Of 2013 Celebrity Deaths

We have all heard about the death of Nelson Mandela; the mass media made sure of that.  However, one death that has gone underreported is that of Paul Crouch, who died on 30 November at the age of 79.  When I got the news of Paul Crouch’s death the report did not sit well with me or did not seem quite right.  I remember some of the early days of TBN--back when everyone was convinced the Rapture was nearly at hand and Paul Crouch really seemed to believe that he was a part of “the generation that will cheat the undertaker,” to use his words.  Indeed, it seems like he was supposed to keep right on living, but he hasn’t.

Several months prior to this I had inquired about the condition of Richard Eby of Spring Valley Lake.  I first saw the man on a CBN broadcast in the 1990s where he was being interviewed on TV in front of an outdoor location that immediately looked familiar and like the Spring Valley Lake area (which it turned out to be).  As I recall, and to hear Richard Eby tell it, he had an accident, he was killed, the Lord spoke to him, his name was temporarily “expunged” from the Book of Life, he went to hell, he was tormented by spider-like demons, and at the end of the matter he was informed that he would still be alive on this earth at the Parousia.  Now, my inquiry seemed to indicate that the man was still alive at the age of 101 or so.  However, I checked again and it now turns out that he died ten years ago without my hearing about it.  According to one website, as Mr. Eby lay on his deathbed someone asked him about his claim that Eby would be alive at the end of the age; this claim was subsequently retracted as a matter of reading too much into someone else’s words.

Add it all up and there apparently is no special reason to believe that only twenty more years of the trials, travails, pitfalls and miseries of life remain; the average lifespan of human beings cannot be used as an approximate gauge of how much time this current world has left (unless you believe the “prophecy” about Hal Lindsey’s having gray hair at the Parousia).  By the same token, the end of the world could be either three hundred years away, three years away, or something else entirely.  We still do not know the day or hour.