In the Last Days: What Was Paul Warning Timothy About?

There are certain passages of Scripture that Christians learn to associate almost automatically with particular ideas. Second Timothy 3:1–9 is one of them. Paul warns Timothy that “in the last days distressing times will come,” and then follows with a disturbing description of human behaviour. People will be lovers of themselves and lovers of money. They will be boastful, arrogant, abusive, ungrateful, unholy, without self-control, brutal, treacherous, reckless, conceited, and lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.

It is not difficult to read that list while watching the evening news, scrolling through social media, or simply observing changes in society and conclude that Paul must have been describing our time. I have heard some version of that conclusion for much of my Christian life. The argument usually seems straightforward: look at what Paul said people would become in the last days, look at the world around us, and the resemblance seems obvious.

But resemblance alone does not establish what a biblical writer originally meant.

Before asking whether Paul's description resembles the twenty-first century, there is a more basic question we should ask: What did Paul mean when he wrote these words to Timothy?

Closely related to that is another question: Was Paul giving a prophecy about a distant generation, or was he warning Timothy about conditions and people Timothy himself would have to face? The two possibilities are not necessarily absolute opposites. A warning can contain prediction, and Paul clearly says that “distressing times will come.” But identifying the purpose of his words matters. Was Paul giving Timothy a description of conditions that would identify the final years of world history thousands of years later? Or was he preparing Timothy for a “last days” crisis that already belonged to the world in which Timothy lived?

Paul was writing to a man he knew, a fellow worker who was dealing with real problems among real people in the first-century church. Whatever “the last days” meant to Paul, his words had to mean something to Timothy before they could mean something to us.

That leads to an even more basic question.

The Last Days of What?

When Christians today hear the expression “the last days,” many immediately think of the final years of human history immediately preceding the return of Christ. That meaning has become so familiar in some Christian traditions that it is often assumed rather than demonstrated.

But that is not the only way the New Testament uses the expression.

At Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was poured out and the disciples began speaking in other languages, Peter stood before the crowd and explained what they were witnessing:

“This is what was spoken through the prophet Joel.”

He then quoted Joel:

“In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.”

Whatever additional fulfillment someone might believe Joel's prophecy still awaits, Peter's statement should be allowed to speak plainly. He was explaining something happening in front of him. He did not say, “This resembles what Joel said would happen someday.” He said, “This is what was spoken through the prophet Joel.”

Therefore, for those gathered before him, the last days, in some meaningful biblical sense, had arrived.

The writer of Hebrews speaks similarly:

“Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.” (Hebrews 1:1–2)

The writer does not say that the last days would begin at some distant point in the future. He says that God “has spoken to us” in these last days through his Son. The coming of Christ itself marked a decisive turning point in the biblical story.

Later in the same letter, Hebrews makes the point even more explicitly. Speaking of Christ's sacrifice, the writer says:

“But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Hebrews 9:26).

Paul uses similar language when writing to the Corinthians. After recounting events from Israel's wilderness history, he explains why those events had been preserved:

“These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us, on whom the ends of the ages have come. (1 Corinthians 10:11)

Paul was not describing people who would live thousands of years after him. He included himself and his readers among those “on whom the ends of the ages have come” (1 Corinthians 10:11).

Peter speaks in much the same way. He tells his readers that Christ “was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake” (1 Peter 1:20). John can go even further and tell his readers, “Children, it is the last hour” (1 John 2:18).

Taken together, these passages establish an important starting point. The New Testament writers did not consistently use expressions such as “the last days,” “the end of the ages,” or even “the last hour” to describe a period that remained thousands of years in their future. They understood something decisive to be happening in their own time.

One common response is that the “last days” began with Christ or Pentecost and simply continue throughout the entire church age until Christ returns. On that understanding, Peter and Paul were living in the last days, but so are we nearly two thousand years later. That is certainly one way of bringing these passages together, but it should not simply be assumed. It raises an important question of its own: Were the apostles describing the beginning of a long age that would continue for thousands of years, or were they living through the closing period of one age and the dawning of another?

The New Testament does not present the transition between these ages as though someone simply turned off one light and switched on another. The new age was inaugurated in Christ, but the old order did not immediately disappear. For a time the two overlapped. The new had arrived while the old was passing away.

