Making Your Rapture Y2K Compliant: Are You Ready?

Many foresee the coming of the millennium as the final stage of these end times.  After all, God created the world in six days and, as everybody knows, each day represents a 1,000 years.  Hence, after 6,000 years have passed – which many religious leaders say culminates at the very moment of midnight, January 1, 2,000 – Jesus will return to reign on Earth for 1,000 years, completing the seventh symbolic day.

This, however, represents only one breed of millenniumist counting.  And key to any good plan preparing for the second coming is to know when your absolutely last chance to seek redemption is.  By our reckoning, there are several candidates for the exact moment of the Lord's return.  Although it's ludicrous to believe that you can know for sure when the rapture will begin – after all, God did say that we'd know neither the day nor the hour – we think we've got most of God's possible options locked down:

December 25, 1994, 12:00am: Christ was born in 6 BC at the earliest (when Augustus issued the census) and 4 BC at the latest (when Herod died).  Counting from his birth, the rapture has already occurred sometime between 1994 and 1997, which just goes to prove that Clinton is the Antichrist.

 

December 31, 1999, 4:58pm: Jesus was a Jew.  Therefore the rapture will not occur at midnight on Saturday January 1 but rather at sundown on Friday December 31.

 

December 31, 1999, 11:00pm: The bible says nothing about Jesus observing Daylight Savings Time, so it must be a diabolical plot of Satan's to throw us off.  Since December is in Winter, we've fallen back an hour, which means that the rapture will actually occur an hour earlier than expected!

 

December 31, 1999, 11:59:59pm: Beat the Millennium!  Be at the International Dateline on the Eve of the Millennium to celebrate the festivities.  Just seconds before midnight, step east over the dateline, putting yourself a full 24 hours back in time.  Watch the flames and destruction of the rapture from just inches away and have a full day to repent before it gets you!  Or if you prefer, cross back over the dateline just as midnight strikes your time zone and you'll find yourself at January 2, missing the rapture altogether.

 

January 2, 2000, 12:00am: Every four years we observe a leap day to make up the accumulated lost day.  The year 2000 is scheduled to have a leap day (sic.) so the rapture will actually occur at midnight January 2 when everyone is getting down and letting go because the world didn't end on January 1.

January 3, 2000, 8:38:24pm: In the year 4000 BC when the world was created, a year was 365.24250 days long.  The length of a year in 2000 will be 365.24219 days due to gravitational dynamics between the Sun, Earth, and Moon, a variation of .00031 days which, without using complex mathematics God would certainly never use, means a maximum slippage of 26.784 seconds a year or an accumulated 44.64 hours, placing the 6000 year milestone on January 3 at 8:38:24pm.

 

January 11, 2000, 12:00am: In 1582, Pope Gregory replaced the Julian calendar with the (you guessed it) Gregorian calendar.  To set the date of Easter, however, he declared in his papal bill that October 4, 1582 (Thursday) would henceforth be known as October 15, 1582 (Friday).  Thus, ten days were lost that year, placing the true date of the millennium on January 11.

 

January 1, 2001, 12:00am: There was no year 0, duh.  The millennium occurs not in the year 2000 but 2001.

 

January 1, 2020, 12:00am: One strategy considered by the US government to stave off the impending doom of Y2K is to legislate that all Americans turn their calendars back 20 years.  Not only will this give the banks another 20 years to ignore the Y2K problem, it will bring back Spandex, Van Halen, Rubik's Cube, and New Coke.  Although having to relive the 80's again will anything but prepare us for redemption, doing so will give us a twenty-year reprieve from the rapture.

 

Easter, 2033, 12:00am: Every good Christian knows that AD doesn't even need to be translated from the Latin to give us the English-accurate acronym "After Death."  Thus, projecting the millennium from Christ's death when he was 33 gives us another entire generation to sin and debauch without worry.

January 1, 2048, 12:00am: The millennium is often referred to as Y2K.  However, Y2K is a computer term, and K actually refers to 1024 (2 raised to the 8th power), not 1000, which places the millennium in the year 2048!

Of course, more than one of these could be the right interpretation, meaning that there are a plethora of different ways to mix and match your options to arrive at the true date of the rapture.  Now that you've got them all, be at the ready with your lamp!  (However, for those of you who don't pick the right combination and still aren't ready for the rapture, despite all of our help, Home Depot will be open 24 hours selling flasks of oil.)