The End Times, Part 1: Why Talk About the End Times?

The world has felt strangely apocalyptic lately. Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel has publicly mused about the Antichrist. Wars drag on in Ukraine while Taiwan braces under the shadow of China. Christians are slaughtered in Nigeria, harassed in the West, or shot in their churches. Britain is preparing for digital ID mandates, and surveillance technology grows exponentially, tightening its grip worldwide. Authoritarianism, once thought a relic of the twentieth century, is finding new life.

When headlines like these pile up, even steady believers begin to wonder: Are we living in the end times?

Reading Headlines Like Tea Leaves

Scripture doesn't dismiss the question. Jesus told his disciples that wars, persecutions, and false prophets would come (Matthew 24:6–11). Paul warned of rebellion and the "man of lawlessness" (2 Thessalonians 2:3). Revelation portrays beastly powers at work throughout history. Christians should expect the world to tremble.

But here’s the danger: allowing alertness to occasion pointless speculation.

I remember as a high schooler attending an “end times revival.” The itinerate preacher had charts, maps, and headlines. The Soviet Union was clearly the final beast. Heavy metal music was proof of satanic infiltration. By the end of the week I was convinced Christ would return before I turned twenty. I am now - ahem - several decades older. The Soviet Union is long gone. The late Ozzy Osbourne is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And the Lord has not yet returned.

Reading history's headlines like tea leaves will always disappoint. We saw this again just weeks ago when some pastors predicted a specific date for Christ's return. Their sincerity was evident, but when the day came and went, they had to issue public apologies. Jesus' words still stand: "It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority" (Acts 1:7).

Two Ways of Thinking About Time

We live our lives in what New Testament writers often described as chronos—ordinary time. The calendar marches on: birthdays, elections, economic cycles, the rise and fall of empires. That’s the time the news reports on, and the time I was so eager to map onto Revelation when I was seventeen.

But Scripture also speaks of kairos—not a different kind of time altogether, but moments when God’s purpose breaks in decisively. Paul uses this word to tells us that Christ came “in the fullness of time” (Galatians 4:4). He says the gospel has now been “manifested in [God’s] word through the preaching with which I have been entrusted by the command of God our Savior” (Titus 1:3). Jesus himself began his ministry announcing, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15).

History often looks chaotic, yet heaven’s clock is keeping perfect time. And one day, in another fullness of time, Christ will return.

That truth helps us resist both panic and presumption. Panic, because the headlines will always look dire. Presumption, because we cannot discern God's appointed time from our charts. Chronos reminds us to live faithfully in the day-to-day. Kairos reminds us that those days are not aimless; they are ordered by the hand of God.

Understanding God's appointed time helps us see something even more fundamental: that time itself is going somewhere.

A Story, Not a Cycle

This view of time puts Christianity at odds with much of the ancient world. Greeks and Romans often saw history as an endless cycle. They saw the rise and fall of nations repeating like the seasons, with no ultimate goal. Even the modern secular mind tends to echo a version of this, imagining that life simply churns forward, generation after generation, until the sun burns out and nothing matters.

Solomon captured that haunting sense of futility when he looked "under the sun": "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

But Ecclesiastes is not the Bible's last word on these matters. It voices the despair of a closed world without God's intervention. The broader canon of scripture shows something different: history is not a circle but a line. It begins with creation, plunges through the fall, is redeemed at the cross, and will be consummated in the new heavens and new earth. The resurrection of Jesus is the decisive turn, the down payment proving that history is not meaningless repetition but purposeful movement toward a glorious end. "In Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Corinthians 15:22).

Christians don't believe in a pointless cycle. We believe in a story, and it is a story moving, under God's sovereign care, toward its appointed conclusion.

The Birth Pains of a New Order

Jesus reached for a striking image to describe the turbulence of history: labor pains. When his disciples asked what signs would precede his return, he spoke of wars, famines, earthquakes, and persecution, then added, "All these are but the beginning of the birth pains" (Matthew 24:8). Paul echoed the metaphor: "The whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now" (Romans 8:22).

The point is not that suffering is trivial. Labor pains are significant, to say the least. But they are purposeful. The New Testament uses this metaphor to show they are not so much the random spasms of a dying world but the contractions of a creation about to be remade. History's upheavals are not merely the death rattle of a collapsing order but the prelude to the birth of a new one.

This changes how we talk about the end times. We don't minimize suffering. We don't deny that evil sometimes feels overwhelming. We don't fail to prepare our minds and hearts for costly discipleship. But we also don't let those realities set the horizon of our hope.

Where This Series Will Take Us

So why raise these themes now? Because our world's unrest reminds us that history is not meaningless churn but purposeful movement toward God's appointed goal. Because we need categories beyond speculation: not panic, but patience; not fear, but hope. Because the church must always look toward yet ultimately beyond the world's troubles, to the promise of "a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells" (2 Peter 3:13).

Above all, we talk about the end times because they keep Christ at the center of our vision. Eschatology is not ultimately about beasts, tribulations, or millennial charts. It's about a Person. The same Lord who came once "in the fullness of time" will come again to make all things new. Every groan of creation, every tear of the saints, every act of courage in a hostile world leans forward to that day.

That's where this series of blog posts will take us. We'll consider the common ground Christians share and the ways we differ in interpreting the millennium, the rapture, and the signs of the times. Faithful Christians hold different views on these matters—premillennial, postmillennial, and amillennial—and we'll explore what unites us even as we examine where we differ. But we must never lose sight of the heart of it all:

Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.

Until that day, we live as people who know how the story ends.