(For future reference, you can follow my ongoing series critiquing Scott Clarke’s “Great Sign of Revelation 12” theory at this link.)
As a preface I want to say that I am not “attacking” Scottie Clarke personally. He seems like a nice and sincere person. My intention is to refute his theory which I believe is misleasing a lot of people with false hopes that the rapture will happen in September, even though Clarke is hedging his prediction by saying he is not dogmatic that the rapture will happen this September. It reminds me when Mark Biltz once said that he is only “providing data.”
(26:30) Step 1: In the summer of 2011, Scott Clarke “discovered” what he thinks to be an astronomical alignment that will be the fulfillment of “the Great Sign” of Revelation 12. He interpreted Revelation 12 as a mid-trib event. The astronomical alignment will happen on September 23, 2017.
Step 2: He assumes the rapture is pretrib so he argues that the church cannot be found on earth during the seven-year period. Accordingly, he works back 3 1/2 years to March-April of 2014 for the beginning of the seven-year Tribulation period.
(28:00) Step 3: However, for him he believes that the rapture cannot occur in the spring, but must occur on Rosh Hashanah, the Day of Trumpets, which is a fall feast. So he explains in the video that the rapture will occur in September-October of 2013. When he came around to making his theory known in the video below (2012), the predicted rapture date was a year away (2013).
(28:50) How then does he account for what would be a temporal gap in his theory between the rapture date of 2013 and the beginning of the seven-year period in spring of 2014? In the video, he explains that he thinks the “Tribulation Period” begins right after the rapture. So he accounts for closing this temporal gap by theorizing that he does not think the mid-trib signs of Revelation 12 are exact; there is wiggle room for the great sign at the mid-point to take place. This allows for the Tribulation period to happen right after the rapture in 2013.
Step 4. Fast forward (or should I say rewind!): The rapture did not happen in 2013, so his first prediction failed miserably.
That is the backstory to his new prediction for September 23, 2017. As most failed prognosticators do, they explain away their failed predictions by saying they are now “recalculating.” What is his new calculation? He has received this new “insight” that Revelation 12 is not a mid-trib event—it is the rapture itself! That is, the “child” (the Church) being caught up in Rev 12:5 is the rapture:
“So the woman gave birth to a son, a male child, who is going to rule over all the nations with an iron rod. Her child was suddenly caught up to God and to his throne” (Rev 12:5).
Now that you know this backstory, I will continue to critique his new interpretation of Revelation 12 where he attempts to correlate the September 23rd astronomical event to the great sign in Revelation 12 where he thinks the so-called pre-tribulation rapture is mentioned.
(31:00) Incidentally, he says in other videos that he was greatly influenced by Mark Biltz of the blood moon debacle not too long ago. Clarke says even though he is pretrib he does not believe in imminence because, (just as Biltz did with his blood moons theory), Clarke says that God has a “calendar system,” by which he means we can decipher the celestial alignments to discover certain messages from God. This is typical of these kinds of pretrib date-setters, since by definition they cannot affirm imminence because they have a particular future date in mind when Jesus returns.
