Last days

“In these last days he has spoken to us by his Son.”

— Hebrews 1:2

The last days is the New Testament’s own name for the period inaugurated by Christ’s first coming and continuing until his return (Heb. 1:2; Acts 2:17), not a distinct span still future.¹ Old Testament prophets spoke of a coming “Messianic period” using the same phrase, “the last day,” “the last time,” “the end of days.”¹ This differs from “the last day” (singular), which Scripture uses for the future day of resurrection and judgment itself (John 6:39-40; 11:24; 12:48), a single point still ahead rather than the whole present age.

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter naming “the last days” as an already-inaugurated era; its eschatology chapters concern “the last day” in the singular, the future day of resurrection and judgment. Chapter 31 states that “at the last day, such of the saints as are found alive, shall not sleep, but be changed; and all the dead shall be raised up with the selfsame bodies.”² Chapter 32 opens:

“God hath appointed a day wherein he will judge the world in righteousness, by Jesus Christ; to whom all power and judgment is given of the Father; in which day, not only the apostate angels shall be judged, but likewise all persons that have lived upon the earth shall appear before the tribunal of Christ, to give an account of their thoughts, words, and deeds.”³

Both chapters address that future day, not the present interadvental period Scripture calls “the last days.”

Biblical Basis

Old Testament prophecy anticipated a coming period of divine visitation, blessing, and conflict named this way: Isaiah foresaw Zion’s exaltation “in the latter days” (Isa. 2:2-3), and Hosea likewise placed Israel’s return to the Lord “in the latter days” (Hosea 3:5). Hodge reads this Old Testament usage as naming the whole “Messianic period,” and observes that those who carry the same reading into the New Testament “hold that the day of judgment covers the whole period between the first and second advents of Christ,”¹ rather than a single future event.

The New Testament writers apply this same language to their own present. At Pentecost, Peter quotes Joel’s prophecy and declares it already occurring:

“This is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel; It shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams” (Acts 2:16-18).

Goodwin reads Peter’s application as decisive: the Spirit’s coming at Pentecost was “as clearly prophesied of…under the Old Testament, as there was of Christ’s coming in the flesh,” and Peter himself “commemorates and applies” Joel’s “last days” prophecy to that visible coming, not to some later event still awaited.⁴ The author of Hebrews opens the same way, that God “in these last days…has spoken to us by his Son” (Heb. 1:1-2), a past-tense arrival rather than a future expectation. Paul, James, and Peter’s other letters describe their own present, troubled circumstances the same way: “in the last days there will come times of difficulty” (2 Tim. 3:1); the wealthy “have laid up treasure in the last days” (James 5:3); “scoffers will come in the last days” (2 Pet. 3:3); and John writes, “it is the last hour” (1 John 2:18). Witmer summarizes the New Testament’s own teaching as “that the last days have arrived in an inaugurated sense and will be consummated at the end of history.”⁵

Historical Development

Reformed and Puritan reading: already begun at Pentecost

Reformed exposition read Peter’s own application of Joel’s prophecy as settling the question: the last days named in the Old Testament had themselves arrived with the Spirit’s outpouring, not a separate future event still owed. Goodwin’s mid-seventeenth-century treatment of the Spirit’s work takes Acts 2:16-18 this way, tying the “last days” of Joel directly to that “visible coming” of the Spirit at Pentecost.⁴

The rise of dispensationalism: a future, distinct period

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century dispensationalism read the “last days” differently, as a still-future period distinguished from the church age and directed especially at Israel. Berkhof describes the position: dispensationalists “do not regard the great tribulation as a precursor of the coming of the Lord…, but believe that it will follow ‘the coming,’ and that therefore the Church will not pass through the great tribulation,” preferring to call that period “the day of Jacob’s trouble” as a trial belonging to Israel rather than the church.⁶

Opposing Views

Dispensational premillennialism holds that the great tribulation, and the “last days” language tied to it, names a future period that follows Christ’s coming for the church (a pretribulational rapture) rather than the whole present church age, resting this partly on “their own preconceived notion of a twofold second coming of Christ.”⁶

Objections and Responses

The dispensational reading rests on a second coming Scripture doesn’t distinguish into two stages. Berkhof answers that Jesus’s Olivet discourse speaks of only one coming throughout, using the single word parousia in Matthew 24:3, 27, and 39, and that the tribulation of verse 29 immediately precedes that same coming rather than following a separate, earlier one.⁶

The tribulation is Israel’s trial, not the church’s. Berkhof responds that Jesus’s own description of the tribulation includes “the elect” generally, who “will be in danger of being led astray” and are gathered “from all quarters of the world” at the Son of Man’s coming (Matt. 24:22, 24, 31), with no warrant in the text for limiting “the elect” to ethnic Israel alone.⁶

Related Doctrines

References

Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 841-42. ↩ ↩² ↩³
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 31, “Of the State of Man after Death and Of the Resurrection of the Dead,” para. 2. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 32, “Of the Last Judgment,” para. 1. ↩
Thomas Goodwin, The Work of the Holy Ghost in Our Salvation, in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1863), 8-9. ↩ ↩²
Stephen Witmer, “Keeping Eschatology and Ethics Together: The Teaching of Jesus, the Work of Albert Schweitzer, and the Task of Evangelical Pastor-Theologians,” Themelios 39, no. 3 (2014): 485. ↩
Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 685. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