When the world feels more violent, more chaotic, and less predictable than we remember, it’s natural to look upward and ask why. Every news cycle brings another conflict, another disaster, another act of cruelty that seems to defy reason. We search for a pattern because a pattern implies a purpose, and purpose is easier to bear than randomness.
For those who believe in God, the question of whether this is God’s plan, touches the oldest tension in theology: the difference between what God ordains and what God allows. Most major faith traditions don’t teach that God delights in violence or creates evil. They teach that God created a world with moral freedom, and that human beings can use that freedom to build or to destroy. In this view, God’s plan is not a detailed script for every tragedy, but a larger redemptive purpose — that justice, mercy, and love will ultimately prevail, even if the path to that end runs through human failure. What we experience as chaos is not necessarily the absence of God, but the consequence of a world still wrestling with its own freedom.
That tension is why so many people ask if we are at the end of time. The language of the end is deeply woven into the Bible, particularly in Matthew 24, where Jesus says there will be wars and rumors of wars, famines and earthquakes, and in the Book of Revelation, which speaks in vivid symbols of upheaval, persecution, and final judgment. For centuries, believers have read those passages and seen their own headlines reflected back. The sense that evil is intensifying, that truth is harder to find, that nations are in distress — these are described as birth pains, signs that history is moving toward a conclusion and a renewal.
And yet history offers a sobering humility. Every generation has believed it might be the last. Christians under Roman persecution, families living through the Black Plague, those who watched two world wars consume continents — all had good reason to say, “Surely this must be the end.” They were not foolish to feel it; they were responding honestly to real suffering. Jesus himself said in Mark 13:32 that no one knows the day or hour. The prophecies were not given to feed a calendar of predictions, but to shape character — to call people to stay awake, stay faithful, and not give in to despair when things grow dark.
Whether we are near the end or simply in another hard chapter, the response faith asks for is remarkably similar. If the world is unpredictable, then we are called to be people of steady hope. If violence is intensifying, then we are called to be makers of peace in the places we can reach — our homes, our neighborhoods, our prayers. The end of time, in the biblical vision, is not ultimately about destruction but about restoration, the wiping away of tears and the setting right of what is wrong. Holding onto that promise does not answer every why, but it does tell us how we should live while we wait.
“But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive… ungrateful, unholy…” – 2 Timothy 3:1-4
Being About The Journey 