When asked by His disciples about the last days as they understood it (i.e., Old Testament perspective), Jesus did not say there was any one particular sign that would signal the start of last days. Instead, He said the signs of the end (i.e., wars, rumors of war, pestilence, famines, earthquakes, and false teachers) would come like birth pangs, increasing in both frequency and intensity as the time drew closer. If there were any one particular sign, it would be the convergence of all these things.
The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show His servants—things which must shortly take place. And He sent and signified it by His angel to His servant John, who bore witness to the word of God, and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, to all things that he saw. Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written in it; for the time is near. Revelation 1:1-3
Although the birth pangs serve as prophetic-markers for signaling the end of the age (i.e., the convergence), they also serve a practical purpose in desensitizing the secular world. But why would God do that? I suppose it is the same reason that Jesus routinely taught in parables and hard sayings.
Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given . . . . And in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, which says: ‘Hearing you will hear and shall not understand, and seeing you will see and not perceive, for the heart of this people has grown dull. Their ears are hard of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, lest they should understand with their heart and turn, so that I should heal them’ (Matthew 13:11,14,15).
Unwillingness on the part of the people to receive Jesus’ message of the kingdom was the reason that He taught in parables. The truths of the kingdom of God were heard by them but not understood. It was not because God was hiding the truth from them-it was because they did not want to hear. (Source)
God has given us the foreknowledge (bible prophecy) and the signs to know when He would be returning to judge the world and restore it to its intended purposes (Jer. 30:7-11). Yet, most people do not want to believe. Most people will accept any reason (aliens, meteors, pandemics, zombies, etc.) before they accept the biblical explanation for how this age ends. They are not only rejecting the repeated warnings, but they are even embracing catastrophism as the new normal (climate change).
In keeping with the 7,000-year theory (I happen to believe this without reservation), which matches God’s seven-days of Creation, God has only given the Church two-millennial days to bring as many with us as we can, before He ends this present reality. Think about it this way, it was two-thousand years (two millennial days) from Adam to Abraham. It was two-thousand years (two millennial days) from Abraham to Jesus. Depending on when we start the clock (either Christ’s birth or crucifixion); we are at two-thousand years from Jesus to the present. Remember that national Israel was not in existence for most of these last two-thousand years.
God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. He did not have to do that. He could have spoken everything into existence in a fraction of a second, and it would have been just as perfect. He used the seven-days as a model for us to live by, as well as a model for how long He would deal with mankind. Notice here, that when comparing a day to a thousand years, the Bible does not say thousands (plural), but thousand (singular).
Lastly, we have the key to our prophetic understanding. The prophet Hosea, who, speaking to the restoration of Israel, noted,
Come, and let us return to the Lord;
For He has torn, but He will heal us;
He has stricken, but He will bind us up.
After two days He will revive us;
On the third day He will raise us up,
That we may live in His sight.
Let us know,
Let us pursue the knowledge of the Lord.
His going forth is established as the morning;
He will come to us like the rain,
Like the latter and former rain to the earth Hosea 6:1-3
For He has torn, but He will heal us;
He has stricken, but He will bind us up.
After two days He will revive us;
On the third day He will raise us up,
That we may live in His sight.
Let us know,
Let us pursue the knowledge of the Lord.
His going forth is established as the morning;
He will come to us like the rain,
Like the latter and former rain to the earth Hosea 6:1-3
We are in the last moments, of the last day (the second day). We have witnessed two-thousand years of church history, the rebirth of the nation Israel, and the convergence of all the signs given to us in the Olivet Discourse, the epistles, and the Revelation have either been fulfilled, or is coming to its economic, geopolitical, and technological fulfillment. Maranatha
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