This is the remarkable historical position occupied by the first Christians. Christ had come, died, risen, and been exalted. The Spirit had been poured out. The new covenant had been inaugurated and the kingdom of God had broken into history. Yet Jerusalem still stood. The temple still stood. Its priests continued their service and its sacrifices continued to be offered. Jesus had pronounced judgment upon that order and declared that the temple would be destroyed, but for those living and writing before AD 70, that judgment had not yet occurred.

Hebrews captures this transition particularly well. After speaking of the new covenant, the writer says:

“In speaking of a new covenant, he has made the first one obsolete. And what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear” (Hebrews 8:13).

Notice the movement in that language. The new covenant is already a reality. The first has already been made obsolete. Yet something belonging to that old order is still “growing old” and approaching its end.

This is not merely a distinction between two theological ideas. The first Christians actually lived through that transition. They stood on one side of Christ's death, resurrection, exaltation, and the giving of the Spirit, while still living in a world in which the temple and the institutions associated with the former covenant remained visibly present.

We do not occupy that same historical position. We live after the passing away of that temple order, not during its final years. That difference matters when we encounter New Testament expressions such as “the last days,” “the end of the ages,” and “the last hour.”

It therefore becomes important not to assume in advance that “the last days” means one continuous period stretching without distinction from Pentecost to the Second Coming. Perhaps that is what a particular passage means, but it must be established from the text rather than built into the definition.

The more basic question remains: The last days of what?

Were the apostles simply announcing the beginning of an age in which Christians two thousand years later still stand in exactly the same historical sense? Or were expressions such as “the last days,” “the end of the ages,” and “the last hour” also describing the closing period of an order that was visibly passing away around them as the new creation had already begun to dawn in Christ?

That question should be answered before we assume that Paul's “last days” in 2 Timothy 3 are our days simply because we can recognize his description in the world around us.

What Did Timothy Hear When He Read This Letter?

Second Timothy was not written as a general prophecy addressed to an unknown generation in the distant future. It was a personal letter from Paul to Timothy. That does not limit its authority or relevance for later Christians, but it does establish the historical setting in which its words must first be understood.

Paul begins the chapter: “You must understand this, that in the last days distressing times will come” (2 Timothy 3:1).

If we stopped there, it would be easy to imagine Paul looking far beyond Timothy's lifetime. The language is future: distressing times “will come.”

But Paul does not stop there. After describing the people who will characterize those times, he tells Timothy: “Avoid them!” (3:5).

That is an important change. Paul has moved from what sounds like a future prediction to a direct instruction concerning people Timothy himself must avoid.

The movement becomes even clearer in the following verse: “For among them are those who make their way into households…” (3:6).

Paul does not say that people will someday begin doing this. He speaks of people who are doing it. Then, after comparing them with Jannes and Jambres, he says: “So these people, of corrupt mind and counterfeit faith, also oppose the truth” (3:8).

The progression deserves to be noticed: “will come” → “avoid them” → “among them are” → “these people.” The people Paul associates with the last days are not merely figures standing on a distant prophetic horizon. People fitting his description were already present in Timothy's world.

The preceding chapter makes this even harder to miss. Paul has already warned Timothy about arguments and false teaching. He names Hymenaeus and Philetus, whose teaching “will spread like gangrene” and who “have swerved from the truth” (2 Timothy 2:17–18). He speaks of opponents who must be corrected in the hope that God will lead them to repentance and “an escape from the snare of the devil” (2:25–26).

Then comes: “You must understand this, that in the last days distressing times will come.”

The chapter division can unintentionally hide the connection. Paul has not suddenly stopped talking about Timothy's circumstances in order to insert a prediction about people living thousands of years later. The discussion continues naturally from the problems Timothy is already confronting.

And after describing these people in 3:1–9, Paul turns directly back to Timothy:

“Now you have observed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness…” (3:10).

The contrast is immediate. These people behave and teach in one way. Timothy has seen another way modelled in Paul. A few verses later comes the practical conclusion:

“But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed” (3:14).

This gives the passage a very different emphasis from the one it sometimes receives in popular end-times discussions. Paul is not primarily giving Christians a list of social conditions by which they can calculate their position on an end-times calendar. He is warning Timothy about corrupt people and false teachers and telling him how to remain faithful in their presence.

