SEOUL, South Korea — The rapture is upon us, according to TikTokers, some of whom have latched on to a prediction that on Tuesday, Sept. 23 — today — Jesus Christ will return to Earth and take true believers to Heaven.

Some evangelical Christians believe the Bible predicts such an event, known as the rapture, which essentially marks the beginning of the end of human history. They interpret parts of the Christian New Testament as describing the rapture, including a passage from First Thessalonians that says followers of Christ “who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.”

It is not uncommon for various individuals and groups to predict specific dates for the rapture, sometimes through interpreting passages and events in the Bible, and sometimes claiming they received visions. None of the predictions have obviously come to pass. In recent days, a prediction spread through social media that the rapture would occur Tuesday, and on TikTok, the hashtag #rapturenow has more than 311,000 videos — some of which endorsed the prediction, while many others poked fun at it.

For those who believe in the prediction, the TikTokers had some advice: Don’t make any weekend plans, leave your phone unlocked and your passwords accessible for those left behind, and maybe leave your house and car unlocked. With the keys easily accessible if possible.

Why Today?

The date of Sept. 23, 2025, appears to have originated from Joshua Mhlakela of South Africa. Though news reports have widely described him as a pastor, he said in a YouTube video from June: “I’m just a simple person, no title. I’m not an apostle, I’m not a pastor, I’m not a bishop. I’m just a believer.”

In the video, he says that Jesus came to him in a dream in 2018 and told him, “On the 23rd and the 24th of September, 2025, I will come to take my church.”

The context, as Mhlakela understood it, was the 2026 FIFA World Cup. “He was telling me that by June 2026, the world is gearing up toward the World Cup,” he said, but because chaos would descend after the rapture, “there will be no World Cup in 2026.”

His prediction somehow gathered momentum on the internet. Searches for “rapture” and “the rapture Tuesday” started to climb around Sept. 20, according to Google Trends.

While some TikTok creators appeared to believe that the rapture was imminent and were encouraging their followers to convert to Christianity, more greeted the prediction with satirical advice.

One creator said that those who wanted to ensure they would ascend to Heaven should place items that might contain demonic energy, like designer clothing, outside their houses. Another discussed how to style outfits to match the angel wings they would soon receive.

It’s Not the First Rapture Prediction.

Predicting the rapture is a long-standing practice.

Some would-be prophets come to their dates by examining numbers found in the Bible. In 2011, Harold Camping, an evangelical broadcaster, predicted that the rapture would come on May 21 that year. He arrived at that date through a series of a calculations that assumed the world would end exactly 7,000 years after Noah’s flood. When the rapture failed to materialize on that day, he revised his prediction to Oct. 21. (The rapture did not happen then, either.)

There is a long history of people using numbers and dates in the Bible to try to calculate when end times will come, according to Peter Sherlock, a professor and theologian at Charles Sturt University in Australia.

“The Bible is full of patterns and symbolism,” he said in an email. “It’s no wonder that in trying to interpret this sacred text, many readers end up decoding these patterns to arrive at prognostications of doom, sometimes even dates for when the world will end.”

But, he added, the fact that people want to believe that the world will end on a certain date usually “says more about the uncertainty of our own times than it does about what is actually in the Bible.”

What Happens the Next Day?

After every predicted rapture has failed to materialize, believers have at times struggled to explain what happened, or what didn’t.

“Some people may suffer a crisis of faith, others may wait for the next prophet to tell them when the end will be,” Sherlock said.

But more generally, Christian theology says that all Christians should live each day as if it were their last, he said.

“After all, Christ could return at any moment,” he said, adding, “So living like today is the end of the world is not so strange after all.”

—

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Yan Zhuang/Tim Gruber
c. 2025 The New York Times Company