I’ve been going to a Bible study Monday mornings at 6:30. So I got up a little early today and went to Caribou where we meet. My father-in-law bought me a hot chocolate (I’m a bad Norwegian, I don’t drink coffee) and the group discussed the second half of Romans 12. When it was time to wrap-up, the pastor who leads the study asked us to read Romans 13 for next week, and added that we should read Revelation 13.
So you are asking what is funny about that, right? I am driving to work, trying to figure out what Revelation 13 would have to do with Romans 13, I am not a biblical scholar in even the slightest sense, so I don’t know. Well I get to work, and my mother had forwarded the following anti-Obama email to me about Revelation 13:
“A Trivia question in Sunday School: How long is the beast allowed to have
authority in Revelations?Revelations Chapter 13 tells us it is 42 months, and you know what that is. Almost a four-year term of a Presidency. All I can say is ‘Lord, Have mercy on us!’
According to The Book of Revelations: The anti-Christ will be a man, in his 40’s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuasive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal….the prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, will destroy everything. Do we recognize this description??
I STRONGLY URGE each one of you to post this as many times as you can! Each opportunity that you have to send it to a friend or media outlet..do it! I refuse to take a chance on this unknown candidate who came out of nowhere.”
The email was twice as long with other scare-tactics, but what struck me as I read this was, first off, my simple knowledge of the Bible tells me that it is Revelation, as in the Revelation to John, not Revelations with an ‘s’, and secondly and more importantly to disregard this, how can the New Testament mention anything about Islam? It wasn’t that long ago that I took a religion class at Augsburg, and in it I learned two things that apply to this email, 1) The New Testement was finished around 140 A.D. 2) Mohammad, the founder of Islam, was not born until 570 A.D. How can a person of “Muslim descent” be mentioned in Revelation, if it was written at least 430 years before a Muslim existed?
There are nutjobs on the left, as well as the right, but it seems people are much more willing to accept things like this from people on the right than people on the left. The person who wrote this comes off as some expert, only because so few of us know the bible well enough to know that this email is completely wrong. Add to that people like Bill Cunningham, the nationally syndicated Republican radio talk-show wacko not just putting out the idea that Obama might be “the beast” of Revelation, solely based on Ohio’s 666,000 (“six-six-six”) new voters registered this election, but he actually said Obama is “the beast” on his national talk show. It is a scare-tactic, appealing to the large number of people who take talk-show hosts seriously, and believe them to be the word, sometimes over The Word.
By the way, what are they so afraid of? It sounds like a lack of faith to me. Either that, or they are not really believers, which is probably more the case. After all, if it is the end of times, is God going to say “hey, wait a minute, those dumb humans didn’t elect the anti-Christ. Oh well, to heck with the rapture”?
www.MNDem.com 
Sounds like the kind of crap my grandma emails me. I love her, but between boycotting McDonald’s over their support for gay marriage (I had an extensive post refuting that one) and various other boycotts and drummed up “facts”, I often hit delete before I even get to the email itself. The sad thing is, half of the stuff they’re getting is coming from the American Family Association…and with a name like that, why wouldn’t people believe they’re credible? It’s all just really sad.