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Save the date? Signs advertise return of Jesus on May 21 
A billboard advertising wecanknow.org on Aurora Avenue in Seattle. (Amy Rolph/seattlepi.com)
If you’ve driven on Aurora Avenue in North Seattle recently, you’ve probably already heard that Jesus is returning next month.
That’s because amid a sea of billboards advertising things like Chase bank and Coca-cola, there’s one that says “Save the date!” in big, red letters. Then it tells you that Christ is returning on May 21.
The signs have been popping up all over Seattle and the rest of the nation this year, paid for by a group of Christians behind wecanknow,org and Family Radio.
Their message is simple: The Bible says God warned Noah, Jonah, Lot and Moses about the exact time of destructive Old-Testament events. So they think God also warned modern Christians by establishing a predictive timeline via genealogies and historical dates in the Bible.
OK, maybe not so simple.
(There’s more on how May 21 was determined to be the rapture date from the San Francisco Chronicle.)
Family Radio board member Tom Evans recently talked with KIRO radio host Dave Ross and said we should brace for a massive earthquake on May 21.
“Can you imagine what it’s like for me and my family and my friends that I know who think that I’m crazy, but there’s so much evidence in the Bible,” Evans told Ross. “I trust the Bible to the point I’m willing to put my life on it.”
The billboards haven’t been well received in some parts of the country. A few cities are even hosting “rapture parties” on May 21 and 22 to mock the message of Family Radio followers, some of whom are traveling the country in RVs to warn of the second coming.
And yes, the atheists have even rented their own billboards.
Claiming to know the date of the rapture isn’t new. For starters, there was the so-called “Great Disappointment” of 1844.
And a former NASA engineer sold millions of copies of the book “88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988.” The author updated his prediction several times before 1997.
This is the second prediction for Harold Camping, the Family Radio broadcaster behind the May 21 date. Camping also predicted the rapture would happen on September 6, 1994.
Even so, don’t get Camping started on those who believe the world will end in 2012.
“That date has not one stitch of biblical authority,” Camping told the San Francisco Chronicle last year. “It’s like a fairy tale.”