Last Days

The last days are the culminating era of history preceding the Savior’s return, an era scripture describes simultaneously as a season of upheaval and a season of gathering. The Hebrew phrase be’acharit hayamim, “in the latter part of the days,” carries less finality than its English rendering implies, since ‘acharit denotes what comes afterward, an outcome as much as a terminus. Isaiah’s most celebrated use of the phrase is architectural: “in the last days, … the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, … and all nations shall flow unto it” (Isaiah 2:2). Popular imagination has fixed upon fire, plague, and collapse, yet the prophet’s first image of the end is a temple drawing the nations upward.

An Era Already Begun

When the Spirit fell upon the disciples at Pentecost, Peter explained the event by quoting Joel with one telling modification. Where Joel had written “afterward,” Peter declared, “in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh” (Acts 2:17). The apostles thus understood themselves to be living already within the final era, and the Greek eschatai hēmerai in Peter’s mouth names a present condition. The same prophecy returned in 1823, when Moroni quoted Joel to the young Joseph Smith and stated that it “was not yet fulfilled, but was soon to be” (Joseph Smith⁠—History 1:41). Latter-day Saints, whose very name locates them within this era, have accordingly read the last days as a dispensation of outpouring, in which revelation and spiritual gifts are distributed with unprecedented breadth.

Paul warned Timothy that “in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud” (2 Timothy 3:1-2). The catalogue that follows runs for several verses and contains no earthquakes or falling stars, for Paul locates the peril of the era chiefly in human disposition. Daniel’s vision, by contrast, closes with a sealed book and the prophecy that “many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased” (Daniel 12:4). Latter-day Saint speakers have frequently heard in this verse a forecast of rapid travel and scientific discovery, while many Hebrew scholars connect it with the anxious searching for the word of the Lord that Amos describes. Both readings converge on an age of intense and restless seeking.

The Fulness of Times

Joseph Smith described the present dispensation as the moment when “a whole and complete and perfect union, and welding together of dispensations, and keys, and powers, and glories should take place” (D&C 128:18). The last days, in this view, gather into one era everything that earlier ages received in part, and the gathering of Israel becomes the outward form of that inward consolidation. Joseph taught that the main object of gathering the people of God in any age was “to build unto the Lord a house” in which the ordinances of exaltation could be revealed. The Prophet’s account thus brings the reader back to Isaiah’s mountain, where the nations flow toward a temple raised in the closing era of history.

The pattern is typological as well as historical. Ancient Near Eastern tradition placed Eden upon a mountain, and Isaiah’s exalted mountain of the Lord’s house recapitulates that primordial summit at the end of history, completing the circuit from garden to temple. The Restoration states the correspondence plainly in its tenth article of faith, affirming “that the earth will be renewed and receive its paradisiacal glory” (Articles of Faith 1:10). The last days, read in this light, constitute the season in which the conditions of Eden are recovered by deliberate effort, as a people builds a house, gathers its scattered kindred, and prepares an earth fit to be renewed.

Apocalypse and Singularity

Secular culture has produced eschatologies of its own. Ray Kurzweil anticipates a technological Singularity in which human and machine intelligence merge, while critics have derided such hopes as “the rapture of the nerds.” Others foresee catastrophe; the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord has estimated the probability of an existential catastrophe within this century at roughly one in six, citing engineered pandemics and unaligned artificial intelligence as the gravest risks. Each vision mirrors a temptation familiar from religious eschatology: fatalism, which treats prophesied calamity as a reason to withdraw, and millennial presumption, which expects deliverance to arrive without the moral preparation scripture requires.

Hedcut illustration of In Restoration teaching, the last days call for moral preparation and constructive work rather than fatalism—because the “perils” are chiefly vices of character (2 Timothy 3:1-2). — In Restoration teaching, the last days call for moral preparation and constructive work rather than fatalism⁠—because the “perils” are chiefly vices of character (2 Timothy 3:1-2).

Restoration eschatology rejects both temptations by assigning the last days a constructive task. The perils Paul enumerates are vices of character, and their remedy lies in the formation of a people capable of wielding increased knowledge without succumbing to covetousness and pride. Mormon transhumanists accordingly regard the mitigation of existential risk as participation in the work of the last days, consistent with the counsel to prepare. The mountain of the Lord’s house stands at the end of Isaiah’s vision as a structure that must be built, and the nations who flow toward it arrive there by their own effort and by the drawing power of God, carrying whatever knowledge and power the latter days have placed in their hands.