Intrigue about the end times has sparked numerous Christian discussions about when Jesus will return. Some of these dialogues might be edifying; others, not so. Along with the intrigue are various points of misinformation. Here are five current myths about the end times.
1. “We are currently living in the End Times.”
Christians who make the claim often mean by it that they are living in the final generation before Christ returns.
The claim may assume a misreading of Matthew 24:34 (along with Mark 13:30; Luke 21:32). Jesus affirms that "this generation will not pass" until the things he predicted are fulfilled. If you read the fine print, however, you discover that in this context, Jesus predicts the events leading up to the first-century fall of Jerusalem. What sparked this conversation in Matthew 24:1–3—Jesus asserts that the great temple in Jerusalem that his disciples are currently admiring will be destroyed. During the Jewish war with Rome, the Romans leveled that temple in 70 CE, forty years after Jesus's prediction—within a generation.
Even so, New Testament authors before and after 70 CE still anticipated Jesus's second coming. They claimed to be living in the last days (Acts 2:17–21; 1 Cor 10:11; Heb 1:2; 2 Pet 3:3–4; 1 John 2:18; Rev 1:1–3). Perhaps the point to be deduced from these texts is that the final period of human history between Jesus's first and second coming should be considered the "last days." In this sense, Christians today can claim to be living in the last days—they have been living in those days for the last 2,000 years!
2. “The Antichrist is alive today.”
In the 1970s, Christians believed that Henry Kissinger was the Antichrist. Then it was President Reagan—the letters in "Ronald Wilson Reagan" added up to 6, 6, 6. Then they thought Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was the Antichrist due to that strange birthmark on his head. Currently, some speculate that the Antichrist is Donald Trump. All these claims have one thing in common—they assume that we are living in the final days or years before the end. And we already know that such a claim is misguided based on #5 above.
What does Jesus teach in Scripture? That no one knows the time of these events: Matthew 24:36; Mark 13:33; Acts 1:7. Christians simply do not know whether they are living in the final generation, and so it is useless to speculate about it. It is time to stop playing the game of "pin the tail" on the Antichrist.
3. “The increase of earthquakes, famines, wars, and pestilences shows that the end is near.”
Actually, such things are not really on the increase. What has increased is the current ability to be informed about these things, given the instant promulgation of information over the internet, smartphones, and various media platforms that were unavailable to previous generations.
You don't need to be an expert historian to realize that wars, famines, and pestilences in the past have been far deadlier than those in recent times. For example, deaths caused by Covid-19 in no way compare with the percentage of deaths during the Spanish Flu of 1918 or the Bubonic Plague in the Middle Ages.
In any case, contextually speaking, Jesus makes the claim about the increase of such events in relation to the temple's destruction in the first century (Matt 24:6–7; Mark 13:7–8; Luke 21:10–11).
4. “The Mark of the Beast is a microchip implant”
This viewpoint is based on a rather literal interpretation of Revelation 13 in which those who follow the Beast will receive a mark on their right hand or forehead if they wish to buy or sell. If not a microchip, the universal product code is sometimes proposed. Back in the days of COVID-19, it was the COVID-19 vaccine that was supposedly the mark. This speculation suffers from the same setbacks as attempts to identify the Antichrist. If no one knows when the end will take place based on Scripture, then no one knows whether the Antichrist is even alive today, let alone how this person's supposed "mark" will be enforced.
5. “Before the end takes place, the Great Tribulation will last seven years, but Christians will disappear in the rapture before then.”
Check whether there is any passage in the Bible that states, point-blank, that there will be a seven-year tribulation right before Christ returns. Likewise, see if you can find that a rapture of all believers must occur before this tribulation. You will not find any explicit Scripture on these things, even though several churches teach them as if they were gospel truth.
In the most celebrated passage of the so-called "rapture," 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18, Paul connects the event with the Parousia, the appearance or "coming" of the Lord (1 Thess 4:15). For Paul, this event is Christ's second coming, and this is almost surely how the Thessalonians would have understood his teaching. Paul does not mention a seven-year tribulation period after the catching away of believers. And he does not mention Christ returning once again (a third time!) after the so-called rapture.
Popular books of the past, such as the Scofield Reference Bible, Hal Lindsey's The Late, Great Planet Earth, and Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series, have left their mark on recent generations of Americans with this type of teaching. It is often promulgated with such dogma that the common church-goer who hears it assumes it as fact without explicit biblical evidence.
Oftentimes, such teachers read a literal meaning into what is intended to be understood symbolically, whether in images or numbers. In Revelation 5:6, for instance, do you really think that when you see Jesus in heaven, you will literally see a lamb with seven eyes and seven horns?
Likewise, these interpreters often fail to consider that the text they are reading was not originally written for them but for ancient Jewish and Christian audiences about 2,000 years ago. What did the text mean back then to those who first read it? Without asking this crucial question first, a misinterpretation of the text is almost inevitable. Incidentally, neither Paul nor his original readers in the 50s CE knew anything about the Book of Revelation. They could not speculate on its numbers and images—it was not yet written.
Nowadays, certain interpreters string together different, and sometimes unrelated, prophetic texts to draw inferences about a so-called seven-year tribulation and the timing of the rapture. At best, Tim LaHaye's view assumes a theological interpretation known as Dispensationalism. This is merely one theory of prophecy among many, some of which have been around much longer than this one.
The early church did not teach such a theory, and its members experienced death and persecution at the hands of the Romans in various intervals until the fourth century. To them, tribulation was part of Christian living. Do Christians today honestly think they will escape tribulation, given that church history tells a different story? Don't the words of Jesus in John 16:33 still pertain to them when he says that, "In the world you will have tribulation…"?
The proper way to approach biblical prophecy is with great humility rather than dogma. Instead of getting one's information from social media hype, cult leaders, or wild-eyed preachers who don't know the biblical languages, Christians should prefer books and teachers that provide various ways to interpret these difficult texts.
Biblical prophecy was intended to correct and encourage Christians to live faithfully for the Lord despite hardships and persecution. If one learns anything about the end-times, it should be this—In terms of behavior, you should live your life as though Jesus is returning tonight; in terms of goals, you should plan out your life as though he is not returning for another thousand years.
