How to Identify Signs of the End Times

The "end times" are talked about throughout the Bible and other religious texts. So many questions exist: when will they occur; have they happened already; what is the order of events; or will they actually happen at all? There is much argument about which world events mark fulfillment of prophecy, but no one can of course know for sure. These steps will help you find information about the signs of "end times."

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

1. Understand that nearly every culture, including plenty that existed before the Bible was written, had prophecies about the end of the world. The Zoroastrians had such prophecies in 500 B.C. involving the world ending in fire, a great battle and a final judgement.
2. Read in the gospels that Matthew claimed the end times would come before the end of the current generation (the one that was alive when Matthew was alive.) Matthew claimed that some of the people listening to him would never know death. This passage can be found in Matthew 16:27-28.
3. Research the preterist view of the Book of Revelation. This view says that the events John of Patmos wrote about took place in the first century A.D. They believe that the prophecies were fulfilled when Herod's temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, as predicted by Jesus in Luke 21.
4. Realize that many Christians base their belief in the end times on the interpretation of Cyrus Scofield, an American minister who developed the Scofield Study Bible. The popularity of the innovative format of the Scofield Bible helped spread the belief that the end times are coming (dispensationalism).
5. Know that people have been claiming that the world is in the midst of the end times for the last 2,000 years or more. Many have made predictions about when the world would end, but none of these have come true. A notable failure was in the year 1000.