What Are the End Times?

You are already in them

Here is the Bible's first surprise about the end times: they are not a countdown that starts someday. According to the apostles, the 'last days' began two thousand years ago. 'In these last days,' the letter to the Hebrews opens, 'God has spoken to us by his Son.' At Pentecost, Peter announced that the prophets' 'last days' had arrived that morning. In the Bible's reckoning, history's decisive event has already happened — the coming, dying, and rising of Jesus. What remains is not another turning point but the unveiling of the one that occurred. Christians have therefore always lived in an overlap: the age to come has broken in, and the present age has not yet ended. Already rescued; not yet home.

What Jesus said — and refused to say

Sitting on the Mount of Olives, Jesus' disciples asked him the question everyone asks: when? His answer is a masterpiece of redirection. Yes, there will be wars, famines, earthquakes, false messiahs — 'but the end is still to come'; these are 'the beginning of birth pains,' the world's long groaning, not a decoder ring. About the timing he could not have been clearer: 'about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.' Every date-setter of the last two thousand years has claimed to know what Jesus said he himself did not. All of them have been wrong; all of their successors will be. What Jesus commands instead is not calculation but character: 'keep watch' — live so that his coming would interrupt nothing you would be ashamed of.

What is actually promised

Strip away the speculation, and the promises left standing are few, massive, and clear. Christ will return — personally, visibly, 'in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.' The dead will be raised, 'and we will all be changed.' There will be a judgment: every wrong named, every hidden thing brought into light — which sounds terrifying only until you ask what a universe with no final justice would mean for its victims. And then: 'a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.' Not the annihilation of creation but its renewal — the same power that raised Jesus' body, applied to the whole cosmos. Evil does not get a permanent seat. Death itself dies. And 'God himself will be with them and be their God.'

Fear, or hope?

Notice what the New Testament does with this teaching. After his longest passage on the Lord's return, Paul does not say 'terrify one another with these words,' but 'encourage one another with these words.' For those who belong to Christ, the judge who is coming is the rescuer who already came — the verdict was settled at the cross. That is why the early church's prayer was not 'delay!' but 'Come, Lord Jesus.' And the practical shape of readiness is almost comically ordinary: Jesus' parables about his return all end with servants found simply doing their work — faithful, awake, kind. Luther is said to have answered the question 'what would you do if the world ended tomorrow?' with: I would plant my apple tree. That is end-times living — hope with its sleeves rolled up.

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