Are We In the Last Days?

Four Horsemen
The Last Days

“We have many reasons for believing that mankind is now living deep in ‘the last days’ of this present wicked system of things…. Since 1914 we have been living in the time of the end of this system of things.”

The Watchtower—What Do the Scriptures Say About “the Last Days”?

Few religious questions are asked more often, or answered more confidently, than “Are we living in the last days?” In every generation there have been those ready to read the day’s headlines — wars, disasters, new technologies, political upheavals — as proof that the end has at last arrived. The dates come and go; the world does not end; the dates are revised; and the question is asked again.

The most systematic modern example is the teaching of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who hold that the “last days” began at a precise calendar moment — 1914 — when, on their account, Christ was enthroned invisibly in heaven and the present wicked system entered its final phase before Armageddon. Their position is set out in the Watchtower literature and on jw.org, and is summarized in the Watchtower View panel below.

The Catholic View panel below sets out the Catholic and broadly historic Christian answer. Its argument is that the popular question, as usually posed, rests on a misunderstanding of how Scripture itself uses the language of the “last days.” The Summary panel puts the reply in brief, and the complete essay, When Did the Last Days Begin?, is offered there for download.

I invite your engagement with me on these questions. You may leave comments below, but please be sure to read our policy on commenting before doing so.

Watchtower View

Jump to the Catholic View ↓

Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that the world has been living in the “last days” since the year 1914. In their understanding, that year marked the end of the “Gentile times” and the moment when Christ was enthroned as king in heaven and began an invisible “presence” (Greek parousia), ruling unseen while the present wicked system of things runs down toward Armageddon. Their position is set out in the publications of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society and in articles such as “What Are the Last Days?” on jw.org.1

What They Affirm

The last days began in 1914. The Witnesses hold that a chain of prophetic chronology — built chiefly on the “seven times” of Daniel 4 and a 2,520-year calculation — identifies 1914 as the year Christ’s heavenly kingdom was established and the “last days” of the present system began. (The Society formerly taught that the last days began in 1799 and that Christ “returned” in 1874, holding these dates into the 1930s.)2

Christ’s kingdom is a heavenly government, born in 1914. The kingdom is understood not as the Church, nor as anything present in the first century, but as a literal celestial administration not yet much more than a century old — a government from which Christ now rules invisibly and will soon act to cleanse the earth.3

Armageddon is imminent. Because the last days began in 1914, the destruction of the present system at Armageddon is held to be very near, after which God’s kingdom will be extended over a cleansed and paradise earth.4

How They Argue It

The “last days” texts. Witnesses cite passages that speak of the moral character of “the last days” — above all 2 Timothy 3:1–5, with its catalogue of people “lovers of self, lovers of money … lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God” — and apply them to the period since 1914, taking present-day conditions as the fulfillment.5

The great commission. They appeal to Matthew 28:19, 20 and to the preaching of “this good news of the kingdom” (Matthew 24:14) as the work of the kingdom established in 1914, by which a worldwide witness is given before the end comes.6

The sign of Christ’s presence. They read the Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24; Mark 13; Luke 21) — wars, famines, earthquakes, pestilences — as a composite “sign” of Christ’s invisible presence since 1914, and understand “this generation” (Matthew 24:34) as two overlapping groups of anointed Christians: those alive when the sign began in 1914, and those whose lives overlapped with theirs — the understanding published in 2010.7

A restored understanding. Consistent with their wider view of Church history, Witnesses hold that the early Church fell away from true worship, so that a restoration of the true understanding of God’s kingdom and the last days was needed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.8