Could This List Describe Almost Any Age?

There is another reason to be cautious about treating Paul's list as a set of identifying signs for our particular generation.

Consider what Paul actually lists. People will be lovers of themselves and lovers of money. They will boast. They will be arrogant, abusive, disobedient, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, slanderous, lacking in self-control, brutal, reckless and conceited. They will love pleasure rather than God.

Certainly these things can be found in our world. But when have they ever not been found?

That question is not meant to suggest that every society has been equally corrupt or that moral and social conditions never become better or worse. History provides plenty of examples of societies experiencing serious moral, political, institutional and social deterioration. It is also reasonable to observe that such deterioration has sometimes accompanied the decline of possibly all great civilizations and empires.

But we do not need to establish a universal historical law to make the more modest point. Nothing in Paul's list is unique to our age. Indeed, Paul himself provides evidence of this. In Romans 1 he describes people as filled with “envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness.” They are “gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful,” rebellious toward parents, faithless and heartless (Romans 1:29–31).

The resemblance to 2 Timothy 3 is difficult to miss. Yet no one needs to suppose that Romans 1 is Paul's description of twenty-first-century society. Paul was describing the human rebellion and idolatry known in his own world.

This creates a problem for one common argument. If selfishness, greed, arrogance, rebellion, brutality and pleasure-seeking were present in Paul's world and have repeatedly appeared throughout history, then finding those things in our world cannot, by itself, demonstrate that Paul was specifically describing us.

Someone may respond that these things are worse now. That may be worth discussing as a historical or sociological claim. Some things may indeed be worse in a particular society, while others may be better. But even if we could demonstrate that several of these behaviours have increased in our time, we would still have to establish that Paul intended increasing levels of those behaviours to function as a prophetic clock.

The passage itself never tells us to do that. More importantly, concentrating upon the general wickedness in verses 2–4 may cause us to overlook one of the most revealing statements in the entire passage.

Paul's description does not end with people who have rejected religion. It ends with people who still possess it.

“Holding to the Outward Form of Godliness”

Verse 5 changes the way the preceding list should be heard. These people are:

“holding to the outward form of godliness but denying its power.”

That is not an obvious description of an increasingly secular society that has abandoned belief in God. These people retain an outward form of godliness. They look religious. They possess the appearance of piety while something essential is missing beneath it.

This becomes even clearer when we continue reading. These people make their way into households. They influence others. Their victims are described as “always studying yet never able to recognize truth.” Paul says that these teachers “oppose the truth” and describes them as people “of corrupt mind and counterfeit faith.”

The setting is therefore not simply social decay. It is religious corruption.

Paul is concerned about people who can operate within a religious environment, speak about matters of faith and truth, gain followers, and maintain the appearance of godliness while their character and teaching deny the reality their profession claims.

Titus contains a remarkably close parallel: “They profess to know God, but they deny him by their actions” (Titus 1:16).

That helps us understand what denying the “power” of godliness may involve. Paul does not necessarily mean that these people verbally deny that God possesses supernatural power. The contrast is between the form of godliness and its reality. Their profession says one thing. Their lives reveal another.

Read this way, the vice list in verses 2–4 takes on additional significance. Their love of money, arrogance, lack of self-control, brutality, treachery, conceit and love of pleasure are not merely signs that society is becoming wicked. They expose the emptiness of the godliness these people profess.

The problem is not that they have no religion. The problem is that their religion has become a shell.

That should cause us to look more closely at the example Paul chooses next.

Why Jannes and Jambres?

Paul writes: “As Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these people, of corrupt mind and counterfeit faith, also oppose the truth” (2 Timothy 3:8).

The names Jannes and Jambres do not appear in the Exodus account itself, but Jewish tradition associated them with the Egyptian magicians who opposed Moses before Pharaoh.

Paul could have chosen many biblical examples of wickedness. He could have pointed to Sodom. He could have mentioned one of Israel's notoriously wicked kings. Instead, he chooses figures associated with counterfeit opposition to God's authentic work.

That is significant. When Moses and Aaron appeared before Pharaoh, the Egyptian magicians were initially able to imitate some of the signs they performed. Something resembling God's work appeared alongside God's genuine work. For a time, the counterfeit could appear impressive. But it could not continue indefinitely.

