Signs of the End Times: What Jesus Actually Said

You probably came here for a list. A clean set of signs you could hold up against the news, to find out whether we are close. That instinct is older than you think, and Jesus actually answered it, but not the way the checklists do. He gave his followers a set of signs, and then in almost the same breath he told them what those signs were not allowed to mean.

This page walks slowly through the signs Jesus named, in his own words, from the one place he laid them out: the long conversation he had with his disciples on the Mount of Olives, recorded in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21. False messiahs. Wars and rumors of wars. Famines and earthquakes. Persecution. The gospel preached to every nation. A desolation Daniel foresaw. Signs in the sky. And then his own return.

It will not predict a year. It will not match today's headlines to verses. What it will do is take you to the words of Jesus and show you the frame he put around them, because the frame is the part the checklists leave off. He called the early troubles birth pains, not a stopwatch. And he closed the whole teaching with a sentence that has not been kind to anyone who tried to set a date.

If the signs have been a source of dread for you, you have been handed them backward. They were given to steady the church, not to scare it. This is the foundational signs page on the site, and where it touches the longer end-times conversation, it will point you to what the end times are, one click away.

The short answer

The signs of the end times are the troubles Jesus listed in the Olivet Discourse: deception by false messiahs, wars, famines, earthquakes, persecution, the gospel spreading to all nations, the abomination that causes desolation, and cosmic signs, leading to his own visible return. Jesus called the early items the beginning of birth pains (Matthew 24:8), a deliberate image meaning real but recurring, not a countdown.

He gave the signs to keep his people watchful and unsurprised, and he expressly refused to attach them to a date. The governing sentence of the whole subject is Matthew 24:36, where Jesus says even he does not know the day or hour. So the honest reading of the signs is this: take them seriously, do not read them as a calendar.

Where Jesus named the signs

Almost everything the New Testament says about signs in Jesus' own voice comes from one teaching. Sitting on the Mount of Olives, his disciples asked him privately what the sign of his coming and the end of the age would be. His answer fills Matthew 24, with close parallels in Mark 13 and Luke 21. Reading the three side by side is the best protection against anyone's chart, because each writer preserves the same shape.

That shape matters. Jesus does not hand his disciples a sequence to track toward a deadline. He gives them a description of the whole age between his comings, names the troubles that will mark it, and tells them how to live inside it. The signs are woven through with warnings against alarm and against deception, which is its own clue about how he meant them to be read.

So when this page walks the signs one at a time below, hold two things together. Each sign is real, named by Jesus himself. And each one sits inside a teaching that keeps saying, in effect, do not let this frighten you and do not let anyone use it to deceive you. The signs and the steadiness were given in the same sentence.

False messiahs and deception

The first sign Jesus names is not a war or a disaster. It is deception, and it is the warning he returns to more than any other.

Jesus answered: "Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, 'I am the Messiah,' and will deceive many."

— Matthew 24:4-5

Notice where his concern goes first. Before the earthquakes and the headlines, his anxiety for his disciples is that someone will fool them. He says it again a few verses later, warning that false prophets will appear and lead many astray, and that as wickedness increases the love of most will grow cold (Matthew 24:11-12).

and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold,

— Matthew 24:11-12

There is a quiet irony here worth sitting with. The sign Jesus stresses most is the very thing that end-times speculation tends to produce: confident people claiming inside knowledge about the end, gathering a following, and being wrong. R.C. Sproul observed that the appeal of date-setting is psychological rather than biblical, that we want a handle on mystery and the Bible refuses to hand us one. Jesus' first sign, read honestly, is a warning against the people who would later turn his other signs into a countdown.

Wars and rumors of wars

This is the sign everyone quotes, and almost no one finishes the sentence. Jesus does not say wars prove the end is near. He says nearly the opposite.

You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places.

— Matthew 24:6-7

Read the middle of that. See to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Jesus attaches the wars to a command not to panic and an explicit statement that the end is not yet. Luke records the same instruction in his own words.

When you hear of wars and uprisings, do not be frightened. These things must happen first, but the end will not come right away.

— Luke 21:9

This is the exact opposite of how the sign usually gets used. The verse is most often quoted to argue that a current war means the clock is almost out. Jesus quoted it to tell his followers that wars are a normal feature of the whole age, not a trigger to start counting. Wars and uprisings have marked every century since he spoke. They are real signs of a world that is not yet what it will be. They are not the year.

