Are We in the Last Days? Yes, Since Pentecost

Yes, if we mean what the apostles meant by the words. At Pentecost, Peter said the last days had begun, and Hebrews says God “hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:2). Whether the end itself is near, no one can say. Jesus told us, “of that day and hour knoweth no man” (Matthew 24:36).

We are already in them. We have lived in them for nearly two thousand years, since the Son came and the Spirit was poured out. And the Lord who will end them gave his friends one word for the whole of that time. “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come” (Matthew 24:42). Every church that confesses he will come again has kept that word, and it is the word for us.

When the Holy Spirit fell on the disciples at Pentecost and the crowd thought them drunk, Peter stood up and quoted the prophet Joel: “And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh” (Acts 2:17). He was not pointing to a distant future. “This is that,” he told them (Acts 2:16): the last days had come that morning in Jerusalem.

The rest of the New Testament speaks the same way. Hebrews opens with God, who spoke “in time past unto the fathers by the prophets,” and “hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2). John writes to his little children, “it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists” (1 John 2:18). When Paul warns Timothy that “in the last days perilous times shall come,” and that men will be “lovers of their own selves,” “lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God,” he adds at once, “from such turn away” (2 Timothy 3:1–5). He is describing people Timothy would meet.

The last days, then, are the time between Christ’s first coming and his return. We are in them, as every generation of Christians has been. What Scripture keeps from us is how long they will last.

Jehovah’s Witnesses give a different answer, with a year attached to it. “God’s Kingdom started ruling in heaven in the year 1914,” their study book Enjoy Life Forever! teaches. “That is also when the last days of human rule began.” None of the other churches quoted on this page names a year for the start of the last days, or for their end.

On the Mount of Olives, in the week of his death, the disciples asked him, “Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?” (Matthew 24:3). His answer begins with a warning, “Take heed that no man deceive you,” and then he lists what they would see:

• many who come in his name, “saying, I am Christ” (24:5);
• “wars and rumours of wars,” with the words, “see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet” (24:6);
• nation against nation, “famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places,” which he calls “the beginning of sorrows” (24:7–8);
• persecution, betrayal and false prophets, and love grown cold “because iniquity shall abound” (24:9–12);
• the gospel “preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come” (24:14);
• a time of “great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world” (24:21).

Christians read these signs in two main ways. Read one way, they mark every age: wars, famines, earthquakes and false messiahs have come in every century since Jesus spoke, and he said of them, “the end is not yet.” He gave them so that when the world shakes, his people would not be shaken with it. Read another way, they grow stronger as the end draws near. The word behind “sorrows” means the pains of childbirth, and many premillennial evangelicals read the signs as birth pains that come harder toward the end. Dallas Theological Seminary teaches that “the world is day by day ripening for judgment and that the age will end with a fearful apostasy,” and it looks for God to “restore Israel to her own land” when Christ returns. Both readings agree on one sign: the gospel itself, carried to every nation. Each believer who tells a neighbour about Christ is taking part in it.

Jesus also told us how to stand when these things come. “When these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh” (Luke 21:28). The signs are meant to lift our eyes.

No. Jesus said it as plainly as anything in the Gospels: “But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father” (Mark 13:32). On the day he ascended, the disciples asked again whether the kingdom would come now, and he answered, “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power” (Acts 1:7).

The churches have held to this. Augustine noted in The City of God that some Christians of his day expected Christ “four hundred, some five hundred, others a thousand years” after the ascension. “In vain, then, do we attempt to compute definitely the years that may remain to this world,” he wrote, and said that the Lord “puts aside the figures of the calculators, and orders silence.” Every one of those reckonings has come and gone. So has every date set since.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “since the Ascension Christ’s coming in glory has been imminent,” and that it “could be accomplished at any moment” (paragraph 673). The Orthodox priest Thomas Hopko wrote that “the exact time of the end is not foretold, not even by Jesus, so that men would always be prepared by constant vigil and good works.” The Westminster Confession, the confession of Presbyterian churches, says God keeps the day “unknown to men, that they may shake off all carnal security, and be always watchful.” The Southern Baptists’ Baptist Faith and Message says that “God, in His own time and in His own way, will bring the world to its appropriate end.” Across all these churches, anyone who names the year has gone further than the Lord himself.

