Christians who are trying to figure out whether we are living in the End Times don’t realize that the Bible shows the Apostles believed they were already in the End Times. They don’t realize that even after reading the following scriptures. But when you see them all together at once, it’s hard to see it any other way. Here they are:

• In the last days (εσχαταις ἡμεραις – eschatais humerais) I will pour out my spirit on my people. (Fulfilled in Acts 2:17, so Acts 2 is in the Last Days)
• These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the end of the ages (τὰ τέλη τῶν αἰώνων – tà téle tōn aiṓnōn) has come. (1 Corinthians 10:11)
• But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times (εσχατου των χρονων – eschatou ton xronon) for you. (1 Peter 1:19-20)
• But the end of all things (παντων δε το τελος – panton de to telos) is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer. (1 Peter 4:7)
• In these last days (ἐσχάτου τῶν ἡμερῶν – eschatou tōn hēmerōn) he has spoken to us by his Son. (Hebrews 1:2)
• He has appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages (ἐπὶ συντελείᾳ τῶν αἰώνων – epi synteleia tōn aiōnōn) to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. (Hebrews 9:26)
• You have hoarded wealth in the last days (ἐν ἐσχάταις ἡμέραις – en eschatais hēmerais). (James 5:3)
• Little children, it is the last time (εσχατη ωρα εστιν – eschatay ora estin): and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time. (1 John 2:18)
• Do not seal the sayings of the prophecy of this book: for the time is at hand (ὁ καιρὸς ἐγγύς ἐστιν – ho kairos engys estin). (Revelation 22:10) This contrasts with Daniel, who was told to seal his prophecy because fulfillments would range up to 620 years away.

The New Testament writers did not merely say they were living in the Last Days. They repeatedly emphasized that the fulfillment they expected for that and for Jesus’ return was near in their own lifetime:

• “The coming of the Lord is near. (James 5:8)
• The Judge is standing right at the door. (James 5:9)
• The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. (Romans 13:12)
• For yet a very little while, and He who is coming will come and will not delay. (Hebrews 10:37)
• The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show His servants what must soon take place. (Revelation 1:1)
• “The time is near.” (Revelation 1:3)
• “He who testifies to these things says, ‘Yes, I am coming soon.’” (Revelation 22:20)

These passages make it difficult to argue that the Apostles expected fulfillment thousands of years in the future. They expected it in their generation.

The Greek words used for last, end, and culmination include eschatos (last), tele (point of completion), and synteleia (synchronized finish). Eschatology is the study of last things, from logos, to think about, and eschatos, last in time or place. The Greek words used for days, all things, ages, time, and hour include hēmerai (days), panta (all things), aiōnes (ages), chronoi (times), and hōra (hour).

The Greek words for “soon”, which is ἐν τάχει (en tachei), never means, “quickly at a later time.” It always means, “quickly, swiftly, and soon”.  

Whatever these “last things” were, the inspired writers unanimously located them in their own day. The last days were not coming—they had come. The end was not centuries away—it was “at hand.” The culmination of the ages was not reserved for a distant generation—it had arrived upon them. If words have meaning, the New Testament’s last days are now past, and the End Times have ended.

God Brought Clarity, Not Confusion, About the Time of the End

Some postulate that since God lives in a different realm and that to him “a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day,” then to Him “soon” means two thousand years later. But this ignores the fact that God isn’t communicating to other gods who live in His realm; He’s communicating to humans who live in our realm with the understanding that we normally have about time. He’s trying to get a message across so they will live differently. Mentions of the soon return of Christ are obviously meant to be taken the way humans normally understand “soon”.

2 Peter 3:8, which is about a day being like a thousand years to God, is often quoted to support the idea that God speaks in some code regarding the time frame for these prophecies. But read in context, and we should always read these verses in context, we see that Peter is not providing a decoder ring for biblical prophecy. He’s simply saying that there were scoffers in the time of Peter, which Peter described as the “Last Days”, who scoffed at the Christians who put their hope in another and a soon coming of Jesus.

Peter said these scoffers were “following their own evil desires” while Peter is exhorting the faithful to remain faithful in their thinking and conduct, to “live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God,” to be “spotless, blameless and at peace” with God. Peter encourages them to be patient when the scoffers are impatient. He told them that God, in his patience, is giving some people time to get their lives in order. For the faithful, they should “be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of the lawless and fall from your secure position.”

All of Peter’s words were for his contemporaries. He never writes encouragement and warning for a far-off people at a far-off time. Even considering that Peter was inspired by the Holy Spirit who can see into the far future and write to those people, it’s inescapable that he and the Holy Spirit meant his words for his immediate audience. He’s simply saying to them to be patient. They will see what they have been promised. God is faithful to do what he told them.

