coming after: later in time or sequence, and so the following or the final point in a series
This word marks where something falls in a sequence of time: it comes after what went before. In the New Testament it shows up almost entirely in its neuter form used like an adverb, "afterward" or "later," tagging the next thing that happens after an interval.
The same word slides naturally into a stronger shade. When it caps a list of earlier events, "afterward" becomes "last of all" or "finally": the landowner sends servants and finally his son, or the woman in the riddle dies last of all. The move is simply from "a later point" to "the latest point," so the events grouped here belong to one idea, not two.
Once in the letters it keeps its plain adjective force, describing "later times" that are still to come. Even there it means only "times that come after," without any built-in sense of the world's end, which comes from the surrounding words rather than from this one.