Every one of these churches confesses that Christ will come again in glory, raise the dead and judge the world. They differ over the order of events, and above all over the thousand years of Revelation 20, when the saints “lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years” (Revelation 20:4).

Catholic teaching

The Catholic Church teaches that before Christ returns, the Church “must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers,” and that its supreme deception will be “that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh” (Catechism 675). It rejects millenarianism, the hope of a kingdom realised within history before the last judgement (676). The kingdom will come “not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God’s victory over the final unleashing of evil” (677). Catholics, like the Orthodox, look for one coming of Christ in glory, at the end, to judge the living and the dead; there is more on that in do Catholics believe in the rapture?

Orthodox teaching

Orthodox Christians speak of the kingdom as already given in the Church. Hopko writes that the Church “in popular Orthodox doctrine is called the Kingdom of God on earth,” and that the kingdom “will become the universal, final cosmic reality for the whole of creation at the end of the ages when Christ comes in glory.” Paul’s words that “we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thessalonians 4:17) are the Epistle reading of the Orthodox funeral service, a comfort spoken over the dead.

The thousand years as the present age

The Augsburg Confession of 1530, the founding Lutheran confession, teaches that Christ “will appear for judgment” and “will raise up all the dead,” and it rejects the idea that “before the resurrection of the dead the godly shall take possession of the kingdom of the world, the ungodly being everywhere suppressed” (Article XVII). Augustine read the thousand years the same way centuries earlier: the saints “reign with Christ even now, through this whole interval which is indicated by the thousand years.” This reading is called amillennial, and the Catholic and Lutheran rejection of an earthly kingdom before the resurrection points the same way.

Baptist teaching

The Baptist Faith and Message of the Southern Baptist Convention leaves the order of events open. It confesses that “Jesus Christ will return personally and visibly in glory to the earth; the dead will be raised; and Christ will judge all men in righteousness,” and that the righteous “will receive their reward and will dwell forever in Heaven with the Lord.”

Dispensational and premillennial teaching

Many evangelical Christians hold that Christ will return before a thousand-year reign on earth, and many of these expect him first to take his church to himself. Dallas Theological Seminary’s doctrinal statement is a clear example. It teaches that “the next great event in the fulfillment of prophecy will be the coming of the Lord in the air” for his people, followed by Israel’s seventieth week, whose latter half is the time “which our Lord called the great tribulation,” and then Christ’s return to earth “in person on the clouds of heaven,” when “He will thus introduce the millennial age.” Israel has a large place in this reading; Israel’s role in the end times sets out the views.

Readers of Revelation also differ on how much of it is already fulfilled. Some, called preterists, find most of it in the persecution of the church by Rome; futurists place most of it after the present age; historicists, among them Seventh-day Adventists, trace it through the whole history of the church; others read it as the struggle of every age. The same lines run through the questions people ask about the mark of the beast.

Jesus did not answer the disciples’ “when” with a date. He answered with stories of servants. “Who then is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath made ruler over his household, to give them meat in due season? Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing” (Matthew 24:45–46). The servant is blessed for being found at work, feeding the household.

He spoke of the days of Noah, when people were “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage” and “knew not until the flood came” (Matthew 24:38–39). Eating and marrying are good things. The danger is a heart so full of them that it forgets the Lord is coming. Luke gives the same warning in Jesus’ words: “take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life, and so that day come upon you unawares” (Luke 21:34).

The early church kept this word close. The Didache, an early Christian handbook of teaching, opens its last chapter with it: “Watch for your life’s sake. Let not your lamps be quenched, nor your loins unloosed; but be ready, for you know not the hour in which our Lord comes.” Paul gives the same call with the picture of dawn: “The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light” (Romans 13:12).

If the delay troubles us, Peter answers that too. Scoffers will ask, “Where is the promise of his coming?” (2 Peter 3:4). But “the Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). The waiting is mercy, time given for one more person to come home.

So we watch, brothers and sisters, with our lamps lit and our hands at work. Near the Bible’s last line the Lord promises, “Surely I come quickly,” and the church answers him with the words we still pray: “Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20).

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