The Real End of the World.

One of the benefits of knowing Bible prophecy is how it enables you to react wisely to current events. The book of Revelation predicts the horsemen of war, famine, disease, and death will ride upon the world. We also know from history that the world has always suffered these miseries, though Heaven mitigates them if a nation walks with the Lord. So Scripture distinguishes between the general fallenness and brokenness of the earth, and that distinct future time we call the great tribulation.

This means that every time there's an earthquake, flu epidemic, or something like a solar eclipse, it doesn't mean we're in the end-times. When we read the prophecies of Revelation, we see that those plagues will be massive, simultaneous, and worldwide. In one case, 1/3rd of the grass and trees are destroyed; in another case, some sort of huge meteor strikes a sea (perhaps the Mediterranean?), and a massive number of ships are wrecked all at one time. 

Here you can see the importance of the literal interpretation of prophecy, unless Scripture itself justifies a hidden fulfillment, like John the Baptist being the "Elijah" that the OT predicted would come (Matt. 11:14). The norm for Bible predictions are literal fulfillment, otherwise we could never tell if they came true. Moses told the Israelites to expect literal fulfillment (Deut. 18), and Agabus' predictions in Acts came true literally.

You'll be blessed if you study the book of Revelation and keep the moral instructions Christ included in it! One of the those blessings  is the ability to tell the signs of the times. Revelation is so clear on the worldwide judgments of the end-times that you can tell they're not happening now. What's happening now is bad enough, to be sure! But it falls under Amos 3:6, as a divine calamity such as those God has inflicted on nations in the past.