[The mini-article below is excerpted from Chapter 2, entitled “The Structure & Interpretation of the Book of Revelation”, in my free eBook “The Essential Apocalypse — Making Sense of the Book of Revelation”. Download details are at the foot of the article]

PEOPLE OFTEN ASK ME: “Are we now living in the Endtimes?” So, at this point in this book, while we look at the structure of the Book of Revelation, a few words need to be said about some important terminology regarding timescales during this age. When people speak about the ‘Endtimes’, they are usually referring to the final approach to the end of this age and the very end of this world itself.

It first has to be said that this world in its current material format has, in a sense, been ‘ending’ ever since its creation. The very first words of the Bible, “In the beginning”, carry the implication that there will be an end. Most certainly, this world has been ‘ending’ since the Fall of humanity, for it is a finite world and was created that way deliberately. The Creator was not taken by surprise by the fall of angels or the subsequent fall of humanity. [For a deeper and more detailed explanation about this subject, please see the ‘Excursus on the Whole Arc of God’s Creation’ in §1 of chapter 10]. For God sees the end from the beginning and knew all that would happen and had therefore already ‘arranged’ for the solution from the very beginning — namely, the Christ, who is foreshadowed in a subtle prophecy in the Book of Genesis, chapter 3, verse 15 — for which the world had to wait until exactly the right moment, which came a couple of thousand years ago.

We need to remember that God is always an infinite number of steps ahead of anything that fallen angels or narcissistic humans can do or anticipate — something which so many of these humans never seem to realize! By the way, I say, “so many humans” and not angels because there is no salvation for fallen angels for their doom is fixed. In fact, as the Christ Himself said, “eternal fire” was originally prepared for Satan and his fellow-fallen angels (Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, verse 41), presumably even before the human creation. Thus, one can say that the ending of this world is a process which deepens in intensity with the passing of time and then climaxes as the very end draws near, and that the drawing near of the very end is what we can call the Endtimes.

One of the key trigger-points in this overall process leading to the end of this present world was the ascension of Christ nearly two-thousand years ago. The moment that had happened, the world entered what is known as ‘the last hour’ or ‘the last days’ (the terms are interchangeable) in its ending process. It is important to realize this because there are many who think that the phrases ‘the last days’ and ‘the last hour’ are identical to what is known as the ‘Endtimes’. Here I must emphasize that this is not the case at all, and it is an important distinction to make. So let us go into this more deeply to improve our understanding.

Towards the end of the very first century AD, John could write in his first letter: “Children, it is the last hour, and just as you heard that the Antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have appeared. We know from this that it is the last hour” (First Letter of John, chapter 2, verse 18). So, in John’s day, the Antichrist was a future figure to come, though many ‘mini-antichrists’ (so to speak) had plainly already appeared by then and would continue to appear until the ultimate manifestation of the ‘spirit of the Antichrist’, which will be the actual Antichrist, comes on the scene near the end of the age. These ‘mini-antichrists’ are standout forerunners in history, each in their own ways and in their own times representing ‘the spirit of the Antichrist’, which the apostle John mentions in the fourth chapter of his first letter, about which I shall have much more to say in chapter 6 below.

You will see that John mentions in the verse quoted above what he calls “the last hour”, which he says is shown by the appearance of all these ‘mini-antichrists’. Even though it might seem to be otherwise because of the brevity of the word “hour”, ‘the last hour’ is a symbolic expression which refers to the whole time period from the ascension of Christ until the end of the age (which will be heralded by the revealing of the Antichrist, who will quickly be overcome by the Christ at His return). That is why it was already ‘the last hour’ when John wrote his first letter. It is most important to grasp this, because within that phrase is the implicit recognition that we are now in the build-up to the end of the age and have so far been for almost two-thousand years (though we are still not yet in the Endtimes). In heavenly terms, the period of time between Christ’s ascension and His second coming is but a symbolic ‘hour’. The very last hour, in fact. But that is very different to the Endtimes. So, the ‘last hour’ is another way of describing the Age of the Ekklesia — the Church Age.

Just to confuse matters (and we’ve only just started with these synonyms for ‘the last hour’!), the time period known as ‘the last hour’ is also known as ‘the last days’. All of it. We know this because the Letter to the Hebrews clearly states: “In these last days God has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, and through whom He made the aeons” (Letter to the Hebrews, chapter 1, verse 2). James, who was likely the same James as the brother of Jesus, also uses the same term when he accuses the brethren of being materialistic and of having “hoarded up treasure in the last days” (Letter of James, chapter 5, verse 3.). So, they were ‘the last days’ when those letters were written in AD 64 and AD 65-85 respectively, and these must also therefore plainly be ‘the last days’ in which we are now living. The apostle Peter also used the term, ‘the last days’, when he quoted the prophet Joel regarding Christ’s post-ascension outpouring of the Holy Spirit (Acts of the Apostles, chapter 2, verse 17).

