infractions.
I mean, before Jonah spoke up these people couldn't even leave the beasts in the field alone . . . but we won't digress on a family blog.
Jonah was definitely not friendly toward them. Maybe they'd laughed in his face. Maybe they threw melon rinds or emptied their chamber pots in his vicinity. Whatever it was that ticked him off, Jonah was dead set on seeing Yahweh finish off the original plan. He wanted Him to bring in locusts, plagues, thunderbolts and earthquakes and leave not one stone on top of another stone. Go Biblical on the place, ya know?
But Yahweh said He was going to let the Ninevites live, saying they now deserved pity, as did the animals in the city. They'd suffered enough. That was that.
This fable of Nineveh is what the Family Radio Network will be claiming in the coming days as the reason no earthquakes or locusts or plagues or comets or Messiahs have appeared.
As this old world goes on as it usually does, they will claim that because of their extra fervent $100 million efforts around this wicked world, enough average louts took to the straight and narrow path of evangelical fervor that Yahweh cut us some slack. Presto! we all get more time.
You want proof?
The proof that Family Radio's heroic efforts have saved us all from Judgement Day is . . . the absence of Judgement Day. You can't argue with that.
Always, always check the fine print . . .