Pastor: My 175,000 Hours of Bible Study Tell Me We’re “100%” in the “Last Days”

After hours — too many hours, really — of intense study, right-wing pastor Perry Stone is convinced we have officially entered the prophesied “Last Days” described in the Bible.

It would be a little more convincing if countless preachers hadn’t said the exact same thing many times before.

I am absolutely convinced — I’m 62 years of age, I’ve been preaching for 46 years, and I’m not saying this in a boasting way, but we probably have well over between 172 to about 175,000 hours, literally, in study — that’s reading, studying, work studies, research, reading books — and that’s not an exaggeration.

Because since I was 16 years of age, I would go 4 hours, then 8 hours, and sometimes 10-12 hours a day — My staff knows I’m telling you the fact. That’s what I do. And in the process of the study and the research, I am 100% — not 99 and a half — that we have literally entered the last of the Last Days, the time of the end…

Of course it doesn’t matter how long you study if you don’t know how to do it right. And claiming 100% certainty about the future, based on a close reading of a text that continues to spur debate even in Christian circles, is a sure sign that Stone never studied the text properly.

Anyone who stayed half-awake in seminary could refute this, too, regardless of how long they studied simply because:

1. The Bible says that, technically, the “Last Days” began with the death of Christ, and
2. No one, no matter their credentials, is supposed to know the day or the hour of Christ’s return.

Maybe Stone skipped those verses during his studying sessions.

It’s really incredible when people start bemoaning the Last Days the moment we’re dealing with plagues, a collapsed economy, corrupt leadership, etc. We’re always in the “Last Days” because it’s impossible to fact check. It’s not hard for the same people who claim God created the universe in six days because the Bible doesn’t specify the length of the “days” to stretch the duration of the Last Days. It means none of us will ever be around to fact-check this down the road.

The irony is that Christians like Stone could make the case that climate change is an existential threat that better fits the idea of the Last Days… but they won’t make that argument because it would involve accepting the reality of our environmental crisis.

(via Right Wing Watch)