If I were to say that the world will not end on that day, I would be making a kind of prophecy — and I don’t want to do that. However, the Bible tells us that the world will end (2 Pet. 3:10-12; Rev. 20:11-13) and we don’t know what day it will be (Matt. 24:36; 1 Thess. 5:2). Since the Bible tells us we won’t know what day it is, it can’t happen on December 21, 2012 because, well, we would know what day it would be. So, what is up with that date?
The date December 21, 2012 is arrived at via the Mayan calendar.
“On Dec. 21, 2012, it will display the equivalent of a string of zeros, like the odometer turning over on your car, with the close of something like a millennium. In Maya calendrics, however, it’s not the end of a thousand years. It’s the end of Baktun 13. The Maya calendar was based on multiple cycles of time, and the baktun was one of them. A baktun is 144,000 days: a little more than 394 years.”1
So, the Mayan calendar operates on cycles and on 12/21/12 it is going to reset to zero and start again. It is not predicting an end to the world. It is simply a cycle of time which happens to fall on that date. Furthermore, different scholars have different opinions about what is the proper day that the Mayan calendar is supposed to end on — though most agree it is the Dec. 21, date.
Their Long Count Cycle began in 3,114 B.C. with a 394 “year period known as Baktuns. Thirteen was a significant, sacred number for the Mayas, and they wrote that the 13th Baktun ends on Dec. 21, 2012.”2 There is no evidence that the Mayans had any secret knowledge about that date. It is simply the end of their calendar cycle.
Two Nigerian pastors have dismissed the fears that the World will come to an end on 21 December 2012, according to a rumored prediction by a Mayan calendar.
According to Pastor Ituah Ighodalo, founder of Trinity House Church in Victoria Island, Lagos, there should be no fear or anxiety as the world will not end on 21 December.
“There would be nothing wrong. The world will not end on December 21,” he said.
To Pastor Tunji Babajide of the Triumphant Assembly Church in Yaba, no one knows when the world will end.
“The Bible said no man knoweth when he (Jesus Christ) will come,it’s just a waste of time. No man knows when he will come,” Babajide said.
The prediction is triggering panic stockpiling of foodstuffs and unusual behaviour in Russia and France, according to the New York Times.
“Inmates in a women’s prison near the Chinese border are said to have experienced a “collective mass psychosis” so intense that their wardens summoned a priest to calm them. In a factory town east of Moscow, panicked citizens stripped shelves of matches, kerosene, sugar and candles. A huge Mayan-style archway is being built — out of ice — on Karl Marx Street in Chelyabinsk in the south.
“Last week, Russia’s government decided to put an end to the doomsday talk. Its minister of emergency situations said Friday that he had access to “methods of monitoring what is occurring on the planet Earth,” and that he could say with confidence that the world was not going to end in December.
“In France, the authorities plan to bar access to Bugarach mountain in the south to keep out a flood of visitors who believe it is a sacred place that will protect a lucky few from the end of the world. The patriarch of Ukraine’s Orthodox Church recently issued a statement assuring the faithful that “doomsday is sure to come,” but that it will be provoked by the moral decline of mankind, not the “so-called parade of planets or the end of the Mayan calendar.”
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