Viral Doomsday Prediction Says World Is Going To End Today. What’s Behind The Trend

The latest trend to cause a stir among netizens is not an item of clothing or a wacky recipe; it is doomsday. A man from  South Africa named Joshua Mhlakela is currently going viral for claiming that God allowed him to see the future, and he said to him, “On the 23rd and the 24th, 2025, I will come to take my Church.”

As expected, his claims of the Rapture being nigh have garnered a lot of attention on the internet, with #RaptureTok trending on TikTok. Christian scholars and commentators have also joined the conversation, trying to make sense of the predictions surrounding the belief in the Rapture.

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What is Rapture?

Rapture is an event or day in the future when, evangelical Christians believe, Jesus will come back to the earth and take his true followers to heaven before the world ends. While the word is not found in the Bible, some passages are used to validate the belief, which includes Thessalonians, 1 Corinthians, and Matthew 24.

Talking to AP in an interview, Amy Frykholm, author of the book ‘Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America’, says, “Belief in the Rapture began in the mid-19th century in Britain and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. It added a secret exclusivity to the Second Coming, which was an already accepted belief at the time.”

She further explained in the interview, “Usually, in this kind of storytelling, the people who are ‘taken up’ in the Rapture are a surprise, while many people who were believed to be good Christians are left behind.”

Past predictions of the Rapture

This is hardly the first time the Rapture has been predicted by an individual. A California-based evangelical broadcaster, Harold Camping, made headlines with his bold claim that Judgment Day and the Rapture were destined to occur on May 21, 2011. While a Korean group known as the Mission of the Coming Days predicted the Second Coming of Jesus to take place on 28th October, 1992.

However, the most significant prediction of the Rapture happened in the 19th century when  William Miller, a farmer and a Bible interpreter, predicted the day of Rapture to be somewhere between 1843 and 1844.  In fact, the Seventh-day Adventist Church was inspired by Miller’s teachings.

However. When 1843 and 1844 came and went without the promised event taking place, it led to what is known as the Great Disappointment. This caused the Millerites to break off. Some followed Ellen White to what is modern Seventh-Day Adventism, and some became Jehovah’s Witnesses.