“And there will be…on earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them from fear and the expectation of those things which are coming upon the earth, for the powers of heaven will be shaken” (Lk. 21:25,26)

The Lord Jesus entered upon the open field in contest with Satan, in human flesh at the point in degeneracy when He was born into the world. Human nature will never be weaker, never reach any lower in itself, than when Jesus Christ came into the world. The only means by which man will be worse is that the same iniquity will be professing Christianity.

And that makes him worse in this respect, in that he has cut himself off from salvation by taking God’s means of salvation and making it a cloak for his iniquities. In himself, in the flesh, his own practical wickedness is not any greater: only now he is a hypocrite as well as wicked.

The world in the last days will not be any worse in itself than it was when Christ was born into the world. The only way in which it will be worse is that in having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof, it uses the profession of Christianity to cover its ungodliness. So it perverts God’s only means of salvation so as to destroy itself against all remedy.

Read the last verses of the first chapter of Romans if you wish to have a picture of the world in the last days. The one who believes in a millennium of peace and righteousness before the coming of the Lord will doubtless be shocked; but he needs to be. The seed which produces such a crop is already sown broadcast. "The man of sin…the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or is worshipped” (2 Thess. 2:3) is the strongest force in Christendom, and its power is daily increasing, by the blind acceptance of its principles by professed Protestants. The majority of Protestants follow in its train, accepting the symbol of justification by works instead of by faith.

Waggoner, Waggoner on Romans, p. 35,36