God is not the author of confusion. He is not tricking every generation to think Jesus might come in their lifetime to motivate them to godly living. He doesn’t have to resort to such deception, to such dishonesty, to get his saints to live like saints. He never has.

So What Ended?

If the Apostles thought they were in the End Times, that begs the question: What was it the end of?

The Bible never mentions the end of the physical world. In the Greek, that is.

Only older, more inaccurate translations, such as the King James, say anything about the end of the world.

The Greek word used after “the end of” is always αἰών (aiōn), meaning an age, era, epoch, or world-order. It is not the normal Greek word for the physical world.

Most modern translations now render these as “end of the age” (NIV, ESV, NASB, NRSV, CSB, etc.).

This distinction is especially important in Matthew 24. The disciples ask:

“What shall be the sign of your coming, and of the end of the age?” (literal translation of Matthew 24:3)

The disciples were asking about the end of the Jewish age centered on the Temple, not the destruction of the planet. This fits Jesus’ immediate prediction that:

“There shall not be left here one stone upon another” (Matthew 24:2), and his repeated statements that these things would occur within that generation:

“Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.” (Matthew 24:34)

This is arguably the strongest time statement in all of Bible prophecy.

Throughout the Gospels, “this generation” always refers to Jesus’ contemporaries. He uses the phrase repeatedly when speaking of the people standing before Him (Matthew 11:16; 12:41–42; 23:36). There is no example at all where “this generation” refers to people living thousands of years later.

Whatever interpretation we adopt, it must account for Jesus’ own time frame.

Some passages tell us of the heavens and earth passing away (e.g., 2 Peter 3; Revelation 21), but even there it’s not about the literal destruction and recreation of the cosmos, which is the common Futurist view popularized by Hal Lindsay in his book The Late Great Planet Earth; rather it’s about the covenantal passing away of the Old Covenant and Torah, the Law of Moses.

There is no New Testament passage where Jesus asks or answers questions about “the end of the planet” using the normal Greek word for the physical world.

The Ending of the Old Covenant Took Time

It’s easy to think of the Old Covenant ending when the New Covenant began, but the scriptures tell us a different story. There is actually an overlap of time between the beginning of the New Covenant, which many say happened on the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2 just a few days after Jesus ascended into heaven, and the end of the Old Covenant. The overlap was about 40 years.

The Scriptures tell us that the Old Covenant was already obsolete by the time Hebrews was written, likely right before the Temple was destroyed in 70 AD:

“By calling this covenant ‘new,’ he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear.”

In Hebrews 12:4 the author mentions the early believers’ enduring suffering, which points to the period of Emperor Nero’s persecutions in the mid-60’s, which puts the date of the book in the late-60’s. The author no doubt knew what Jesus had said over 30 years earlier, as recorded in Matthew 24, about that generation not passing until the stones of the temple were torn down. Since many of those standing there with Jesus had already died, he would have sensed that the time for that to happen was drawing to a close. It wouldn’t be long before that generation would pass.

Rome Rocked the Temple – And Ended the Old Covenant

When Jesus told his Jewish followers who had come to the temple several times a year for their whole lives that the temple would be torn down in their generation, they were devastated. The temple had served as the center of their faith.

To modern Christians, the temple can appear to be merely an important religious building. To first-century Jews, it was the center of their covenant world. It was the place where sacrifices were offered, priests ministered, vows were made, and the nation gathered before God. The priesthood, sacrifices, feast days, purification laws, tithes, vows, and national identity all revolved around it. Its destruction was not merely the loss of a building. It represented the collapse of an entire covenantal order.

To many Jews, the temple represented God’s presence among His people and the visible sign of their covenant with Him. The thought of its destruction seemed unthinkable.

Yet Jesus repeatedly warned that judgment was coming upon that generation because the nation had rejected God’s prophets and ultimately His Messiah. Forty years later, in AD 70, the Roman armies under Titus surrounded Jerusalem, destroyed the city, and burned the temple. Not one stone was left upon another, just as Jesus had foretold.

The Jewish historian Josephus said the Romans were very thorough in their destruction of both the temple and the city:

“…the rest of the wall surrounding Jerusalem was so thoroughly laid even with the ground by those that dug it up to the foundation, that there was left nothing to make those that came thither believe it had ever been inhabited.”

Without the temple, the Jews were not able to obey Torah, and without doing the Law, they had no more covenant.

With the temple’s destruction came the end of the sacrificial system established under the Law of Moses. No altar remained on which sacrifices could be offered, no priesthood could function as prescribed, and no Holy Place stood where Israel could gather before God. They couldn’t even follow the Law of the Tithe since that Law said to bring the tithe to the temple storehouse. Jews haven’t tithed since 70 AD, because since then they haven’t had a temple to take the tithes to.