Famines and earthquakes

In the same breath as the wars, Jesus names famines and earthquakes in various places (Matthew 24:7). These are the disasters the checklists love, because there is always a famine somewhere and the earth is always moving somewhere. That is precisely the problem with using them as a countdown.

Famines and earthquakes are not new arrivals on the timeline. They have happened in every generation, on every continent, for the whole stretch since Jesus spoke these words. If they were the signal that the end was upon us, the end has been upon every generation equally, which is closer to what Jesus actually meant than the modern habit of treating this decade's disasters as uniquely significant.

Wayne Grudem, walking through this passage in his Systematic Theology, notes that these events are described as things that simply must happen across the age, not as a series of escalating markers we can measure our distance from. The honest reading is humbler and steadier. A famine is a real grief and a real sign of a broken world groaning toward its renewal. It is not a clue about the date, and treating it as one has a long record of leading people astray.

Persecution and betrayal

Here the tone shifts from the world's troubles to the disciples' own. Jesus tells the people in front of him that following him will cost them.

Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me.

— Matthew 24:9

This sign was not abstract to its first hearers. Within a generation, most of the men listening would suffer for the name of Jesus, some to death. The persecution Jesus names began almost immediately and has continued, somewhere in the world, ever since. It is happening today in places where confessing Christ is dangerous, and it has happened in every century in between.

That continuity is the point. Persecution is not a late-stage sign that flickers on near the finish. It is a feature of the whole age, the cost Jesus told his followers to expect from the start. Luke's version of this section ends not with fear but with a promise: by standing firm, Jesus says, you will win life. The sign of suffering comes wrapped in a word of endurance, which is how Jesus framed nearly everything in this teaching.

The gospel preached to all nations

Tucked among the troubles is a sign of an entirely different color. It is the one genuinely hopeful marker in the list, and it is the only one Jesus connects directly to the end.

And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.

— Matthew 24:14

This sign points forward, not just at disaster. The spread of the good news to every people is something Jesus says will happen before the end, and across two thousand years the reach of the gospel has gone from a handful of disciples in Jerusalem to every continent on earth. Where most of the signs describe a world groaning, this one describes a mission advancing.

It also reframes what watchfulness is for. If the end waits on the gospel reaching all nations, then the faithful response to the signs is not to scan the news but to join the work. Billy Graham, who spent his life on exactly this verse, refused to set dates and pointed people instead to the task it names. The sign is not a measurement to take. It is an assignment to take up.

The abomination that causes desolation

Of all the signs, this is the one that sends readers to the footnotes, and Jesus knew it would.

So when you see standing in the holy place "the abomination that causes desolation," spoken of through the prophet Daniel, let the reader understand,

— Matthew 24:15

Let the reader understand. Jesus reaches back to the book of Daniel and asks his hearers to think carefully. Faithful Christians read this sign two ways, and it is worth knowing both rather than picking up someone's certainty. Many tie it to the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem temple in AD 70, and they point to Luke, who describes the same moment as armies surrounding the city (Luke 21:20). Others expect a still-future fulfillment near Christ's return.

R.C. Sproul, in The Last Days According to Jesus, made the careful case that much of the Olivet Discourse found its first fulfillment in the fall of Jerusalem, while other Bible-honoring teachers read the desolation as still ahead. This page is not going to hand you a verdict, because the text invites care rather than confidence. What both readings agree on is the thing Jesus stressed: the sign is real, Daniel foresaw it, and it is meant to make God's people watchful, not to date the end.

Cosmic signs and the coming of the Son of Man

The signs build toward something far larger than wars and rumors. Jesus moves from the troubles of the age to the close of it, and the language turns to the sky.

Immediately after the distress of those days "the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken."

— Matthew 24:29

This is not one more disaster to add to the checklist. It is the signal that the age itself is ending, drawn in the imagery the Old Testament prophets used for God acting in history. And it leads to the one event the whole discourse has been driving toward: the return of Jesus himself, visible to all.

Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. And then all the peoples of the earth will mourn when they see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.

— Matthew 24:30

Notice that the final sign is not something his people decode in advance. It is his arrival, seen by everyone at once. There is no inside track on it, no chart that gets you there early. When it comes, it will be unmistakable to the whole earth in the same instant. That is the destination of every sign before it, and it is why Luke can tell the frightened disciples to lift their heads.

When these things begin to take place, stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

— Luke 21:28

Why Jesus called them birth pains

Here is the line that governs how to read everything above, and it is the one the checklists almost always cut.

All these are the beginning of birth pains.

