The end of the world I never had the chance to know
by Sierra
When I reached the age of nine, I began seriously worrying about the age of accountability and the Rapture. There was no magical number attached to the former; indeed, the fact that I was old enough to worry about it seemed evidence enough that I should worry. I was obviously old enough to understand sin, and consequently was old enough to miss the Rapture. And the Rapture was coming. Of that we all were certain.
William Branham taught that only the elect, or Bride of Christ, would make it to Paradise in a dramatic snatching-away in the last moments of time. In a 1958 sermon entitled “The Sudden, Secret Going Away of the Church,” he told a Cinderella story as a “type” of the Bride of Christ awaiting the return of her groom. She was the wise virgin who filled her lamp with oil to await the bridegroom, while the foolish busied themselves with hedonism and empty religious rituals. “Lukewarm” Christians, including those who followed the Message of the Hour but did not fully surrender to the Holy Ghost, would be left behind to suffer three and a half years of unspeakable torment. Indeed, the number of people saved in the Rapture would be so small that the world would go on without noticing their absence.
The Tribulation rivalled descriptions of Hell in the most graphic of Puritan sermons. Fire and brimstone were not enough punishment for the wicked and the lukewarm alike. We were regaled with warnings on a near-weekly basis of terrible diseases as yet unknown to humanity: flesh-eating bacteria that would dissolve the skin and leave us to die fully conscious. New, aggressive cancers. The return of smallpox. Each disease was a brand-new demon to be released when the gates of Hell were broken open and Satan was unleashed on the earth. As Branham had been a young man during the Second World War, the Great Tribulation was riddled with nuclear fallout imagery as well. The lucky ones, we were told, were to be in the major cities when a small country (not Russia, Branham emphatically warned – that would be too obvious) got hold of nuclear arms and blew up the United States from coast to coast.
What happened to the rest of the world at Armageddon was anyone’s guess. The end of the world was evidently an American affair.