Eventually the magicians reached the limits of what they could imitate, and their inability became apparent. That makes Paul's next statement especially fitting:

“But they will not make much progress because, as in the case of those two men, their folly will become plain to everyone” (2 Timothy 3:9).

The comparison is not merely between good people and bad people. It is between truth and counterfeit, between God's genuine work and those who present something resembling it while actually opposing it. This brings Paul's warning remarkably close to another first-century warning about religious appearance and inward corruption.

Jesus Had Described Something Remarkably Similar

Matthew 23 contains one of Jesus' strongest denunciations of the religious leadership of his generation. Again and again, the contrast is between what appears outwardly and what actually exists within.

In addressing the crowd, Jesus said that the outside of the cup is clean while the inside is filled with greed and self-indulgence. He said the tomb appears beautiful on the outside while death lies within, and that people appear righteous to others while inwardly they are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness.

The problem he was addressing wasn’t an absence of religion. These are deeply religious people. They possess Scripture, religious institutions, traditions, teachers, ceremonies and public demonstrations of devotion. Yet Jesus said that the outward form conceals something profoundly wrong. The similarity to Paul's “form of godliness” should at least get our attention.

There is another important feature of Matthew 23. Jesus did not leave the timing of the coming judgment undefined. After describing a long history of rejecting God's messengers, he tells his hearers:

“Truly I tell you, all this will come upon this generation” (Matthew 23:36).

Then comes his lament:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!”

The following chapter begins with Jesus leaving the temple and announcing its coming destruction.

Paul's warning belongs to the same first-century world in which Jesus had condemned outward religious faithfulness concealing inward corruption, warned of opposition to God's messengers, and announced judgment upon the existing religious order.

Against that background, Paul's language about “the last days,” counterfeit faith, outward godliness, and opposition to the truth does not sound strangely out of place.

It sounds remarkably at home.

But Can We Really Know?

At this point another response sometimes appears: “But we can't really know what Paul meant.” There are certainly details about this passage that remain open to discussion, and responsible interpretation should acknowledge them. But that does not mean the passage itself is so uncertain that nothing definite can be said.

“We can't really know” can sound appropriately humble while actually avoiding the evidence in front of us. Paul was not writing a cryptic message intended primarily for Christians living thousands of years later. He was writing a letter to Timothy, a real coworker facing real problems in real churches. Paul expected his words to communicate something Timothy could understand and act upon. If our interpretation makes Paul's warning largely unintelligible or irrelevant to Timothy but remarkably specific to us, we should at least ask whether we have begun reading ourselves into the passage.

The text gives us considerable help. Paul begins by saying that “in the last days distressing times will come.” Yet only a few sentences later he tells Timothy, “Avoid them!” He then speaks of people who “make their way into households” and refers to “these people” who presently oppose the truth. The people who characterize Paul's “last days” are not merely distant figures on a prophetic horizon. Timothy is already encountering people of precisely this kind.

That does not answer every question about what Paul meant by “the last days,” but it answers more than “we can't really know” allows. Whatever else Paul may have believed about the future, he understood the conditions he was describing to have direct relevance to Timothy's own time.

This is where appeals to uncertainty can become a problem. If someone begins with the assumption that “the last days” must mean the final years before Christ's return, evidence that Paul and other New Testament writers regarded themselves as already living in the last days creates an obvious difficulty. One response is to reconsider the original assumption. Another is to say that the prophecy may have had an initial first-century application but awaits its real or complete fulfillment at the end of history. And when that becomes difficult to demonstrate from the passage itself, the discussion can retreat still further to, “We simply can't know.”

But uncertainty should not be used to make an interpretation immune to contrary evidence. If evidence can establish an interpretation, evidence must also be allowed to challenge it. An interpretation that becomes definite when the text appears to support it but suddenly becomes unknowable when the text points elsewhere is not being treated by the same standard in both directions.

The better question is not, “Can we know everything Paul had in mind?” Of course we cannot. The better question is, “What does the evidence in the letter allow us reasonably to know?”

Quite a bit, as it turns out.