Ironically, Christians living in the New Covenant are told by money-hungry churches to tithe, while Torah-observant Jews don’t tithe. Today they just have a membership fee at their synagogues.

The Old Covenant order had reached its appointed end. What remained was the New Covenant inaugurated by Christ—a covenant no longer centered on a physical temple in Jerusalem, but on a living temple made up of God’s people themselves. (Matthew 24:1–2; Luke 21:20–24; Hebrews 8:13; 1 Corinthians 3:16)

The astute Bible student will know that when the disciples asked Jesus about the destruction of the temple that Jesus had mentioned earlier when they were there, they weren’t asking about that only. They were also asking about what we call the Second Coming of Christ.

The Second Coming Also Happened in Their Time

“Tell us,” they said, “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” (Matthew 24:3)

Jesus’ answer to both the question of the signs showing the imminent destruction of the temple and what would be the signs of his coming again was the same. He gave them a list of things to look for to show them that both events were about to happen, in their lifetime, not thousands of years later. He was standing there talking to them and telling them these things. He wasn’t talking to people who were going to be living in our time.

We know from history that one of those events happened in 70 AD.

So we have the destruction of the temple, which already happened in the first century, preceded by the same events that mark the imminent return of Christ. Logically, and reasonably, we would have to say that his return happened in the first century as well. In addition, both events are spoken of by Christ as something that will happen in their generation.

That being the case, we shouldn’t be reading our newspapers to see if the signs of his return are happening.

This is a tough one, because most Christians are unaware of any reason to think he returned in the first century, and also it’s hard to see how he could have returned at that time since the Bible never says he did, and they are unaware of any events from that time that indicate that he returned.

Part of the difficulty comes from modern assumptions about what a “coming” of God must look like.

Throughout the Old Testament, God is repeatedly described as “coming” in judgment against nations while remaining enthroned in heaven. Isaiah describes the Lord “riding on a swift cloud” when He comes against Egypt (Isaiah 19:1). Similar imagery appears in Psalm 18, Micah 1, and many other prophetic passages.

The prophets often used coming-on-the-clouds language to describe divine judgment in history rather than a visible descent from heaven. Jesus’ coming against Jerusalem follows this same prophetic pattern.

As with people not being aware of all of the scriptures saying the Apostles were in the End Times, Christians are also unaware of all of the scriptures that say Christ would return in the lifetime of some (or at least one) of the Apostles. Yet there are about 20 scriptures to that effect. When you see them all together in one place, it makes it hard to escape the implications. For your perusal, I have put them all together in my article Were Jesus and His Apostles Mistaken About His Soon Return. That article also explains the nature of that return, and how those prophecies were fulfilled. The symbolic nature of those prophecies makes it difficult to see, but with a little work we can get there.

Many Reasons to Believe in a Historical Last Days and Return of Christ

Besides the nine scriptures at the beginning of this article about the timing of the end of the Old Covenant, and the seven scriptures following that about the soon return of Christ, Matthew 24 gives us several reasons to not believe in the Last Days and Return of Christ as something we should expect in our future. They include Jesus telling them the temple would be destroyed and the signs that would happen first that they would see. This was for their time, not our time or any other time.

We know the following signs prophesied by Jesus in Matthew 24 happened in their lifetime:

• False Christs and False Prophets – The New Testament mentions several deceptive figures including Theudas, the Egyptian, and Simon Magus. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus repeatedly describes prophets and deliverers who misled the people before Jerusalem’s fall.
• Wars and Rumors of Wars – The period AD 30–70 was marked by conflict between Rome and Parthia, rebellions throughout the empire, and the Jewish revolt against Rome (AD 66–70). Josephus describes the era as increasingly unstable and violent.
• Nation Against Nation – The Roman world experienced numerous uprisings and civil conflicts, climaxing in the Jewish War and the Roman civil wars of AD 68–69 (“Year of the Four Emperors”).
• Famines – This one is explicitly confirmed in Scripture: “A severe famine would spread over the entire Roman world.” (Acts 11:28) The famine occurred during the reign of Claudius and is also mentioned by Roman historians.
• Earthquakes – Several major earthquakes occurred during this period, including in the Pompeii region (AD 62), Laodicea (AD 60), Crete, and Rome. Ancient writers record earthquakes as unusually frequent during these decades.
• Persecution of Believers – This is one of the most obvious fulfillments. The book of Acts records persecution by Jewish authorities, local governments, and Roman officials. Notable examples include Stephen, James son of Zebedee, and Paul the Apostle.
• Apostasy – The New Testament repeatedly warns about this in Hebrews, 2 Peter, Jude, 1 John, and the Pastoral Epistles. These warnings suggest the phenomenon was already occurring.
• False Prophets – Again, this is a major theme of 2 Peter 2, 1 John 4, and Jude. The apostles treat false teachers as a present reality, not a distant future one.
• The Gospel Preached Throughout the World – This is a surprising one considering the Gospel is still being taken to tribal groups who haven’t heard it yet. But the Greek word oikoumenē usually means the inhabited Roman world and Paul says the Gospel had reached that whole world by the time he wrote Romans and Colossians: “Their voice has gone out into all the earth” (Romans 10:18), and “The gospel … has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven.” (Colossians 1:23) Obviously Paul was not claiming every individual on earth had heard it, but he believed the commission had effectively reached the known world, so Jesus’ prophecy about the Gospel reaching the whole world had already been fulfilled by the time Paul wrote those epistles.
• The Abomination of Desolation that Daniel Mentioned – Most scholars believe Daniel 11:31 was first fulfilled when Antiochus IV Epiphanes desecrated the Temple around 167 BC. He stopped the sacrifices and apparently set up an altar or image associated with Zeus in the Temple precincts. For faithful Jews, idolatry in God’s sanctuary was the ultimate abomination. The Temple was the place where God’s presence dwelt. To bring pagan worship into it was not merely disrespectful—it was spiritually revolting. This siege under Antiochus was a desolation because the temple ceased to function as intended. Until the Maccabean revolt restored it, the temple was left desolate of God’s presence. Luke’s account of the Olivet Discourse also helps us to understand that desolation that was about to happen: “When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation is near.” (Luke 21:20) Jesus, as narrated by Luke, explains Matthew’s “Abomination of Desolation.” Rather than leaving the prophecy mysterious, Luke identifies the approaching Roman armies as the sign that Jerusalem’s desolation was at hand.

• Great Distress – Josephus’ account of the siege of Jerusalem describes: famine, cannibalism, mass crucifixions, civil war within the city, and the destruction of the temple mentioned before.

• Cosmic Signs – Jesus said “the sun will be darkened…” in Matthew 24:29. Similar language appears throughout the Old Testament when God judges nations, such as in Isaiah 13 regarding the fall of Babylon: “For the stars of heaven and their constellations will not give their light; the rising sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light.”

Concerning cosmic signs, we also see the same language in Ezekiel 32 regarding the downfall of Egypt: “When I snuff you out, I will cover the heavens and darken their stars; I will cover the sun with a cloud, and the moon will not give its light. All the shining lights in the heavens I will darken over you; I will bring darkness over your land,” declares the Sovereign Lord.”

And also in Joel 2: “Before them the earth shakes, the heavens tremble, the sun and moon are darkened, and the stars no longer shine,” and, “The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful Day of the Lord.”

In the Ancient Near East, celestial bodies represented divine order, rulers, and empires. Their darkening symbolizes a cosmic disruption—the downfall of the supreme earthly power and the terrifying reality of God’s wrath. That helps us to understand the imagery symbolically as the collapse of the Jewish covenant world rather than literal astronomical events.

Some will be confused by literal interpretations and think that Jesus’ words must be fulfilled literally rather than his words being symbols pointing to something else, but we already have precedent in Scripture for how these same words came to pass in the Old Testament. To be consistent, we should assume Jesus and his Jewish audience who lived according to our Old Testament understood this and so would not expect literal fulfillments.

The book of Revelation is another prophetic book where many are hoping to see fulfillments in our time. There are many indications right in that book itself that tell us the same thing: that the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD is the fulfillment, and again it doesn’t make any sense to be looking for the Mark of the Beast, the rise of a dictatorial global system, and severe ecological collapse if the symbols in Revelation point to something that happened in the first century.  Showing those indicators within Revelation would be the subject for another article. Suffice it to say, there is plenty there to inform us.

Viewing many of the prophetic passages in Scripture as already fulfilled is called Preterism. Derived from the Latin praeter (meaning “past”), this school of thought stands in direct contrast to Futurism, which views these events as still-future.

The purpose of understanding these prophecies is not merely to win arguments about the End Times. It is to understand what God was doing in history.

Jesus and His apostles were not mistaken when they said the end was near. The Last Days were the last days of the Old Covenant age. The end they anticipated arrived when Jerusalem fell, the Temple was destroyed, and the old covenant order passed away exactly as Jesus had foretold.

That realization frees Christians from the endless cycle of date-setting, newspaper prophecy, and speculation about modern events. We no longer need to search for antichrists, marks of the beast, rebuilt temples, or signs that the end is finally near.

The end was near—because it was near to them.

The great prophetic crisis that dominated the New Testament has already passed into history. Christ reigns. The New Covenant stands. The old age has ended.