This same period of time known as ‘the last hour’ or ‘the last days’ was also known as “the last time” (Letter of Jude, verse 18), and “these last times” (First Letter of Peter, chapter 1, verse 20). We still live now in the same ‘last hour’ in which John said he was living. The ‘last hour’ or ‘last days’ or ‘these last times’ are what we are living in right now and we have been doing so for almost the past two thousand years! Therefore, all these expressions involving ‘lastness’ are not reserved for the ‘Endtimes’, which is what so many seem to assume. They in fact cover the entire span of time since the ascension of the Christ and will continue until He cataclysmically comes again. These ‘last days’ (of which, since Christ’s ascension, there have so far been around three-quarters of a million days!) will come to a climax in the revealing of the satanically-inspired Antichrist heading up a global government, which I will go into in much more detail in chapter 6 below, when we look at chapters 12-14 of the Book of Revelation. That coming of the Antichrist — which is called a “parousia” just like it is called when referring to second coming of the real Christ (Second Letter to the Thessalonians, chapter 2, verses 8-9) — which will have been inaugurated through the taking away of the divinely-appointed (presumably angelic) restraint, will mark the start of the Endtimes and herald the great tribulation which will be visited especially upon the Ekklesia.

As we will come to see when I open it up in the appropriate places, ‘the last days’ — the whole period of time from the ascension of Christ until His cataclysmic return at the end of this age — also goes under four specific symbolic terms in various places in the Book of Revelation. These are: “a time and times and half a time”, and “forty-two months”, and “1,260 days”, and “three and a half years”. It can easily be shown (and I will deliberately do that as we go through the Book of Revelation) that these all refer symbolically to the same period of time as the ‘last hour’/the ‘last days’ which is the period of time between Christ’s ascension and the end of this age, the Age of the Ekklesia, which is what the Book of Revelation is busying itself to reveal. The fact that these terms have been taken literally by so many rather than symbolically has created a huge stumbling-block in interpreting the Book of Revelation. I will be going into this in much more detail in chapters 5 and 6 below when looking at chapters 11-14 of the Book of Revelation, where these terms are mentioned.

This period of ‘the last hour’ or ‘last days’ — from the ascension of Christ until the end of this age — is what the Book of Revelation is revealing the truth about in six vignettes which occur between chapters 4 and 20 in The Book. Each vignette (which are not given chronologically but are really to be taken as being in parallel, as I stressed in the previous section) is revealing some different aspects of that time period, in increasing intensity.

Thus, those last two thousand years or so, and however much longer this age has yet to run, involve what can only be described as a lengthy ‘mopping-up operation’ on the battlefield of this world in which the faithful ones are called into the kingdom of Light of the Christ, and there is not a single thing that Satan can do about it. In fact, that concept of being “called” is what lies behind the full meaning of the Greek word ekklesia, which is commonly translated as ‘church’. Ekklesia is a compound of two words which literally mean ‘the called-out ones’: Called by Christ out of the pretended empire of Satan, ‘Babylon’, into the kingdom of God. Souls are being plundered, so to speak, from out of Satan’s grasp as the effects of Christ’s ascension victory reverberate across the globe and down the centuries.

Because those ‘plundered’ souls might wonder why there is still a maelstrom of satanic evil on earth, despite Christ’s victorious ascension, the Book of Revelation has been gifted to us because it pulls back a curtain giving us glimpses into the workings of heaven and the assurance that Christ and His angels never cease acting on behalf of the Ekklesia, not to mention that it also shows how the story will end in no uncertain terms! That, my friends, is what apocalypse is really all about. Revelation: The curtain being pulled back — the veil being lifted — to reveal the truth about Christ’s ceaseless work during ‘the last days’, which is the countdown to the end of this evil age, which will then become the ‘Endtimes’. So, just to be clear, we are not yet living in the Endtimes, but we are certainly in ‘the last days’ and the end of those ‘last days’ is always drawing nearer.

Thus, when one sees it like this, with each of these parallel six vignettes representing different facets of the exercise of the Christ’s kingship over the earth in the time-period since His ascension, which are the ‘last days’ (as I will show in the next section of this chapter), and how He is waging the battle against the forces of darkness, which will culminate in the Endtimes battle of Armageddon — which is not an actual physical battle but is the symbol of the climax of a global spiritual war against the true Ekklesia of disciples of the Christ which will trigger the sudden return of that Christ, as we will see in chapter 6 below — one is simply letting the Book of Revelation speak for itself in the most natural way possible. In this way, each vignette increasingly sheds light on the key events of this age — from the ascension to the end of it — right through until we reach the unnecessarily controversial chapter 20 of The Book, after which there is a two-chapter epilogue depicting the new heaven and new earth in the new aeon.

In the following nine chapters, we will open up the eight portions of the Book — Prologue, six Vignettes and Epilogue — to discern what they are revealing to us and what they should mean for us in our own time.

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[The above mini-article is excerpted from Chapter 2, entitled “The Structure & Interpretation of the Book of Revelation”, in my free eBook “The Essential Apocalypse — Making Sense of the Book of Revelation”, which is available here in v.2.1: https://diakrisis-project.com/2025/03/12/second-edition-of-the-essential-apocalypse-is-now-available-as-an-e-book-in-pdf-format/ ]

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© Copyright, Alan Morrison, 2023
[The copyright on my works is merely to protect them from any wanton plagiarism which could result in undesirable changes (as has actually happened!). Readers are free to reproduce my work, so long as it is in the same format and with the exact same content and its origin is acknowledged]