The "last days" catchphrase

A Jehovah’s Witness gave us this “Awake!” magazine not long ago. The eschatology in it isn’t too much different from what you get in Left Behind, or Chick tracks, or even a lot of Sunday school curricula.

Are we living in the last days? The implied answer is “Yes!” It’s so obvious, isn’t it? There are “wars and rumors of wars,” there are “perilous times.” These must be the last days.

The implied application is, “Straighten up, the teacher’s coming back, look to the skies…and whatever you do, don’t make any long-range plans.”

But is this Biblical doctrine, or a clever trick of Satan to paralyze our outlook?

Certainly Paul warned Timothy, “This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come” (2 Timothy 3: 1). But when are the “last days”? If he was talking about 2,000 years in the future, how would that pertain to Timothy? Did perilous times ever come in Timothy’s lifetime?

If we dig a little deeper it appears that “the last days” mainly refers to the last years of Old Israel.

When many in the church were filled with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, Peter told the bystanders “…these are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day. But this is that which was spoken by 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: 15-17). So the prophecy about the “last days” was being fulfilled at that time—2,000 years ago.

In the opening passages of Hebrews we read, “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (1: 1, 2).

John writes, “Little children, it is the last time: 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). Surely his readers didn’t think he meant the last moments of history. Even if they did, we know that it wasn’t the “last time” of history. It was the “last time” of Israel.

Peter writes of Christ, “Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you” (I Peter 1: 20). So Christ and Peter lived in the “the last times”—the last days of Israel. (The nation of Israel, established by God, was permanently destroyed by God via the Roman army in A.D. 70—just a few years after most of the New Testament books were written).

So the meaning of phrases like “the last days” or “the last times” changes dramatically when they’re read in context. But that doesn’t keep many Christian “experts” from sensationalizing them—or even claiming that they refer exclusively to our own generation. How else can they scare people into buying books and turn their attention away from things that matter?