Wars and Rumours of Wars: Did Jesus Say These Were Signs?
Jesus named wars, famines, pestilences and earthquakes, and then, in the same breath, said they were not the sign. His exact words after the list are "the end is not yet". His exact words about how to react to the list are "see that ye be not troubled". That is not a countdown. It is close to the opposite of one.
Then he gave the list a name. He called these things "the beginning of sorrows", and the Greek behind "sorrows" is ōdinōn, birth pangs, the pains that open a labour rather than close it. A birth pang is a signal that a long process has started, and the plainest reading of verse 8 is that these troubles mark the beginning of the age, not the end of it. Most Christian readers, across quite different schools, agree about that much.
The passage
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. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows. Matthew 24:6-8
Three sentences, and each one does something different. The first names a category of news and tells you not to be moved by it. The second widens the category from war to famine, disease and earthquake. The third labels the whole set.
Notice what the passage does not contain. There is no instruction to count, no threshold, no comparison with previous centuries, no suggestion that the volume of these events measures anything. The instruction attached to them is behavioural: do not be troubled.
See that ye be not troubled
The Greek verb behind "be not troubled" is throeisthe, from throeo, to be alarmed or thrown into confusion. It is a rare word, and Paul uses it in 2 Thessalonians 2:2, warning the Thessalonians not to be shaken or troubled by a report that the day of the Lord had already come.
Both places have the same shape. In both, a report is circulating. In both, the apostolic instruction is to stay steady rather than to react.
That fits the context in Matthew 24 exactly. The paragraph opens at verse 4 with "take heed that no man deceive you" and warns of people coming in Christ's name to mislead many. Luke's version of the same passage adds a detail Matthew leaves out: "when ye shall hear of wars and commotions, be not terrified", and warns against those who come saying "the time draweth near" (Luke 21:8-9).
So the list of troubles arrives already wrapped in a warning about people who will read too much into it. That is part of the text, and it is usually the part left on the cutting room floor.
The word behind sorrows
The KJV's "sorrows" is a soft translation of a physical word.
Ōdin means the pain of childbirth. The plural ōdinōn in verse 8 is governed by archē, beginning, so the phrase is literally "the beginning of birth pangs". The same word family runs through the New Testament in exactly this sense. Paul says in Romans 8:22 that the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now. In 1 Thessalonians 5:3 the day of the Lord comes "as travail upon a woman with child". In Galatians 4:19 Paul says he is in labour again over the Galatians until Christ be formed in them.
The image also had a home in Jewish thought before Jesus used it. Later rabbinic writing speaks of chevlei Mashiach, the birth pangs of the Messiah, meaning a period of distress preceding the messianic age. Jesus is using a figure his hearers already possessed.
Two things follow from the metaphor, and it is worth taking both.
The first is the one that is usually missed. Labour pains begin a labour. When they start, the birth is not imminent in the sense of minutes. Something has begun that will take its own time, and the pains themselves are not the arrival.
The second is the one futurists press, and it is fair. Labour pains do increase, in frequency and in intensity, as the birth approaches. That is what the metaphor is for. Anyone who dismisses the intensification reading as a misuse of the image is being unfair to the image.
What holds the two together is verse 6. Whatever the pangs do over time, Jesus said of the specific items on this list that the end is not yet.
How each reading takes the birth pangs
| Reading | When the pangs run | What the end is not yet means |
|---|---|---|
| Preterist | The years before AD 70 | Not yet, but within a generation |
| Futurist | A future tribulation period | The list precedes the real signs |
| Historicist | Across church history | The process is long |
| Idealist | The whole age | The list never dates anything |
Preterist. The troubles named are concentrated in the decades between the discourse and the fall of Jerusalem: the famine under Claudius recorded in Acts 11:28, the year of four emperors in AD 69, the earthquake that damaged Pompeii in AD 62, the Jewish revolt itself. "The end is not yet" then means what it says on a short clock, with Matthew 24:34 setting the outer limit at one generation. That verse carries the whole reading, and it is examined in this generation shall not pass.
Futurist. The pangs belong to a future period of tribulation, and their function is to occupy the opening stretch of it. On the dispensational scheme they fill roughly the first half of Daniel's seventieth week, with the abomination of desolation at the midpoint. "The end is not yet" is then a caution against mistaking the first phase for the last.
Historicist. The pangs run the length of church history, and the interpreter's task is to map periods rather than to wait for a single episode. This was the mainstream Protestant reading for centuries.
Idealist. The pangs describe the ordinary condition of the world between the two comings. War, hunger, disease and earthquake are what this age contains, and Jesus said so in advance precisely so that Christians would not read each fresh instance as a bulletin. On this account "the end is not yet" is not a stage in a schedule at all. It is a permanent instruction.
The full set of readings, and how they combine with the three views of the millennium, is laid out in every end times view.
The habit the text is speaking to
There is an old and very understandable habit of reading the morning news alongside Matthew 24 and finding that the two match. It is not a modern failing and it is not a foolish one. Cyprian of Carthage wrote in the third century that the world was growing old. Luther expected the end in his own lifetime. The Millerites in the United States settled on 22 October 1844 and had to live through the day afterwards. The Cold War, the year 2000 and every large war since have each produced their own wave of the same reading.
What people in that habit are usually doing is taking suffering seriously, which is a decent instinct badly aimed. The text simply does not support the use it is being put to. Jesus listed the troubles and then said, of those troubles, that the end is not yet, and a few verses later he closed the door on dating altogether: "But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only" (Matthew 24:36).
Whether disasters are in fact increasing is a separate question, and a factual one, taken up in are natural disasters increasing.
What the list is for
Read as a countdown, verses 6 to 8 fail, and they fail by their own words. Read as what they claim to be, they work: a warning given in advance so that Christians living through terrible news would not be shaken by it, and would not be deceived by anyone who used it to sell them a date.
That is the first of the three signs, and its function is quite unlike the two that follow. The birth pangs are the events you are told not to read as the sign. The abomination of desolation is one recognisable event in one place. The signs in the sky are visible to everyone alive. The sequence moves from ambiguous to unmistakable, and it only makes sense taken in order.