What Are the Signs of the End Times? The Three Jesus Actually Named
Jesus was asked this exact question, and he answered it in one chapter. The signs he named are in Matthew 24, and they fall into three movements: a long stretch of troubles he calls the beginning of sorrows, a specific desecration of the holy place, and then signs in the sky that no one on earth could miss.
What most articles leave out is the second half of his answer. Jesus also said, in the same paragraph, which things are not the sign, and he refused to give a date at all. If you want to know what he taught about the end, you have to take both halves.
What he was answering
The disciples had just been told that the temple would be pulled down stone by stone. On the Mount of Olives they asked him privately when it would happen and what the sign of his coming would be. The answer runs from Matthew 24:4 to 24:51 and is usually called the Olivet Discourse.
The three signs below are a way of organising that answer, not a phrase Jesus used. Other teachers count seven signs, or twelve, or twenty. Three is the count you get if you follow the time markers in the text itself, because each movement opens with one.
| Sign | Verses | The marker in the text |
|---|---|---|
| One, the birth pangs | 24:4-14 | "the beginning of sorrows" (v 8) |
| Two, the abomination of desolation | 24:15-28 | "when ye therefore shall see" (v 15) |
| Three, the signs in the sky | 24:29-31 | "immediately after the tribulation of those days" (v 29) |
Sign one: the birth pangs
The first movement is a list: deceivers claiming to be Christ, wars and rumours of wars, nation against nation, famines, pestilences, earthquakes, then persecution, betrayal, false prophets and love growing cold, and finally the gospel preached in all the world. Then the summary.
All these are the beginning of sorrows. Matthew 24:8
"Sorrows" translates the Greek ōdin, which does not mean sorrow in general. It means the pains of childbirth. The image is deliberate and it does the interpretive work for you. Labour pains are not a random misfortune. They come in a pattern, they intensify, they get closer together, and they end in something.
That is why the list is genuinely hard to use as a countdown. Every item on it has occurred in every century since it was spoken. A woman can have contractions for hours before anything is imminent. What the image predicts is not the presence of these things but their intensification.
What Jesus said would not be a sign
This is the part the prophecy-news industry cannot use, which is probably why you rarely see it quoted.
And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. Matthew 24:6
Three instructions sit in that one verse. You will hear of wars. Do not be troubled by them. They do not mean the end has come.
He goes further a few verses later. When people say the Messiah is in the desert, or in the inner rooms, do not go out and do not believe it, because his coming will be as visible as lightning across the whole sky (24:26-27). And then the sentence that ends every calculation.
But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. Matthew 24:36
Preterists, futurists, historicists and idealists disagree about almost everything else in this chapter and agree entirely about that verse. Any teaching that produces a date is contradicting the passage it claims to be reading.
Sign two: the abomination of desolation
The second movement is different in kind. The birth pangs are a category of events. This is one event, in one place, and Jesus expects it to be recognised.
The phrase comes from Daniel, and its historical pattern is Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Seleucid king who desecrated the Jerusalem temple in 167 BC and provoked the Maccabean revolt. Jesus attaches an unusual aside, "whoso readeth, let him understand", and then gives an instruction so specific it reads like an evacuation order: those in Judaea are to flee to the mountains, the man on the housetop is not to go back inside, and they are to pray it does not fall in winter or on a sabbath.
Where readers differ is over what it points to. Luke's parallel account has "when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies" (Luke 21:20), which many take as Luke explaining the same warning in plain terms. Eusebius records that the Christians of Jerusalem left the city for Pella before the Roman siege, which looks like obedience to this instruction, although historians still debate the tradition. Futurist readers point instead to 2 Thessalonians 2:4, where a coming figure sits in the temple of God claiming to be God, and expect a still-future fulfilment.
Sign three: the signs in the sky
The third movement removes all ambiguity.
Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken: and then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven. Matthew 24:29-30
Notice the progression across the three. The birth pangs could be mistaken for ordinary history. The abomination is a single recognisable event in a single location. This one is visible to everyone alive. By the time the third sign arrives, nobody is checking a chart.
How the four readings take the list
| Reading | The birth pangs | The abomination | The signs in the sky |
|---|---|---|---|
| Preterist | Fulfilled before AD 70 | Roman armies or the Zealots in the temple, AD 66-70 | Old Testament idiom for the fall of a political order, as in Isaiah 13:10 |
| Futurist | The first half of a future seven years | A future figure in a rebuilt temple | Literal and still ahead |
| Historicist | The sweep of church history | A power in church history, usually dated 538 to 1798 | The Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the Dark Day of 1780 and the meteor storm of 1833 |
| Idealist | The permanent character of the age | Any power that profanes what is holy | The real return, described in traditional imagery |
Naming which reading a teacher holds is more useful than arguing about any single headline, because the reading decides the headline in advance.
Why matching the news never settles it
Pew Research found in November 2022 that 39 percent of Americans, and about 47 percent of US Christians, say we are living in the end times. That is a large number of people watching the same news feed and reaching opposite conclusions from the same events.
The reason is structural. Every item in sign one is permanently available. Wars, famines, earthquakes and deception are never absent, so any generation can assemble a list, and every generation has. What Jesus gave was not a checklist that produces a date. It was a sequence with a shape, plus a warning against being troubled by the early part of it, plus a flat statement that the timing is not disclosed.
Which leaves a better question than "is this it". The better question is what he actually said, in order, with the words he chose, before anyone arranged it into a system.