> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.the-unpreached-bible.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# What Are the End Times?
- URL: https://www.the-unpreached-bible.com/what-are-the-end-times/
- Published: 2026-08-19T22:19:15.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-26T11:11:11.000Z
- Description: A period the New Testament writers believed they were already living in, and expected to see finish inside their own lifetimes.
- Author: Isacc Johnson
- Tags: End Times

Ask in most American churches and you’ll get a version of the future: a sequence of events still ahead of us, arriving on a schedule you can partly work out if you read the signs correctly. Wars, a rapture, a tribulation, a final battle.

The Bible’s answer is a different thing entirely. The end times are a period the New Testament writers believed they were already living in — and expected to see finish inside their own lifetimes.

Almost none of that architecture is in the Bible. What’s in the Bible is a group of first-century writers saying the end was close, saying it in five different books using five different phrases, and telling people to change how they lived because of how little time was left.

**Start with the sharpest one.** Mark 9:1:

> And he said to them, “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”

Luke 9:27 carries the same saying. And Matthew, at 16:27–28, spells out what “coming with power” is supposed to mean — the Son of Man arriving with angels, in glory, to repay everyone for what they’ve done — and then says some of the people standing there will still be alive to see it.

Three of the four Gospels. A promise attached to specific living bodies.

**Then look at the rest of the New Testament.** Peter, at Pentecost, explains what’s happening in the room by quoting Joel and calling it “the last days” — not coming, arrived (Acts 2:17). Paul tells the Corinthians that the stories of Israel were written down for people “on whom the ends of the ages have come” (1 Corinthians 10:11). The writer of Hebrews says God has spoken “in these last days” (Hebrews 1:2). First Peter says Christ was revealed “at the end of the ages” (1 Peter 1:20). And First John opens a paragraph with “Children, it is the last hour!” (1 John 2:18).

Not the last days. The last hour.

That verse is worth sitting with, because it does two jobs at once. The whole sentence runs: “Children, it is the last hour! And as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come.” The last hour and the antichrist arrive in the same breath, and the antichrist is already present, plural — a category of people the writer’s readers could have pointed at.

Five writers, five separate expressions, none borrowed from another. A stock phrase repeated could be a figure of speech nobody meant much by. Five independent formulations is a shared conviction showing through.

**And they acted on it.** Paul, at 1 Corinthians 7:29: “the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none.” That’s a man telling married people to live as though they weren’t, because of the calendar. Whatever the last days meant to him, it was concrete enough to reorganize a household around.

**The usual answer to all this** is that “the last days” names an era rather than a stretch of years — an age that began with the resurrection, of unspecified length, which we’re still inside. On that reading nobody was wrong about anything.

It doesn’t work. “Some standing here will not taste death” isn’t era language; it attaches to a group of people and it expired when they died. First John doesn’t say we’re in a theological epoch, it says it’s the last hour, addressed to children, as a reason to act now. And a phrase that can absorb two thousand years and keep going isn’t a description of anything. It’s an immunization.

So: the end times, in the Bible, are the first century. The writers said the world was ending soon, they were specific about it, and they were wrong.

Everything since — every chart, every countdown, every date that came and went — has been built by readers who needed those sentences to survive their own failure.

*I write about what’s actually in the Bible, as opposed to what people are told is in it.* [*The free guide*](https://the-unpreached-bible.kit.com/twelve-verses?ref=the-unpreached-bible.com) *below covers twelve verses that are in your Bible and were never in the sermon.*

*There’s a novel too —* [*The War Against the End of Days*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX32PBBS?ref=the-unpreached-bible.com)*, an apocalyptic reimagining of Revelation.*