We know Paul was writing to Timothy. We know Timothy was expected to respond to the warning. We know Paul moved from what would happen “in the last days” to people Timothy was presently instructed to avoid. We know those people were already entering households, influencing others, opposing the truth, and presenting a counterfeit form of faith. And we know that elsewhere the New Testament writers could speak of their own period as “the last days,” “the end of the ages,” and the time upon which “the ends of the ages have come.”

None of that requires us to pretend that every interpretive question has been settled. But neither should responsible caution be confused with interpretive paralysis. Sometimes we genuinely cannot know. Sometimes we can know enough to recognize that a familiar interpretation has serious difficulties. The task of interpretation is to tell the difference.

So Was Paul Talking About AD 70?

This brings us to a question that naturally arises from everything considered so far. If the New Testament writers believed themselves to be living in the last days, and if Jesus had announced judgment upon Jerusalem and the temple within that generation, was Paul specifically talking about the events leading to AD 70?

Here again, we should allow the evidence to determine how far we go.

AD 70 belongs to the historical world in which Paul's language must be understood. Jesus had announced judgment upon Jerusalem and its temple. The earliest Christians lived during the final decades of that temple order. At the same time, the gospel announced that Israel's Messiah had come, the new covenant had been inaugurated, the Spirit had been given, and God's kingdom had broken into history.

Jesus had announced judgment upon Jerusalem and its temple. The earliest Christians lived during the final decades of that temple order. At the same time, the gospel announced that Israel's Messiah had come, the new covenant had been inaugurated, the Spirit had been given, and God's kingdom had broken into history.

That creates an important distinction. The question need not be whether 2 Timothy 3 predicts AD 70.

The better question is whether the approaching end of the old covenant temple order helps us understand why first-century Christians could speak naturally of themselves as living in “the last days.”

There is good reason to take that possibility seriously. The destruction of Jerusalem did not bring history to an end. The earth continued. The gospel continued to spread. The church continued its mission among the nations. But an age really did end.

The temple that had stood at the center of Israel's covenant life was destroyed. Its sacrifices ceased. Its priestly service ceased. The political and religious world centered upon that sanctuary underwent a catastrophic judgment of exactly the kind Jesus had warned would come upon his generation.

From that perspective, asking “the last days of what?” becomes essential.

If we automatically hear “the last days” as “the final days of planet Earth,” we may miss the redemptive-historical transition the New Testament writers believed was already taking place around them.

Second Timothy 3 does not require us to identify every feature of Paul's warning with AD 70. But neither does it require us to transport Paul's warning thousands of years into the future before it can properly be called a “last days” passage.

Paul and Timothy were already living in the last days.

The Warning Still Belongs to Us

None of this makes Paul's warning irrelevant to Christians living today. It may actually make it more relevant.

If we read 2 Timothy 3 primarily as a prediction of society shortly before the Second Coming, the passage encourages us to look outward. We examine the surrounding culture. We notice selfishness, greed, rebellion, sexual excess, brutality, arrogance and pleasure-seeking. Then we compare the world around us with Paul's list and conclude that prophecy is being fulfilled before our eyes.

But Paul directs Timothy's attention somewhere much closer.

His greatest concern is not simply with people who have rejected God. It is with people who maintain “the outward form of godliness” while denying its reality.

That warning cannot safely be confined to someone else's generation.

It asks Christians in every generation to examine the relationship between what we profess and what our lives actually reveal. Religious language is not enough. Correct appearances are not enough. Belonging to the right religious community is not enough. Even teaching and learning about spiritual things are not enough if we can be “always studying yet never able to recognize truth.”

The warning becomes particularly uncomfortable when we remember that the people Paul describes apparently do not recognize themselves as the counterfeit. They possess a form of godliness. They operate among religious people. They influence others. They speak about truth.

The danger, therefore, is not merely that the world might become increasingly worldly. It is that God's people can become very skilled at maintaining the appearance of faithfulness while resisting the transforming reality to which that appearance is supposed to point.

That danger existed in Jesus' generation. It existed in Timothy's generation. And it exists in ours. Perhaps, then, the most important question raised by 2 Timothy 3 is not, “Does this prove that we are living in earth's final days?”

The New Testament had already declared the arrival of the last days long before we were born. The more searching question is the one Paul's warning places before every generation of Christians:

Do we merely possess the form of godliness, or has the truth we profess actually been allowed to exercise its power in us?