I Watched an End Times Documentary So You Don't Have To (Or Maybe So You Will)
I found this one on streaming. Stumbled across it the way you stumble across anything at that hour of the night when you're not quite ready to sleep and the algorithm hands you something that sounds just interesting enough. The title was The End Times—How Close Are We? and I clicked it thinking I'd watch twenty minutes and then move on. I watched the whole thing.
I am not a scholar. I don't have a theology degree hanging on my wall. I read my Bible and I think hard about what it says, and sometimes I read people who are smarter than me and see if they help. That's the full extent of my credentials, and I think that's worth saying upfront, because this documentary is full of people with impressive titles and long lists of books, and if you're watching without your thinking cap on, those titles can start to feel like proof. They're not always proof. Sometimes they're just a long list of books.
So here's my honest, non-scholar take.
The documentary is hosted by Dr. Randall Price, who actually does have real credentials—a doctorate in Middle Eastern Studies, years of archaeological work in Israel, and a serious academic career. When he's talking about the physical history of Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, or the Dead Sea Scrolls, he's working in his lane and he's worth listening to. The film covers the usual ground you'd expect from this kind of production: the nation of Israel being reborn in 1948, the coming Antichrist, the Tribulation, the Rapture, the Battle of Armageddon, and then a new heaven and a new earth. If you grew up in any kind of evangelical church in the last fifty years, you've heard most of this before.
And a lot of it is genuinely worth thinking about. The book of Daniel really does contain one of the most remarkable prophetic passages in all of Scripture—the 70 Weeks prophecy—and serious Bible students have wrestled with it for centuries. The Antichrist really is described across multiple books of the Bible, and Jesus really did tell His disciples to watch for signs. The Apostle Paul really did write about believers being "caught up" to meet the Lord in the air, and that passage in 1 Thessalonians 4 is as vivid and real as anything in the New Testament. These are not the inventions of nervous churchgoers. These are the actual words of the Bible, and they deserve serious attention.
The documentary handles that material with reasonable care in most places. Where it starts to wobble is when it moves from what the Bible says to what specific headlines mean, and where it comes completely off the rails is in one particular segment about the Great Pyramid of Egypt — but I'll get to that.
There's a section of the film where several contributors argue that major American disasters—Hurricane Andrew, the Northridge earthquake in California, and Hurricane Katrina—happened at the exact same time that U.S. presidents were pressuring Israel to give up land. The argument is that these weren't coincidences. That God was sending a message.
I want to be careful here, because I believe God can and does work through history. I believe His hand is over the nations. I believe the promises He made to Israel are real and that they matter. But there's a difference between believing all of that and claiming that you can look at a hurricane's landfall date on a calendar and tell people it was direct judgment for a specific diplomatic meeting. The Bible actually has a name for people who do that without being sent by God to do it—it calls them false prophets. The standard in the Old Testament was 100 percent accuracy. Not "interesting coincidence" accuracy. Not "you have to admit the timing is suspicious" accuracy. One hundred percent. And these men are not claiming to be prophets. They're just noting parallels. But "noting parallels" between bad weather and political events is something that can be done with almost any two events in history if you look hard enough. It doesn't require God to explain it. It just requires selective attention. If you want to dig into what the Bible actually says about judging nations, start with Zechariah and Joel—the film even mentions them. Read those books for yourself and see what you think God is actually communicating.
The film also spends a lot of time on the question of when the Rapture will happen—before the Tribulation, in the middle of it, or after. I appreciated that the documentary at least admitted that serious scholars disagree on this. What it doesn't tell you is that the idea of a rapture happening before the Tribulation as a separate event from Christ's Second Coming is actually a fairly recent idea—it became popular in the 1830s through a man named John Nelson Darby and didn't exist in church teaching before that. That's not a reason to automatically reject it. New light on Scripture is possible. But it does mean that when someone presents the pre-Tribulation rapture as the obvious, natural reading of the Bible that all Christians have always believed, they're not being entirely straight with you. Generations of Christians read those same texts and came to different conclusions. That's worth knowing. Look up the different views—pre-trib, mid-trib, post-trib—and read the actual Bible passages each side uses. It's a genuine and important conversation, and you're allowed to think for yourself.
