What signs precede Christ’s return?

Question 10073.

What signs precede Christ’s return? The answer depends entirely on which return you mean, and that is not a piece of clever footwork. Scripture describes the Lord coming for His people and coming with His people, and the two events are given very different treatment.

For the Second Coming in glory, Scripture supplies a substantial list of signs. For the Rapture of the Church, it supplies none whatever, which is precisely why we are told to expect it at any moment.

Two comings, two sets of expectations

When Jesus comes for His Church, believers are caught up to meet Him in the air and taken to the Father’s house. When He comes with His Church, He descends to the Mount of Olives, destroys the armies gathered against Jerusalem and begins His reign.

The difference is not a modern invention; it comes from the texts themselves. One is described as a mystery revealed to Paul, a change in the twinkling of an eye. The other was described by the prophets centuries before and is visible to every eye on earth.

That distinction governs the whole question of signs. My answer on the difference between the rapture and the Second Coming works through it in detail, and unless it is held clearly, the New Testament’s instructions about watching become contradictory.

So when someone asks what signs precede Christ’s return, my first response is to ask which stage of His coming they have in mind. Sorting that out solves most of the confusion before we open a single prophecy.

The New Testament word for the coming is parousia, which means presence or arrival, and was used of a royal visit to a city. It covers both stages of His coming, which is one reason careful attention to context is needed.

The signs Jesus gave before Christ’s return

The disciples asked for the sign of His coming and of the close of the age, and He answered at length. False messiahs who deceive many. Wars and rumours of wars. Nation rising against nation. Famines and earthquakes in various places. Then He says, “All these are but the beginning of the birth pains” (Matthew 24:8).

The list continues with persecution, betrayal, false prophets, lawlessness increasing and love growing cold, and the gospel of the kingdom proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations. Then comes the hinge: the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place.

After that Jesus describes unparalleled distress, cosmic disturbance, and finally “the sign of the Son of Man” appearing in heaven, with all the tribes of the earth mourning as they see Him coming on the clouds with power and great glory.

These are signs that precede Christ’s return in glory, and most of them cluster in the second half of the seventieth week of Daniel. They are specific, sequential and unmistakable when they happen.

Luke adds distress of nations in perplexity, people fainting with fear and foreboding of what is coming on the world, and the powers of the heavens shaken. Taken together the signs of Christ’s return in glory cover the political, the natural and the cosmic, so that no observer could mistake them for an ordinary bad decade.

Signs of the season, not of the date

Jesus adds the parable of the fig tree. When its branch becomes tender and puts out leaves, you know summer is near. In the same way, when the generation that sees these things sees them, they will know that He is near, at the very gates.

That is instructive. The signs indicate proximity, not appointment. Nobody watching a fig tree can name the first day of summer, but nobody watching it mistakes June for January either. Signs give a season.

Immediately afterwards Jesus says, “But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.” Whatever the signs do, they do not produce a date, and anyone who extracts one has misused them. I say more in my answer on why date-setting is wrong.

This is where a great deal of prophecy teaching has come unstuck. The signs preceding Christ’s return were given so that those living through the tribulation would recognise where they stood, not so that we could run a countdown from our armchairs.

The moral and spiritual signs

Paul gives Timothy a different kind of list: “in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy” (2 Timothy 3:1-2), and the catalogue runs on to those “having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power.”

Peter adds that scoffers will come, following their own sinful desires, saying, “Where is the promise of his coming?” The mockery of the doctrine turns out to be one of the evidences for it, which is a rather neat arrangement.

Paul also warns of a departure from the faith, with people devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, and of a time when men will not endure sound teaching but accumulate teachers to suit their own passions.

Every generation has recognised itself in those descriptions, and I think that is deliberate. These are characteristics of the whole period between the two comings, intensifying towards the end.

What I would not do is treat moral decline as a calculable indicator. Every century has had its commentators announcing that things have never been worse, and the eighteenth century said it as loudly as ours does. These are characteristics of the age rather than measurements of its remaining length before Christ’s return.

The Rapture has no signs at all

Here is the point that changes everything. Not one passage about the Rapture attaches a precondition to it. Paul tells the Corinthians it will happen in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, and gives no prior indicators.

The instructions attached to it are equally telling. Titus 2:13 tells us to be “waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ.” Waiting, not calculating. Paul tells the Philippians that our citizenship is in heaven, “and from it we await a Saviour.”

If a series of signs had to occur before the Church was taken, then the early Christians who expected the Lord in their lifetime were mistaken, and the New Testament writers were mistaken to encourage them. I do not believe they were.

So the honest answer to what signs precede Christ’s return for His Church is that there are none. My answer on imminence explains the difference this makes to daily discipleship.

Then why do things look so relevant now?

Because the stage can be set long before the play begins. The regathering of Jewish people to their land, the technological capacity for global commerce and surveillance, the reach of media that could show one event to every eye at once, all of these make the tribulation scenario intelligible in a way it was not for earlier generations.

That is genuinely interesting, and I do not despise it. What I refuse to do is turn it into arithmetic. The signs belong to the period after the Church is removed, so what we may be seeing is the shadow of coming events rather than the events themselves.

It helps to remember how often confident identifications have collapsed. Napoleon, the Kaiser, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Kissinger and a long line of others have all been nominated by people who were certain, and all of them are dead.

The signs that precede Christ’s return in glory will be unmistakable to those who see them. They will not need a paperback to explain them.

What Jesus told us to do about it

His own application is repeated and simple. “Therefore, stay awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” (Matthew 24:42). Then the parable of the faithful servant found doing his master’s work, and the wise virgins with oil in their lamps.

Notice what watchfulness looks like in those stories. It is not scanning the horizon. It is feeding the household, keeping the lamp trimmed, trading with the master’s money. Readiness is faithfulness at your post.

John draws the same conclusion. “Everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.” The doctrine of Christ’s return is a sanctifying doctrine, and if a person’s prophecy interest is not making them holier, something has gone wrong with the way they are holding it.

That is the test I apply to my own study, and it is a searching one.

He also warned against the opposite error, the servant who says in his heart, “My master is delayed,” and begins to beat his fellow servants. Losing interest in Christ’s return is as dangerous as obsessing over its date, and considerably more common in the churches I know.

So, now what?

Read Matthew 24 and 25 as one unit and notice that the teaching about signs is followed by three parables about being ready. Jesus spends more time on readiness than on chronology, and our attention should probably be distributed the same way.

And settle the personal question. If the Lord came for His people in the next hour, with no sign given and no warning issued, would that be your blessed hope or your worst moment? What would you want to be doing when He arrives?

“Therefore, stay awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

Matthew 24:42, ESV