Ahm-a-gettin' (The Hell out of Here!)

The current events that have been playing out in the Middle East over the past 4 weeks have made many people, particularly Evangelical Christians, bring up the question of whether or not this is the beginning of the Final Days. As a devout Christian myself, the thought has been on my mind since the beginning of this crisis. But I've also been wondering if this is just a typical period of increased violence in human history.

You Mean This Has Happened Before?

There have been many events throughout human history that have begged the question: "Are we at the end of the World?"
First of all, when the end of the World is talked about, especially in the Western media, it is the Christian belief of how the World will end, depicted in the book of Revelation, the final book of the Bible. Revelation was written around 70 AD by the apostle, John.
At this period of time, Christians were being persecuted by the Roman Empire, so the hope of something along the lines of the Rapture (the word "rapture" never appears in the Bible) would have offered hope to Christians of the day. To many early Christians, the persecuting they faced under Nero and the fall of the Roman Empire itself seemed to indicate that the World was coming to an end, and in a sense (in terms of Western culture) it did.
As the Dark Ages in conjunction with the Mini Ice Age (from shortly after the fall of Rome until the late 19th Century) set in, there were many points in time when Christians sought solace in the Church because they thought the end was at hand. This perhaps reached a peak between 1346-1351 during the years of the Black Death. Anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of the population in Europe was killed due to the Black Death (2/3 are killed in Revelation.) Wars were common place during this period, and for the Jews it was a living hell. Most members of the Church blamed the Jews for poisoning well water, among other things, that were in turn making people sick. It should be noted that this period in time triggered the Renaissance.
There have been many fanatics that have claimed the end was at hand, unfortunately also taking the lives of hundreds of their believers in the process.

What if this is it?

As a Christian, the end of the World is a glorious event, to be celebrated. As a scientist, the end would be a tragedy from the standpoint that there is so little we know, and that the end would eliminate 10,000 years of human knowledge, along with beings that can keep that knowledge alive and pass it on to potentially other (alien) races.