— Matthew 24:8

Birth pains. Not the chart, the contractions. Think about what the image actually does. Labor pains are real, you cannot ignore them, and they tell you something genuine is underway. But they are not a stopwatch counting down to a posted time. They come and go across a long labor, sometimes for many hours, and no contraction tells you the exact minute. A first-time mother knows the pains are real and still cannot name the hour.

That is exactly the posture Jesus is asking for. The wars, famines, and earthquakes are real birth pains of a world straining toward its renewal. They are meaningful. They are also not a countdown, and the moment you try to time the delivery by the contractions, you have misread the metaphor Jesus chose on purpose. N.T. Wright, in Surprised by Hope, presses this same point, that the New Testament's end is not the destruction of the world but its rebirth, and the groaning we feel is creation in labor, not a building set to detonate.

So the signs are real and the timing is hidden, both at once, by design. Jesus gave the birth-pains image precisely so his followers would feel the contractions without pretending to know the hour. The pain says something is coming. It does not say when.

Are these signs unique to our time?

No. This is the single most clarifying fact for anyone anxious that the signs are uniquely lining up right now, so hold onto it. Every generation of the church has looked at its own wars, plagues, and disasters and concluded the end was upon it, and every generation has been wrong about the timeline.

The reason is built into the signs themselves. Wars, famines, earthquakes, deception, and persecution are not rare late-stage markers. Jesus described them as features of the whole age between his comings. There has not been a century without them. The early church believed it was living in the last days, because in the New Testament's own language it was, and so are we, and so was every generation in between. That is why the signs cannot be used to measure distance to the end. They are evenly spread across two thousand years.

This is not a new caution. The pattern of reading current events as fulfilled prophecy has a long and humbling record. William Miller predicted Christ's return for 1844, and his followers called the day it passed the Great Disappointment. Edgar Whisenant sold millions of copies of 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Could Be in 1988, then watched 1988 end. Harold Camping covered cities in billboards for May 21, 2011, recalculated, and watched October pass too, before admitting the predictions had been sinful. The score is zero, and it should be, because Jesus said so. If a teacher is certain this decade's signs are unique, they are telling you something about themselves, not something about God.

What Jesus told us to do

After all the signs, here is the thing Scripture is actually clear about. Jesus did not end the Olivet Discourse with a calculation. He ended it with a command, and the command was not figure out the date. It was be ready.

Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come.

— Matthew 24:42

Two verses later he says it again, and the reason he gives is the opposite of date-setting.

So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.

— Matthew 24:44

The unexpectedness is the whole point. Watchfulness in the Bible does not mean scanning the news for prophecy clues. It means living, today, as someone who belongs to Christ and would not be ashamed to meet him this afternoon. John MacArthur, who reads the signs as genuinely pointing toward Christ's return, still lands the discourse here: the application is not prediction but readiness, the faithful servant found doing his work when the master comes. The parables Jesus tells right after this, the faithful servant, the ten virgins, the talents, all press the same note. Do your work. Keep your lamp full. Be found faithful.

And underneath the command is a patience that is easy to miss. The reason the signs stretch across so many centuries, the reason the end has not come, is not delay or neglect.

The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

— 2 Peter 3:9

That reframes the whole question. The time before the end is not a countdown running down. It is a door held open. If your reading of the signs has you anxious instead of awake, afraid instead of kind, something has gone sideways with the reading, not with you. The signs were given as comfort to a church under pressure, so that when the troubles came, his people would lift their heads instead of losing them.

Further study

If you want to go deeper without picking up someone's chart, start with the texts themselves. Read Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21 side by side in one sitting. Reading the three together is the best inoculation against any single confident system, because you see the same shape preserved three ways.

For careful book-length treatments from across the views, R.C. Sproul's The Last Days According to Jesus walks the Olivet Discourse with unusual care, and N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope reframes the whole subject away from escaping the world and toward its renewal. Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology lays out the major positions fairly while naming their weak spots. For shorter pastoral reading online, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association's answers on the end times consistently refuse to set dates.

To keep reading on this site, what the end times are is the foundational map for the whole subject. The rapture page walks the views on Christ's return for the church, and the antichrist page gives the same calm treatment to that loaded word. And if the signs have been frightening you because of a deeper question about whether God is good when the world hurts, why a good God allows suffering is where that conversation lives.

May the God who holds the day and the hour in his own hand keep you from the fear of a calendar he has chosen not to show you. May the birth pains, when you feel them, lift your head instead of lowering it. And may you be found awake and unafraid, doing the next faithful thing, on the day the Son of Man comes in glory.

Common questions about the signs of the end times