Endnotes
  1. For the Watchtower’s own statement of the doctrine, see “What Are the Last Days?” and related articles in the “Bible Questions Answered” section of jw.org, and the book What Does the Bible Really Teach? (Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, 2005, rev. 2014), ch. 9, “Are We Living in ‘the Last Days’?” The 1914 date is treated as foundational throughout the Society’s literature. ↩
  2. On the “seven times” of Daniel 4 and the 2,520-year calculation yielding 1914, see What Does the Bible Really Teach? (2005), Appendix, “1914—A Significant Year in Bible Prophecy.” On the earlier chronology — the last days beginning in 1799 and Christ’s invisible “return” dated to 1874 — see C. T. Russell, Studies in the Scriptures, vol. 2, The Time Is at Hand (1889), and vol. 3, Thy Kingdom Come (1891); these dates were held into the 1930s before being superseded. The history is summarized in Jehovah’s Witnesses—Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom (1993), pp. 132–138. ↩
  3. On the Kingdom as a heavenly government established in 1914 rather than the first-century Church, see What Does the Bible Really Teach? (2005), ch. 8, “What Is God’s Kingdom?”, and the long-running Watchtower series on God’s Kingdom. ↩
  4. On the imminence of Armageddon and the paradise earth to follow, see What Does the Bible Really Teach? (2005), chs. 3 and 8–9. ↩
  5. 2 Timothy 3:1–5 is the Society’s most-cited “last days” text; see e.g. “What Are the Last Days?” (jw.org) and What Does the Bible Really Teach? (2005), ch. 9, which lists the moral conditions of the passage as a fulfilled sign of the period since 1914. ↩
  6. Matthew 24:14 (“this good news of the kingdom will be preached”) and the commission of Matthew 28:19–20 are read as the work of the post-1914 Kingdom; see What Does the Bible Really Teach? (2005), ch. 9, and the regular Watchtower emphasis on the global preaching work as a sign of the end. ↩
  7. On the Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24; Mark 13; Luke 21) as a composite “sign” of Christ’s invisible parousia since 1914, and on the shifting interpretation of “this generation” (Matthew 24:34), see What Does the Bible Really Teach? (2005), ch. 9, and the revised explanation in The Watchtower, April 15, 2010, pp. 10–11. ↩
  8. The “last days” teaching is bound up with the Witnesses’ wider claim of a great apostasy and a modern restoration; see Jehovah’s Witnesses—Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom (1993), and the companion page on this site, Was There a Great Apostasy? ↩

Catholic View

The Catholic Church holds that the last days began with Christ, not in 1914, and not on any other date a calculation might produce. This is not a Catholic peculiarity but the plain and repeated statement of the New Testament, made by writers who located themselves inside those days rather than looking forward to them. Once that is seen, the question is no longer when the last days will start, but what it means to be living in them.

The Last Days Began in the First Century

The first Christians did not invent the phrase. They inherited it from the prophets, and then announced something startling: the long-awaited age to come had already dawned, because the Messiah had come, the Spirit had been poured out, and the new covenant had been sealed in His blood.

They say so repeatedly and without hedging. Hebrews opens: “in many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son” (Heb. 1:1–2). Peter writes that Christ “was made manifest in the last times for your sake” (1 Pet. 1:20). John tells his readers, “it is the last hour” (1 John 2:18). And Paul says of his own generation that “these things … were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor. 10:11), where the Greek verb is a perfect, denoting an arrival already complete.1

The clearest declaration comes at Pentecost. When the Spirit falls and the crowd is bewildered, Peter stands and explains: “this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel: ‘and in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh’” (Acts 2:16–17). This is that. Peter tells the assembled crowd that they are standing in the last days the prophets foretold, not centuries off, but in the outpouring they are watching. The gift of the Spirit is itself the proof that the final age has begun.2

Two texts the Watchtower itself leans on say the same. Paul’s description of “the last days,” with its lovers of self and money and pleasure (2 Tim. 3:1–5), ends with the instruction “Avoid such people” — counsel that is useless unless such people stood in Timothy’s own congregation. And Jesus told His hearers that some standing before Him would not taste death before they saw the kingdom of God come with power (Mark 9:1) — which fits a kingdom inaugurated in their generation, in the Resurrection, Pentecost and the gospel’s spread, and does not fit one established in 1914, long after every one of them had died.

A Witness will reply that the New Testament’s last days were the last days of the Jewish system, or of the apostolic era, while 1914 opened “the last days of this system of things” — a different period. The distinction should be met, not brushed past. The phrase can be applied to more than one ending, and the first-century usage alone does not disprove 1914. What it does is shift the burden: if Scripture already locates the last days in the age Christ opened, a second, dated set of last days needs a warrant of its own, and the only warrant offered is the chronology examined below — not any text that names a later period.

