From the Christianity Along the Rhine blog series…
The Veracity blog is normally not a high-traffic website. I am well-aware that long-form blogging does not really generate lots of “clicks.” Social media, like Facebook and Instagram, is way too time consuming and life-draining for me to deal with, anyway. But back in mid-September of this past year (2025), I was shocked to discover that Veracity received over 80 thousand views in just a matter of days.
80,000 views???
I had written a blog post about the supposed “rapture” prediction that caught the attention of secular media algorithms, with lots of Facebook and Instagram pages promoting the idea that Jesus will come to take the church out of the world sometime around September 23-24. A South African YouTuber Joshua Mhlakela had “prophesied” that Jesus would return, telling listeners that he was “one billion percent” sure that the prophecy would become true.
I published my blog post about it on September 20, and somehow Google picked it up as the 3rd or 4th highest ranking Internet resource world-wide on the topic. Never before has something I have written gone so viral before.
We had 80,000 hits in just a matter of days, for a blog that gets just a tiny fraction of that on a typical day. Pretty wild for a blog with less than 200 subscribers.
As one might reasonably conclude, Jesus did not come back during the September 23-24 window. Shockers of shockers, Mhlakela was not deterred, and he ended up reformulating yet another prediction that Jesus would return during another window on October 7-8.
Alas again, October 7-8 passed without any fanfare. No rapture happened. The last I heard, he came up with yet a third date prediction, perhaps October 16-17, that of course, failed again. “Rapture Talk” since then morphed into “Rapture Fatigue.” Date-setting for Jesus’ return is a peculiar hobby that keeps on going despite the obvious, with its popularity waxing and waning over time.
If you completely missed this whole story, and want more detail on it, I highly recommend YouTube apologist Mike Winger’s resources on this topic, where he goes into great and fascinating detail about the lunacy.
In September, 2025, many end-times enthusiasts were waiting for the “rapture” of the church by Jesus…. a “rapture” that never came. What was all the fuss about?
Veracity 