The End of the End Times

Why the Last Days Began at Pentecost — and Why God Is Not Consulting America’s Prophecy Charts

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 28, 2026

It is time to end the nonsense peddled by the “end times” prophets who insist we are living in the last days.

We are living in the last days. We have been for two thousand years, and we may go on living in them for decades or centuries more. That is precisely the point these hucksters miss. What they are selling — for the price of a book that makes them richer — is not that we are living in the last days, but that we are living in the end of the end times, with themselves as the anointed reader of the clock.

The Last Days Began at Pentecost

Start with Scripture. The Bible has a great deal to say about the last days. Peter said we entered them at Pentecost: “this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel” (Acts 2:17). Hebrews says God has spoken to us “in these last days” by his Son. Paul, John, and Peter all wrote as men who knew the ends of the ages had already come upon them. The last days are not a coming attraction. They are the age we have inhabited since the Spirit fell.

What Scripture never mentions — not once in your English Bible — is a secret rapture, and not one syllable of an American prophetic timetable bolted onto it. Go to Young’s Concordance and hunt for the pre-tribulation rapture the peddlers describe. You will not find it. You will find the Lord returning in power and glory, for every eye to see — not a vanishing act staged to spare comfortable Americans the indignity of suffering for the name of Christ.

Jesus himself shut the door these men keep trying to pry open. He said plainly that he did not know the day or the hour — only the Father knew, and the Father was not telling (Matthew 24:36). If the Son declined to set a date, what manner of prophet claims to have found one in a chart?

So, ninety percent of what is served up by the men who think they can locate the United States in the book of Daniel or the Revelation of St. John is tommy rot. God has never operated on an American prophetic timetable cooked up by Tim LaHaye or any other vendor of end-times snake oil. And let us be fair: these are not stupid men. That is the trouble. They are able, industrious, and confident — and they are getting rich being wrong.

A Gospel Bigger Than America

Here is the question that never seems to occur to them. Has it not entered their calculations that God might intend to save millions of unbelievers — in Iran, in Indonesia, in Japan, in North Korea, even in Israel — before his Son returns? Muslims are turning to Christ by the hundreds of thousands. Whole peoples who have never heard the gospel are hearing it now. Is all of that to be halted on a dime because some prophecy salesman wants the church raptured out before the hard part begins?

This is the rotten core of it: an American fundamentalism so enamored of itself that it has made the consummation of all things about us. Who cares that God might be pleased to save two hundred million Chinese, or a hundred million Indonesians, or tribe after tribe that has never once heard the name of Jesus? On this accounting they are consigned to outer darkness — to the weeping and the gnashing of teeth — while a comfortable throng of Western believers is whisked to glory, having risked nothing and lost nothing for the Lord they claim to serve. That is not the gospel. That is narcissism with a study Bible.

The Harvest Is Not Yet In

God is not consulting the charts. He is not waiting on a timeline drawn in Dallas or keyed to the evening news out of Washington. The Spirit was poured out at Pentecost for one purpose — witness, to the ends of the earth — and that work is not finished. The Lord is not pacing the floor of heaven waiting for an American preacher to tell him when to wrap up history. He is gathering a people from every nation, and he will return when that harvest is in, and not one hour before.

The end times do not need another chart. They need a church — awake, unafraid, and busy about the Master’s work until he splits the eastern sky. That is where the end of the end times begins.

David W. Virtue, DD is the founder and editor of VirtueOnline, an orthodox Anglican online news and commentary website. He writes on the culture wars as they impact the church and on Middle East issues as they have erupted in Anglican circles causing harm and distress to the state of Israel.