The text usually named is Luke 21:24, “until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled,” read as the 2,520 years ending in 1914. But Luke gives the phrase a subject and an object: Jerusalem “will be trodden down by the Gentiles” until those times end. It describes the city’s subjection, not a heavenly enthronement, and it names no number; the years come from Daniel 4, which does not mention the Gentiles at all. A text that says nothing of 1914 cannot be the warrant for it.

Two Ages, and the Overlap

Behind the phrase lies a structure the first Christians took over from Judaism: this age, marked by sin and death, and the age to come, marked by resurrection and the reign of God. The Jewish expectation was that one would simply succeed the other at the Messiah’s arrival.3

What the apostles proclaimed was stranger and better. The age to come had already broken into this one. The decisive turn had already occurred, in the death and resurrection of Christ, and the two ages now overlap. The Christian lives in that overlap: really in the new age, since the Spirit is given and sins forgiven and the Kingdom entered; still in the old, since death and sin persist and the final consummation awaits. This is what theologians call the already and the not yet, and it explains why the New Testament can speak of Christians as already raised with Christ and still awaiting the resurrection without contradiction.4

The Kingdom belongs to that same pattern. Christ said it had already come upon His hearers (Matt. 12:28; Luke 17:21), and Paul says of living Christians that God “has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Col. 1:13), a past tense, written eighteen centuries before the Kingdom is said to have been born.5

Where the Date Comes From

Set against all this is a chronology that needs analysis. The 1914 date rests on the “seven times” of Daniel 4, a passage about the madness and recovery of Nebuchadnezzar, in which nothing is said of Gentile times, of 2,520 years, or of any date whatever. The seven times are converted to 2,520 years by treating each “time” as 360 days and each day as a year, then counted from a date for Jerusalem’s fall that secular chronology does not support. Every step requires an assumption the text does not supply.6

The method’s own history is the strongest comment on it. The Watchtower’s earlier calculations yielded 1799 for the beginning of the last days and 1874 for Christ’s return, and those dates were taught into the 1930s before being replaced. A calculation that has already produced two abandoned answers is not made reliable by producing a third.7

The expectations, in order — each from the Society’s own publications:8

  • 1799 — the “last days” begin (taught into the 1930s).
  • 1874 — Christ returns invisibly (taught into the 1930s).
  • 1914 — first expected as the end of earthly rulership; recast, after it passed, as an invisible enthronement.
  • 1925 — Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob expected back on earth (“Millions Now Living Will Never Die”).
  • 1943 — Christ’s return re-dated from 1874 to 1914.
  • 1975 — six thousand years of human history to end; families praised for selling their homes to pioneer “the short time remaining.”
  • 1995 — “this generation” of 1914 redefined: no longer the people alive in that year.
  • 2010 — redefined again: two “overlapping” groups of anointed.
Vigilance, Not Calculation

What Christ actually said about dating is unambiguous, and He said it in the middle of the very discourse from which such predictions are built: “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only” (Matt. 24:36). After the resurrection the disciples asked directly whether He would now restore the kingdom, and He refused the question: “it is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority” (Acts 1:7).9

What He called for was not calculation but readiness. Watch, therefore, because you do not know. The whole point of the parables of the returning master, the wise and foolish virgins, and the thief in the night is that the hour is not disclosed, and that a servant who needs to know the date in order to behave has misunderstood the command. A teaching that supplies a date removes the very uncertainty that vigilance depends on.

The composite “sign” fares no better, and Christ Himself is the one who blunted it. Wars and rumors of wars, He said, must come, “but the end is not yet”; famines and earthquakes are “but the beginning of the birth-pangs” (Matt. 24:6–8). He offered these not as a calendar but as a caution against being misled by them — they are what every generation sees, which is why every generation since has found them abundantly. A sign present in all ages marks out none. And the presence it is said to signal invisibly is, in the same discourse, as unmistakable as lightning shining from east to west (Matt. 24:27).

