They woke up this morning with a sense of excitement and dread, thrilled with their sense of foreboding and relief. Today, Jesus was returning. No one knew the hour, that is certain, but it would certainly happen today.

Unless it didn’t. It wasn’t the first time their leader had predicted Jesus’s return. It wasn’t even the second time he’d foretold the day. It wasn’t the third or fourth time. Many members of the group had lost track of how many times their leader had made this exact prediction with the same fervent confidence.  Just a year before, their leader had suggested that during this same fall festival Jesus would return.

“You won’t be returning to your houses!” He’d confidently assured everyone. He’d suggested that members might be talking to the resurrected Abraham — the Abraham of the Bible — within days. Even the original leader of their group, Herbert Armstrong, would have risen from the dead within that week and members would be able to “ask him yourselves” about various prophetic timing he seemed to get a little wrong.

So when they wake this morning and recalled their leader’s words from earlier in the week-long festival they were celebrating when he’d assured them Jesus would come back by Tuesday, they were hopeful that he might finally be right and worried that once again the prescribed day would come and go just like every other day before it.

Why do these people, members of the Restored Church of God under the autocratic leadership of Dave Pack, stick around and continue to support Pack’s delusions? The man sees himself as the most hated man on Earth. He has said about his importance in coming events that, from the perspective of the powers of evil seeking to wreck God’s plan, “I must be stopped at all costs!” Why do they continue to support him when year after year he has made the same false prophecy about the return of Jesus? It’s simple: the sunken cost fallacy. They’ve invested so much time and money into the prospect already that they cannot bring themselves to cut free. After all, there’s still the hope that he is God’s only apostle and his exclusive spokesman on Earth. If they leave now and then Jesus returns, they’ve forfeited their crown, literally: they believe they will become gods, part of the so-called “God family” that Pack and other heretics teach is the explanation of the passage in Genesis, “Let US make man in OUR image.” Abandoning the plan now means giving up god-hood if Pack ever does get it right. And since they thought for so long that eventually, he would get it right, they can’t bring themselves to admit that while he might be wrong now, he might eventually be right.

And yet they’ve heard it all before. They likely view their doubts as temptations of the devil, an attempt to get them to give up their crown — the ultimate victory for the devil.

In the midst of all this, I look at this little group that splintered away from the group I grew up in — I used to believe many of the absurd things the Restored Church of God teaches — and think about those members who are watching these last hours of the promised day slip away, and I feel for them.