Now. The Great Pyramid.
There is a segment of this film featuring a man named Patrick Heron, who wrote a book called The Nephilim and the Pyramid of the Apocalypse. The documentary presents him as an expert. His background is in business. He has a business degree from Trinity College Dublin. He later received an honorary doctorate from a small unaccredited school — and that honorary doctorate was based on the very book this film is citing him as an expert about. That's a little like someone giving you a trophy for winning a race that they designed the trophy for before the race started.
His argument goes like this: there's a verse in Isaiah 19 that mentions an altar to the Lord in the middle of Egypt and a pillar at the border. He says the Great Pyramid is the only thing that fits this description because, depending on how you count the ancient borders, it sits at a place that could be called both the center and the edge of the land. From there he argues that the Nephilim—the mysterious figures mentioned in Genesis 6—were actually fallen angels who built the pyramids as a kind of prideful copy of the heavenly city of God. And then he connects the pyramid's shape to the dimensions of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21.
I'm not a scholar, but I can read. Isaiah 19 is about Egypt turning to God. The "altar" in that passage is almost certainly talking about a place of worship—a community of believers—not a limestone monument. The connection to the Great Pyramid requires you to stack speculation on top of speculation on top of a very loose reading of ancient geography. And the claim that the Nephilim built the pyramids has no support in the Bible, no support in archaeology, and no support in any serious historical study of ancient Egypt. This is the kind of material you'd find on a late-night cable show about ancient aliens, and it does not belong in the same conversation as the book of Daniel or the letters of Paul.
If you want to understand the Nephilim, start in Genesis 6 and read the text carefully. Read what it says and what it doesn't say. There's genuinely mysterious and fascinating material there without needing to bring in pyramid engineering. The Bible is interesting enough on its own.
There is one contributor in this film who stands out as genuinely worth listening to across the board—a theologian named Dr. Sung Wook Chung, who holds a doctorate in systematic theology from Oxford University and teaches at Denver Seminary. His comments in the film are measured and careful in a way that some of his fellow contributors are not. He doesn't overreach. He doesn't claim more than the text supports. If you want to follow up on any of the theological ideas in this documentary, finding work by someone with his kind of training and carefulness is the direction to go.
The film also includes a real scientist named Duncan Steel—a researcher who has worked with NASA on asteroid and comet impacts, with an actual asteroid named after him. He talks about the statistical reality of near-Earth objects, and what he says is legitimate science. The documentary uses his credibility to support a reading of Revelation 8, where something like a burning mountain is thrown into the sea. That's fair enough as far as it goes—the connection between apocalyptic imagery and asteroid impacts is at least a coherent thought. But Steel is a scientist, not a Bible scholar, and the documentary doesn't clearly separate those roles.
Here's where I land, as a regular person who read his Bible and then watched this film.
The end times are real. The return of Jesus Christ is real. The signs He told His disciples to watch for are real. The warning against false teachers and false Christs is real—and Jesus gave that warning precisely because things would get confusing and deceptive near the end. That's why it matters enormously that Christians actually know their Bibles well enough to tell the difference between solid teaching and something that just sounds solid because the person saying it has a lot of titles next to their name.
The best thing this documentary does is make you want to open Matthew 24, Daniel 9, 1 Thessalonians 4, and the book of Revelation and read them for yourself. Do that. The worst thing it does is mix those real and weighty texts with speculation and coincidence-hunting and present it all at the same level of confidence. Be a Berean about it—the Bereans in Acts 17 received the message eagerly and then went home and checked the Scriptures every day to see if what they'd been told was true. That's not skepticism. That's faithfulness.
The end times are not a reason to panic. They are not a reason to build a bunker or stare at hurricane forecasts looking for signs of judgment. They are a reason to know your Bible, love your neighbor, hold your hope firmly, and keep your eyes up.
That much, at least, this documentary gets right.
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