What the Church Requires

It is worth saying what the Catholic Church does not do here, because the contrast is part of the argument. She holds that Christ will return, that the dead will rise, that there will be a judgment, and that the Kingdom will be consummated. She has never defined a date, a timetable, or a scheme for reading current events as prophecy, and she has consistently discouraged the attempt. The Christian is left where the New Testament leaves him: in the last days already, awaiting a day nobody knows, and told to be ready for it now.10

This is the short answer. The full treatment adds the two-age schema set out in detail with its Jewish sources and its Christian transformation, the parousia and what the word meant in the first century, Augustine on the millennium and how the Catholic tradition reads Revelation 20, the history of the Watchtower’s dates from 1799 onward with the publications that carried them, what the Church has and has not defined about the last things, and full documentation for everything asserted here. It is available as a Word document at the end of this page.

Endnotes
  1. Hebrews 1:1–2; 1 Peter 1:20; 1 John 2:18; 1 Corinthians 10:11, where katēntēken is perfect, denoting a completed arrival whose effects continue. See also Acts 2:17; Hebrews 9:26 (“at the end of the age”); 1 Peter 4:7. ↩
  2. Acts 2:14–21, citing Joel 2:28–32. Peter’s “this is what was spoken” identifies the event before him with the prophecy, and the prophecy locates itself “in the last days.” ↩
  3. On the two ages in Second Temple Judaism, 4 Ezra 7:50 (“the Most High has made not one world but two”) and 6:7–10, where the age to come follows this age as Jacob’s hand followed Esau’s heel, with nothing between; 2 Baruch 44:8–15; and, among the rabbis, m. Avot 4:16 (“this world is like a vestibule before the world to come”). That Judaism expected the one age simply to succeed the other, whereas the New Testament sets the two overlapping, is the point classically made by George Eldon Ladd, The Presence of the Future (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), ch. 3, and A Theology of the New Testament, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), part 1. ↩
  4. On the two ages, see Matthew 12:32; Mark 10:30; Ephesians 1:21. On the overlap, Romans 6:4–11 and Colossians 3:1–4, where believers are already raised with Christ and still await the appearing. ↩
  5. Matthew 12:28; Luke 17:20–21; Colossians 1:13, where the verb is aorist. The nature of the Kingdom is treated on the companion page What Is the Kingdom of God? ↩
  6. Daniel 4 concerns Nebuchadnezzar’s madness and restoration; the chapter mentions neither Gentile times nor any span of years. The 2,520-year figure is obtained by treating the seven times as prophetic years of 360 days and applying a day-for-a-year principle drawn from other passages, then counting from a date for the fall of Jerusalem which standard Neo-Babylonian chronology does not support. ↩
  7. The Society formerly taught that the last days began in 1799 and that Christ returned invisibly in 1874, holding both into the 1930s before replacing them with 1914. See C. T. Russell, Studies in the Scriptures, vol. 2, The Time Is at Hand (1889), and vol. 3, Thy Kingdom Come (1891); the history is summarized in Jehovah’s Witnesses—Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom (1993), pp. 132–138. ↩
  8. In order: note 6 above for 1799 and 1874; C. T. Russell, The Time Is at Hand (1889), on 1914 as the end of the kingdoms of this world; Millions Now Living Will Never Die (1920) on 1925; The Truth Shall Make You Free (1943), re-dating the presence to 1914; Life Everlasting in Freedom of the Sons of God (1966): “six thousand years from man’s creation will end in 1975”; Kingdom Ministry, May 1974, p. 3, on “brothers selling their homes and property” to serve in “the short time remaining before the wicked world’s end”; The Watchtower, November 1, 1995, and April 15, 2010, on the successive redefinitions of “this generation.” ↩
  9. Matthew 24:36, with Mark 13:32; Acts 1:6–7. On vigilance rather than calculation, Matthew 24:42–51; 25:1–13; 1 Thessalonians 5:1–6. ↩
  10. Catechism of the Catholic Church §§668–682 on the Kingdom and the last things, and §676 on the Church’s rejection of attempts to realize the Kingdom within history by human calculation or effort. ↩

Summary

Questions to Answer
  • The Society has placed the end at 1914, 1925, and 1975, each time in God’s name. How many times may a prophet be wrong before Deuteronomy 18:22 applies?
  • Jesus said that of that day and hour no one knows (Matt. 24:36). By what authority does the Society keep announcing the generation, the year, the nearness?
  • The apostles said they were already in the last days (Acts 2:17; Heb. 1:2). Why relocate their beginning to 1914?
  • If every date so far has failed, why is the next prediction more trustworthy than the last?

These are the questions the Society’s own texts raise, and they deserve answers.

The Watchtower teaches that the “last days” began in 1914, that Christ was enthroned in heaven that year, and that Armageddon is therefore imminent. Each of these claims runs against the way Scripture itself uses the language of the “last days,” and the principal proof-texts, examined in context, point the other way.

“The last days began in 1914.” The New Testament places the “last days” not in the twentieth century but in the first. “In these last days [God] has spoken to us by his Son” (Heb. 1:1–2). Christ “was made manifest in the last times” (1 Pet. 1:20). “It is the last hour” (1 John 2:18). The end of the ages “has come” upon Paul’s own generation (1 Cor. 10:11). At Pentecost Peter declared that Joel’s prophecy of the Spirit poured out “in the last days” was being fulfilled before the crowd’s eyes: “This is what was spoken by the prophet Joel” (Acts 2:16–17). The last days began with Christ’s first coming and the gift of the Spirit, not with a calculated date nineteen centuries later.

The 2 Timothy 3 proof-text refutes the use made of it. Witnesses cite Paul’s description of people in “the last days,” lovers of self and money and pleasure (2 Tim. 3:1–5), and apply it to the period since 1914. But Paul ends that very passage by telling Timothy, “Avoid such people” (v. 5). The counsel is useless unless such people were present in Timothy’s own day. Paul plainly understood himself and Timothy to be living in the last days already. A Witness may distinguish the apostolic “last days” from “the last days of this system”; the first-century usage does not by itself disprove 1914, but it moves the burden to the chronology, since no text names a second, dated period.

Christ already holds “all authority.” The Witnesses say Christ was enthroned as king in 1914. Yet the risen Christ told His disciples, before the ascension, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matt. 28:18), and commissioned them to make disciples of all nations on that basis. Matthew 28:18 does not by itself rule out later phases of Christ’s reign — 1 Corinthians 15:24–28 looks to a consummation still ahead — but it does deny that His kingship waited for 1914 to begin. Paul confirms it: God “has … transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Col. 1:13), already, in the first century.

“Some standing here will not taste death.” Jesus told His hearers that some of them would not die before they saw the kingdom of God come with power (Mark 9:1). That fits a kingdom inaugurated in their own generation, in the Resurrection, the Ascension, Pentecost and the spread of the gospel. It does not fit one established in 1914, long after every person standing there had died.

The deeper problem is a misread expectation. The pattern is telling. When predictions tied to dates fail to deliver what was expected, whether 1799 or 1874 or 1914, the teaching is revised rather than abandoned and the disappointment is explained away. This is the same error the New Testament writers diagnosed in the expectation of a political Messiah, where the expectation itself was wrong from the start. The “last days” were never a datable countdown, and the kingdom was never a government to be installed in a calculated year. As the Catholic Church puts it, the Christian hope is one “which can only be realized beyond history” (Catechism §676), and no calendar can hold it.

In short: the Catholic answer is not a better calculation but an older and different understanding. The kingdom came in Christ, comes now in His Church and in every heart that receives Him, and will come in glory when He returns at an hour no one knows (Mark 13:32). We have been living in the last days since Pentecost. The proper response is less to scan the headlines for a date than to live today as people in whom the end has already begun, in vigilant hope rather than feverish speculation.

The last days began with Christ. The kingdom is already among us, and not yet revealed in full. No one knows the day or the hour, so keep on the watch.

For a more complete essay on this topic, download When Did the Last Days Begin? (.docx) or (.pdf)

Next: Who Is “This Generation”?